The day I (almost) got mugged

January 23rd, Monday, 7 pm

It was late evening and we had decided to go for dinner to Noble China, a local joint located a couple of blocks away from the hotel. It was twilight as we started walking the approximately 1 km distance and unthinkingly switched on our torches as we went down a street without street lights, loudly chatting in English about the day’s work. It was a street off the main road, with mainly residential buildings and large trees flanking both sides of the street.

Unconsciously, my friend Lyndsey and I had flanked our newest companion, who was visiting Lilongwe for a few days. About 200 metres from the gate of the restaurant I felt someone running towards us and turned my torchlight on our thief just as he went for Lyndsey’s bag.

What followed was a blur of the thief jumping for Lyndsey’s bag, me jumping for the guy and yelling loudly and Lyndsey falling to the ground holding on to her bag. After a brief scuffle the guy ran off with neither of us trying to go after him. We pushed ourselves up and walked quickly to the restaurant, all the time looking behind us. Obviously, we took a taxi on the way back.   

A few things struck me as we discussed the incident over dinner: 

1. The experience of being mugged is quite scary even if it’s not violent. Neither of us quite remembers what happened in that 30 second blur of activity, except for Lyndsey falling to the ground and me screaming. On my part, I remember feeling like I was stuck in a slow motion film while the thief was racing through with his moves. I couldn’t get to him fast enough while he tried to steal our bags. 

2. Typically, as the economic situation in a country deteriorates, the security on the streets deteriorates proportionally, with muggings slowly becoming more frequent and violent. Malawi is clearly on that path. Till last year you couldn’t walk on the street for fear of animals, but now I think I’m not walking down the street in the evenings for fear of being robbed.

3. From what I understand, similar security annoyances in other African countries don’t go away as the economic situation improves. For example, in some countries, even though the economy is stronger, getting mugged on the streets and getting your house cleaned up by thieves is so common that people have started factoring it in their regular budgets.

4. Later, our friend told us that she had noticed the guy as we left our hotel and that she should’ve followed her gut instinct and called him out earlier. It is a very weird experience when someone is following you or intently looking at every move you make – like someone is trying to pre-empt every move you make. I think I'm going to be a lot more alert and allow my gut to actually sense such people around me.  

Of course, we had our dinner and chatted happily about other things after this, but I think the bitter aftertaste is still there and my rating on the Malawi-is-a-shithole scale just took a huge hit.