Malawi Emoji

🇲🇼 the Malawi flag emoji shows three horizontal bands, black, red and green, with a red rising sun of 31 rays in the black band. Like every flag emoji it is not a picture but two invisible regional indicator letters, 🇲 and 🇼, for the country code MW, which phones and Macs draw as the flag. Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font and shows the letters MW instead, but whoever opens your message on a phone still sees the flag.

The flag was first raised on 6 July 1964, when the British protectorate of Nyasaland became independent as Malawi. The black stands for the people of Africa, the red for the blood of those who died for African freedom, and the green for the land, which stays green through the year. The rising sun is the dawn of hope and freedom, not only for Malawi but for the whole continent, which is why so many Malawian posts pair the flag with 🌅. Where flags don't show, people write the colours as hearts, 🖤❤️💚, in usernames and on Independence Day.

People also search for the old and new Malawi flag, because for two years there was another one. In 2010 the government changed the order of the stripes to red, black and green and replaced the rising sun with a full white sun in the middle, saying the country had moved from dawn to day. The change was unpopular, and in 2012 parliament voted to bring back the 1964 flag, the one the emoji shows today.

The coat of arms has a lion 🦁 and a leopard 🐆 holding up a shield with wavy lines for Lake Malawi 🌊 and a rising sun, standing on a picture of Mount Mulanje, with an African fish eagle 🦅 on top and the motto Unity and Freedom. Malawi's best-known nickname is the Warm Heart of Africa, written ❤️🌍 or 🇲🇼🤗, after the friendliness visitors always remember.

Malawi currency symbol: kwacha, K and MK

The Malawian kwacha (ISO code MWK) replaced the Malawi pound in 1971 and is divided into 100 tambala. There is no special Unicode kwacha sign: Malawians write a capital K before the amount, as in K5,000, and MK when it has to be told apart from Zambia's kwacha, which shares the name. So the "kwacha symbol" you can copy is simply K or MK; in chats people add 💵, 🪙 or 💰.

Both names are Chichewa words. Kwacha means "dawn", the same idea as the sun on the flag, and tambala means "rooster" 🐓, the bird that announces the dawn.

Chichewa letters: ŵ and how to type it

English is Malawi's official language and Chichewa its national one. CLDR lists about 14 million each for English and Nyanja (called Chichewa in Malawi) and 1.8 million for Tumbuka, but describes these as estimates of the literate, functional population rather than complete speaker totals. Both Chichewa and Tumbuka are written in the plain Latin alphabet with one extra letter, ŵ (capital Ŵ), w with a circumflex. It writes a w said with the lips almost closed, between w and v. Tumbuka uses it constantly; in Chichewa careful writing keeps it, while much everyday writing, the press and phone messages simply use w.

The rest of Chichewa spelling is about letter groups, not accents: ch as in Chichewa itself, ng' with an apostrophe for the ng of "singer" at the start of a syllable, as in ng'ombe (cow), ny, dz and ts. Words you will meet in every Malawian chat: Moni (hello), Muli bwanji? (how are you?), Zikomo (thank you, also excuse me) and Zikomo kwambiri (thank you very much).

ŵ is not in the old Windows character sets, so it has no short Alt code. In Word type 0175 and press Alt+X (0174 for Ŵ). On a Mac switch to the ABC Extended input source and press Option+6, then w. On a phone, long-press w, or add a Welsh keyboard, since Welsh uses ŵ too. In HTML it is ŵ (Ŵ for the capital). Or copy it from the grid above. For the whole alphabets see the Nyanja and Tumbuka collections; English, Nyasa Tonga and Zulu, also spoken in Malawi, have their own pages.

Malawi national food emoji: nsima, chambo and ndiwo

No meal in Malawi counts without nsima, a stiff porridge of white maize flour, cooked until it holds its shape, rolled into a ball in the right hand and dipped into ndiwo, the relish served with it. In emoji it is 🌽🍲, and ndiwo is whatever comes alongside: 🥬 for mpiru, pumpkin leaves and other greens cooked with tomato or groundnut flour 🥜, 🫘 for beans, 🐔 for a village chicken, 🐐 for goat. In the north and along the lake cassava 🫜 is the staple as often as maize, and 🍠 is mbatata, sweet potato.

From the lake comes chambo 🐟, a tilapia that is Malawi's favourite fish, fried or grilled whole and served with nsima or rice 🍚, and usipa, tiny sardine-like fish dried in the sun on racks along the shore. 🍩 is the nearest emoji to mandasi, the fried dough buns of every morning market, 🥭 the mango season at the end of the year, and 🐁 and 🐜 are no joke: roasted field mice on sticks, mbewa, are sold by the roadside, and fried flying termites, ngumbi, are a treat of the first rains.

Malawi is one of Africa's big tea growers, with estates on the green hills of Thyolo and Mulanje, so 🍵🍃 is a very Malawian pair; ☕ is coffee from the northern highlands around Mzuzu. 🍺 stands in for a cold local lager or for Chibuku, the thick maize-and-sorghum beer sold in cartons that you shake before drinking.

Lake Malawi, Mulanje and the parks in emoji

Lake Malawi fills most of the country's eastern side; it is the third largest lake in Africa and is shared with Mozambique, where it is Lago Niassa, and Tanzania, where it is Lake Nyasa. It holds more species of fish than any other lake on Earth, most of them small, brightly coloured cichlids 🐠 found nowhere else and kept in aquariums all over the world. Lake Malawi National Park at Cape Maclear has been on UNESCO's World Heritage list since 1984. Fishermen go out in dugout canoes 🛶 and at night their lamps dot the water, which is why it is called the Lake of Stars ⭐🌟, also the name of its music festival. 🏖️ is Cape Maclear, Nkhata Bay or Senga Bay, and ⛴️ is the old ferry MV Ilala, which has carried people and goods up and down the lake since the 1950s.

In the south, Mount Mulanje ⛰️ rises straight out of the tea estates; its Sapitwa peak, about 3,000 m, is the highest point in Malawi, and its slopes are home to the Mulanje cedar 🌲, the national tree. 🥾 is the climb up, and Zomba Plateau is the other favourite hike. For wildlife, Liwonde National Park on the Shire River is the place for elephants 🐘, hippos 🦛 and crocodiles 🐊, with rhinos 🦏 brought back under protection; Majete in the south has lions 🦁 again, and the high grassland of Nyika in the north has zebras 🦓 grazing among wild flowers.

Holidays, dance and sport: the emoji Malawians send

Malawi Independence Day is 6 July: independence in 1964, and the day Malawi became a republic two years later. Greetings are 🇲🇼🎉🎆 with Happy Independence Day! and the flag colours 🖤❤️💚. Other holidays are John Chilembwe Day on 15 January, for the pastor who led a rising against colonial rule in 1915, Martyrs' Day on 3 March, Mother's Day in October 💐, Christmas 🎄 and the Eid holidays 🌙 of the country's large Muslim minority. Most Malawians are Christian, and ⛪🙏 is the Sunday combo.

Gule Wamkulu, the "great dance" of the Chewa people, is performed by masked dancers of the Nyau society at funerals, initiations and remembrance ceremonies, in costumes of feathers 🪶, rags, straw and carved masks 🎭; UNESCO lists it as intangible heritage of Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia. In the north, Vimbuza, the Tumbuka healing dance to drums 🥁🪘, is on the same list.

The national football team is called the Flames, so match-day posts are 🇲🇼⚽🔥. Netball is the women's game Malawi is famous for: the national team, the Queens, is one of the strongest in Africa, and since there is no netball emoji fans use 🏐 or 🏀 with 👑. And 🌬️💡 is the story of William Kamkwamba, who as a teenager built a windmill from scrap to bring electricity to his family's farm, told in the book and film The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind 📖.