A new national consciousness: Agenda for the next 50 years

We are winding down a year that marked two key milestones in our nation’s autobiography. We marked fifty years of independence, and we also marked twenty years of multiparty democracy and the end of one-party dictatorship. As we embark on another fifty years of national independence and another twenty of multiparty democracy, I want to ask a question: Do we as Malawians have a sense of national consciousness? A sense of Malawi being bigger and more important than our individual selves and interests?

Having a national consciousness is about putting one’s country above one’s personal, clan, ethnic, class, political and other self-serving interests. A national consciousness gives one hope in something greater than oneself. It grounds one’s optimism and protects a society from hopelessness, pessimism and paralysing negativity. But national consciousness does not originate itself. It has to be cultivated and nourished. And it has to be taught to the younger generation so they can nurture it further and carry it into the future.

The national heroes who fought for independence fifty years ago had a national consciousness that they held above personal and other narrow interests. They sacrificed their lives because they believed in something that was greater than them. They espoused a national, indeed Pan-African, cause for which they were prepared to die. And many indeed died. Kanyama Chiume, Henry Masauko Chipembere and others wrote autobiographies and other accounts that have taught us what sacrifices they made and what it took to achieve independence and nationhood. Their lessons still resonate today, if not more so.

So did the heroes who fought for multiparty democracy twenty years ago. They knew how dangerous it was to contradict the then Life President, Ngwazi Dr. H. Kamuzu Banda, and the almighty Malawi Congress Party. Some had been killed before, and others had been imprisoned indefinitely. Others had left the comfort of home and had gone into exile. Others simply disappeared and were never heard from again. Yet these heroes bravely espoused a national cause to liberate the country from one-party tyranny. Today, all that is being gradually eroded. That history is being methodically sanitised and purposefully forgotten. 

Something seems to have happened to our national consciousness. As Taweni Gondwe Xaba once observed in an online conversation, today Malawians have a very low sense of “national allegiance.” Personal, ethnic, class and political interests have taken over what was once an allegiance to the nation. When a society loses its sense of national consciousness, national amnesia, blind frustration and paralytic pessimism come in and occupy the vacuum. There are Malawians for whom the idea of a national consciousness does not exit. Bola zawo zikuyenda basi.

That is the stage Malawi is at today. There are hardly any national figures to look up to for optimism and inspiration. The few Malawians who still embrace national consciousness have the odds stacked against them in a society whose moral relativism favours personal aggrandisement or ethnic chauvinism. Instead, we have supposedly respectable people proudly boasting about knowing national secrets that are destroying the nation. But they choose to keep those secrets to themselves so as to protect individuals, at the expense of national progress.

We have people who have inside information about murders, massive theft and plunder, and other heinous crimes against the nation. But they choose to keep quiet. They hold their personal interests and narcistic considerations above the national interest. They have no sense of national consciousness. They selfishly hold themselves to be bigger than Malawi. They do not wish the country well. They are content to see mothers and fathers forever mourning their murdered children while the killers roam the streets as free people. They are content to see the country continue haemorrhaging economically, yet they have the knowledge of who stole what and how they did it. And that plunder still goes on today.

We have Malawians so beholden to the saintly image of their leader they are loath to any suspicions of impropriety by the leaders, even in the face of evidence. They comfort themselves in a false sense of righteousness and refuse to accept that their heroes are plundering the nation and need to be held to account. When you reach that stage where you defend your leader to the extent of absurdity, know that you have lost your sense of national allegiance. The same goes for ethnic, political, class and other types of unexamined allegiances.

But all is not lost. The two milestones we marked this year give us pause to reflect on how to change things and imagine a new Malawi. As Levi Kabwato is fond of reminding us, quoting Frantz Fanon, “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.” And we have the intellectual and ideological tools to do this. Our leading thinkers and philosophers have pointed the way. We still have Malawians we can look up to.

We must start with cultivating a culture of uMunthu, upon which our ancestors built their societies. As the psychologist Chiwoza Bandawe points out in his book Practical uMunthu Psychology: An indigenous approach to harmonious living, “to lose uMunthu is to lose our history and identity as people.” Which means, in paraphrase, to regain our uMunthu is to regain our history and identity as a people. That is the beginning point for the rebirth of a new Malawian national consciousness. Let us make this uMunthu-based national consciousness our mission to fulfil for the next fifty years.

Note: A version of this post appeared in The Malawi News of Saturday 27th December, 2014.

Malawi at 50: Song & Dance, Tears & Laughter

These students had fun composing songs and dances improptu

In June this year I accompanied a team of educationists visiting a school in the eastern part of Dedza. I observed a Standard 4 Expressive Arts lesson in which students composed and enacted an impromptu song and dance. I would have thought this impossible, but not the students, nor their teacher.

It was clear from the expressions on the students’ faces that they enjoyed the lesson. The absence of a larger social meaning in the activity was more of a fault with the curriculum design than with the teacher’s purpose for the lesson. The lesson had achieved its purpose by giving students an opportunity to express their artistic skills in composing, singing ad dancing.

The children in this school came from a remote  part of Malawi. They were using a powerful medium of expression and knowledge-making. Although such performances of theatre, song and dance have become universal ways of disseminating what has come to be described as “civic education”, they also serve as a way through which communities engage and interact with social change. Communities use such performances to talk to authorities, subvert unequal power relations, and celebrate a vibrance and vitality that is easily missed in the top-down, one-way discourse of officialdom.

While Malawian artists have exploited these forms of expression in music, poetry, film, painting, and pottery, among others, aid workers and government departments have also used these art forms to disseminate civic information and development messages. The comedy duo of Chindime and Samalani  appear at public functions, on TV and in radio sketches to make Malawians laugh while conveying public service messages. Sadly, Samalani, real name Elias Chimbalu, passed away at the end of June. He was aged 40. Chindime ndi Samalani perfected the art of theatre for development in an arena whose other great performers include The Story Workshop, Timveni Arts,  and Theatre for a Change.

The current sensation on the Malawian music front this year has been Lawi. With Francis Phiri as his real name, Lawi adopted his nickname from ‘Malawi’ (Lawi singular, Malawi plural). The genius of Lawi’s music is expressed in the everyday persona whose mass collectivity accumulates into the many flames that shine the Malawian path.

His song Amaona kuchedwa burst onto the scene early this year, and has enjoyed playtime on practically every radio station, entertainment joint, engagement parties and weddings. But it is his other songs that capture the warm heart of Africa that is Malawi in a range of childhood memories, images of the capital city Lilongwe, and the beauty of rural livelihoods. Lawi’s golden voice has charmed the Malawian ear in a way no other musician of his Afro-soul genre has done in recent memory. His is a phenomenal  addition to a tradition trailblazed by Wambali Mkandawire three decades ago.

In poetry, there is a new generation of performers who have taken over the mantle from the generation that fought the one party dictatorship. That generation was represented by scholar poets such as David Rubadiri, Felix Mnthali, Jack Mapanje, Steve Chimombo, Frank Chipasula, among others. They mostly wrote in English and taught in universities. Today the poetry that is telling the Malawian story is in Chichewa, and is performed by young poets. Many of them follow Benedicto Wokomaatani Malunga in intonation and voice deflection, in deference to a poet who pioneered a genre.

As was with the earlier generation, there are still few women poets, but they pack an intellectual punch. Ovixlexla Bunya is a multi-talented artist who dabbles in TV, poetry and is also a student of philosophy. Days before the general elections on 20^th May she released a recorded Chichewa poem that subtly laid bare the shenanigans of the major political parties that were contesting. Titled after a campaign slogan, ‘Dzuka, Malawi, Dzuka’ (Wake up, Malawi, Wake up), it is a rapid-fire narrative crafted in a powerful, moving lexicon that brings sobriety to the inebriation of blind partisanship.

Ovixlexla Bunya, poet, artist, TV personality

Malawian artists tell all. They have seen governments come and go. They have given artistic interpretation to scandal, crime and vice. They will continue reflecting the kind of society Malawi is. They will keep imagining and re-imagining the future. They will tell more Malawian stories through song and dance, tears and laughter. That is why the arts and the humanities need to continue being an integral part of the school curriculum from primary through to university, including teacher education.

* A version of this post first appeared as an article under a different title in The Malawi News of Saturday 26th July, 2014.