THE BACKGROUND TO MALAWI

Kamuzu Banda and Kanyama Chiume

The Royal African Society

The Background to Malawi

Author(s): George SheppersonSource: African Affairs, Vol. 66, No. 263 (Apr., 1967), pp. 152-155

Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal African Society

Summary of a talk by GEORGE SHEPPERSON

Edinburgh University

PROFESSOR  SHEPPERSON OPENED by recalling that the Sixth of July was the significant day in Malawi's year. On 6 July 1958, Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda had returned to his country after 43 years away from home; on 6 July 1964 'Nyasaland ' had become independent as Malawi under the sovereignty of Queen Elizabeth II; on 6 July 1966, the new state had become a republic.

Discussing the influence of language, he suggested that on the whole the Nyanja language had, like Swahili in Tanzania, been a unifying force; this was rare among African vernacular laguages. (An interesting question was the decline of the Yao language, which seemed to have been much more widespread as a lingua franca during the nineteenth century). Dr. Banda had always been very conscious-as a student he had seen his native Cewa recognized as a post-graduate degree subject at the University of Chicago-of the importance of language; in at least two recent public addresses he had put forward with passion his aim of ensuring that Malawi's two linguae francae, English and Nyanja, should be properly taught, spoken and written.

Professor Shepperson went on to discuss the particular significance of the name 'Malawi' (or 'Maravi'), a term with associations of political and ethnic unity for many, but not all, of the African peoples around the western and southern shores of the lake. For some it indicated the southern and western origin of one wave of occupation of the country; to the Yao it meant 'tomorrow'; for the Ngoni and others it signified 'flames of fire '-with possible reference to the effect of sunset on the lake, or to the once prevalent local practice of iron-smelting, or to the ancestral spirits who were thus symbolized. It had probably made its first appearance on European maps early in the seventeenth century; and it had remained until at least the late 1850s the name on all maps by Europeans for the country and people next to a great African lake. David Livingstone's brother Charles had noted on their 1858/9 expedition that the people to the south west of the lake were called Maravi, and that they never heard of the terms Wanyasa, Nyasa, Nyasaland, except from the Arabs. The name Malawi thus seemed highly appropriate for the newly independent country; although another name also found on some old maps-Mwenemugi-had also been mooted.

What political significance had the term held in the days of early European penetration of the area ? Antonio Gamitto, the second in command of a Portuguese expedition which had passed through the southern part of the Malawi complex in 1831/3, had written 'All these peoples are today totally independent of each other ... Nevertheless it is beyond dispute that all are of the same Maravi race, having the same habits, customs, etc.' If the chiefs were united, wrote Gamitto, they would constitute a respectable nation. By this analysis, Professor Shepperson suggested, the Malawi peoples could in the early nineteenth century have been called a proto-nation : but it was clear that by the time of Livingstone's arrival slaving, Ngoni raiding, etc. had had a fragmenting effect-though whether this was the reversal or continuation of a previous process it was impossible to say. Within less than a generation, however, the activities of the Scottish missionaries in the region, and the response of its African peoples to European influences, were to create a new proto-nationalism; whose heirs revived the term 'Malawi' and its associations as an emotional force for their new state.

In a letter to The Times of 13 September 1953 Sir Hector Duff, a former Chief Secretary of Nyasaland, had expressed the belief that a generation earlier (that is, in the early 1920s) its African inhabitants had not been interested in any part of the country except their own, and would not have known what the word 'Nyasaland ' meant. Professor Shepperson claimed that, for some of them at least, consciousness of the European-imposed state, and resentment at their own restricted role in it, could be traced back a great deal further. From the middle of the nineteenth century Africans from this area had been going overseas into the Euro-American world of democracy and technology, others were soon travelling into the complex political and economic world of southern Africa. By 1900 Nyasaland had had its political protest movements working through the independent African churches, culminating in the proto-nationalist rising (in protest against African participation in the first world war) led by John Chilembwe in 1915. By this time too emigrants from Nyasaland were playing a fundamental part in the growth of African trade unionism to the south; of this the outstanding example was the creation by the Tonga Clements Kadalie of the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union-the strongest and most feared African union in South Africa's history. Another early leader was Charles Domingo, a protege of the Scottish missionary doctor, Robert Laws of Livingstonia. Although Domingo eventually joined the Protectorate Civil Service, he had earlier developed his own independent church and had made some striking statements before the first world war:

'My proposal is to train boys and girls not only to read and write, but to be strong men and women, possessing higher faculties and independence.'

and:

'If a people do not wish to help themselves there can be no liberty or independence, but only beg, beg, beg.'At the same period such sentiments were being stimulated among the Nyasaland evolues by Scottish missionaries, who stressed the importance both of teaching the evolutionary nature of laws and institutions, and of grounding the school teaching of history in the African as well as the European past.

One feature of this Malawi 'proto-nationalism' was its volatile (if determined) and highly individualistic character. Another point was that it had now become the common property both of Dr. Banda's followers, the ruling group in modern Malawi, and of his opponents, largely Mr. Chipembere's followers in exile; its very existence gave the lie to the belief that African nationalism was the creation largely of the period after the second world war. By 1944, when the Nyasaland African Congress was founded, Nyasaland could look back on almost half a century of increasing African attempts to employ Euro-American methods of political organisation and agitation to bring about social change. Historically, several phases could be distinguished. First, starting in the early 1890s, there had been the period of militant resistance and of reliance on the vehicle of independent African churches, ending with the defeat of Chilembwe's rising in 1915. Then, during the 1930s, there was alarm at the possible amalgamation of Nyasaland with the Rhodesias, which began to be expressed by the regional native associations of the protectorate. The Zomba archives were rich in valuable material for the study of this period ; a recent article by Dr. J. van Velsen on the so-called native associations between the wars showed that the representative committee of the Northern Province Associations could in fact fairly be regarded as the forerunner of the Nyasaland Native African Congress of 1944. Finally, there was the period after the second world war, of which the significant feature was the change in character from rebellion to revolution-that is, from seeking to secure a shift of power within the existing structure to seeking to take it over altogether. This change had, as elsewhere in Africa, been hastened by the new horizons opened up by the war; it had been accelerated further by bitter resentment at the creation of the Federation of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland. It had culminated in independence.

On economic problems, Professor Shepperson drew attention to the symposium which had taken place, on the initiative of the late Dunduzu Chisiza, at Blantyre in July 1962, and in which economists from all over the world had taken part. Malawi's own economic problems were largely agricultural in character, and had been reflected in two unpopular institutions of the colonial period, the labour rent system on the plantations and agricultural regulations for natural conservation: but the problems were proving difficult to the new government in its turn. Mr. Rolf Gardiner, writing in The Times on 14 October 1964, had given a grave warning of the threat to the Malawi economy in the destruction of the country's natural resources. The world, he added, could not afford to lose the genius of its people.

What of this genius ? Professor Shepperson quoted a speech made by the late Mr. Chisiza on the generosity and hospitality with which, by and large, Africans had treated the strangers who had come among them, and suggested that it might have been particularly applied to his own people. He also quoted a passage written by a Scottish missionary in an early work on the Nyanja language: 'This language bids fair for a high place in the Kingdom of Heaven, and anyone who would surpass it must be as broad and courteous as this language and this people declare the genius of Africa to be.'

Malawi's claim to historical importance was threefold: its contribution to African political organisation in the period of European rule, especially in the pioneer character of John Chilembwe's movement ; the influence of the Malawi 'diaspora ', exemplified by the careers of Kadalie in South Africa, Kaunda in Zambia, Karume and Kambona in Tanzania; and finally and most controversially, its role in the destruction of the Central African Federation. The peoples of this little country had suffered much in the last 150 years; in slave raids, in world wars, in labour migration, in economic depression. Would the future prove that even independence offered only the 'dreary vista of poverty and disorder' described in Lord Alport's book The Sudden Assignment- Or would Malawi through the realism of its home and foreign policy become an example showing other African states the way forward ? At all events, with such a history, such a background, it could hardly fail to hold our attention in times to come.

NOTES

Given at a joint meeting with the Royal Commonwealth Society on February 2, 1967.

The Chairman was Professor Gerald Graham