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Historical Context for Hip Hop Store in Malawi
A Response by Masauko Chipembere
First off, I would like to thank you for
exposing the contradictions going on between African American
images and self image in Africa. I am a U.S. citizen with
parents from Malawi. My father was the first minister of
education in Malawi when it got its independence in the early
60s. So I have grown up in a political environment.
Malawi for many years was run by a dictator
called Kamuzu
Banda. Banda had been educated in America and came
back to help lead the revolution against colonial rule. My
father had invited him.
Banda was great at first. He was really
instrumental in pushing the British from power. However after he
achieved this he changed his course. Due to his many years
abroad he had lost touch with Malawian culture. He became afraid that
the same people who had invited him to come back and lead would
push him from power. As a result of this he began making
alliances with the British and South African governments. These
were considered enemies of the African people and the Pan-Africanist
movement that had supported Banda.
My father ended up breaking with Banda and having to flee
into exile. Maybe you rode down Masauko Chipembere highway in
Blantyre?
Anyway, as Banda increased his power he began
to ban certain information. Very little information was supplied
about slavery in the Americas. Why? Because he didn't want the
people to see that he was creating a nation under siege. He
banned books like Cotton Comes to Harlem by Chester
Himes or Animal Farm by George Orwell. This created
a great vacuum in people's understanding of blacks in America.
I was in Malawi in 1996 for the first time. I
heard the word "nigger" used all the time by middle class kids who
had grown up watching a bunch of movies from the USA. They had
satellite TV, etc.
I immediately asked them if they knew what
the word nigger meant. They said, "my friend right?" I
then went on to explain the Atlantic slave trade and the roots
of the word.
These young men were crushed and I think that
conversation made them begin journeys that most of them are
still on now.
I say all this to say there are two things
happening in Malawi at the same time:
1) We have a country that has been
systematically mis/under-educated in relation to the world,
especially black struggle. You couldn't be dictator in the 60s
and 70s in Malawi and expose Africans to Martin Luther King and
Malcolm X. In places like South Africa that exposure brought
about folks like Steven Biko and a black consciousness movement
that cried "power to the people."
2) Malawi just got national television a few
years back and has now moved into the media age without a proper
understanding of the history of Hollywood, i.e., D.W. Griffith's Birth
of a Nation. In middle class Christian homes in Malawi you
will find kids watching videos by Foxy Brown with their faces
about 12 inches from the TV. No one has even begun to tell people
that close proximity to the TV can damage your sight.
This will come to light in the next ten years
when a generation of rich kids can't see both physically and
mentally.
This is just a note to give you a bit of
history about the country you traveled through. I must also tell
you that the USA did nothing to help remove this despot from
Malawi. They felt it was better to have a fascist dictator there
for close to 40 years than to have a potentially governed Communist
country, and remained silent.
peace and blessings *
* * * *
Henry Blasius Masuko Chipembere
Colin Baker.
Chipembere: The Missing Years. Zomba:
Kachere, 2006. 391 pp Most students
of postwar Africa are able to identify individual nationalists
who played—major roles in the struggle for independence, or
indeed, in the negotiating processes leading to decolonization.
Malawi has a long list of such personalities, and very high on
the list is Henry Blasius Masuko Chipembere. It was he who,
along with other young activists, particularly William Kanyama
Chiume, in 1957 encouraged their rather ineffective party, the
Nyasaland African Congress (NAC), to persuade the older and more
urbane Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda to return home from Ghana and
take charge of the crucial stage of the fight against British
colonial rule. By the time of his death in exile in the United
States in 1975, Chipembere had started to write an autobiography
which, clearly unfinished, covers his life to early 1959. Many
years later, Robert Rotberg edited the manuscript, and in 2001
the Christian Literature Association in Malawi (CLAIM), of
Blantyre, published it in its Kachere series under the title,
Hero of the Nation: Chipembere of Malawi: An Autobiography. Thus
the story of this popular politician, key to understanding
Malawian affairs in the mid-twentieth century, remained
incomplete until the publication of Professor Colin Baker's
Chipembere: The Missing Years.
The book is divided into three parts, the
first consisting of the main biography which is subdivided
further into fourteen short chapters totaling about 160 pages,
the second being a compilation of most of Chipembere's published
and unpublished papers, and the third section comprising the
epilogue, notes, and index. The first chapter, "Before the 1959
State of Emergency," highlights the colony's constitutional
changes, mainly in the 1950s, including those which brought into
the colonial legislature, for the first time, five Africans,
including Chipembere, all elected by provincial councils. It
also highlights aspects of Chipembere's early life, from the
time of his graduation from the University of Fort Hare to his
brief and unhappy employment in the colonial civil service,
progressing to his political activism and entry into the
legislature, and to his rise as a forceful radical and popular
speaker. The chapter also summarizes the part he played in
bringing Dr. Banda back to Nyasaland in 1958, and his key role
in planning the nationalists' next course of action, strategies
which would lead to the state of emergency and the detention of
hundreds of people, including Banda, Chipembere and the majority
of the central executive of the Nyasaland African Congress.
The next three chapters cover the period
from Chipembere's custody in a Gwelo (Gweru), Southern Rhodesia
(Zimbabwe) facility, followed by his release and tours to
various parts of Nyasaland during which time he made some of his
most impassioned anticolonial speeches, to his prosecution,
conviction, and incarceration in Zomba Central prison from
February 1961 to January 1963. His imprisonment meant that he
was not included in the constitutional talks which brought about
the first adult suffrage general elections in August 1961,
resulting in the establishment of a government in which the
Malawi Congress Party, formerly the NAC, had a majority. His
confinement also prevented him from influencing directly
deliberations and decisions on further political changes in the
colony. These events are central to understanding the personal
and political relations between Chipembere and Hastings Banda. .
. .
This is certainly an important book concerning Malawi's recent
past, even though it leaves many questions unresolved. For
example, despite his success in portraying Chipembere as a
vehement anticolonial politician, one with widespread popular
support, Baker does not show clearly the dynamics between him
and his colleagues during daily political life, nor does he
really examine Chipembere's interactions with the common urban
and rural person. What was the basis of his popularity, besides
his rousing speeches? How did the perception of his strong
leadership arise? These and many other questions would have been
answered only by interviewing many more people than Baker does
here. . . . Finally, one must applaud
the decision to publish the book in Malawi, where Hero of the
Nation was also published. Considering the cost of books
these days, it is hoped that many Malawians will be able to buy
and read the biography of this beloved and able politician, the
president-in-waiting whose destiny was never fulfilled.—Owen
J. M. Kalinga,
H-Net
* * * *
*
posted 26 August 2005 /
update 3 November 2006 |
