Political culture and nationalism in Malawi: building Kwacha, by Joey Power, Rochester, University of Rochester Press, 2010, 350 pp., £55.00 (hardback), ISBN 9781580463102
Given the protests, killings, and transitions of power which have marked Malawi over the past few years, Joey Power's Political culture and nationalism in Malawi: building kwacha (2010) could not be more timely. The only serious and sustained colonial and post-colonial political history of Malawi to appear for several decades, this book is invaluable in understanding contemporary socio-economic and political dynamics in the country.
Power illustrates the ways in which Malawian independence and subsequent political developments were enabled by the ability of political entrepreneurs to manipulate local and parochial concerns into national issues (for example creating a relationship between British-imposed agricultural laws and impending federation in the 1950s). More broadly, Power provides a deep and fine-grained analysis of colonial and postcolonial politics in Malawi. Power utilises archival records and private correspondence from the colonial and postcolonial eras supplemented by first-hand interviews with some of the main protagonists of the independence struggle at a time when they were perhaps freer to speak than they had been for a long time following the political and then natural demise of Hastings Banda. The two most-cited secondary sources are Phillip Short's Banda (1974), now somewhat dated and limited to a sympathetic reading of the life and times of Hastings Banda; and Andrew Short's canon of work which mostly focused on the fall-out of Banda's reign for his political opponents, and which was published by a small Malawian press with limited circulation.
This history forms the means by which Power is able to communicate the central tensions which have defined Malawian twentieth-century political history, namely the urban and rural, radical and moderate. The backdrop to this analysis is no less than the story of anti-imperial struggle and collaboration in Malawi through the early to mid twentieth century. Power touches on a number of themes which have come to characterise broader imperial relations with and in Africa, such as the deployment of tradition by imperial powers and latterly postcolonial regimes, against radical currents in African societies (p. 31) or the inscription of capitalist relations on indigenous societies through the granting of private property rights (pp. 47–48).
The book addresses three themes. First, Power illustrates how resistance in imperial Nyasaland could not be considered as straightforwardly anti-imperial, but was rather concerned with preserving the ‘devil you know’ of indirect rule against the ‘devil you don't’ of the white settler-proposed Central African Federation. Chapters 1 to 3 illustrate the gradual transition from this cooperative stance towards the British imperial centre to a more aggressive nationalist position once it became clear that the British were prevaricating and ultimately supportive of the establishment of the Central African Federation of the two Rhodesias and Nyasaland.
This provides the backdrop for the second theme addressed through the book's middle chapters. Power describes how a younger and more nationalist-minded generation, frustrated with the collaborationist approaches of the African political elite, adopted a twin-pronged strategy of urban and rural movement-building. The unifying principle was to link local grievances to the impending and then actual federation. Even where the source of a grievance was British colonial legislation (such as the infamous thangata, a form of bonded labour prevalent in rural areas), nationalists within the Nyasaland African Congress successfully argued that with federation would come more and worse.
One of the more ironic features of this growing nationalist movement was that its main protagonists felt the need to coalesce under an older, more paternalistic figure that the British would treat as, if not an equal, then at least a formidable adversary. And so we have the entrance onto the scene of Dr Hastings Banda, whose subsequent 32-year rule forms the backdrop to the remainder of Power's book. In many senses this is the most analytically interesting of the three sections. Where the first two are largely concerned with fleshing out the detail of Malawi's political and social developments under colonial rule and how resistance to that rule came about, the final section seeks to draw broader lessons from Banda's reign for how his particular form of authoritarianism survived for so long, and then dissipated relatively peacefully. In particular, Power implicitly and explicitly invokes Achille Mbembe when she writes of the role played by rumour (Chapter 9) and orality (Chapter 10) in sustaining Banda's rule. Whilst the former emerged often beyond the scope of Banda's control, not least in reaction to the deaths of several political opponents by ‘car crash’, one of which is accounted for in detail in Chapter 9, it was the power of orality which really defined Banda, and allowed state and citizen to enter into an uneasy and ‘odd conviviality’ (p. 201, quoting Mbembe). By repressing scholarly writing Banda was able to revise Malawian culture and history, enabling him to play the role of not only the nation's father, but its kwacha (‘dawn’) grounded in historical and tribal folklore. Similarly, the ‘systematic erasure of actions and events in which he did not play a major role was a part of that vision’ (p. 191).
Such themes are a familiar part of the rule of several authoritarian figures in the post-independence period. And indeed it is this lack of further contextualisation which one sometimes feels when reading Building kwacha. There are times when the amount of detail could perhaps be scaled back in favour of greater analysis. For instance, there are countless examples offered of rural struggles against colonially imposed agricultural rules and collaborationist chiefs (pp. 95–105), when fewer might make the same point. Additionally, there are 85 pages of endnotes, many of which contain long supplementary passages. One wonders why some of these could not have been entered into the main text to ease the reading process.
These minor criticisms aside, Joey Power has written an incredibly engaging and methodologically impressive book. The sheer range of original sources, and the comprehensive historical landscape Power presents us with makes this an invaluable book for anyone wishing to gain a deeper understanding of Malawi's past, present and future.