Reuben Chirambo
English
University of Minnesota

I grew up in a rural community in Malawi where I also went to school. As early as in my first grade I was intrigued by the fact that each time party officials visited the school, we were all supposed to show our membership card of the Malawi Congress Party (MCP). If we didn’t have one we would be sent away until we got the card. My mother always struggled to find money for the card which meant that I would be away from school for days and sometimes weeks. It was also during the same time that I heard my mother sing songs as she worked around in our house extolling Banda and the MCP. These were the same songs that I heard members of the Women’s League of the MCP sing during rehearsals for political party functions. These were now my mother’s work songs. In the songs I heard that Banda was the father and founder of Malawi. He was a Savior like Jesus, Ngwazi, life president and so many other things. He was supposedly a benevolent person as president of the country. Twice a year my mother traveled by bus to Blantyre, to dance during the national independence celebrations and during the October 17 Mothers’ Day celebrations. Of course the contradictions between what my mother sang and what I experienced in school became apparent to me only later while I was in college. Since then I have worked to understand how my mother who obviously struggled to buy me a membership card because of poverty seemed quite happy singing praises for Banda who was a dictator. My mother and many women seemed genuinely excited to perform praises for Banda yet from all descriptions Banda was a vicious dictator.

The experiences above led me to begin to examine popular culture in its relation with politics. I have studied how popular music, for example, employed metaphor to criticize the dictatorship of Banda and how today the same music is probably the only voice the masses have to speak against continued exploitation by the ruling clique. I have examined how political cartooning, for example, is a viable means of political agitation, a weapon of the weak against the politically powerful leaders.

It is from this background that now I turn to study the appropriation of songs of the people, their cultural expressions and traditions into instruments of elite hegemonic politics. I want to examine the possibilities of the people’s songs becoming means of their own oppression when they expresses consent instead of opposition to dictatorship.