Nationalism and Politics of Narrating the Malawian Nation In
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NATIONALISM AND POLITICS OF NARRATING THE MALAWIAN NATION IN LEGSON KAYIRA’S NOVELS AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY By JOSHUA ISAAC KUMWENDA (Student Number 0718647G) Thesis submitted to the Department of African Literature, Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfillment for the award of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in African Literature Supervisor: Professor Isabel Hofmeyr Date of submission: 4th November, 2019 Declaration I declare that this thesis is submitted to the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in fulfillment for the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy as an original work done by me. This work has not been submitted to any other university or examined for any other degree before. I further declare that the various materials used in the study have been duly acknowledged. SIGNED: Joshua Isaac Kumwenda: Signature Date (Candidate) APPROVED: Professor Isabel Hofmeyr: Signature Date (Supervisor) I understand that my thesis will become part of the permanent collection of the University of the Witwatersrand libraries. My signature below authorizes release of this thesis to any reader who would like to use the information for academic purposes. No part of this thesis may be reproduced by any means without prior permission from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Joshua Isaac AUTHOR: 0718647G Signature Date Kumwenda: (Candidate) (Student Number) i Dedication To my mother, Mama Ethel Nyasindani Nkhoswe who did everything to ensure that I attained education when the situation was very tough for her as a single parent, I say that this thesis is for you. May the Almighty God bless you with more years ahead to enjoy the fruits of my sweat and witness my rise to positions of prominence and influence in society. This thesis is also dedicated to you Daniel and Tawonga. I will always cherish the love, patience and understanding you guys have demonstrated over the years that I have been away. ii Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Isabel Hofmeyr most sincerely for her invaluable engagement, intellectual insights and support throughout this research project. I really appreciate the amount of time she spent reading my drafts and suggesting sources to consult from time to time. Her unwavering support saw me present papers at conferences such as the African Literature Association (ALA) conference, the African Studies Association (ASA) conference, the Global South literary and cultural conference and the Commonwealth Literature Association conference in Europe, North America and Africa. Some of the papers presented at those conferences ended up being published in journals while others are still under review. The same token of appreciation should go to academic staff of the African Literature Department at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg whose ideas and insights shared during departmental seminars I always found useful and simulating. In a special way, I would like to thank Prof. Dan Ojwang, Prof. Pumla Gqola, Prof. Bhekizizwe Peterson and Dr. Danai Mupotsa for their ‘listening ears’ on a wide range of issues both academic and non-academic although they were not directly assigned to supervise my project. Let me also acknowledge the goodwill of my employers, Mzuzu University for providing me with a scholarship and a three-year study leave that enabled me to embark on this study. My friends at the Graduate Centre in the Faculty of Humanities deserve thumbs-up, particularly Ranga, Ayanda, Franscis, Nancy, Rebecca, Zweli, Dikupo and Bongani for proving to be such great assets in fighting boredom and depression, and as sources of valuable information on various aspects of life in Johannesburg, plus they were fun to hang out with during the entire duration I was in Johannesburg. I won’t forget the hot debates, the laughs, pieces of advice, fears and visions we shared. Above all, I would like to thank God Almighty for protecting me, keeping me in iii robust health, providing for my daily needs and guiding my thoughts throughout the epic journey of the PhD. For all these I say, “The Lord is good!” iv Abstract In this study I set out to investigate how Legson Kayira, one of the leading Malawian novelists, has narrated the nation across the colonial and early post-independence eras through his novels and autobiography, and highlight key questions surrounding the country’s nationhood which he confronts. The thesis contends that the main concern of Legson Kayira’s literary works is the concept of the ‘nation,’ a topic that has not been adequately explored by critics in relation to him. It argues that Legson Kayira largely narrates the Malawian nation as a contested discursive formation in which certain interpretations or discourses are pushed into dominance and others marginalised, but his aim is to foreground the excluded conceptions in relation to the dominant ones, to stage a contest or debate among the various strands of thought and/or belief. The five content chapters of this thesis are organized thematically as each chapter focuses on one text to thoroughly investigate aspects of nationhood around which the text is constructed and which appear to be dominant in that text. I draw upon the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) and Homi Bhabha (2009) to account for Kayira’s narration of the nation. In Bakhtin’s view, the process of narrating a nation exposes literature’s tendency of heteroglossia, that is, to inhabit stories that portray different and competing imaginings of the same nation. The nation is, therefore, viewed as a space of dialogue between histories, narratives and perspectives all imbedded in it. As for Bhabha (2009), competing narratives of the nation are embedded within a literary text because the nation is an ambivalent, contested and unsettled construct to such an extent that literature’s engagement with the nation is very political and ideological. Broadly, I also utilize the postcolonial theory, specifically its key concepts of essentialism, subversion, ambivalence, otherness and hybridity to consider how Kayira has interrogated key aspects of Malawi’s nationhood through those concepts and reveal how the characters try to recover their lost pre- colonial identities, histories and cultures in vain which leads them to search for new identities v as individuals or groups. I observe that in narrating the Malawian nation, Legson Kayira has engaged elements of nationhood to confront key political questions and dominant discourses about the nation in order to achieve his overall aim of showing that the postcolonial Malawi nation-state is a highly contested and complex entity to define. In order to achieve that broad aim, I have concentrated on how Kayira has interrogated the main elements of Malawi’s nationhood by using incidents in the characters’ lives and elements of form that question or cast doubt over Malawi’s status as a nation. I have further examined the rather problematic relationship between the tribe and the nation especially how it reproduces and challenges the country’s claims to nationhood. This is done by uncovering the metonymic and oppositional relationships it has with the nation’s official imagination, history and character. In all the texts that have been analysed, the protagonist as a member of a particular tribe represents the nation allegorically in order to construct and even undermine the dominant discourses such as the traditionally rooted depiction of the Malawi nation as a mother (Mother Malawi) which Kayira over-rules as masking the true nature of the country’s nationhood and character. It is also observed that Kayira’s writing seems to edge the Malawian nation imagination towards Globalization which is characterized by homogeneity of cultures through embracing universal values and a common vision of social organization and control leading to internationality. Although Kayira wrote all his texts within the context of an emerging Globalization as a dominant social reality, this study has revealed that his gender, international exposure, race and ethnic background seem to have greatly influenced the manner in which he has narrated the Malawi nation to such an extent that his internationalist thrust is somehow undermined. This is reflected in his rather subjective selection of historical events and hostile engagement with the Chewa nationalism that has come to define the identity and character of the Malawi nation, and through the positive depiction of elements of modernity towards which the Malawi nation is edging. vi Table of Contents Declaration ............................................................................................................................................... i Dedication ............................................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................................ iii Abstract ................................................................................................................................................... v 1.0 CHAPTER ONE: Introduction ........................................................................................................ 1 1.1 Literature and the Question of Narrating the Nation .............................................................. 1 1.2 Key Theories on Nation and Nationalism ..............................................................................