Epistemic Entanglements in an Age of Universals: Literacy, Libraries and Children’S Stories in Rural Malawi

Epistemic entanglements in an age of universals: literacy, libraries and children’s stories in rural Malawi

Thandeka Julia Siobhan Cochrane

Magdalene College

· This dissertation is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy ·

Department of Social Anthropology University of Cambridge January 2020

DECLARATION

This dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. It is not substantially the same as any that I have submitted, or, is being concurrently submitted for a degree or diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University or similar institution except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. I further state that no substantial part of my dissertation has already been submitted, or, is being concurrently submitted for any such degree, diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University or similar institution except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. It does not exceed the prescribed 80 000 word limit for the Archaeology, Anthropology and Sociology Degree Committee.

ABSTRACT

This thesis examines the spread and impact of the universal of literacy in rural Malawi, through the lens of globally circulating Anglophone children’s story books and the emergence of village libraries. While Africa in the twenty-first century is being seen as an emerging global player, many African countries are, however, still struggling to provide the basics of a quality education for their children. One approach to solving this problem taken up by many development organisations and governments is the heavy promotion of literacy programmes in primary schools. Within this framework literacy acts as what Anna Tsing calls a ‘universal’ – historically and socially contingent ideas which are elevated to the category of a universal good. The spread of universals in a world marked by asymmetrical power relations creates both deep aspirations and desires for the promises of the universal of literacy (education, economic and social progress, status) whilst simultaneously producing often violent marginalisations and exclusions (hegemonic school systems, new elites and hierarchies, failures of access and achievement, epistemological erasures). In looking at these processes through rural African libraries and the reading of fiction in rural Africa this thesis explores two areas of study that have received very limited anthropological attention: rural libraries and fiction reading. The work is based on eighteen months ethnographic fieldwork in a village conglomerate on the northern lakeshore of Lake Malawi. In my quest to find Anglophone children’s books in these villages, I encountered six-small scale local village libraries. In the first section of the work (Chapter 1), I ask how these libraries got to these villages, who built them and why? Drawing on extensive time spent in the libraries, chatting with librarians, readers, teachers, villagers, well- wishers, volunteers, and heads of charities, and following the trails of the libraries’ construction, I show that they did not emerge through large-scale macro-coordinated development projects, but rather through many individual and personal relations between local villagers and international well-wishers - offering a different picture to the usual marco-oriented development projects. Using the work of Tim Ingold, I suggest that one can understand how these micro-practices and relations are able to unintentionally contribute to the desired outcomes of the development agenda through the lens of entanglements and meshworks, which are underpinned by the expectations and requirements of universals as globally desired norms. In the second section of the thesis (Chapters 2 & 3), I explore the ways in which the universal of literacy facilitates the production of knowledge hierarchies, new elites and epistemic inequalities and how people contest these through claims about local oral literature (nthanu). From these discussions I posit nthanu as a key didactic tool for the ethical formation of the social-self that acts as a vitally important intellectual and ontological technology. I look at the ways in which schooling fails as a platform for engaging with nthanu and how the exclusions of literacy are exacerbated in Malawi through what I call an ‘English Myth’. I also discuss an old book, Nthanu za Chitonga, in which local oral literature was written during the colonial period, as an example of the intermingling of orality and literacy and an artefact of intellectual history and (post)colonial entanglements. I suggest that people’s ‘nostalgic’ discussions about ‘disappearing’ oral literature can be understood as a way to mark the limits of the universal and make claims for epistemic justice and recognition. In the last section of the thesis, I ask what happens when the universal of literacy brings fantasy-fiction books into communities where witchcraft and magic are part of everyday reality. By speaking to readers of fantasy books such as the Harry Potter and Percy Jackson series, I explore how readers make sense of the worlds they encounter in these books, incorporate them into their own ontological understandings and imagine an increased global affinity based on shared discourses of magic and witchcraft. Through the lens of libraries and literacy, the first dimension of the thesis contributes to understanding the transnational social and political history and contemporary relations in an area of northern Nkhata Bay considered the home-region of an ethno-linguistic group called Tonga. The second dimension of the thesis contributes towards a general analysis of the ways in which literacy acts as a universal which spreads through global connections and produces aspirations and exclusions in rural African spaces. By examining small-scale ‘development’ projects that are locally and globally co-constituted through entanglements, my research contributes to debates on the anthropology of development and the global-local encounter. By showing the contestations that form around literacy and orality, and the ways in which people navigate the aspirations offered and exclusions produced, the thesis adds to debates on literacy in rural Africa, universals and epistemic justice.

To Mum, Dad, Bisa and Nops.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

“If you wish to go quickly go alone, if you wish to go far, walk with others”

- proverb from the field

This thesis was a long journey that was only made possible by those who walked with me. My first thanks goes to my supervisor, Harri Englund, for his guidance and understanding for the challenges faced, and for the sharing of his rich intellectual world. I am grateful to my advisor, Susan Bayly, for her inspiration and enthusiasm, and continued support. My deepest thanks and gratitude goes to all the people in Malawi, and especially the people of Chituka and Kamwala, who took me in, housed me, cared for me, shared with me and made me part of their families. This thesis rests on their lives, and the generosity with which they shared these lives with me can never be done justice. Tawonga ukongwa. No words can do justice to my gratitude for my two host-mothers, Elida Mwase and Fannie Ngwira, who took me in and let me live in their homes as if they were my own. They showed me what kindness and generosity truly mean and gave me a place to belong. My thanks to their families who became my own, Grace, Damson and Thompson, and Rhoda and Ambuya Mwase.

I would like to thank my translator, James Mpanda, without whose quick wit, exceptional desire to learn and easy multilingualism none of this work would have been possible. For many months James was my daily companion to whom I turned with all my thoughts. The friendship that was forged walking those village paths will never be forgotten.

My heartfelt thanks to James’ parents, Maud and Jobson, who always welcomed me into their home with open arms and taught me so much about village life. To their children, Allicki, Mada, Enoch, Katherine and Junior.

My thanks goes to Burton at Mwaya, who welcomed me with open arms, sharing his knowledge, his humour and even his home. The steady presence of Kamoza Banda, his willingness to answer all my questions with his vast depth of knowledge and the way I was always welcome in his home were one of the most important support structures I had in the field.

To the old gentlemen, Msinawana and Elias Kamanga, whose magnanimity with which they shared their knowledge and milky tea deeply touched my heat. To the people at Kande, who housed me so briefly, Stanley and his family, Mercy, Ethel and their families, thank you for letting in a total stranger and letting me share so richly in your worlds. To the people at Mayoka, Joy’s, Makuzi Beach and Mushroom Farm; Naomi, Cam, Precious, Justin Krauss, Joy, Brett, Laura, Gary, Katherine, Lyman and Justin Kettler, for giving me a comfy space of indulgence, nonsense, and all the cheese.

My thanks to Thomas Ngwira, who so patiently taught me Chitonga. To Nikolas Mwakasula, who was the first to greet me in Malawi, and was a crucial translator of nthanu. To the girls and teachers at Bandawe Girls Secondary School for so warmly sharing with me, and to the teachers at Macalpine for being a comforting part of my daily life. To Rebecca and James at Mwaya for their gracious hearts, and to Vitu and Scorpion for their dry wit. My gratitude goes to Symon and Margaret Matola for being the first to offer me a home, and to Keni Banda, for his enthusiastic support of my work and for incorporating me in all his projects. To Tobias Berg, for being a gracious listener and an unflinching support. To Wezi and Claire Mollat, for keeping me sane, for always being there to listen to my struggles and difficulties and for making me laugh and find my strength. Lastly to Flora, who magically fell into my life and not only briefly gave me a heart-home in Malawi, but showed me what it truly means to fully embrace life with love and joy.

In Cape Town, my thanks goes to the friends I have had for many years, who rallied around me when I came to visit; Julie, Mikey, Brownie, Stu, Hayley, Tabs, Matty P., Mel, Anna, Kevin, Maxine. Special thanks to Grace, whose calls gave me strength and hold, to Claire Martens, whose compassion and understanding were invaluable, and to David Jacka who rescued me in my hour of need. To Richard Parry, for being the rock that I built my life on for many years and for teaching me to learn to love myself again. And to Thembi Luckett, for being there from the beginning, always catching me when I fall.

To my friends across the globe, whom I carry in my heart. Igor, Lisa and Thomas who reminded me of the joy in life at a time when it was most needed, to Wouter whose life updates and sage advice kept me steady and gave me strength, to Marco Funk, who is always in my heart, to Marko KG, who opened me to worlds I had not known, and to Marcia Schenck, whose boundless love and faith never cease to fill me with hope.

In Cambridge, special thanks goes to Sally Butler and Katie Ball, two women who were my everything and who made this city a place I could love. To Kostas, Afnan, Julia Modern, Matt Roese, Alex Taylor, Josh Miller, Freya, Roxine and Craig, Luci and Fede and Sophia and Felix, whose laughter and companionship made life in this city rich with friendship and warmth. To Greg and Eduardo, who offered me solace and friendship in the Gates room. To the anthropology crew, in the basement and the attic, Alice, Pete, Sofia, Cam, David, Juliet, Anna, Tom and Christina, for grounding me during the vagaries of fieldwork, sharing their intellectual insights and being compassionate comrades on the PhD road. My immense gratitude goes to the decolonise collective, Victoria, Uzair, Nikita, Jasmin, who made me feel seen and gave me the courage to keep fighting.

I owe the greatest debt of thanks to my most incredible readers, who brought me hope when I thought all was lost, and who were instrumental in pulling this work together, Marcia, Sophia, Felix, and Tik, your generosity of mind and spirit overwhelms me.

My utmost gratefulness goes to my final readers, Tobias Müller and James Cochrane, without whose dedication, time and love this work would be nothing.

To Tobi, for giving me his love and care, for carrying me through the darkest times and for enfolding me in the warmth of his being. My world has been made richer and more beautiful through knowing you.

Lastly to my family, James, Renate, Thembisa and Cagn Cochrane, who are the foundations upon which my life is built, thank you for all you have given me. Contents

GLOSSARY ...... 4 LIST OF FIGURES ...... 5 A NOTE ON NAMES AND TRANSCRIPTION ...... 6 MAPS ...... 7

INTRODUCTION ...... 9 Setting the Scene ...... 11 Section One: Undercurrents ...... 16 Literacy, orality and colonialism: becoming a universal ...... 16 Literacy and development in the (post)colony ...... 20 Literacy, education and development in Malawi ...... 24 Section Two: Themes ...... 27 Village libraries ...... 27 Texts ...... 28 Texts that move: fantasy books ...... 30 Section Three: Field ...... 31 Locating a field site ...... 31 A place steeped in history ...... 32 A place of development ...... 35 Methodology ...... 37 On footsteps/ethics ...... 40 Chapter Outline ...... 43

CHAPTER 1: Housing Stories Entangled libraries and moving books...... 45 Introduction: libraries, literacy and development ...... 48 Section One: Coming into being: four libraries ...... 51 1. The Tupane Library ...... 51 Three librarians: a portrait ...... 55 2. Bandawe Girls Secondary School Library ...... 59 3. Kande School Library ...... 64 4. Macalpine School Library ...... 67

Bone fragments: a ‘failed’ project? ...... 70 Section Two: Housing, moving, leaking ...... 72 Leaking libraries: things in (perpetual) motion ...... 72 Libraries as museums and archives: order and power ...... 75 Books on the move: global and affective entanglements ...... 80 Conclusion ...... 83

CHAPTER 2: Speaking Stories Declining (m)orality? Orature, schools and elites ...... 86 Introduction: stories beyond libraries ...... 88 Section One: Nthanu ...... 91 Telling stories ...... 91 Disappearing stories...... 92 Teaching morals, making ontologies ...... 93 Nthanu and school ...... 97 Performing (m)orality ...... 98 Ownership ...... 103 Section Two: Alienation, English and elites ...... 104 Schools and alienation ...... 104 An ‘English Myth’? ...... 107 Taking hold of (English) literacy: the making of elites...... 114 Conclusion ...... 118

CHAPTER 3: Writing Stories “The wisdom of the Tonga”, a book disappears ...... 121 Introduction: writing and remembrance ...... 124 Nthanu za Chitonga ...... 125 The author...... 127 A book disappears… ...... 131 Politics of knowledge ...... 133 Chimbano’s council ...... 138 “That is a political book” ...... 140 The salience of writing it down ...... 144 Conclusion ...... 146

CHAPTER 4: Reading Stories Magical epistemologies and fantasy f(r)iction ...... 151 Introduction: reading worlds of magic ...... 154 Section One: Situating reading, fiction and magic ...... 156 Anthropology and history of reading ...... 156 Fantasy fiction: the making of a genre...... 158 Magic and witchcraft in Africa ...... 160 Section Two: fearing fantasy, reading fantasy ...... 163 Fantasy fiction is “a very bad thing”: transgressing boundaries...... 163 Witchcraft is taught ...... 166 Bandawe Girls Secondary School and Percy Jackson ...... 170 The readers and their library ...... 174 Harry Potter ...... 181 Conclusion ...... 188

CONCLUSION ...... 191 Dualities of universals ...... 193 Challenging universals ...... 195 Further investigations ...... 197 Final remarks ...... 198 BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 201 APPENDIX 1 Library statistics from Tupane Library ...... 227 APPENDIX 2 Three stories from Nthanu za Chitonga...... 229 APPENDIX 3 Comparison of Chichewa and Chitonga ...... 232 APPENDIX 4 Writing assignment for Standard 7 ...... 233 APPENDIX 5 Book audit data ...... 234

GLOSSARY

CDSS – Community Day Secondary School DEM – District Education Manager ECD – Early Childhood Development GVH – General Village Headman HDI – Human Development Index MDG – Millennium Development Goal MIE – Malawi Institute of Education MoEST – Ministry of Education, Science and Technology MoFDP – Ministry of Finance and Development Planning MSCE – Malawi School Certificate of Education NGO – Non-governmental organisation NSoM – National Statistics Office of Malawi PEA – Primary Education Advisor SDG – Sustainable Development Goal TA – Traditional Authority UN – United Nations UNDP – United Nations Development Programmes UNESCO – United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation UNICEF – United Nations Children Fund VH – Village Headman

LIST OF FIGURES All photographs are the author’s own

Figure 1: Map of Malawi with Nkhata Bay District magnified (Nations Online Project). 7 Figure 2: Map of field site with key villages demarcated (Google maps) 7 Figure 3: Tupane library from outside 57 Figure 4: Tupane library from inside 57 Figure 5: Bandawe Girls Secondary School library from open shelves 61 Figure 6: Bandawe Girls Secondary School library from front door 61 Figure 7: Inside Kande FP library 66 Figure 8: Kande FP library shelves after first library session 66 Figure 9: Macalpine school library when I first arrived 70 Figure 10: Macalpine school library after I cleaned and ‘ordered’ it 70 Figure 11: Tea being served at Msinawana’s house 194

A NOTE ON NAMES AND TRANSCRIPTION

All the names of individuals in the thesis have been anonymised except the names of my translator, James Mpanda and Msinaŵana. Msinaŵana is the nickname for one of my closest and dearest interlocutors in the field who passed away a few weeks after I left. I chose to use his nickname in order to honour his memory. The ways in which people were addressed in the field have been maintained, for example, if I always addressed someone as Mr X, then their name in the thesis will be Mr Y. The names of chiefs remain unchanged as their names are titled-names which are carried over generations, rather than the names of individuals. The names of all schools, villages and libraries remain the same except Tupane village, where the name of the village would immediately lead to the identification of all interlocutors connected to it. All transcriptions are the author’s own work. Most of the translation of interviews from Chitonga was done with the help of James Mpanda. Nikolas Mwakasula assisted with the translation of Nthanu za Chitonga. All interviews conducted in Chitonga have a * in front of the person’s name the first time their name appears, e.g. *Silias Luwo said, “….”. Chitonga words are given in brackets in italics.

MAPS

Figure 1: Map of Malawi with Nkhata Bay District magnified (Nations Online Project)

Figure 2: Map of field site with villages of Kamwala, Chituka, Chifira and Kande marked.

It is easy to forget how mysterious and mighty stories are […] They work with all the internal materials of the mind and self. They become part of you while changing you. Beware the stories you read or tell: subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world. – Birds of Heaven (Ben Okri)

INTRODUCTION

This thesis is about stories. It is about stories in their material form, as books, and the libraries in which they are housed. It is about stories that are spoken, stories that are written, and stories that are read. It is about who speaks them, who hears them, who reads them, and who writes them. It is about the social life of stories, what stories are when they are not only stories but the things that people build worlds around.

This thesis is also about universals. It is about the ways in which universalised ideas of literacy and education set books in motion and bring them into rural Malawi. It is about power and knowledge interwoven, about literacy projects and ‘development’ in southern and eastern Africa, and about the challenges, contestations, emergences and engagements these bring. It is about whose stories are valued and why, about what structures and relations bring stories into communities. This thesis explores these themes by looking at Anglophone children’s fantasy books that are brought into rural northern Malawi as part of literacy projects, the libraries that are built to house them, and the oral literature that is marginalised in their wake.

In the year 2000 the United Nations (UN) launched their Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) — goals to be fulfilled by all countries the world over by the year 2015. MDG2 aimed to achieve “universal primary education” (United Nations n.d.a). In 2015, the United Nations launched a new set of goals, this time called the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). SDG4 aims to achieve “quality education”, a key part of which is literacy (United

Nations Development Programme n.d.). These major international ‘development’1 agendas exert a substantial amount of pressure on developing nations. Southern and eastern Africa, whilst making the “greatest progress in primary school enrolment” since 2000, still face enormous challenges in education (United Nations n.d.b). Within these global development paradigms, alphabetic literacy – reading and writing – is seen to be fundamental to educational practice and economic and social achievement, and thereby becomes tied into international and local development structures (see for example Save the Children International 2016; UNESCO 2019; UNICEF n.d.). One result of this is that a plethora of literacy projects are established in towns, villages and cities across southern and eastern Africa. Many of these projects bring English language children’s storybooks from across the globe into rural communities. This movement of stories has, however, received limited critical attention. In this thesis I ask how this movement

1 For ease of reading the term ‘development’ will not be put in scare quotes throughout the thesis, the scare quotes should however be read as still being there.

9 of books unfolds in a rural part of south-eastern Africa, northern Malawi, and what the literacy that brings these books into the area does in these communities. To do this I argue that this movement of books and the construction of libraries rests on the nature of alphabetic literacy as a universal.

“Universals”, according to Anna Tsing (2005), are ideological formations that operate at a global scale – such as democracy, human rights, or liberalism. They are things “we cannot not want, even as [they] so often exclude us” (2005:1). Universals, using Tsing’s definition, are marked by concomitant desires and aspirations, for themselves and for what they promise, coupled with exclusions and dominance. They are dreams and schemes that are aspirational in the global sense: they hold within them the idea of a universally abstracted possibility of a coherent whole, one that everyone can become part of. Abstracted at the global scale, it is in the “sticky materiality of practical encounter” that they become actualised, where their power becomes visible and their aspirations are played out (ibid.). Hence, they are also aspirational at the personal level. They are things to which people aspire, which hold a promise of personal prosperity – even as that very act of wanting ushers in disappointments, exclusions and marginalisations. They show us the desires that mark the contemporary era, the strivings of people, their actions of reaching, but at the same time they also show the “shadows” (Ferguson 2006) of that universality, the dominances and erasures that are produced. These universals, which so often are the products of colonial encounters, are a “guide to the yearnings and nightmares of our times” (Tsing 2005:1).

In her work on universals, Tsing does not mention literacy as a universal. In this thesis, however, I take Tsing’s concept of universals and apply it to alphabetic literacy, arguing that alphabetic literacy (henceforth just literacy) is a universal in the Tsingian sense. I argue that seeing literacy as a Tsingian universal allows us to unpack it in terms of global relations of connection, power and friction. Equally, I suggest that the analysis of literacy presented here offers an ethnographic example of a Tsingian-type universal at work. In short, this thesis is an exploration of the effects of a universal – the universal of literacy.

Universals spread through, and produce, global connections. They ride on the coat tails of connectivity, whilst at the same time being a core component of producing the imaginative possibility of a global whole. “Global connections are everywhere” (ibid.) but they are not smooth and seamless threads that run without struggle or challenge across the world. They are marked, as Tsing argues, by frictions, by places of ‘stickiness’, where the ideas, dreams and schemes of the universal encounter difference and come into contact with lived realities (2005:1-

7). It is in these spaces of tension, where universals rub against local forms and practices, that change is engendered and new forms take shape. It is also in these frictions that power and hierarchies manifest, and struggles for voice and recognition take place. This thesis takes up the challenge of studying the universal of literacy by way of exploring these frictions, spaces of tension and contestation that are also the spaces that produce global connections. It thus looks at “knowledge that moves – mobile and mobilizing – across localities and cultures” (emphasis added, Tsing 2005:7), in the material form of books, in the form of concepts and ideas around literacy, and in the stories contained in fantasy fiction books.

In this introduction, I first describe the Malawian context of the ethnographic fieldwork and how I came to the thesis questions. Then follows a richer discussion of literacy and schooling as universals and as the ideological landscape within which the fieldwork was situated, supplemented by a brief introduction to the key themes of libraries, texts (oral and written), and fantasy fiction. Finally, I introduce the field site(s) and comment on method and ethics.

Setting the Scene

The encounter between stories, literacy and development unfolds in a conglomeration of rural villages that straddle the northern shores of Lake Malawi and the M5, the great Lakeshore Road. The M5 runs the length of the lake, from the large fishing town of Salima at its southern end, through the old Arab slave port of Nkhotakota 112 kilometres to the north, up to Nkhata Bay, a Caribbean-like fishing port popular with tourists, 195 kilometres further on. As you come up the M5 from the country’s capital, Lilongwe, the drier and deforested landscape of the central region gives way to the lush forests of the north.

The lake is first seen in tantalising glimpses through breaks in the hills, until the road crests the last peaks around Senga Bay and opens up to a vast vista across an endless blue that seems to stretch beyond the horizon. As the road curves northwards hugging the lakeshore, it is bracketed by the lake’s blue waters to the east and the Viphya mountains to the west. Between these lies the densely populated lakeshore – a seemingly endless collection of huts and villages interspersed with bustling trading centres, where goats, cyclists and pedestrians overwhelm the crumbling tar roads. Far along this road, about 50 kilometres south of Nkhata Bay, one comes to another bend and drives through a village as unremarkable as the next, except, perhaps, that you might notice the large white painted sign directing you to turn right to Cichlid Lodge, one

11 of the more idyllic and expensive high-end lodges in the north. This village is Chituka, my home for nine months of my fieldwork, and the centre of my operations. Right next to it, the one bleeding into the other at a boundary indiscernible to the unknowing eye, is the village of Kamwala, where I lived for the first seven months of my fieldwork.

Initially I came to the field with the intention of studying imported English language children’s stories, specifically fantasy and fairytale books, that were being read in Early Childhood Development (ECD) Centres. Three years previously, January to March 2014, I had undertaken my master’s fieldwork on ECD centres in Chituka. At the time there were a number being run by three women, from Ireland, Norway and Australia, who had a passion for fantasy and fairytale children’s literature.2 I was fascinated by the penetration of this literature into the area, and by the ideas and practices around literacy, the materiality of the books, the organiser’s adoration of fairytale books with their magical themes, and the parents’ mistrust of these very themes. This brought me back to this field site to begin my PhD fieldwork. As is so often the case in anthropology, on returning to Malawi I discovered that the field had changed. All three women had left the area, and with their departure the supplies of books had dwindled and the ECD centres shrunken or completely closed. Finding that the ECD projects I had come to study were gone, I embarked on a long process of tracking down all and any places where imported children’s literature, in particular fantasy and fairytale literature, penetrated into the communities I was living in.

I decided to keep the original focus of children’s fantasy fiction for a number of reasons. I was interested in exploring epistemological formations and the imperatives around morality and imagination, and as the primary didactic subjects of societies these are crystallised in children and the stories made for them (see Lancy and Grove 2011; Lancy 2012, 2017; LeVine et al. 1994; LeVine 2007; Schwartzman 2001). Children are also the primary subjects of literacy and education interventions, another key interest of my work. Added to this, they are the most vulnerable to the moral ambiguities in fantasy fiction. Fantasy fiction is a particular focus, first because it is the most popular book genre in the world and its magical elements are present in a large proportion of children’s literature.3 Second, and most saliently, because it presents an

2 For more detail on these projects see Cochrane 2014 (unpublished MSc thesis). 3 Despite its global popularity, and Harry Potter selling vastly more books than any other fiction book world-wide, children’s literature and fantasy fiction have received limited academic attention (Fitzsimmons 2012; Nikolajeva 2003, 2013). According to a number of lists, among the top six bestselling books worldwide that have sold over 100 million copies (excluding the Bible, Qur’an and Mao’s Little Red Book) four are fantasy fiction (in order of books sold): 1. The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien), 2. Le Petite Prince (Antoine de Saint-Expuréy) 3. Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone (J.K. Rowling), 4. The Hobbit (J.R.R. Tolkien), 5. And Then There Were None (Agatha Christie), 6. Dream of the Red Chamber (Cao Xueqin) (List of best-selling books 2019; Worldatlas n.d.; Ranker n.d.).

12 interesting ontological challenge, one in which the worlds of magic portrayed in the donated books come into friction with the ontological worlds of the village communities, in which magical elements are a part of daily life.

Much to my surprise, my quest in search of fantasy fiction and fairytale books eventually led me to discover a number of small-scale, grassroots libraries. These libraries and the fantasy books that are brought into them from across the globe form a core focus of this thesis.

While I was on my quest wandering through the villages looking for children’s stories, I spent a vast amount of time speaking to people about their local oral literature. In this I encountered the immense importance this literature holds for many and the deep concerns they have about its loss in the face of a literacy-based English school system. This oral literature and people’s relationship to it form the other core focus of this thesis.

In this thesis I seek to understand the relationship between universals, development, and epistemic (in)equality through the lens of literacy and the books and libraries that it brought into rural Malawi. Libraries and books provide a way of ethnographically ‘seeing’ knowledge on the move, of studying the manifestations and productions of the abstracted universal of literacy in the stickiness of its encounters with local and lived realities. In turn, this allows me to unpack how the abstracted universal of literacy unfolds in practice in development-saturated spaces marked by unequal power relations, and to examine the global connections, meshworks and entanglements that are constituent in the production of libraries and circulation of books that run through the villages I worked in. In this I show the core tension inherent in universals – between their simultaneous emancipatory potential and their production of domination and exclusion.

This tension runs through the thesis and is elucidated in a number of different contexts. In each chapter, we will see how people express and navigate exclusions and the limits of the universal, but we will also see the ways in which people pick up the opportunities offered to them in the universals. This is particularly true of the intellectual elite who speak close to fluent English. In a country like Malawi, the promises contained in the potentials of (English) literacy are immense, and underpin much of the country’s economic, political and educational structure, driving people towards wanting to attain it by all means. However, the nature of the school system means this literacy is dominated by one language: English. Literacy, education and English are embedded in colonially produced global hierarchies and structures of power that still shape contemporary Malawian life. In recognising that these universals are thus able to produce

13 violent exclusions, I also explore the ways in which people feel losses around their own oral traditions, struggle to make libraries work, or question the ways in which schools teach things like morality. In this, I ask whether some of these claims of exclusions are not only statements of loss, but also ways that people use to mark inequalities and the highlight the limits they see in the universal.

I do not, however, wish to suggest that literacy, or for that matter libraries, inevitably must or always will produce violent exclusions and marginalisations. Rather, I suggest that in the context of universals when entering the rural south-east African landscape, they do so through (and produce) structures and relations of power that need to be critically examined.

In exploring these themes, this thesis asks the following questions: What does literacy do in villages spaces and how is it encountered, adopted, challenged and transformed? How do libraries filled with English language books land up in rural Malawian villages without overarching development projects? What happens to local stories? Whose, and what kind of, stories are elevated and valued? What happens when they transmit fantasy fiction into rural villages?

These questions are answered over four ethnographic chapters, each looking at a different dimension of what people do with stories: housing stories (Chapter One), speaking stories (Chapter Two), writing stories (Chapter Three), and reading stories (Chapter Four). In this they also show different aspects of literacy at work, for it is in questions of literacy that the global relations of power in which stories circulate are played out. The first chapter begins with housing stories, examining how libraries come into being in village communities by exploring the emergence of four small-scale libraries: the community library built by Impact Africa at Tupane village, the library at Bandawe Girls Secondary School in New Bandawe, the library at Kande Free Primary (FP) in Kande village, and the library at Macalpine FP, in the village of Kamwala (see Figure 2). These libraries form the starting point for the thesis because they are the gathering points for imported children’s literature, showing the infrastructure through which children’s fiction comes into the region, and the entanglements this produces. The second chapter looks at speaking stories, asking how literacy and the books it brings excludes and marginalises local oral literature through an exploration of nthanu (folktales). In this it shows the role that extant children’s stories play in people’s lives, and what people understand under stories. It then looks at the Malawian school system as part of the broader context of relations of power in which literacy, education and children’s stories circulate. It explores how schools, and particularly English, create violent exclusions in Malawi, but equally also create opportunities for

14 socio-economic advancement and for the production of elites. The last two chapters explore how people take up, reshape, and reform literacy and the stories it brings. Chapter Three, looks at writing stories through the production of a book of nthanu, Nthanu za Chitonga (Folktales in Tonga) in the late colonial period. Here we see how literacy and orality, in the right conditions, can productively and equitably work together, and further explore what people’s local literature means to them. The last chapter, Chapter Four, discusses reading stories by engaging with young readers from the libraries studied who read Anglophone fantasy fiction books. In this it shows how people take up the possibilities offered by literacy, and the ways in which they engage with and navigate storybooks that contain potentially problematic themes, such as witchcraft and magic.

The rest of this introduction is divided into three sections. Section one, ‘Undercurrents’, explores literacy as a universal by unpacking its relationship to colonialism and development, the binaries embedded in the concept, and the way this manifests in Malawi. This forms the background to the thesis, showing the epistemological and historical currents that drive people towards wanting to have and create libraries and read Anglophone fiction books. In Section Two, ‘Themes’, I discuss more specifically the themes of libraries and texts which will be addressed in each of the four ethnographic chapters. In Section Three, ‘Field’, I enter into the field, locate my field site and discuss my method and ethics.

Section One: Undercurrents

Literacy, orality and colonialism: becoming a universal

For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, literacy was seen purely as the ability to read and write. It was regarded to be culturally abstracted, universally applicable and “autonomous” (Street 1984) — a set of techniques and uses of language which could be transported across the world in reasonably unchanging form, and which were ‘autonomous’, i.e. their consequences for society and cognition could be arrived at from literacy’s intrinsic character (Bartlett et al. 2011:156; Collins and Blot 2003:3-4). In short, literacy was perceived to be the same thing everywhere, to function the same way and to produce the same outcomes, independent of context. In the latter half of the twentieth century this so-called ‘autonomous model’ of literacy came under heavy attack from anthropologists and literacy theorists alike, who argued that literacy was actually deeply culturally constituted, locally contingent, and enmeshed in relations of power (see Aikman 1999; Collins 1995; Heath 1982; Heath and Street 2008; Street 1984, 1995). Over time the concept has been vastly expanded by scholars to denote almost all forms of drawing information and meaning from signs — such as reading spoors in the sand or making sense of a shopping mall, to encapsulating ideas such as digital literacy, emotional literacy, media literacy and many more (Collins and Blot 2003). Contemporary theorists have thus argued for new models of literacy, such as a “situated model” (Collins 1995) of literacy, understood as diverse historically and culturally variable practices with texts, or an “ideological model” (Street 1984, 2005) which argues that literacy is a social practice always embedded in socially constructed epistemological principles. These models allow for the existence of multiple literacies rather than a singular literacy. In this thesis, however, I hone in on one particular understanding of literacy, one that far more closely resembles the ‘autonomous’ model — that of alphabetic literacy, learning to read and write. Despite much theoretical criticism, it is this literacy which is still firmly coupled to the contemporary school system and is most readily carried across the globe, particularly in development frameworks. It is this literacy, therefore, which acts as a universal.

The act of reading and writing has been a human practice since the first Sumerians wrote cuneiform on tablets over five thousand years ago (Radner and Robinson 2011). For most of the five thousand years following, literacy was the province of a small, educated and often powerful elite (Kaestle 1985:15). It was only in the late eighteenth century that literacy began, in Euro-America, to be seen as something for the masses (Manguel 1997:140). With the elevation

16 of the Enlightenment ideals of learning and reasoning, literacy took on a new importance – as a key mechanism through which to carry ‘man’ out of the dark ages and into the light of the age of science and reason (Collins and Blot 2003:74). In the nineteenth century, growing political liberalisation and calls for more expansive suffrage, which were seen to depend on an educated literate demos, transformed literacy into a political question and therefore a responsibility of the state (ibid.; see also Anderson 2006; Habermas 1989; Knuth 2012; McHenry 2002; Wadsworth 2006). This shifted the nature of education and literacy and reformed them from no longer being something only for the elite, but rather a capacity, and later right, for all citizens of the state. As the nation-state gained traction as the political entity par excellence, the importance and prominence of literacy for the majority escalated.

During this period literacy also came to be seen as a marker of progress and ‘civilisation’ (Graff 2010a; Street 2001). Through the encounters of colonialism, Euro-American scholars and researchers began building complex theories and discourses about difference and hierarchies based on supposedly scientific ideas of race, ethnicity or phrenology (Millar 1779; Dunbar 1781). Debates raging around the question of the mono- or polygenesis of humans developed into highly racialised social conceptions of evolution and hierarchies of capacity and progress (Dunbar 1781; Ferguson 1793; Pocock 2005; Sebastiani 2013). This produced an epistemological stratification of the peoples of the world, dividing them along a binary linear teleology, of “savage [versus] civilized” (Pels 2008:281), “primitive and barbarous versus advanced and rational” (Vail and White 1991:6-8). Within this bifurcated image of the world, literacy became a marker of progress and was attached to evolutionary analyses of societies in which non-literate societies were seen as evolutionarily behind literate societies (Vail and White 1991:21-23). This was amplified in colonial discourses in which ‘illiterate’ societies, usually oral and ‘native’, were seen as being barbarous, savage and primitive and ‘literate’ societies were seen as being civilised and advanced, like the nations of Europe (Pels 2008:281). Literacy and orality were thus pulled in the dichotomies of the colonial landscape, with literacy being placed firmly on the side of civilisation and orality on the side of savagery.

Colonial expansion further fused literacy and textuality with relations of power — writing and texts were a key part of how Empire functioned, dominated and ruled. Historians and anthropologists alike show how the textual world of Empire, the letters, reports, documentation, archiving, law, written bureaucracy, and so on, were absolutely crucial to the Empire’s practice and maintenance of power (see Ballantyne 2011; Comaroff and Comaroff 1997; Hawkins 2002; Stoler 2002, 2008). This colonial “world of paper” had ambivalent effects

(Ballantyne 2011). On the one hand, it provided possibilities for negotiation and contestation by local elites with the colonial powers, as well as avenues of personal elevation and emancipation through education and literacy. On the other hand, this world of paper also produced profound domination and exclusions (Hawkins 2002).4 With the process of “imperial territorial extension” came a process of textualising cultures and subsequently transforming the “mentalities and social practices” of colonized peoples (Ballantyne 2011:233). Not only were indigenous worlds subsumed into worlds of paper which changed the nature of social and textual relations, and through that epistemic formations, but the avenues of power and voice were also altered. To have power or access to power, or to understand your rights within the system and to fight for them, you needed to be literate (Ballantyne 2011:247). This produced a colonial elite, both within the settler and the indigenous communities, whose elite status rested on worlds of paper and print. Reading rooms, reading clubs and newspapers proliferated (Barber 2006; Newell 2013, 2016). Even a small number of colonial libraries appeared (Amusi 1991:597) but these were often also spaces that created new hierarchies and exclusions by elevating those who were literate far above those who were not (Barber 2006; Newell 2006).

It was in this colonial encounter that universals were able to gain a “specific valence” (Tsing 2005:1) as “European categories” which were elevated to the level of “human universals” (Stoler 2008:349). This produced an “epistemic supremacy” (ibid.) of the European norm over others, within which parochial European categories became universal and something that everyone should want in order to join into the “global stream of humanity” (Tsing 2005:1). Colonialism thus dramatically elevated literacy’s universal status, as it carried a particular idea of literacy across the globe as a key mechanism for achieving ‘civilisation’. This literacy was to be transmitted through a parochial method of teaching it, namely European schooling.

In southern and eastern Africa, this universal good of literacy, coupled with schooling modelled on British and Portuguese education, entered the landscape as a handmaid of colonial expansion, both as an aspirational universal, and as a tool for power and control. Because literacy was sold as a crucial step in the civilizational advancement of all peoples of the world, colonialism was all too often “not written as a history of capitalist expansion, but as a massively, entirely laudable, educational enterprise bringing enlightenment and religion to those left behind in the civilizational process” (Collins and Blot 2003:121). In many parts of Africa, this ‘laudable’

4 Sean Hawkins, for example, speaks of the ways in which the “world of paper” instituted by the colonial regime in Ghana sought to curtail LoDagaa culture and epistemologies “through foreign categories of knowledge” which affected “indigenous knowledge, morality, gender relations and social reckoning” (2002:36).

18 education work was undertaken by missionaries (McCracken 1977:199; Peterson and Hunter 2016). In Malawi, the narrative of a ‘laudable’ educational expansion was particularly potent (Banda 1982; Kamwendo 2010; Kayambazinthu 1999; van Velsen 1960b). The first missionaries to set-up mission stations in the country, at Blantyre and Cape Maclear, came from the Church of Scotland and the Free Church of Scotland respectively. These Scottish missionaries wanted to bring David Livingstone’s dream of ‘saving’ the region from the East African slave trade to life. The Scots entered the country with a firm belief in their role not only in emancipating the country from slavery, but in bringing the light of civilisation through a robust emphasis on education, which focused heavily on teaching basic literacy (Livingstone 1921; McCracken 1977:58; van Velsen 1960b).

As noted, in colonial Africa, this literacy, and the schooling provided by missionaries and later colonial governments, offered the primary route to gaining power and position within the colonial system, producing a small educated African elite (Barber 2006; Newell 2013, 2016; Kayambazinthu 1999). Literacy also served, however, as a way of forcing a western normative and epistemic framework onto colonial subjects and of creating new hierarchies amongst those subjects (Newell 2006; Watson 2006). This is especially apparent when we ask ourselves which language people were meant to be literate in. The question of language, and the elevation of the colonial language was one of the most detrimental ways in which the colonial process enacted violence through literacy. As James Collins and Richard Blot argue, in the colonial process “schooling for the subject population [mostly] entail[ed] the acquisition of the language and literacy of the colonial power” (2003:122). It was therefore not only literacy per se which was seen as the precursor for cognitive capacity and civilizational progress, but literacy in the colonial language. In Malawi, the outcome of this colonial history is that English, the language of the British colonisers, is still to this day the language of instruction in schooling, as well as of government, parliament and most larger economic enterprises (Matiki 2001). This, I argue, is part of what I call the ‘English Myth’ (Chapter Two) which carries many of the same characteristics of the literacy myth, discussed below.

Literacy and development in the (post)colony

In the period of (post)colonial5 independence, many of the binaries that were part of the colonial world order were re-inscribed into the liberal world order of the latter twentieth-century, often as part and parcel of universals. Postcolonial theorists have argued that the construction of such binaries is one of the most powerful lingering inheritances of the colonial system, which produced dichotomizing systems and discourses to differentiate Europe from the colony, demarcating the difference between “traditional versus modern, oral versus written and printed, agrarian and customary versus urban and industrialized civilization” (Mudimbe 1988:3). These dichotomies, it is argued, still deeply characterise the (post)colonial landscape (ibid.; see also Mbembe 2001, 2017; Stoler 2013, 2016).

One of the ways in which the colonial binaries of traditional versus modern and oral versus written, were taken up and reformed in the twentieth century was through what Harvey J. Graff calls the ‘literacy myth’ – the idea that literacy is necessary for, and will also inevitably result in, “economic development, democratic practice, cognitive enhancements, and upward social mobility” (Graff 2010a:635). This myth posits literacy as a core technology which will produce all of these outcomes, despite extensive evidence showing it neither guarantees these outcomes, nor is inevitably necessary for them (Graff 2010a; Street 2001). Literacy, through the effect and impact it has on the mind, learning and knowledge, is thus perceived as the key to things like individual and social socio-economic advancement and cognitive development and as inevitably producing them. This once again couples literacy to the idea of advancement and progress. Linguists and anthropologists such as Walter Ong and Jack Goody also put forward arguments that reading and writing have significant and grand-sweeping cognitive and socio- structural impacts with profound effects on society, further supporting the claims of the ‘literacy myth’ and the belief that literacy is co-constituting of ‘modernity’ (Goody 1986, 1987; Ong and Hartley 2012; for their effect on the literacy myth see Briggs 2000; Collins and Blot 2003:15; Vail and White 1991:23-25).

This myth of literacy was incorporated into the (post)colonial development agenda, in which the same model of schooling, reading and writing used in the colonial period was carried over into development frameworks (Graff 2010b; Street 2001). Although the colonial now appears to lie temporally in the past, one “cannot simply demarcate a past colonialism from

5 I follow Stoler (2016) in writing (post)colonial to show that the “post”colonial is a reforming of the colonial, not a temporal or ontological period separate to it.

20 struggles in the present” (Pels 1997:164; see also Mbembe 2001; Stoler 2013, 2019). As Achille Mbembe (2001) states, there is no time ‘after’ colonialism as marked by an absence of the colonial – colonialism is a feature of long duration and its tendrils still penetrate the fabric of African life. The (post)colony is a place in which “past and present are entangled in hydra-headed ways” (Mbembe and Hofmeyr 2006:182) to such a degree that Ann Stoler (2013, 2016) questions whether one can even speak of the ‘post’-colonial.

This temporal entanglement is felt most keenly within the African landscape in the extensive development industry that is still to a large degree “based on development regimes constructed under colonial rule” (Pels 1997:178). This industry reproduces many of the same logics, inequalities and power structures that colonialism did, just under different rubrics. In this it can often act as a form of neo-colonial and neo-imperial practice complicit in enacting structural and epistemic violence upon those who are to be ‘developed’ subject to the norms, discourses and values of the ‘developed’.6 Thus the development industry often reproduces the “basic power structures of Victorian notions of ‘improvement’” (Pels 2008:286).

By the mid-twentieth century these colonial notions of ‘improvement’, of progress, and of a linear, teleological trajectory of advancement, had filtered into development practice and policies through another myth – that of modernisation theory, which also reproduced many of the binaries of the colonial period (Gardner and Lewis 1998:12; Sachs 1992; Venkatesan and Yarrow 2014). The literacy myth was incorporated into this theory, with illiteracy (or orality) being a marker of traditional societies supposedly ‘behind’ in development, and literacy a marker of those who were ahead and were therefore more ‘modern’ – making literacy a key marker of ‘modernity’, something to be achieved by all who wished to be, or become, ‘modern’ (Vail and White 1991:20-23). Equally, this legitimated the idea that one of the primary ways to ‘modernise’ those who were in need of development was through providing schooling and literacy for all.

Although anthropologists and literacy theorists alike have heavily criticized the view of literacy as key to modernity and advancement and for its potential to create epistemic inequalities and global hierarchies, the idea of literacy as key to human success, as implied in the literacy myth, continues to underpin the imaginaries of governments and development organisations

6 See for example Escobar 1997, 2012; Esteva 1998; Farmer 2003; Ferguson 1990; Ferro 1997; Graaf 2004; Gardner and Lewis 1998; Kim et al. 2000; Lewis 2012; Mosse 2006, 2008, 2013; Sachs 1992; Schneider 1988; Stiglitz 2002; Thirwall 2006; Wainwright 2008. Others have argued that the colonial conditions of the development industry can be overcome by changing from needs based to assets based development, tried to create actively pro-poor development programmes, tried to get more local buy-in, or to create people-centred development projects (see for example De Wet 2001; Fakuda-Parr 2005; Haq 1995; Hercules 1997; Ntshona and Lahiff 2003; Max-Neef 1991; Rogerson 2001; Sen 2000; Taylor 2000).

(see for example Collins and Blot 2001; Finnegan 1970; Street 1995, 2001; Vail and White 1991). As Collins and Blot argue, the optimistic story of the transformative powers of literacy is perhaps the most enduring element of an “otherwise battered modern liberalism” (2003:7). The epistemic inequality of the colonial period which elevated literacy has not disappeared and still continues to “structure global asymmetries” (Tsing 2005:9). Universals play a key role in this, because they tend to propagate historically particular and contingent norms as universal ideals and to (re)produce “knowledge that legitimates the superiority of the West as defined against its others” (Tsing 2005:1). They also form a large part of the operative logics of the development industry, which we see in programmes such as the Sustainable Development Goals which make claims to universalist projects (Gray 2009). Through this the unspoken distinctions and hierarchies of the colonial past continue to thread through the fabric of contemporary life and the colonial “rot remains” (Stoler 2013:2, 2016:4).

One of the key ways in which literacy both spreads as a universal and enacts a particular legitimation of superiority is through the school system. Schooling and literacy are deeply intertwined universals, needing each other and supporting each other. Schooling produces the infrastructure on which literacy travels and is ‘spread’.

Schooling is incorporated into development frameworks because it is viewed as a crucial component for the emancipation, liberation and economic and social advancement of individuals and societies. Schooling and education have indeed been heralded as places of freedom, opportunity and growth and as powerful spaces for ongoing transformation (Levinson and Holland 1996:1; Varenne 2008:10). Theorists such as critical pedagogist Paulo Freire (2017) particularly emphasise the liberatory potential of education (outside of formal schooling) for “the oppressed” and its capacity to provide a space for social critique. Amartya Sen, whose capabilities approach has heavily influenced the development paradigm and United Nations policies, also advocates for literacy as one of the capabilities all humans should have that will ultimately help lead to their freedom (Sen 2000a; Nussbaum 2003:41). In particular, Sen was one of the co- creators of the Human Development Index, which was designed to measure “life expectancy, literacy, and indicators of economic affluence”, and which underpins many contemporary measurements of the development of nations (emphasis added Sen 2000b:18; see also Biao 2011; Fakuda-Parr 2005; Haq 1995; Taylor 2000).

While schooling, literacy and education are undoubtedly able to open up vast avenues of possibility and growth, schooling is just as ambivalent as the universal of literacy. Particularly in (post)colonial and development spaces it is often as likely to produce exclusions, marginalisations

22 and oppressions as it is emancipation and transformation (see for example Aikman 1999; Collins and Blot 2003:5, 96; Collins 2009; Viruru 2006; Watson-Gegeo and Gegeo 1992). Schools are spaces saturated in relations and structures of power and, particularly in (post)colonial development spaces, they can become places where “knowledge techniques are used not to increase freedom and well-being, as our ideals would have it, but rather to adjust ordinary people to a bourgeois domination that presents its rule as justified on universal principles” (Collins and Blot 2003:74).

Despite these critiques, in countries like Malawi, the literacy myth and belief that schooling will lead to individual and social advancement, still hold immense sway. This is in part because in Malawi literacy is a crucial skill needed in order to obtain most of the coveted middle- tier jobs, such as working for development agencies or being a teacher or pastor. This does not mean that these jobs will be attained if literacy is achieved, nor does it mean that there are not a large variety of jobs, such as trade jobs, that are attainable without literacy. Rather, it shows both the power of literacy to act as a lure within particular socio-economic configurations, and it shows that the aspirations and desires of people to attain literacy are not based only on a myth but also on concrete economic and political needs and demands. In the contemporary world, it ultimately is beneficial to have literacy, including English literacy, in order to obtain economically lucrative positions. People in Malawi seek literacy and English not for the value of those things in themselves, but for the global membership they offer, and the political, economic and social rights that they hope to gain from this membership. James Ferguson uses the idea of ‘abjection’ to describe the phenomenon within the African landscape of having an acute awareness of the ‘first class’ privileged world coupled with an increasing social and economic distance from it (Ferguson 2006:166). This abjection creates aspirational drives for universals and global connections such as schooling and literacy in the hope that they will help empower the demand for the “political and social rights of full membership in a wider society” (Ferguson 2006:161). It is this desire for literacy, and the depth of the perception of what it can bring, that, I argue, is the core paradigm which underpins people’s decisions to bring books to Malawi, to open libraries and to seek engagement with libraries and Anglophone literature.

Literacy, education and development in Malawi

In Malawi, the immensely struggling school system contributes significantly to the promises of literacy and schooling often going unfilled. Although primary schooling is free, studies have shown that after six or seven years of schooling the vast majority of students are still unable to read for comprehension, and even fewer are able to read critically. Most schools in the country, particularly in rural areas, suffer from extreme resource poverty, overcrowded classrooms, poorly trained teachers and very low completion rates (Dube 2017; Ministry of Finance and Development Planning (MoFDP) 2011; Malawi Institute of Education (MIE) n.d). The structural issues facing schooling are coupled with the difficulty in language learning. The majority of schooling is conducted in English and from Standard 57 onwards, all subjects are taught in English. The language is, however, non-native to the vast majority of the country, and something with which many of the children battle immensely.

The result is that the majority of children who go to school do not achieve full literacy, particularly in English. The official literacy statistics of the 2008 National Census places the overall literacy rate in Malawi at 65% and the literacy rate in the northern region at 77% (NSoM 2009). This, however, is based on literacy in any language, including minority languages and

Chichewa.8 USAID claims that in Malawi 83% of Standard 1 pupils cannot read a single syllable and 92% cannot read a single word. By Standard 3 there is more reading capacity, but even at this stage pupils can only read 11 words per minute on average and 67% cannot identify the first phoneme in a word (USAID 2016).

Because all other subjects are also taught in English from Grade 5 onwards, the inability to understand English for comprehension means that the content of these other subjects is also not understood. Nonetheless, the power of English as the language of access to the echelons of the middle-class and elite, and the profound aspirational allure it still carries, has meant that despite criticism from Malawian academics, it remains the language of school instruction (see Kamwendo 2002, 2010, 2016; Kayambazinthu 1999; Matiki 2001; Moyo 2001; Namphande 2017). This is part of what I call the ‘English myth’, discussed in Chapter Two. Therefore, while the children, and their parents, in my field site are offered literacy and schooling on the grounds of its universal claims and emancipatory potential, the resource poverty, rote learning, structural

7 Malawian schooling is divided into Primary School, Standard 1 to 8, and Secondary School, Form I to IV. 8 While English is the official language of Malawi, Chichewa is the “common language” (Malawi Government n.d.). There are 270,833 Chitonga speakers in the country (National Statistics Office of Malawi (NSoM) 2009).

24 struggles and curricula difficulties, including the language in which this literacy and schooling is provided, strongly contribute to these aspirations not being met. It is my contention, however, that these promises are not only failing to be met due to a struggling school system, but that the continuation of colonial school structures, the continued use of the colonial language, and the (re)enforcement of colonial and global power structures and epistemic inequalities in and through the school system, play a pivotal role in the system’s continuing failures. As Francis Nyamnjoh argues, “education in Africa is victim of a resilient colonial and colonizing epistemology” (2012:129). This will be further discussed in Chapter Two.

As noted, literacy and schooling were first institutionalised in Malawi by the missionaries. After independence, in 1964, Malawi came under the rule of Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda. Banda left Malawi in his youth to study and then practice medicine in the United States and United Kingdom (Vail and White 1989:179). He returned to Malawi in 1958 to head the Malawi Congress Party. Heralded as a liberator, Banda soon began to clamp down on those who threatened his power (ibid.). In 1971 he declared himself ‘Life President’ and continued to reign as an increasingly autocratic dictator until the first multi-party elections of 1994 (McCracken 2012). Banda was a significant Anglophile and so heavily advocated for English language schooling following the British school model. His influence ensured that English, and British- based schooling, remained at the centre of Malawi’s education policies. Whereas Banda had kept a tight rein on the economic, social and political life of Malawi and Malawians, democracy loosened this stronghold and opened spaces for global market forces, development agencies, and bi- and multi-lateral negotiations to flood into the country.

Since its independence, Malawi has consistently ranked very low on UN development reports and is often seen as one of the poorest countries in the world (Chinsinga 2001:28; United Nations Human Development Report 2019). These rankings problematically order countries into teleologically oriented trajectories of comparative progress; however, within the framework of development logics, they give justification for extensive development interventions into countries like Malawi (Chinsinga 2001:28-29). They also help motivate, and self-legitimate, the large engine of the development industry which has deeply saturated Malawi and left a reasonable degree of the country’s infrastructure and basic services in the hands of development organisations (see for example Banik and Chinsinga 2016; Cochrane 2014; Eggen 2013; Gunnlaugsson and Einarsdottir 2018; Kuanda 1995). While Malawi is no longer being determined by colonial rule, dependence on international donor funds and organisations such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and the impact this has both on Malawi’s

25 government structures and on the everyday lives of Malawians, is one of the defining characteristics of contemporary Malawian life.9

As James Ferguson has argued, in many African countries the state is “in significant ways, no longer able to exercise the range of power we usually associate with a sovereign nation-state”, and countries continue to be “ruled in significant part by transnational organisations that are not themselves governments but work together with powerful First World states within the global system of nation states” (2006:92-100; see also Ferguson and Gupta 2002). In many African countries “the responsibility for the well-being and health of vast sections of the population has been transferred to non-governmental organisations which have proliferated since the 1990s” (Neumark 2014:13). While this argument shows the struggles of internal sovereignty faced by many African states and their citizens, it also emphasises the extensive degree to which most African states are deeply entangled in global connections. As Ferguson argues, in order to understand development on the continent we need to move away from seeing it as a process that happens within or through the state, and rather pay attention to the “transnational character of both ‘state’ and ‘civil society’” (2006:90). In Malawi, a lot of the work done in the education sector is done with the financial and intellectual support of international organisations and foreign aid (Chimombo 2009a; Dube 2017; Kadzamira and Kunje 2002). In my field site, however, none of the libraries studied were built by large international organisations or through foreign aid organisations – rather, they emerged through an expansive entanglement of small- scale actors across the globe, as will be discussed in the next section.

9 For example, prior to the Cashgate Scandal of 2013/2014, 40% of the country’s budget was being paid for through international, bi- and multilateral aid (Wroe 2012; Kayuni 2016:169; for aid dependency in general see Morton 2011 and impact of SAPs see Chinsinga 2001; Kuanda 1995).

Section Two: Themes

Village libraries

So far, I have argued that alphabetic literacy, tied with schooling, acts as a universal operating within development frameworks to enact and (re)inscribe particular global power relations. I now turn to one key ethnographic focus of this thesis, the stories and books that this universal brings with it. It is my contention that Anglophone children’s literature is brought into rural Malawi on the back of the universal of literacy. These books are not brought into rural communities by people because they feel it is of vital importance for young children to know the stories contained in them. Rather, I argue, the books are brought, and often enthusiastically accepted, on the basis of a conviction that it is important for children to read, specifically to read English. As Impact Africa, whose library at Tupane is one of the main libraries studied, state on their website describing the library: “the connection between books and literacy is self-evident”. It is the universal status of English literacy and the “self-evident” connection between English books and literacy which drives people to bring parochial stories in a non-native language that few can read into rural Malawian villages, and to build small-scale libraries to house them.

Libraries have not received much ethnographic attention within anthropology. Whereas there is extensive work on libraries within Information Science Studies, this tends to focus on university or public libraries with a heavy bias towards the global north.10 Rural village libraries in south-eastern Africa have received even less ethnographic attention. With this thesis I want to draw attention to rural libraries as ethnographically rich and interesting objects of study. I do not, however, present a thick ethnography of the daily life of libraries and their users, rather I explore the libraries specifically from the angle of trying to understand them as globally entangled productions that collect particular epistemological frameworks within certain power relations. Libraries, I contend, are places that show both global epistemological and material entanglements and the ways in which people engage with the threads of universals. They provide collections of epistemological productions in their books, which incorporate vast amounts of travelling knowledge — but they equally produce and present new forms of knowledge collection and ordering, new dispositions and ways of being, new possibilities, and new spaces

10 A 2012 Library and Information Science (LIS) survey found 81 LIS studies that had used ethnographic methods in the previous 30 years. The majority were focused on academic libraries in the global north (Khoo et al. 2012).

27 of generative productivity and (re)formation. In this, I suggest, they open up spaces through which one can unpack questions of global epistemic justice.

As noted, the libraries I studied were not part of planned projects, or focused literacy interventions, or, as we will see, always even intended to be built. In this they demonstrate James Ferguson’s suggestion that much development work in Africa is done by transnational civil society and that, when looking at development in contemporary Africa, we should not fixate on “vertical topographies of power” but rather look at the transnational character of the ‘civil society’ that produces development projects (2006:90). The libraries in my field site, however, also complicate the picture Ferguson paints of the transnational ‘civil society’ of development, which is primarily located within large-scale international NGOs and multilateral organisations (2006, see also Ferguson and Lohmann 1994). The ‘civil society’ behind the libraries studied largely consists of individual well-wishers or very small-scale charity organisations run by individuals. The large-scale international organisations that are almost always seen to be the forces taking over the role of the state in some African countries make no appearance in the rural libraries I studied.

In Chapter One, I suggest that Tim Ingold’s work on lines, meshworks and entanglements, provides a fruitful way of seeing how the global manifests and connects to the local, and of exploring how people, books and libraries emerge through a process of entanglement (2000, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2016). Entanglement, I thus also suggest, offers one way of analysing the global connections that universals ride on without losing sight of the local into which they are enmeshed. Connecting this to Tsing, I contend that one reason this happens is due to the power of literacy operating as a colonially informed universal with “sticky engagement” (Tsing 2005:6), an idea that ‘sticks’ around which coalesce people, activity and action.

Texts

The libraries studied in this thesis exist primarily in order to house books. Books are texts, and texts, as Karin Barber tells us, “are social facts. Texts are used to do things: they are forms of action” (Barber 2007a:3). In her seminal work, The anthropology of texts, persons and publics (2007a), Barber sets out to do for texts what writers before had done for literacy, namely, to write against the idea of texts as abstracted, autonomous sources of information. She urges anthropologists

28 to go beyond looking primarily at the content of texts to look at the ‘publics’ and ‘persons’ that create, constitute and consume them. Throughout her work, Barber lays great emphasis on the social and historical nature of texts, arguing that texts are “historically and contextually bound utterances” which arise from social relations and in turn shape them (2013:32).

This thesis looks at different types of ‘texts’ each with their own ‘genre’. Genre constitutes the intertextuality of texts which makes them socially and individually legible (Bakhtin 1986:86, 91). Genres, Barber argues, give us the purpose of a text and mark it out for particular types of the attention telling us what kind of text it is and how we should approach it (Barber 2007a:28, 37). More fundamentally, a genre “suggests a particular perspective on the world” and “frames our perception of reality and enables us to see” (Barber 2013:41). In Chapter Two, I explore a genre of oral literature, nthanu, and what this means to people, what perspectives on the world it suggests, and what perception of reality it frames. Chapter Three looks at a merging of oral and written literature in the form the book, Nthanu za Chitonga, showing how people can make literacy work for their oral literature, how it is historically and contextually bound, and what kinds of social relations and understandings of texts this literisation of orality produces. Chapter Four explores the genre of fantasy fiction, how it emerged and how young readers make sense of it and reshape its meaning within their own frameworks. Each of these genres suggest different perspectives on the world, frame different realities and enable different ways of seeing.

Barber further argues that texts are “part of the apparatus by which human communities take stock of their own creations” and by which societies give back their own understandings of themselves (Barber 2007a:5). However, for this to happen, the texts need to emerge from within communities, to be their own creations — something imported Anglophone children’s literature cannot and does not do. In Chapter Two, I show that people make precisely these claims for their oral literature as central to taking stock of their own creations and giving back their own understandings of themselves. This sociality of texts — their crucial role in the building of social relations but also of being-in-the-social-world — forms a key element of this thesis. Here I follow Barber in seeing texts as means through which social relations and subjectivities are produced (2007a:106) and, similarly, look at these oral texts as technologies for the formation of the social-self.

I thus look at the ways in which people mobilise oral texts not merely in order to re- animate their traditions or hark back nostalgically for a past time, but through them, to seek attention to and recognition of their ways of seeing the world. As Tsing argues, those who claim to be in touch with the universal “are notoriously bad at seeing the limits and exclusions of their

29 knowledge” (2005:8). In Chapter Three, I suggest that we can see people’s claims about their local stories, about the way they used to teach outside of school, about the book Nthanu za Chitonga that has been ‘lost’, as ways of trying to point out and make known these limits and exclusions. In this regard, I follow Ann Stoler in seeing epistemology as “what people do, as a navigational strategy”, allowing us to look at epistemologies as part of an “ongoing pursuit of intelligibilities” (2008:351). In people’s discussions around orality, their folktales and a book of these folktales in Chitonga, I argue that we can see the universals of literacy and school education being contested and questioned, producing frictions which limit the universal’s ability to seamlessly and smoothly dominate.

Texts that move: fantasy books

The books that this thesis explores are an example of knowledge on the move. In Chapter One I follow the “intricate and unexpected circuits through which books are routed and rerouted” into villages libraries in northern Malawi (Hofmeyr et al. 2001). Books, Hofmeyr et al. argue, act as material objects which “choreograph” readers in part “through libraries” (ibid.:5). The books I consider are children’s and young adult fantasy and fairytale books. This is not a well-known genre in the communities I lived in. The themes of these books, like witchcraft and magic, however, are well known. I therefore look at how readers of fantasy literature make sense of the worlds and lenses, the genre conventions and socialities, they encounter in these books.

Within sub-Saharan Africa, much historical and anthropological work has been done on readers of public texts, particularly newspapers, but also periodicals and letters (cf. Barber 2006; Newell 2013; Peterson et al. 2016). There seems, however, to be far less fruitful ground in the anthropology of reading fiction. In his review article on this, Adam Reed (2018) notes that there are few “ethnographic encounters with literary objects or cultures” and little said about fiction reading or fiction readers (p. 34). Perhaps they are too ‘interior’, done in silence and internally, and therefore hard to engage with ethnographically. Perhaps also, they are too close to home. Lys Alcayna-Stevens’ claims that anthropologists have not looked much at primatologists because they are too similar to us, too close to home — perhaps libraries and reading are too akin to our daily practices and our own academic endeavour, to seem anything more than mundane (Alcayna-Stevens 2016).

The work of anthropologists of literature and texts provide a sustained argument for the deeply socially and culturally embedded nature of texts. They show how texts reflect, create, and reproduce social relations, construct structures of thought and ways of seeing, create personhood and subjectivities, frame our perception of reality, and even, from a macro genre approach, are the products and creators of specific forms of historical consciousness (see for example Ballantyne 2011; Barber 2007a; Collins and Blot 2003; Vail and White 1991). The power of texts, and the specificity of their creation, production and reception, are echoed with strength and depth throughout these discussions. And yet there is much less said about what happens when texts move. In this work I ask how this plays out when texts have come from ‘elsewhere’, when they have moved from one space/place to another, not as autonomous, abstracted, informative texts, but, in the same vein as Barber, as texts that are embedded in social relations, intertextualities, ways of seeing, structures of cognition, specific historical consciousnesses, lenses on reality and structures and ideas of literacy.

Section Three: Field

Locating a field site

This thesis rests on 18 months ethnographic fieldwork, from August 2016 to March 2018, in a village-conglomerate in the Nkhata Bay district of northern Malawi.11 The area defies the archetypal image of an ‘African village’— a cluster of houses with definable boundaries. Malawi’s lakeshore is one of the most densely populated areas in southern Africa. The villages that run along it seem, to the untrained eye, to continue in an endless line of huts and houses. Defined by invisible boundary lines, the villages come in all shapes and sizes. Kamwala, where I lived for the first seven months, is small and compressed, about one square kilometre. Chituka, by contrast, where I lived for nine months, is narrow, only about one kilometre wide, but very long, ranging about four or five kilometres from the lakeshore into the hills (see Figure 2). In each case, no village centre or grouping is discernible. Many villages, however, contain within them smaller groupings, called ‘hamlets’ by Jaap van Velsen (1964),12 clusters of houses in close proximity to each other, often built by extended families. While there are numerous hamlets in

11 The Nkhata Bay district has a population of around 215,000, 11,300 of whom are urban, with the rest being rural (NSoM 2009). 12 Jaap van Velsen (1964) wrote the only monograph on the area.

31 the area, there are also many isolated houses spread across the area. The two houses I lived in were not in hamlets, so I spent much of my time walking across vast distances, primarily through four villages: Chituka, Kamwala, Chifira, and Kande. Later, when looking for libraries, I was to go further by car, to Bandawe Girls Secondary School, about eight kilometres to the north, and the Kusambira Centre at Tupane, about twelve kilometres to the south. The villages that formed the central space of my fieldwork are all part of an area the missionaries called Bandawe, after Bandawe Point, a promontory used as a navigational landmark in the early colonial period. To this day, many people refer to the area as ‘old Bandawe’.13 The area as a whole is populated predominantly by people broadly described ethno-linguistically as ‘Tonga’ who speak Chitonga as their mother tongue.14 The Nkhata Bay District is still considered the home district of the Tonga people.

A place steeped in history

Old Bandawe is a place steeped in history. It was here that one of five late nineteenth-century stockaded villages of the Tonga people was located — the stockade of Marenga. In the nineteenth century, northern Malawi was invaded by Ngoni polities fleeing Shaka’s Mfecane in the Zulu Kingdoms to the south.15 The Ngoni’s military prowess enabled them to dominate many parts of Malawi but, despite frequent raids by their impis (warriors), they failed to capture the Tonga territories (McCracken 2012:47-48; van Velsen 1962:179).

Coupled with this pressure was the expansion of the East African slave trade into Lake Malawi in the mid-nineteenth century. It centred on the Sultanate of Zanzibar, where one observer in the 1860s claimed that around 19000 slaves had passed through the port that year

13 In 1894, the mission moved to New Bandawe, a few kilometers to the north, where Bandawe Girls Secondary School is located. 14 Recognising the problematic nature of nomenclature and the danger of reification, in this thesis I use the word ‘Tonga’ to describe people whose mother-tongue is Chitonga, who self-identify as Tonga and speak of themselves as connected historically to ‘Tonga culture and heritage’. As outlined, this ‘formation’ of a ‘Tonga’ identity seems to have been relatively recent and the product of a mixture of peoples and languages coming together. This does not mean to make claims for people against their self-identification, nor does it mean to suggest that they would not consider themselves to also be Malawian, among the many identities that people carry. Rather it is to suggest that one of the key terms of self-identification is through the term ‘Tonga’. The term, however, should always be viewed as a heuristic which does not capture the shifting complexities of identity. 15 The Mfecane, the crushing or scattering, was a period in the first half of the nineteenth century, when King Shaka brought together various Zulu chieftains under his reign through extensive militaristic warfare (McCracken 2012:7).

32 from the region that is now Malawi (McCracken 1977:9).16 To protect themselves from these two violent pressures, the Tonga retreated into four or five malinga (stockaded villages), each headed by a dominant chief: Chinyentha, Mankhambira, Chavula, and Malenga, according to van Velsen, or Mankhambira, Kangoma, Chikulu, Chimbano and Malenga, according to John McCracken (van Velsen 1959:114; McCracken 1977:58). The last, Malenga’s, was at Bandawe. Some historians, and some of my interlocutors, argue that the system of malinga, created a greater sense of “unity of sort in resistance” among people who identified as Tonga (van Velsen 1959:115; McCracken 1977:11).

The area is also significant in the country’s colonial history. A few hundred metres from my Kamwala home stands a large, red burnt-brick church, one of the oldest in Malawi, built in

190117 — an impressive visual reminder of the importance of Bandawe in the colonial history of Malawi, for it was here, in 1881, that Dr. Robert Laws, one of the earliest missionaries in the country, set up his second Livingstonia Mission station. Laws had come to Malawi in 1875 inspired by David Livingstone’s call to bring an end to the slave trade in the region, “the greatest obstacle in existence to civilisation and commercial progress” (Livingstone 2011(1865):8; Livingstone 1921:4). The period of colonialism began in Malawi with the arrival of the Scottish missionaries in 1875 and the establishment of their mission stations at Blantyre and Cape Maclear. These missionaries were the primary colonial force in the country for almost two decades until Nyasaland (present day Malawi) was declared a protectorate in 1891 (McCracken 2012:45). Laws first settled with his party at the southern tip of the lake, at Cape Maclear, but the large number of malarial deaths sent the missionaries up the lake, where they decided to settle at a location David Livingstone had visited years before — the home of Chief Marenga, the predecessor of the current Chief Malenga Mzoma, Traditional Authority (TA) of the region.18 It was Marenga who greeted Livingstone when he first came ashore at Bandawe, receiving a glowing account in Livingstone’s journal.19 The meeting between Livingstone and Marenga, and later between Laws and Marenga, is well remembered in oral history accounts, and many of my interlocutors see it as an important claim to fame for the Bandawe area. The Tonga people of

16 While the East African Slave Trade is seen as a crucial component in shaping nineteenth-century Malawi, Brian Morris has argued that the ivory trade played an equally, if not more important role in the shaping of the region (Morris 2006). 17 The Church now belongs to the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian (CCAP). 18 Malenga is the name of the chieftaincy, not of an individual. The Traditional Authority is a government granted title that incorporates the chief into government structures. For more detail on chieftaincy structures see Chapter Three. 19“The northern Chief, Marenga, a tall handsome man, with a fine aquiline nose, whom we found living in his stockade in a forest […] He was especially generous and gave us bountiful presents of food and beer” (Livingstone 2011(1865):377).

33 the area embraced the missionaries’ arrival (McCracken 1977:58). Faced with Ngoni raids from the mountains and slave raids from the lake, the Tonga saw in the missionaries a great political opportunity to gain outside support in their fights against these forces (McCracken 2012:47-48). Consequently, many of the missionaries’ early years were spent acting as political negotiators for the Tonga, assisting in negotiating peace with the Ngoni and keeping slavers at bay (McCracken 1977:11; Livingstone 1921:172; Van Velsen 1959:115). When Laws moved his mission into the hills further north in 1894, the mission presence in the area dwindled somewhat.

Most of the pre-colonial history of the area prior to the nineteenth century is known through oral history. Many of my interlocutors claim, according to their oral histories, that a group of people moved into the region from Tanzania a few centuries ago, eventually calling themselves Tonga. Historians have differing accounts, some arguing the people in the region were Chewa from the south, others that they were from the east coast of the lake (Douglas 1950:66; McCracken 1977:3; van Velsen 1959:109, 1962:179). Whereas the pre-nineteenth century history of the region is somewhat unclear, what all historians and local interlocutors agree on is that ‘the Tonga’ were never a coherent or cohesive group but, rather, a fluid amalgamation of people who shared a language and some cultural practices (Douglas 1950:66; van Velsen 1962:179; McCracken 2012:22). Calling oneself Tonga was not completely dependent on lineage or ethnic heritage. Many people who had moved to the region from other parts of Malawi would call themselves Tonga after a few years of settlement (1959:113). This migrational fluidity was even evident between groups that saw each other as enemies – as is evident in the consistent migration of people between Tonga and Ngoni chieftaincies, showing the degree to which ethno-linguistic loyalties were often less important than perceived political, economic and social benefits (Livingstone 1921:153; van Velsen 1959).

Migration has continued to play an important role in the shaping of the region. With increasing colonial activity at the end of the nineteenth century, the mission presence in the north facilitated quick entry into the burgeoning colonial labour market (McCracken 1977:114). In the twentieth century, Tonga men, in particular, continued prolifically to migrate, “going by the hundreds” (McCracken 1977:115) south of the Zambesi, so that by 1909 a Nyasaland colonial official was able to lament “the state of Atonga Country where hardly an able-bodied man can be found … all men having left for South Africa” (van Velsen 1962:180).

In 1964, as the British Empire disintegrated, Malawi gained its independence. For the Bandawe area this marked a loss of status. With the gradual decline of the missions and the departures of the missionaries, the area lost its importance as well as many of its points of

34 connection, not only to wider southern Africa, but to Europe as well. Some activity returned to the area in the 1980s with tarring of the lakeshore road (M5), making it an important transport and trade artery for the country. In response, many villagers moved their houses away from the lakeshore to the road, changing not only the geography of the village, but also its orientation, no longer focused on the lake, its water, and its fish, but rather on the road and the goods, commerce, business, tourism and transport opportunities that it represented.

With the coming of democracy in 1994, Malawi once again underwent a seismic shift. In 1993, the aging Kamuzu Banda eventually acceded to holding a referendum on whether or not the country should have an election, and the majority of Malawians voted for their political freedom. In the first democratic elections in 1994, Banda’s MCP was ousted by Bakili Muluzi’s United Democratic Front Party (UDF) (Englund 2002a:11). The ending of Banda’s regime and the coming of democracy opened up the country to market liberalisation, a continuation of the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) and increased international development activity in the country (Chinsinga 2001; Kuanda 1995). Currently Peter Mutharika, the younger brother of Malawi’s second democratically elected president, Bingu wa Mutharika, holds the presidency with his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) after a turbulent re-election won in May 2019.

A place of development

Malawi is often depicted as ‘classically African’, with its rural population, agrarian economy, women dressed in chitenje cloths carrying anything from water buckets to improbable piles of wood on their heads, children strapped to their backs, men neatly dressed in hand-me-down suits cycling old bicycles to work, all interspersed with red-dirt roads and, in the central regions, majestic baobabs. However, in many regards the country is somewhat atypical for the continent. Whereas 40% of Africa’s population is urban (Mbembe 2016:97), in Malawi over 80% of the population is rural (NSoM 2009). The heavy mining and mineral extraction industries that mark so much of the continent are virtually non-existent. Equally, Malawi had a very small settler- colonial population, and in the north, where my fieldwork took place, there was almost no land appropriation by the colonial powers. Almost all my interlocutors were living on land that had belonged to their families, or some form of relation, for many generations.

In my conversations with well-wishers and NGO workers, Malawi was often painted as a particular picture of ‘Africa’ which seemed to portray it within a romantically or classically

African discourse. Almost all the projects explored in this thesis are supported by the funds and work of overseas donors and funders who are not connected to any international charity organisation, or who have set-up their own charity organisation precisely in order to work and live in Malawi, many of them claiming that they had fallen in love with the area, or the country, and had been driven both by a desire to return and have closer connections to it, and by a desire to intervene in what they perceived as the struggles of its inhabitants. Malawi is full of development practitioners, but also on a much smaller scale of charitable individual donors, funders and well-wishers, many of whom express sentiments of exceptionalism, that Malawi, and particularly the north, is an exceptionally special place, and attachment as partial grounds for their decision to build or support projects.20 In Chapter One I discuss how these “affective entanglements” help produce and maintain libraries and literacy projects.

Whereas my field site area is a development-saturated space, very little ‘development industry’ as such is present, no large-scale projects, no big, known, international NGOs running projects or programmes. All the Early Childhood Development centres in the area are run by charities: the Kavli Foundation, Mphatso, and the Central Church of Africa Presbyterian. The nearest clinic, about an hour’s walk, is ‘private’, run by a Christian organisation called Vibitac. Macalpine Free Primary (FP) had all four of its classroom blocks built with financial support from donors, including its library, and occasionally hosted volunteer teachers who came to the school through the local lodge. Malenga Mzoma FP had its library built and stocked with the help of a grassroots charity, BolaBola, and has an afternoon school and sports programme running with that charity. Both schools host the UK foundation Harcourt, which runs summer programmes at the schools and brings stationery and learning materials to fill the classrooms with things like pictures, numbers and alphabet boards. The girl’s dormitory at Chifira Secondary School was built by the Solon Foundation, the same NGO that built the library at Bandawe Girls Secondary School. The Capacity Foundation, run by an invested businessman from England, began a small project of offering micro-loans to villagers in the area. A former volunteer to Macalpine School from Sweden has also begun a micro-loans project in the immediate community.

From this select list one can see how much of the daily lives of the villagers is shaped by an interaction with projects and over-seas well-wishers. In the villages where I worked, the

20 For example, the owners of the luxury lodge near Chituka would frequently comment on how special northern Malawi was. Or an NGO worker whom I met at a backpackers who told me, “There is nowhere elsewhere in Africa like northern Malawi”.

36 ubiquitous nature of development projects, and the degree to which it runs a large proportion of what would be government services in more affluent states, means development is present in one way or another in the life of my interlocutors almost every single day.

Methodology

My first two months in Malawi I spent living in Nkhata Bay, the capital town of the Nkhata Bay District, learning Chitonga. As there are no schools or centres that teach Chitonga, no grammar books and no dictionary other than the missionary WY Turner’s Chitonga/Chitumbuka dictionary which focuses on Chitumbuka, learning Chitonga proved very challenging. Chitonga also has almost no written texts, other than the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ translations of Watch Towers (Chigongwi cha Alinda) and Awake! (Jani Masu!), and the Bible (of varying denominations). Consequently, although I could hold conversational chit-chat with people by the time I left the field, I always tried to have someone to help with translation during interviews to do justice to my interlocutors. A large proportion of my work, however, was done in English as it is the language of instruction in schooling and a reasonable number of people are able to speak it. This has skewed my fieldwork data towards intellectual elites. However, an orientation towards elites is already embedded in the very focus of my study — libraries and books, and so frequent engagement and association with intellectual elites was the inevitable outcome of where I spent my time.

I spent the first eight months in the field walking around the villages of Kamwala, Chituka, Chifira and Kande, getting to know the places and people, visiting schools and Early Childhood Development centres, and looking for places where I could find children’s literature. Eventually I found six libraries in my field area: the library at Macalpine FP, the primary school for Kamwala, next to which I lived; at Chifira Community Day Secondary School (CDSS), the secondary school for Kamwala, Chifira, and Chituka; at Malenga Mzoma FP, the primary school for Chituka; at Kande FP, the primary school for Kande; at Bandawe Girls Secondary, an old mission boarding school to the north; and finally at Tupane village, the Kusambira Centre, a community library built by the small charity Impact Africa. The last eight months of my fieldwork were spent exploring these libraries.

I first moved to the village of Kamwala in October 2016, where, after about a month looking for suitable accommodation, I moved in with a teacher from Macalpine FP, Constance,

37 a divorced woman in her mid-forties. I stayed in Constance’s own bedroom which she vacated to sleep in her children’s room for seven months. Constance’s son and nephew, both at Macalpine FP lived with us, and her daughter, who went to Bandawe Girls Secondary would stay with us over the school holidays. We lived right next to the school grounds with three other teachers’ families living nearby. As a teacher’s house at a reasonably well-sponsored school, we had the good fortune of having electricity, however the space was incredibly small, there was nowhere I could sit and write and I felt guilty for occupying Constance’s bedroom. Therefore, after seven months, I moved to a new home, about three kilometres away in Chituka, near the tar road. This was the home of Nola, who lived in a large house with her aging mother, Bertha. The house was built by Nola’s father, who had been a high-level clerk at a Zambian mine. When he returned to his home village on retirement he built the home of his dreams – a large, burnt- brick house with an iron sheet roof sitting on top a small hillock, with a beautiful view all the way down to the lake. Around it he planted a small forest — almost fifty pine trees circle the home, creating a canopy which keeps the house cool during hot summer months. Nola and her mother had a spare bedroom for me, and although there was no electricity in this home, the kitchen and dining room table at which I could write in the evenings more than made up for this. Over the course of my fieldwork I lived with eight different families in total – with Nola and Constance, for many months each, at my translator James’s family home many nights and twice for a week, with Alfred Ngoma, the head librarian at Tupane, for a week, with Gutamo Manda’s family for 10 days, with Elvis Langa, another Macalpine teacher, for three weeks, and with two families at Kande, each for a week. This somewhat disparate living was in part to gain a more varied sense of different villages, in part to live with people in differing socio-economic circumstances, and in part the result of trying to find a place to stay more permanently.

The focus of my ethnographic analysis, libraries and stories, made participation a somewhat difficult pursuit as reading and interacting with libraries is generally a reasonably individualised experience. Living in people’s homes however provided me with ample participation in daily village life. Still, the financial inequality between myself and a majority of the villagers, coupled with my own needs for a private room and space for cooking and ablutions in a household without a man at the head,21 meant that I was constrained in the options I could choose for housing. This meant living in homes that, whilst certainly in ‘the village’, were often

21 Patriarchal norms govern many of the interactions between men and women, and often make women subject to men in a household. After three weeks in a male-headed household I felt my personal and physical space and freedoms were restricted enough to make me seek housing elsewhere.

38 also somewhat separate from a lot of village life through the higher income and status of their occupants.

In pursuing stories and trying to grab a hold of the life-worlds of the people I lived with, I thus spent much of my early days in the field walking long distances to look for books, and interviewing older people about their oral folktales and literature. For the first eight months of my fieldwork, I spent most of my days walking the villages with my translator, James Mpanda, visiting people’s homes, speaking to people we found along the paths, and chatting to parents and children along the way. At the beginning of my fieldwork I spent many mornings in Early Childhood Development centres, to see if I could still do work with them. I also spent a lot of time in schools, teaching, volunteering, doing training programmes, working in their libraries, and living next to a school. I spent the first term at Macalpine volunteering as an English teacher but, despite only taking a few English classes a week, I quickly found myself exhausted by the task of teaching classes for 40 to 100 children in a language they barely understood in small classrooms that turned into ovens under their hot tin roofs. This brief episode of teaching gave me the utmost respect for the teachers in the area and the difficult task they choose to undertake. In the second term I volunteered as a tutor for the highest-achieving Standard 7 and 8 pupils. At Chituka, I volunteered as a tutor with BolaBola once a week. I also ran a number of workshops with BolaBola tutors and ECD teachers.

Once I had established the presence and location of libraries I wanted to study, about six months into my fieldwork, I spent most of my time visiting them, sitting in the libraries watching as people went in and out of them, hanging out with librarians, or chatting to people who came to take out books. I helped re-organise two school libraries, at Macalpine FP and Kande FP, spending a lot of time going through all their books and chatting to teachers and children at the schools. At Macalpine, I also acted as the weekly librarian for half a year. I visited Bandawe Girls Secondary School many times, sitting in the library, chatting with the girls, or speaking to the teachers. The majority of my time in libraries, however, was spent in the one at Tupane, where I also spent a week living with the head librarian Alfred Ngoma. In order to gain access to this library, I agreed to do an audit of all their library data for the year 2017 (see Appendix 1).

Over the course of my fieldwork I conducted around 240 semi-structured interviews and had many more casual conversations. As the subject matter of my work, stories, libraries and people’s thoughts and feelings about these, is heavily oriented to people’s internal worlds, much of my data collection focused on conversations, discussions and interviews. People’s own

39 narrations of their lives, experiences, perspectives and feelings, therefore form a core component of this thesis’s data. I spent a lot of time speaking to teachers and librarians, but also spoke to many elders and parents as I walked through the villages. I interviewed children at Macalpine, at Nola’s book club, at Kande, at Bandawe Girls, and at Chifira. I tracked down the most avid fantasy readers at Tupane and spent some time getting to know them. The families I lived with were my most constant and consistent interlocutors, and above all James, my translator, with whom I spent hundreds of hours walking village paths and visiting dozens of village homes.

As the flows and threads that I followed were not always contained to Malawi, I interviewed Roger Peel, the founder of Impact Africa, at his offices in the UK, and went to Dublin to interview Cillian O’Cillian, a volunteer at Impact Africa.

On footsteps/ethics

Peter Pels argues that “a major part of the anthropological method consists of finding out in whose footsteps the researcher is treading” (2008:289). When we are in the field, who was there before us, and in what capacity, is of significance. As already noted, the Bandawe area in particular has a deep missionary history. One of my interlocutors still remembered the missionary Alexander Macalpine, speaking of him as a person highly valued by the community, who would often walk around the villages, chatting to people in Chitonga and exclaiming, for all to hear, how his favourite food was cassava sima, the staple food of the Nkhata Bay region.22

Since the missionaries left, many development workers, volunteers and project organisers have come through the area. For example, a number of young volunteer teachers, primarily from Netherlands and Sweden, came to Macalpine School over the years, with support from the nearby lodge, to teach for three to six months. This local high-end luxury lodge on the outskirts of the village offers its guests the opportunity to do a ‘village walk’, usually guided by Fred, whom we will meet in Chapter Three. On this village walk, visitors are able to give small donations of money if they wish, and many children will run after them asking for money, sweets,

22 Cassava sima is a hard porridge made from cassava flour and water. The hardy cassava root grows underground and can be harvested at any time of the year. Having cassava sima as a staple, rather than maize sima like the rest of the country, has been credited as a key component in many the socio-political forces in the region, including as a reason why the Tonga were able to barricade themselves in malinga, as they did not have a harvest season, or a harvest to protect from raids. It has also been posited by Tonga interlocutors as a reason why they do not have initiation ceremonies for their young men, and as an explanation for the reasonable capacity to withstand male labour migration, as women were able to harvest cassava without male support (Livingstone 1921:154; Van Velsen 1960b:266).

40 or failing that, a pencil. It is also quite common in the area, as in much of Malawi, for those who go to university to do so with the help of ‘a sponsor’, usually white and foreign, who pays for a young person’s education. Through this matrix of ‘sponsorship’ I met my translator, James. James initially approached me while I was walking through the village to ask if I would sponsor him to go to university. I told him that such a financial commitment was far beyond my reach. However, after speaking to him a few times I was both impressed by his English language skills and enthusiasm, and wanted to support his studies. We therefore agreed that I would pay him to be my translator, and this money would go towards his studies.

It was into this world of long-standing historical relationships between the people of the area and white foreigners that I entered. As Malawi has a very small white population, and an equally small tourist industry, the relationships that most of the people of the area have formed with white people, and the history of these relationships, is deeply shaped by the relationships first to the missionaries, then to development workers and volunteers. As the area is vast and houses a large number of people, including many children, who I was and what I was doing there was far from clear to everyone. Even until my very last days, I would still walk in parts of the villages I had never been before and be followed by the excited cries of children calling “mzungu, mzungu” (white/foreign person) and “give me money”, “give me sweet”, as I walked past. This is not to disparage the children for their cries, but rather to articulate the degree to which I, as a white person walking around, was a ‘known category’ to many, a category formed by particular historical and contemporary relationships, many of which reflected deep economic inequality. As Pels argues, examining the footsteps in which we walk is part of “reducing the historical distance” between the researcher and the researched, by openly recognising our own place in the contingency of local historical relationships (2008:289).

Not only am I an mzungu, I am also an mzungu of African origins. As a white South African (with dual German and South African nationality), I live in a world of split identities, both ‘European’ and ‘African’. My own identity is born of the colonial encounter. The history of the discipline of anthropology is also intimately tied to the processes of colonialism. The very foundations of the epistemological structures of the discipline were born of this, an epistemological genesis with which the discipline finds itself struggling to this day (Pels 1997:164; 2008:283; Mudimbe 1988:17; Asad 1973, 1975, 1994). In this, I was aware that I was coming into the field through multiple avenues of the colonial, through my own identity, and through the discipline I was enacting.

My life-experience as a white South African growing up and living in Cape Town also plays out in the motivations for the types of research I do and the types of questions I ask. Following Bourdieu, I acknowledge that “what I have to say here […] is rooted in the singular, and singularly limited, experiences of [my] particular existence” (2000:3). As Bourdieu goes on to argue, what we as researchers have to say is also always accompanied by a “degree of personal interest in unveiling” certain things — we bring with us our own motivations for the particular explorations we chose to undertake (ibid.). Growing up in South Africa, both during Apartheid and the period of economic and social difficulty that has followed since, has left me inscribed with a will to consider questions of justice. The question of the moral and political obligations of anthropologists is one which continues to be discussed within anthropology, not without deep contention. Anthropologists have long accepted that it is not possible to be in the field as neutral participant/observers, and that it is better to openly acknowledge the power of one’s own positionality (see Clifford and Marcus 1986). As Peter Pels argues, it is “impossible to wish for a neutral or innocent descriptive vocabulary” (2008:284). This personal biography, of growing up as an immensely privileged white person in South Africa, has been the impetus for my research interest in epistemic and structural injustice.

In foregrounding these questions, my intention with this work is not to write a “miserabilist” ethnography focused on “witnessing suffering” (Neumark 2014:24; see also Englund 2011; Thin 2010). Joel Robbins suggests that recent anthropology has taken as the contemporary other of its gaze the “suffering subject”, where subjects living in conditions of struggle, suffering or oppression have come to stand at the centre of anthropological work, a practice Robbins claims can fall into “‘horror-story collecting’” (2013:454). I therefore feel it prudent to emphasise that while I discuss inequalities and exclusions in this thesis, and people faced many real struggles in my field site, I would not want to be seen as depicting them as ‘suffering’. They were almost all able to live on their own land, provide sufficient food and clean water for themselves and their families through their subsistence life-styles, and seemed to live rich and rewarding lives of their own design and making. If anything, the people in the area I lived in had a level of resource and social security higher than has been described of communities elsewhere in the country (see Vaughan 1982).

I would however like to turn to the work of Fiona Wright to argue that we should not have to choose between writing about striving subjects or suffering subjects (Wright 2014:13). In her comment on Joel Robbins’s anthropological depictions of the ethical, striving subject, Wright contends that while suffering should not be the focus of (all) ethnographic work, and it

42 is important to critique its fetishization within anthropology, it should also not be seen as inimical to striving. “What do we do,” Wright asks, “when striving and suffering seem not only to co- exists in our ethnographic fields, but also to be constantly subject to reformation and resistance within specific socio-political, historically contingent situations? How can subjectivity be theorised without privileging a priori either pain and suffering, on the one hand, or ideals, hopes, and desires, on the other?” (Wright 2014:14).

This is a key question I would like to take up in my own work. Striving and suffering are not opposing dimensions or depictions of social and personal life. Where I was living, people are striving and suffering at the same time, sometimes even around the same phenomena. They want to go to school, but they also suffer under the lack of resources at school; they want to learn English in order to gain access to jobs, but they also suffer under the domination of that language and the difficulties in learning it; they want libraries and books, but they also suffer under the marginalisation of local literature and stories and the dominance of English literature in those libraries, as well as the difficulty in using, building and accessing libraries.

This tension, of aspirations and exclusions, also lies at the heart of Tsing’s analysis of universals, as discussed above. As she states, the effects of encounters across difference through universals can be “compromising or empowering” (2005:6). Or, I argue, they can be both at the same time. Sometimes, I suggest, it is the very act of striving that produces more suffering — if you were not striving to learn English, you would not suffer under the immense hurdles that make this task so difficult, if you were not striving to gain an education, you would not suffer under the huge obstacles that the school system creates against this very process, if you were not striving to attend university, you would not suffer under the inability of your family to afford it. The suffering and the striving are concomitant, and sometimes it is in the very act of striving that some of the suffering becomes more present, more potent.

Chapter Outline

In Chapter One: Housing Stories, Entangled Libraries and moving books, I explore how small-scale libraries have emerged in my field site. I look at who constructed them and why, what books fill them and where those books come from, at how libraries are used and by whom. Using ideas of meshworks and entanglements I explore the ways in which the movement of books and the creation of libraries create nodal points in transnational networks

43 of material, affective and epistemological entanglement. Historical theories of transnationalism and the movement and use of books in the Empire, as well as work on archives and museums, provide a lens through which to unpack the ways in which books and buildings of collection are imbricated in global networks of power.

Chapter Two: Speaking Stories, Declining (M)orality? Orature, schools and elites, looks at the local oral folktales that are told to children, nthanu. I show how nthanu are embedded in the production of morality and sociality, functioning as technologies for the formation of the social-self, and bring this into brief discussion with the contemporary anthropological work on ethics and morality. The chapter ends with a discussion of the contemporary school system in Malawi and how it produces aspirations and exclusions, including the ‘English Myth’ and how it exacerbates these exclusions.

Chapter Three: Writing Stories, “The wisdom of the Tonga people”, a book disappears, examines the production of a local book, Nthanu za Chitonga, a compilation of Tonga nthanu written in Chitonga by Filemon K. Chirwa in the 1930s. I use this book to examine the ways in which orality and literacy intersect, including the colonial history of schooling in Malawi and how the production of local language texts was part of this. I also unpack how the book is used by chiefs as an aid to political practice, thereby outlining the history of chieftaincy in the area and the role of literacy and English in this regard.

In Chapter Four: Reading Stories, Magical epistemologies and fantasy f(r)iction, I return to the libraries discussed in Chapter One, and look at the people who have read fantasy and fairytale books from the libraries. This includes a group of girls at Bandawe Girls Seconday School, how they speak about and engage with the Harry Potter and the Percy Jackson series, and how they reform their ideas of witchcraft and magic through reading these texts.

The Conclusion outlines how the thesis has analysed the ways in which the power of universals such as literacy and education set in motion local and global forces, to produce libraries, bring fantasy fiction into rural villages, underpin school structures and create written forms of oral literature. It shows how the dualities of universals, of hope and despair, play out in the four preceding chapters, and how people navigate the process of both desiring and challenging universals. It concludes by arguing that literacy and education as travelling universals that are both locally desired and contested, offer an insight into broader questions of global epistemic parity.

CHAPTER 1: Housing Stories Entangled libraries and moving books

Navigating the dirt roads that wind through the villages in the Nkhata Bay district is a tricky task. On this particular morning I am gently easing my car down a small cleft where the road has been washed away by the rains. I am on my way to the Kusambira

Centre23 for the first time, or the Tupane Library as it is locally referred to. I had heard about this library quite late in my fieldwork — when James and I were driving

far down south to the mountain peak of Kuŵiriri to consult a ng’anga24 who lived tucked away in a mountain valley. As we drove past the Tatuwa Road Block, James had casually mentioned, “oh, this is where they have that really good library”. I turned to him in surprise – why had he not mentioned it before? As was often the case in the field, he replied that as I had not asked, he had not thought it would be of interest to me. The discovery of a “really good” library near my field site was very exciting, and so I swiftly set out to find it.

I am not sure what I will find as I drive towards it, but when I turn the last corner of the dirt road, I am surprised to see a small octagonal structure come into view, ringed by a covered patio, with a second large square covered patio next to it. At my arrival, I am greeted by Susan, one of the British staff members of Impact Africa (the charity that built the library), and my contact person for access to the library. She sits me down for a brief chat to find out who I am and why I am there. We come to the agreement that I can have access to the library in exchange for collating all the user data for 2017. Susan then introduces me to Alfred Ngoma, the Head Librarian, a small man, neatly dressed in a blue shirt, black dress pants and gleaming black dress shoes. Alfred and I greet each other formally, shaking right hands with our left hands at our elbows and going through the long back-and-forth

of a Tonga greeting.25 Alfred is charged with showing me around the library, a task

23 Kusambira means to learn in Chitonga. 24 A ng’anga is a healer who uses traditional knowledge of medicine, particularly of trees and barks (munkwala wa vimiti), to heal. S/he will also usually have some knowledge of occult powers and is able to use these, when necessary, in the healing process, or to assist clients in fighting off or protecting themselves against the occult powers and witchcraft of others. 25 There is no word just for ‘hello’ in Chitonga.

he is used to performing as many visitors and volunteers are brought to see the library.

The Tupane library is a small community library built by Impact Africa in 2005. Most immediately striking is the highly unusual shape of the library — a small octagon sitting on top of a square cement porch, with what looks like a tiny bell tower on its roof (actually a type of sky-light and air vent). Alfred leads me through the entrance of the library, two large wooden doors that are thrown wide open every morning to let in light and visitors. We walk into the library and Alfred points at the seven shelves built along the walls. The octagonal shape had posed some challenges for shelf placing, he tells me. The Malawian carpenters had originally planned to have bookshelves coming into the centre of the space, creating a sort of internal star shape, but the Irish volunteer who was project manager of the library convinced them to put the bookshelves flush against the walls, looking out towards the reader. This gives the library a feeling almost like an inverted panopticon, with the books watching over the reader from every corner. It also allows the librarian to monitor the entire expanse of the (very small) room from his desk at the front door.

I glance at the books on the shelves as we walk past — a large selection of children’s picture books with many fairytales and Disney books are in the first two shelves, then the adult fiction books across three shelves. I spot Bryce Courtney’s The Power of One, Stephen Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever Chronicles, Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace and The Robber Bride, and a large number of books by David Gemmell. I recognise multiple books by Bernard Cornwall, as well as what look like a large number of paperback romance novels unfamiliar to me.

The Tupane library is unusual in the degree of its order: the books are very neatly stacked on the shelves, divided by categories (two shelves of children’s books, four shelves of fiction, one of information books, two and a half of reference books,

and lastly a handful of dictionaries and a spattering of local language books),26 all

marked with stickers in accordance with the Dewey Decimal system.27 Alfred tells me that keeping order is a key part of his role as head librarian, and something he takes very seriously. To demonstrate this, he takes me to the shelves above his desk

26 Mostly Chichewa and Chitumbuka. 27 The Dewey Decimal System codes books by class numbers, ranging from 0 to 999, which each number block of one hundred corresponding to different themes, for example history or science. The system used in the library was not an exact reproduction but rather an estimation towards the Dewey system.

and shows me multiple flip-files into which every book borrowed and returned is meticulously entered. Above these he pulls out a small plastic box full of paper cards – these are the borrower’s boxes into which each borrower’s card is meant to be put and updated every time they borrow a book (although this is not done in practice). There are even sheets of paper pasted onto the inside of the library door that detail the number of books borrowed and the number of people who entered the library in the previous month.

After the tour Alfred invites me to a daily ritual for the librarians — tea and

mandazi28 to be taken either in the small store room or in the large outside patio area, an open-air teaching and reading space. Over tea I ask Alfred why he chose to work at the library. He tells me it is because “I like reading books. And, I also like writing”. He laughs, and then tells me he likes reading because “it impresses me, and it encourages me to write other stories”. Alfred has written six stories and considers himself a writer. “Chinua Achebe inspired me to write […] the way he presents stories, and most of the stories are set in the village”, he tells me. He loves stories and enjoys being able to have such easy access to books at the library. He then confesses that, of course, working at the library is also good because it gives him a job. In an area where few people are able to find paid employment, the work at the library, although very poorly paid, is nonetheless well-regarded as gainful employment. After our tea I take leave of Alfred and head home, promising to come back the next morning to start my data-analysis work at the library. As I walk away from the library at Tupane I am deeply struck by finding such an incredible library space hidden away in a village, far down a dirt road. I wonder how such a library had come to be in such a place, and what kinds of worlds, meanings, understandings and connections were being built through it.

28 Mandazi are a type of deep fried dough ball often eaten as tea time snacks.

Introduction: libraries, literacy and development

Research shows that libraries, both school libraries and public libraries, can play an important part in promoting, creating and supporting literacy practices (cf. Gildersleeves 2012; Krolak 2005). In recent years there has been a push in southern and eastern Africa for governments and large-scale NGOs to take school and public libraries more seriously as a crucial part of educational infrastructure (see Dube 2017; Equal Education n.d.; Maserow 2015; Mchombu and Cadbury 2006). In Malawi, the government has invested relatively little in school libraries. Building, supporting and supplying libraries is an expensive endeavour, particularly in a country with a limited publishing industry where access to books is both cumbersome and costly (see

Ellis et al. 2003; Mapulanga 2012a, 2012b, 2013).29 Malawi has a National Library Service, in operation since 1967, which runs 17 libraries across the country, primarily in larger towns such as Lilongwe and Blantyre, with the bulk of their books being procured through Book Aid International (National Library Services of Malawi n.d.; Book Aid International n.d.). Although this service has managed to provide a small number of community libraries in larger towns, and wealthier schools often have libraries, access to libraries is still very limited for Malawian school children, with only 15% of Standard 6 pupils having access to a school library (Dube 2017:85).

The Malawi Government’s latest large-scale education project, the 2014 National Reading Programme, states that the government wants to promote a “reading culture” in the country in part through school libraries (Dube 2017:91). However, no provision is made for building or supplying these. Instead, the government calls upon the local communities to provide library spaces and books and to supply the salary for a librarian (Dube 2017:90). This means there the is almost no government support for libraries. Equally, and in line with the government’s focus, there are few larger international organisations building libraries in the country. Nonetheless, there were at least six rural libraries in my field site: five school libraries and one community library, at Macalpine FP, Chifira Community Day Secondary School (CDSS), Kande FP, Malenga Mzoma FP, Bandawe Girls Secondary School, and Tupane village. The question arises of how these libraries, filled with Anglophone literature, found their way into rural African villages. What brings people, I ask, from across the globe but also locally to come together to build and fill small-scale village libraries?

29 For general critiques of SAPs see for example, Farmer 2003; Kim et al 2000; Klein 2002; Stiglitz 2002.

The libraries in my field site, how they emerged and have continued, offer a version of the processes of development with few actors who would fall into the ambit of traditional ‘development organisations’, and where there seems to be no overarching development programme or agenda. I argue that what we observe with these libraries is the power of universals to “mobilize people” across vast distances (Tsing 2005:8). The libraries offer an ethnographic example of the ways in which global connections “give grip to universal aspirations” (ibid.:1) and how universals produce, form and shape lived realities on the ground. The global connections that run through the libraries give the abstracted aspirations of the universals of literacy and education an actualising hold. Through the libraries these abstract universals are transformed into material and social everyday realities that can be actively engaged with and accessed, as well as ethnographically explored.

Drawing on Tsing, I argue that the libraries in my field site emerge because universals must travel “across distance and difference” in order to try to pursue their universal telos (2005:4). In the pursuit of universality, universals must move, they must spread because being spread, being global, is a core component of their imaginative constitution. I thus explore these rural libraries as nexus points of transnational connectivity, through which run many lines of connection embedded in the global circulation of fiction books. These lines of connectivity are imbricated in ideas and practices of development, fundamentally resting on the assumption that literacy and literacy-based engagements are beneficial and desired.

In trying to understand how the libraries came to be in the villages, and to find the language to describe how they are deeply globally connected, I found the work of Tim Ingold and his theories of meshworks, lines and entanglement a heuristically fruitful theoretical vocabulary. Ingold’s work builds on the work of Bruno Latour and his Actor Network Theory (ANT), where he combined the position of taking seriously the social life of things with ideas of networks and connectivity. Although Latour has since distanced himself from some of the more radical claims of ANT, he nonetheless believed it would overcome the oppositionary logics of ‘macro’ versus ‘micro’ analytical lenses (1993, 1996:373, 1999:17). Latour’s understanding of networks was critiqued for ‘flattening out’ the world and thereby obscuring power structures and inequalities (see for example Ingold 2008; Harman 2014). In Social theory for arthropods, Ingold (2008) counters this flattening by suggesting that Latourian ‘networks’ should rather be thought of as ‘meshworks’, patterns of intersecting lines that are multidirectional and dynamically knotted rather than flat and nodal. Meshworks are “interwoven lines of growth and movement” where persons, things, ideas and discourses find themselves in “knots or bundles” of relations (Ingold

2007:35; 2010:3). Unlike Latour’s networks, they spread in multiple directions as the traces of humans and things, creating endless lines; able to entangle each other, they can also be stronger or weaker, have more or less presence, create thicker or thinner lines. Ingold uses the metaphorical image of the mycelium fungus to elucidate meshworks — a fungus that grows as a “web of linear fibres, radiating in all directions, with no inside or outside, no coherent skin, permeating its surroundings” (2016:xvi). Ingold suggests a reconfigured lens in which we see every person and thing, like the mycelium, as “a thing of lines, and the social as the domain of their entanglement” (ibid.). As people and things move through the world, through time, through space, they draw lines and leave traces of themselves, of their movement, of their presence, through affects, through interaction – they are part of lines, they make lines, draw lines, and connect lines. In this conception of the world, lines run through the human and non-human worlds, but also through temporal dimensions. Through this lens, ‘things’ such as libraries become “a place where several goings on become entwined” (2010:4).

Libraries are thus ‘things’, buildings, spaces/places, constellations of materials which connect lines and create knots, but also, equally, emerge through an entanglement and knotting of lines. Libraries are the homes for the ‘things’ of books, they exist in order to house stories, gathering and collecting from across the globe. With this lens we can trace how books and libraries are entangled materialities, emerging from within complex meshworks in which ‘libraries’ come into being, through the coalescing of myriad flows as knotted threads of things, creating new flows and carrying with them new relations and orderings. Combining the works of Tsing and Ingold, I suggest that these lines are a core constituent of global connections along which universals flow. It is also these lines which when entangling with each other produce frictions as they rub along each other and get caught in sticky knots. I suggest that in looking at the emergence of rural libraries through the lenses of meshworks, lines and entanglements that reach across time and space, we are also able to meet one of the great challenges of ethnography

— namely how to study the global at the level of the local.30

This chapter is divided into two sections. Section One, ‘Coming into Being’, gives an ethnographic account of how four of the six libraries studied came into being. Each library has its own unique genesis story. Each also offers different insights into ways in which global entanglements and development play out in the emergence, maintenance and use of these libraries. As outlined in the introduction, this chapter does not discuss in detail the daily going- ons of the libraries, but rather focuses on this emergence and entanglement. First, I return to the

30 For discussion on this see Cochrane 2019.

50 library at Tupane. Of the four libraries chosen, the library at Tupane was the most ethnographically rich and interesting and is therefore explored in the most detail, including giving a portrait of its three librarians. I then turn to the library at Bandawe Girls Secondary School, which illuminates the role extraversion and aspirations play in the making of libraries. The final two libraries, at Macalpine FP and Kande FP, offer an example of what James Ferguson (1990) calls ‘failed projects’ and help us see how epistemic obscurity creates struggles over the (re)production of libraries. Due to constraints of space, the other two libraries studied, at Chifira Community Day Secondary School (CDSS) and Malenga Mzoma FP, only receive a brief mention.

Section Two, ‘Housing, moving, leaking’ gives the theoretical reflections on the libraries studied. It shows how the libraries are entangled locally and globally, how some are successfully maintained and kept ‘intact’, while others ‘fail’, and how they are part of an epistemological ordering that lies at the heart of libraries.

Section One: Coming into being: four libraries

1. The Tupane Library

The library at Tupane was the most striking of any I encountered in the field. Not only was it visually unique as described above, after the library at Bandawe Girls Secondary School it was also the most frequently used. The impressive nature of the library, the relatively high degree of activity in it and my firm friendship with Alfred Ngoma, the Head Librarian, meant that I spent the majority of my time at this library. The library has over 4500 books (almost all in English). In 2017, 2713 people borrowed books from the library — very few of these, however, were primary school children (only 8%).31 The majority of visitors to the library are villagers (45%) and secondary school students (32%), who mostly come to the library to borrow school textbooks.32

The library at Tupane was an exceptional oddity — it is very unusual for any villages to have a community library, let alone such a well-presented one. It was in trying to unpack how

31 These statistics are taken from my processing of the library’s records for 2017, see Appendix 1 for graph. 32 Many of the villagers who come are those who failed their Malawi School Certificate of Education (MSCE) exams and are looking to rewrite them.

51 this library came to be in the village, who was supporting it and where all its books came from, that I first began to build a picture of the libraries as deeply globally connected and entangled.

The library at Tupane belongs to Impact Africa, a small charity with its base in Tupane and a head office in the UK. The CEO of a British cleaning company, Roger Peel, started the charity in 2003. Roger recounted the genesis story of his charity during an interview I did with him in his UK offices. On a journey through east Africa in 2002, Roger and his wife had come across a dishevelled tourist lodge on Lake Malawi that was for sale. Roger had spent the first five years of his life in South Africa and “had in [his] blood [a] love for African wilderness”, as he told me, which led him to decide that he and his wife should buy the old lodge. The lodge, however, was still housing a number of health and education volunteers at the time of the sale, and the owner of the lodge declared that keeping them on was part of the sales-deal. Not wanting to run a tourist lodge, and wanting to honour their commitment to the volunteers, the couple decided to start a small charity. Roger told me he “hadn’t really thought about starting a charity, but just to help the local people, see if we could improve education and help them with business and that sort of thing”. Even now, over a decade later, he “still feel[s] terribly embarrassed to be owning… to run a charity”. By now the charity is a flourishing small-scale project with a head office in England, one full time and two part-time UK staff members, and 14 Malawian staff members.

Mostly interested in conservation Roger had never intended to build a library. In 2005, however, the charity was contacted by a primary school near their UK offices in Buckinghamshire. The school was clearing out its library and wanted to donate its old books, for which it chose Impact Africa. As Roger told me, the Impact team thought, “well, that’s a great idea, so my warehouse [in Buckinghamshire] had all these books in it. It must have been about 3,000 books.” Around the same time, a board member’s daughter who was attending Stowe, an elite private school in the UK, won a school social project competition, proposing to do work with Impact Africa. She came to Roger and asked him “what sort of thing do you need?”, to which Roger replied, “We need a library! So, if you can raise the money for the library, then we can build the library, and then we can ship the books out, and hey presto! So that’s basically how it all started.” Why, I asked, did he feel that Impact Africa needed a library? “Well it’s cause of all these books! I didn’t have anywhere to put them,” he said, laughing uproariously at himself. “So, it was not a thing…. I just had to get them out of my warehouse.”

One could argue that one of the things that was key in bringing the Tupane library into being was the material weight and presence of the books that it now houses. With the books in

Roger’s warehouse we can see how things can have the capacity to act upon the world, to bring people to action and to shape and form things around them.33 Things have weight, substance, a need to be used in particular ways which drive people to action, which guide actions and outcomes. In exploring this I take up James Ferguson’s (2019) most recent work in which he theorises about the power of ‘presence’, how people are able to make social and political claims based on their presence, the act of being present — that presence itself has weight and meaning (2019). Using this idea, I argue that the books now housed in Tupane library made certain demands and set actions in motion through the power of their presence. Books, particularly in large numbers, exercise a presence through their being there, in limbo, waiting either to be used, made use of, or discarded. Books, in a large enough quantity, call to be sheltered, ordered, accessed and read; to be, in short, housed. Books need to go somewhere, and when there are enough of them, this somewhere often becomes a library. With their amassing presence and the pressure for them to come into their full being as books — things that are displayed, opened, and read, the books in Roger’s warehouse exerted a form of power and influence that created a key thread for the emergence of the Tupane library. The library has since seen a steady donation of books from volunteers at Impact — they are all asked to bring a handful of books with them from their home country, keeping up a small flow of books into the library. Impact Africa also occasionally purchases fiction books, and has purchased a large number of older secondary school textbooks for the library.

At the time when the Tupane library was coming into being Roger came to the realisation that, as a small business owner, he actually had no idea how to set up a library. As he recounts,

I thought: ‘Hang on, I don’t know anything about libraries [laughing], I’m just an office cleaner’. So somebody approached us who wanted to volunteer who was a librarian in the college in Dublin… Cillian O’Cillian. What a name! … [H]e came over to our warehouse here in the UK and went through all the books and decided which ones were crap and absolutely no good at all … and we found a charity in Scotland that shipped for free… so we had the library!

Once Cillian arrived at Tupane in 2005, the money from the Stowe girls’ collection was sent, a British eco-oriented architect, a friend of a friend of Roger’s in Malawi, was roped in to do the architectural design, a form of cement-brick construction Roger had seen in Zambia was

33 For a discussion of the social life of things and how anthropologists ‘see’ through things, see Appadurai (1986) and Henare et al (2007). For a discussion of the breaking of the nature-culture (human-thing) binary and the ontological turn, see for example Descola (2013), Pedersen (2010, 2014) and Viveiros de Castro (2014a, 2014b).

53 imported, local construction workers and carpenters were employed, and Cillian was made head of operations. A myriad collection of lines became entangled and knotted to produce a library.

After returning from fieldwork, I went to Dublin to meet Cillian at his home, over a decade after he had left Tupane. In his late fifties when he went to Malawi, he had spent much of his life as a library assistant at Trinity College Dublin. Although Cillian had adamantly wanted nothing to do with libraries during his year abroad and had joined Impact Africa in order to teach, Roger managed to convince him to help with the library. He volunteered at Tupane for a year, becoming the key architect of the library, and the primary reason it is so meticulously organised. There he recreated the filing and borrowing system practised in Trinity College Dublin in the 1980s, prior to computerisation. He repeatedly told me that he could never have established the library successfully without the input of two local librarians: the man who took up head librarianship after Cillian left in 2007, Mr Kwambili, and Peter Mhone, who at the time was head librarian at Nkhata Bay some 40 kilometres away. According to Cillian, one of the most important things Peter told him was that if he wanted the library to work he would need the support of the chiefs. Cillian had an idea of how to go about this:

I had the idea in the back of my head, because Cambridge, Oxford and Trinity would have had a latinated library declaration for a hundred years. So I had….I wanted a declaration….when we sat down with Peter, he said, ‘okay, the smartest thing you can do is get the chiefs involved, when you get the chiefs involved and make it their job as chiefs, group village headmen, elders, if Joanne wants to become a member of the library, that she brings a form, to chief Chilumba, Chief Chilumba says yes, she…is one of my subjects, and yes, she can be a member of the library.’ So I had this in the back of my head, let’s translate this ancient document from Latin into simple English, and let’s start with that, and he said you’ve got it.

What Cillian and Peter created in the end were sign-up forms for library membership that were an English version of the Latinate pledge Cillian knew from Trinity, where members pledge to take care of the books in the library. Once signed by the chief, this document would be filed into the blue binder and the person would be given a cardboard library membership card. In Cillian and Peter’s idea of membership cards we see a convergence of multiple threads and lines connecting this little library in Tupane village across time and space, to the libraries of places like Cambridge and Trinity College, to the histories of those libraries and the rituals and performances that were part of their “rites and purifications” that establish “certain permissions” for entry (Foucault 1986:26). This small example from Tupane library shows how the libraries

54 in the villages are globally and temporally entangled; through them run the histories and rituals of library practices from a distant time, and a distant place, which weave those places, times and the libraries together. We also see how frictions are able to produce new cultural forms – through a sign-up sheet that incorporates archaic latinate Oxbridge traditions with the mechanisms of chiefly authority and subject relations in a rural Malawian village.

Three librarians: a portrait

Cillian’s meticulous ordering and categorising system is still in use at the Tupane library to this day. When Cillian left Tupane, Mr Kwambili, who had been working alongside him for the whole year of his volunteering, took over the job as head librarian and continued to use Cillian’s system. Mr Kwambili worked at the library for eleven years before retiring in 2016, aged 69, due to ill health and old age. When he stepped down, Alfred Ngoma, who had been working alongside Mr Kwambili for six years, took over the job, continuing the library’s by then well-established system of ordering and categorising. Alfred, as described in the vignette, is always neatly and smartly dressed. He takes his work as a librarian seriously, very conscientiously ensuring that all books are correctly marked and returned, all borrowers entered, all returns noted. Alfred was born in Zimbabwe in 1976, where his father was working in the mines. He lived there until he was fifteen, when he moved back to Malawi and completed his secondary schooling in the central region of the country. He spent some time trying to make a living in Lilongwe, however he returned to Tupane village in 2007, when his sister’s husband passed away, in order to look after his sister and her children. Alfred lives in a small mud-brick home near his sister’s house. His home has expansive grounds around it, though the grass-roof is old and perpetually leaks. The house has no electricity and no furniture other than two beds, and

Figure 3: The Kusambira Centre from the outside, with Cobra at the outside desk.

Figure 4: The inside of the Kusambira Centre with Tiso sitting at the loan’s desk.

56 with all his dependents Alfred is perpetually short of money. He was given the job at the library because a cousin who held the job had left and suggested that Alfred be given the position. Alfred admits he initially had no deep desire to work at the library, but appreciated the chance to attain an income. This income is modest enough that despite having a full-time job, all the librarians still live in challenging economic conditions. However, despite the low wages and the initial disinterest in the library itself, Alfred now says he is “proud” of his job and feels he is well respected through it, “because I help the community, more especially the children”. He has come to love reading, and can often be found on quiet days sitting at the loans desk reading books, and, as mentioned in the vignette, has even begun writing his own stories.

While Alfred takes most of the responsibility for the daily running and ordering of the library, Cobra, the second librarian, looks after the books. Teasingly called the ‘book doctor’ by Alfred, Cobra’s main job is fixing library books. Sitting at his desk outside the library’s front door, he meticulously sticky-tapes spines together, sticks sheets into books, glues pieces here and there. He does this not only for the library’s books, but also for the primary school children from the school next door, who often bring their school books to be fixed by him. Cobra is a bit of a rebel. He always comes to the library dressed in baggy jeans, flip-flops and large t-shirts. He only sits at the outside desk, never entering the library. By his own admission, he does not like to read books and so avoids the interior of the library. Like Alfred, Cobra was born in Zimbabwe, in 1975, where his father worked at the Hwange coal mine, only moving to Malawi as an adult. He lived over a decade in Lilongwe doing piece work, but eventually returned to his parent’s home village because he did not want his widowed mother to live alone. As he said, “it is better if I live at home”. Returning to one’s home village to look after aging parents is very common, and a primary reason many of my interlocutors gave for moving back to their villages after living and working elsewhere. Cobra lives as a bachelor with his mother in a small mud- brick hut with a crumbling grass-roof, out on the marshy grass plains of the village. He got the job at the library shortly after returning as a result of the good education received in Zimbabwe. However, he tells me that he does not really like it very much and only really took it for the (small) income.

Tiso, the third librarian, and Alfred are a counter-point to Cobra. More so than the occasionally recalcitrant Cobra, they seem to have adopted some of the habitus of a stereotypical librarian. They are generally inside the library and always smartly dressed. Whereas Cobra refuses to be inside the library, they always sit at the little loans desk by the front door, reading, looking through old magazines, or quietly chatting.

Tiso does not speak much, but he takes his role as library guide very seriously. Whenever anyone enters the library, it is Tiso who jumps up to ask them what they are looking for, and to guide them to the right section. In his early twenties, Tiso, the son of Mr Kwambili, is the youngest of the librarians. He had originally taken a job as a teacher at the Tupane FP next door, however, after two months he quit because he was not being paid a full salary. His father then arranged that he could take a job at the library. Tiso is immensely shy, at least, as Alfred told me, around women, and consistently tried to avoid having to talk to me. I was able to garner that he was happy with his work, and enjoyed being in the library, but, like the other librarians, wished the work came with better remuneration. Tiso is the key mediator in the interactions people have with the library. Only very few visitors are allowed to walk around the library without Tiso’s guidance — namely those who are considered by the librarians to be regular readers and therefore know their own way around. The majority of readers, however, upon entering the library, are immediately given into Tiso’s hands and shown where to find the material they want. Tiso makes the library experience swift and efficient for most visitors, taking them straight to the books they are looking for. However, by taking people directly to the resources they need, helping them pick the right book, and then ushering them to the loans desk, he also ensures that the library is not often browsed or lingered in. On top of this the library has no desks or reading spaces inside it. The culmination of Tiso’s swift guidance and a lack of space and seating in the library means that ultimately very few people spend more than a few minutes in it.

The three librarians at Tupane are, quite literally, responsible for keeping the library open and running. Every week-day and Saturday morning around 8:30 am they unlock it, swing its double doors wide open, set out the tables and chairs and the loans desks, ensure all the paper work for the day is prepared, and then help, guide, support and interact with anyone who comes to the library. They are also the guardians of the books, making sure they are not taken without documentation, and if they are not returned on time, one of the librarians will set off on his bike and cycle into the village to the home of the offending non-returner to retrieve the requisite book. In the brief portrait of the librarians at Tupane we see the crucial role librarians play in keeping things ‘intact’, keeping the libraries going, bringing them to life. We also see, however, how it is the educated elite, often with a migratory background, who are able to take up these positions. From Alfred, Tiso and Cobra it also becomes clear that while some enjoy the work, it is primarily taken up for financial reasons – to find paid employment, a rarity in many rural villages.

2. Bandawe Girls Secondary School Library

The first time I walked into the library at Bandawe Girls Secondary School was on a scorching October day. Inside it was boiling hot. Like most buildings in Malawi, the library has an iron sheet roof, which becomes a baking tray in the summer sun. Two small ceiling fans whirring at full speed brought some small relief. Six large desks that can seat at least twelve girls each fill the front half of the library, and at almost any time of the day one can find a handful of girls seated at them studying. The library’s role as a study space is, the girls told me, one of its most valued functions. On that October day eighteen girls were in the library, neatly dressed in their light blue button-up shirts and dark navy-blue skirts, sweat lining their brows as they quietly worked at their tables. Many seemed overcome by the heat and were dozing with their eyes half closed. The librarian was ill, her sneezing and heavy phlegmatic coughing the only sounds disrupting the hush of the library. Four computers on desks lined the walls near the wall sockets, available to the girls but seldom used.

I walked to the other half of the library, not occupied by study desks but filled with six large free-standing book shelves filled almost entirely with books in English. Walking past them I could see that most books on these open shelves were older textbooks, or old information books, on subjects like geology or engineering. There were some old fiction books, often with tattered or dusty covers, many of them mystery stories or love stories from the 1950s and ‘60s, coming from various parish communities in the UK, particularly from Scotland.

In the front corner of the library, on the wall opposite the entrance, stands a large metal filing cabinet that caught my eye the moment I walked in. Its metal doors thrown wide open, the cabinet was veritably bursting with books packed in double rows, piled on top of each other, or even just placed on the top of the cabinet. Overflowing with new, bright and colourful books, the cabinet stands in stark contrast to the library’s open shelves which are weighted down by old, dusty books, in dark, dour colours, in various states of disrepair. This cabinet has been designated to hold a collection of books that were given to the library by the Beit Trust, a British- South African Trust funded by the legacy of the 1906 will of Alfred Beit, a director of the British South Africa Company (The Beit Trust 2019). It is full of young adult fiction, much of it being fantasy fiction, with covers of fire-breathing dragons and children on adventures filling it with glorious colours.

Figure 5: Bandawe Girls Secondary School library looking towards the door on the left, and the Beit Trust cabinet in the right back corner.

Figure 6: Bandawe Girls library seen from the front door, with the open shelves at the back.

Bandawe Girls Secondary School is the main girls’ boarding school in my field area, located in New Bandawe, about fifteen kilometres to the north of Chituka. As an ex-Scottish Mission school it is considered to be one of the better schools in the Nkhata Bay district. Its library is quite new, only built in 2015 by the school’s previous head teacher, Lawson Kulungila. Having already established a name for himself as an immensely effective and respected head teacher by turning around two ‘problem schools’, Lawson was sent to Bandawe Girls in 2014 to fix the struggling school. Upon his arrival he found it in a bad state. Many girls were failing and only two or three were being picked for university each year. The school was plagued by rumours of Satanism and witchcraft accusations amongst the girls (discussed in Chapter Four), which led to the entire Form IV34 class being suspended for ‘gross indiscipline’ in 2013 (Ngwira 2013). One of the first things that struck Lawson was that the school had no proper library, just a dark closet room with some books piled up in it, which he described as “the disease of the school” when I spoke to him. Seeing the dire situation at the school, Lawson told me, “I knew that without a library, there could be no success story for this school.” A few months after Lawson had begun his job as head teacher, a man called Paul drove onto the school grounds in a large, white Toyota truck with a red plastic horn on the front from a ‘Save the Rhinos’ campaign.35 Paul is the Canadian administrator for the Sierra Foundation, run by a wealthy Swiss man. I met Paul by chance whilst staying at a backpacker’s in Mzuzu, and subsequently on a number of his later trips through the county. Paul explained to me that he has been charged by the Foundation, whose head is an old friend of his, to drive around Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe for three months every year in search of schools and individuals working “to achieve things in their community” that he would like to support. According to Paul, the Sierra Foundation is very much a person-to-person foundation; money is given primarily on the basis that Paul is inspired by a person and their vision.

When Paul arrived at Bandawe Girls he had no interest in supporting the building of a library; in fact, as he told me later, he does not really see the point in building libraries for schools and would much rather spend the Foundation’s money on building things like dormitories.36 This was in part because, as he said, “I just don’t really think [a library is] necessary” and he felt for most schools a library was “more of a prestige thing” than something they actually used. At

34 Secondary school in Malawi is four years long. The years are divided into Forms I, II, III and IV. 35 Paul told me that when the rumours of bloodsuckers had broken out in the south of the country in November 2017, he had had to very quickly remove the horn from his car as many people associated it with blood-magic. 36 Girls’ dormitories are a valuable educational intervention as girls are often kept at home to cook and clean.

Chifira Community Day Secondary School (CDSS)37 Paul had been asked to build a proper library for the roughly 800 books they had housed in a classroom, but he had told them he did not feel they needed one. Instead he supported the building of a girls’ dormitory. This required a storeroom for the construction materials, and so the 800 books were moved into piles in the head teacher’s office and are now inaccessible to the students. Through Paul’s intervention, Chifira CDSS gained a girls’ dormitory, but its students lost access to the library the school was trying create. Paul had also come to Bandawe Girls to build a girls’ dormitory, but Lawson refused to consider a dormitory before building a library. Lawson is a man of great charisma and persuasion, and it was the force of his conviction that made Paul agree to support his goal. As Paul told me, he would never have provided funds to build a library at Bandawe Girls if it were not for the fact that Lawson was “such a great guy”. Notwithstanding Paul’s reservations, Lawson felt that the library was a crucial investment for the school, telling me he believed “that library transformed that school”.38

From the library at Bandawe Girls Secondary School, we can see how the promises and possibilities of the universal of literacy are able to motivate the aspirations of local elites in order to be able to expand the possibilities for engaging with it and grabbing hold of it. We are also able to see how local actors are able to manoeuvre international donors to work in their favour and support them in fulfilling the goals they wish to achieve, although, as is clear with the Chifira example, this is not always achievable. Lawson’s handling of his school’s dependence on donor aid to produce a library he wanted could be seen as a smaller-scale version of Jean-François Bayart’s concept of extraversion (2000). Bayart argues that faced with unequal global power relations, actors and actants in Africa often resort to “strategies of extraversion”, which he understands as “mobilizing resources derived from their (possibly unequal) relationship with the external environment”, turning this external environment into a “major resource” in processes of political centralization and economic accumulation (2000:218-219).39 In the context of asymmetrical power relations African people have thus been “active agents in the mis en dependence of their societies, sometimes opposing it and at other times joining it” (ibid.:219). Following on Bayart’s notion of ‘extraversion’, some anthropologists have argued that development in Africa

37 Chifira CDSS is the secondary school for the Chituka, Chifira, Kamwala area. CDSS are intended for those not picked for boarding secondary schools, or unable to afford them. They have very low fees, but also often poor educational resources and standards (Chimombo 2009b; Kamwendo 2010). 38 After the success at Bandawe Girls Paul has since supported more libraries. 39 Although Bayart’s concept as outlined in his 2000 article is not unproblematic in its depictions of African states and their supposed role in their own exploitation, and the article can slide into derogatory language (e.g. democracy “is a form of pidgin language that various native princes use in their communication with Western sovereigns and financiers”), the concept of an extraversion where African actants exercise a “management of dependence” rather than simply being the victims of it, is a fruitful one.

62 should not be understood as a uni-directional flow of externally imposed structures and projects, but rather in terms of how external connections are consciously and purposefully sought out, used, manipulated and engaged with by Africans themselves (Englund 2002b, 2003; Ferguson 2006, 2015). In this view people across Africa see, use, create, encourage, enforce and engage with ‘lines of dependence’ rather than just being ‘subject’ to them.

Extraversions also play out in relation to the aspirations inherent in universals. As Harri Englund argues, within the African landscape “widespread poverty retains the importance of extraversion” (2003:93), engendering a continued pressure to look outwards to fulfil basic needs. The desire for literacy and the possibilities that it offers draws people towards practices of extraversion so as to gain access to some of the possibilities and make good the promises of the universal. This desire for literacy, and the reaching out towards those who come to the region with a potential for structural, financial and material support to facilitate the attainment of it, is a dynamic that runs through many of the libraries in the region, shaping the ways in which people, particularly in schools, take up libraries and books. Like Lawson, many teachers and parents wanted schools to have libraries, perceiving them as desirable, something to be wanted even by those parents or villagers who had never been in a library themselves. As Archibald Mwase, a sick, elderly man living in Chituka stated, he liked libraries because “if [the children] read [the library books] they can have enough knowledge of English”. The vast majority of those I spoke to echoed this sentiment — libraries are seen to contain English books, and learning English is seen to be a crucial skill. A handful of interlocutors, such as Teacher Frank who taught at Macalpine, or Goodman, my translator James’ asibweni (maternal uncle), did feel that the fact that libraries were filled with English books made them somewhat inaccessible for the majority of children, who cannot read English. Their view, however, was in the minority. In my field site, anything connected with English was valorised, as were institutions connected to schooling, making libraries something the majority saw as desirable, whether they ever entered them or not.

3. Kande School Library

Eight kilometres to the south of Chituka, down the M5 tar road, lies the trading station of Kande, where Kande Free Primary has a small library. The Kande library is visually impressive, with twelve bookshelves, two at a time, put back-to-back in three rows. Its walls are painted with lady bugs containing counting numbers, leaves with letters, and various other pedagogical images. Each wall is lined with desks for writing and studying, and at the front is a large desk for the librarian. The shelves are heavy with books — there must be at least 2000 of them, almost all in English. On closer inspection the shelves are chaotic and unordered. Many books are either set on their sides, or spine facing back, or piled on top of other books. I gained access to the library by offering to help them sort out the books – putting them into categories of genre and reading age. This gave me access to the school and library, but it also made me the agent of ordering in the library, bringing my own ideas and schemas of ‘order’ into a space positioned as ‘disordered’ by myself and the head teacher.

The library at Kande was “started, in fact, by a visitor”, as Nikolas Nambe, the previous head teacher, put it when I visited him at his home. Nikolas had been head teacher for fifteen years before retiring in 2015. He told me the story of the library’s genesis on a stormy afternoon, loudly shouting at me to be heard over the cacophony of rain beating on the iron-sheet roof. That visitor had come from New Zealand in 1995, volunteering for a while at the school. In 1997, she returned with a donation of books, and in 1999 sent an even larger donation from New Zealand through Kande Beach Lodge, the nearby tourist lodge. For several years the school received many books from visiting volunteers, but they just lay around in an office. As Mr Nambe said, the school “had a problem to give the books to the children to learn”. Finally, in 2001, a classroom was requisitioned by the school to act as the library. As in the case of the Tupane library, we see the presence of a collection of books enacting a pressure that calls forth a library. In his time, Mr Nambe laments, “the books were many, but now I hear that many are missing”. Missing books, or the potential for books to go missing, is also a recurring theme at the school libraries and a key concern at Kande. The current head teacher of the school, Michael Khoma, told me that the reason the library at the school “was [actually] not functioning” was because you need someone trustworthy to run it. “A library is a serious issue,” he told me, “because you can lose all the books”. This conversation with Michael was towards the end of my time at Kande, for when I first arrived at the school, I had been told the library was functioning very well, something which its aesthetic presentation made me believe.

Figure 7: The library at Kande Free Primary.

Figure 8: The library shelves after the first library session.

At my first ‘library day’ at the school, the library was packed full of children. Initially surprised and impressed by the popularity of library time, during the following hour I was overtaken by a sneaking suspicion that something else was going on — that I was witnessing a staged performance for my benefit. This feeling was reinforced when, at the end of library time, the children put the books back on the shelves in every imaginable way and any place they could find — folded squished into corners, piled on top of each other. Within a few minutes the ‘order’ I had spent days creating was thrown back into total chaos. I asked Joseph, the librarian, if it was like that every week, and how much time it cost him to re-organise the books after each session. He looked at the shelves, and sighed, telling me that the children at the school had never been taught how to use a library.

Over the next two weeks, I found out from the pupils at the school that the library was actually never open, and that library hour was only something that happened when I came to visit. In conversations with Joseph, I also realised that he was quite unsure about what to do with the library, and rather afraid of what would happen if books disappeared. As he said to me, “the office has really trusted me”, but he was scared that “if the learners don’t take care of the books, the office will blame me”. Young Walter, an avid Standard 7 reader with whom I spent quite a bit of time, told me that they could not really borrow books from the library but that he would love to be able to do so. After two weeks at Kande, I realised it was a futile exercise to visit a library that was only being opened for me, where the children were only able to access it when performing for my benefit. It was then that I spoke to the head teacher and asked him directly about the library, at which point he told me, that actually, yes, the library was “not functioning”.

The library at Kande FP helps us see how the donor relationship and the expectations of a library can exert both a pressure of performance on schools that ostensibly have libraries, and create significant epistemological insecurities. In my interactions and discussions with Joseph, it seemed to me that he felt a vast amount of insecurity about what to do with a library. Any question I would ask, he would take as a suggestion to change something, and many of my queries and comments lead him very quickly to change a practice or something in the library. Shortly before I left the field, when discussing his job as librarian, Joseph told me he had never actually been told how to run a library: “There is nobody who taught me to become a librarian. Nobody”. Nonetheless, as the teacher willing to sacrifice his time to be librarian, Joseph was expected not only to know what to do, but to have enough confidence in this to keep the library open and running by himself whilst making sure that none of the books were lost or damaged.

The case of Kande, I suggest, shows how the expectation to perform and produce ‘libraries’ can leave people trying to enact and recreate something that produces epistemological alienation rather than generating epistemological fertility, as they attempt to guess at the types of form and practice ‘expected’ of one in order to produce particular spaces such as ‘libraries’ to the ‘satisfaction’ of those who have financially invested in them. When “epistemic supremacy” (Stoler 2008:349) — the idea that libraries are a particular type of thing that must exist and be performed in particular ways — is coupled with financial dependence on ‘visitors’, and then added to over a century of relations of power and knowledge that have entrenched particular epistemic supremacies and validated epistemic inequality, one finds people such as Joseph experiencing epistemological insecurity and engaging in “anxious epistemic labors” (Stoler 2008:353).

4. Macalpine School Library

The first library I entered in Malawi was actually right next door to my first home in Kamwala - in the adjacent Macalpine Free Primary School. I had been told by the teachers at the school that it had a good library, but that it was not being used because the librarian had left. I was asked if I would be willing to take on the job of librarian for a few months while there. When I consented the head teacher, Mr Changa, took me to show me the library. We walked up to one of the classrooms at the back of the school, and I watched as Mr Changa pulled out a key, turned it in the lock, and then pulled out a piece of cardboard from between the two doors. The library, it turned out, does not actually lock, instead the doors are held together with a piece of folded cardboard. The teachers, however, always pull out a key and pretend to unlock the door, in a feigned demonstration that ensures that the children all believe that the library is actually locked and therefore inaccessible.

The Macalpine library, housed in an old classroom, had clearly not been used for some time. Dust motes floated through the room and pieces of old paper lay across the floor. There were shelves against two walls of the library, seemingly intended for books, but most of them were empty. Mr Changa told me that the shelves could not be used, because termites would build their long clay nests along the walls and eat through all the books. The red veins of the termites’ tunnels that arced across the walls were a clear testament to this problem, as were the large piles of crumbling, half-eaten books lying abandoned on the shelves and the floor. The library books that had been salvaged from the voracious hunger of the termites were kept on six large wooden

67 tables arranged in three rows in the middle of the room. The books, at least 800 of them, were lying on the tables on their sides, in piles of various sizes, without any discernible order – children’s books on top of adult novels on top of mathematics textbooks on top of encyclopaedias.

The library was stocked through an assorted collection of book donations from the lodge owners of the nearby luxury lodge, from guests at the lodge, from Harcourt, a British volunteer organisation that sends a group of volunteers to the school every year, and from BolaBola, a local charity run by Charlie Venga, originally from Chituka but now living in the United States. This haphazard process means that, like most libraries in the area, the library is filled with a motley assortment of books, almost all of them in English. There are, for example, more than

40 copies of an old history textbook, Living History, from the 1960s, on British history.40 There are a number of Disney books, such as Cars and Beauty and the Beast, a few Angelina Ballerina books about a ballet dancing mouse, some science fiction such as John Wyndham’s Stowaway to Mars, Michael Crichton’s Sphere or Asimov’s The Mixed-Up Robot, and several books with overt magical themes such as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, or Mrs Broomstick’s School for Witches. There are also some more regular school type story-books, such as The Woman and the Millet, a Longhorn Reading Scheme World Reader, and many Reading 360 reading scheme books, such as I can Hide. The most popular book with the children was a collection of stories written by young Malawian girls, in English and Chichewa, called Winning Stories.

I spent the first two weeks of November 2017 sorting through Macalpine’s books, throwing away damaged books, cleaning and wiping books that could still be used. I sorted the books out by a graduating level of reading difficulty based on my experience with early literacy projects in South Africa, once again becoming the architect of ‘order’ in a library. I then lined them up on the tables on their thin edges, with their spines facing outwards, and bought a ledger within which to register books borrowed and returned. At this stage libraries were not yet a focus of my fieldwork. However, by becoming aware of how I was shaping and forming the

40 By Ray Mitchell and Geoffrey Middleton.

Figure 9: The Macalpine FP library when I arrived.

Figure 10: The Macalpine FP library after I cleaned and ‘ordered’ it.

69 library and the role I was playing in its resurrection, I began to reflect on the ways in which libraries were informed by, but also produce, particular materialities and epistemologies. After two weeks, the library opened and continued to run once a week under my ‘librarianship’ for the next six months, until I moved from Macalpine to Chituka and so left the school library. The result of this was that the library soon closed after my departure.

Bone fragments: a ‘failed’ project?

From the above description it is clear that Macalpine Library ‘exists’ in the sense that there is a room which has a pile of books in it. It can, however, be conceptualised in terms of James Ferguson’s concept of ‘failed projects’ (Ferguson 1990, 1999). Ferguson argues that it is the rule rather than the exception that development projects ‘fail’, neither achieving their goals, nor leaving a sustainable project behind. When they fail and, for the most part, disappear, they leave behind traces of their existence - the skeletal bone fragments of infrastructure, roads that were built, broken water pumps or empty disused buildings (Ferguson 1994). These projects can also leave affects and relations behind, sometimes negative feelings of disappointment or even betrayal, sometimes also a positive disposition towards future projects or development attempts (Ferguson 1990, 1999).

The Macalpine Library could be understood as the remains of a development project, a constellation of bone fragments that went through two project iterations and now seems to be a dormant reminder of these. The initial project, for which the building was built, was to create a computer centre for the school. With the financial support of the nearby luxury lodge, the building was constructed, computers installed, and the centre run for a few months. However, after computer equipment was stolen several times, the project was shut down and the computers removed. Although this project ‘failed’ it left particular fragmentary infrastructures behind - in the form of an empty room filled with large, wide desks. Through a large donation of books from the luxury lodge and Harcourt, this room was then turned into a library. That library, I was told, ran well for two years. However, when the schoolteacher who had taken it upon herself to be the librarian left the school, a year before my arrival, the library was closed, sitting fallow until I re-opened it.

During my own period of working in the library, around 20 to 30 children came to the library every week. 293 books were borrowed from the library – but, to my frustration, only 102

70 were returned, showing how hard it is to keep books from going ‘missing’. After my departure the school tried to keep the library open but struggled to find a teacher who would take on the job of being librarian — without any extra pay and a lot of extra work it was an unenviable task. One teacher, who was very enthusiastic about building international connections, did volunteer. Although he opened the library a handful of times, he confessed to me that he found the task of coordinating all the children, putting borrower’s data into the library book, re-ordering returned books, and losing many hours of his day, quite strenuous. After being caught up in some personal difficulties, he was transferred to another school, signalling the permanent closure of the school library.

When I left the field ten months later, the library was still closed, but with all the potential of being opened up again. The Macalpine library is emblematic of a ‘failed’ project that has nonetheless not quite ‘failed’. The library has left an infrastructure and resources that can be (re)mobilized at any point. When looking at development projects, Ferguson states “perhaps what is most important about a development project is not so much what it fails to do but what it achieves through its ‘side effects’” (1994:182). The ‘side effects’ of the ‘failed’ computer centre project was that a new room was built – which was left empty after the ‘failure’ of that project. It was this empty room which made a space into which a library could be imagined, and so in its very emptiness called forth ideas of how to use this space. The library project has also, to some degree, ‘failed’ in that the library was closed multiple times, is currently still closed, and has lost a large number of books. It has ‘failed’ to become a long term, well-functioning library at the school. Nonetheless, for a handful of years, the library did operate, and many children were able to enter and access it for those years. For many of these children, this is the only library they have ever been into, and the only time they have had access to non-curriculum fiction books.

Section Two: Housing, moving, leaking

Leaking libraries: things in (perpetual) motion

Above I have argued that the library at Macalpine could be understood within the matrices of a ‘failed’ project. However, this perception runs the risks of buying into an understanding of libraries as ‘static’. The Macalpine library, whilst currently ‘failed’, is not a static and closed thing — it has left traces and lines and created new entanglements in the village. It is still “leaking” (Ingold 2010) into the village space, through its books, through its presence, and through its potential of being re-opened. Ingold suggests that all things ‘leak’ - meaning that “the lives of things generally extend along not one but multiple lines, knotted together at the centre but trailing innumerable ‘loose ends’ at the periphery […] no longer a self-contained object, the thing now appears as an ever-ramifying web of lines of growth” (ibid.:12). They do not have concrete external boundaries but are rather a knot of constituent threads, which trail beyond themselves and get caught in other threads, “forever discharging through the surfaces that form temporarily around them” (2010:4).

Using anthropological theories of materiality allows us to gain a view of libraries which sees them as dynamic, alive, leaking things.41 The same applies to their books, which are similarly dynamic, alive, leaking into the lives of those around them. This view, of the ways in which entangled things are constantly still ‘alive’, can help enrich the idea of ‘failed’ projects, showing how development projects, even when failed or long gone, still leave traces, lines and entanglements behind, “forever discharging”. In this sense, libraries, often seen as static once built, are by contrast things in perpetual motion.

As Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva argue, “the problem with buildings is that they look desperately static”, when they should really be seen as “movement, as flights, as a series of transformations” (2008:103). Ingold expands on this idea when looking at houses, arguing that a real house is a “gathering of lives, and to inhabit it is to join in the gathering” (2010:5). A ‘real’ library, a house for books, is also a gathering of lives and a leaking of lines, where people and

41 The anthropology of materiality and things has been a burgeoning field of anthropological enquiry since Arjun Appadurai’s edited volume on the Social life of things (1986) and Bruno Latour’s work in Science and Technology Studies on actors and networks (1993, 1996). For further discussion on the anthropology of ‘things’ see for example Ingold 2010; Hodder 2014; Holbraad 2012; Henare et al 2007.

72 things trace their lines across spaces, places and time through a series of transformations. Libraries are emergences and convergences, seeping, flowing, leaking and coalescing.

Seen this way, the library at Macalpine, as all the other libraries studied, was constantly in motion and in flow, opening and closing, gathering books and discharging them into the community, creating interpersonal relationships between people and epistemological and imaginative relationships between people and books. The library, whilst ‘closed’ is, for example, still ‘leaking’ into the area with its books. While the library ‘lost’ 191 books that were never returned, these 191 books were also ‘gained’ by the community, spreading tendrils of the library out into the village spaces — books which I occasionally saw peeking out of children’s backpacks or being leafed through by a huddle of children sitting under a tree. The library also ‘leaks’ through its presence, the potential of its re-opening and the idea of a library, and through the books people read from it, the stories they now carry, and through the student’s memories of having used it and engaged with the books in it.

Because things are always in motion, leaking, threading, weaving and connecting, attempts have to be perpetually made to keep things intact, to bring them into a form or coalesce them in certain ways. Within the alchemy of entanglement it takes effort to keep things intact, for “left to themselves […] materials can run amok. Pots are smashed, bodies disintegrate….” (Ingold 2010:9). Equally, it takes effort to keep a library intact and stable — agents need to be perpetually performing, inscribing and creating the library. Borrowers and readers need to keep coming to the libraries, books need to be taken out, but they also need to be re-shelved and re- organised, newspapers need to be read, doors need to be opened and closed, floors need to be swept, paths walked, thousands of micro-iterations need to occur and re-occur in vaguely recognisable patterns for the library to keep coalescing in its library form. At Macalpine we see constant attempts to keep the library intact and stable as a ‘library’ that do not always succeed. This work, as has been shown, can be immensely challenging. Most development projects require this constant work to keep them ‘intact’, and when this work is not ongoing, or is not able to keep projects stable in trying to keep them ‘intact’, projects ‘fail’.

Practice-oriented development theorists have used assemblage theory, inspired, like Ingold’s work, by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987, 2012) to explore the ways in which things are kept ‘intact’ in development work. Analysing society in terms of fluidity, immanence and emergence, they have argued that development is performed and enacted through social relations, and its “realities are assembled” and given coherence through this practice (see Sriprakash and Mukhopadhyay 2015:231-2). Development is thus not considered an extant

73 reality that is enacted ‘on the ground’, but rather a reality that gains coherence and stability (but can also create instability and incoherence) through the actions, performances and statements of practitioners and recipients. As such it is “not a coherent set of practices, but a set of practices that produces coherence” (Mosse 2013:231). The lens of leaking lines, meshworks and entanglements enriches this understanding of development as practice. It positions development not only as needing to produce coherence or to be assembled, but also as leaking, allowing an expanded understanding of the ways in which development projects seep into their environments and the social worlds around them. The lens also shows how this production of ‘coherence’ is equally a constant process of keeping things ‘intact’ in the face of their perpetual motion, and how the processes of assembling and keeping things ‘intact’ are deeply globally entangled.

In my field site, many ways of keeping libraries ‘intact’ require ongoing financial investment – librarians need to be paid, glue needs to be bought, shelves need to be repaired, new books need to be purchased, and many of the hundreds of micro-practices that converge to keep a ‘library’ intact, are, in the end, quite costly. The result is that the most ‘stable’ and ‘coherent’ libraries, at Tupane and Bandawe, are also the only ones that receive ongoing financial support. The other libraries are left mostly to fend for themselves, with the delivery of books and the building of a structure seemingly seen as sufficient to produce a library. As noted, in Malawi, as in many other African countries, governments and NGOs frequently rely on local communities themselves to provide basic goods and services, in the name of an imagined African ‘community spirit’, which is relied upon to sustain development projects (cf. Ferguson 2006; Neumark 2014).

Harri Englund has critiqued this as what he calls the “false premise of the village as a unit of productive endeavors, as though a communitarian ethos energized devotion to the village”, which drives the expectation that villagers will take on project work and service provision simply because it is assumed they must be dedicated to the greater village good (2008:40). In a similar vein, Louise Rasmussen has argued that NGO projects in much of Africa are initiated with an expectation of their ‘sustainability’ which rests on the implicit assumption that communities will take on the work of ensuring project sustainability themselves (Rasmussen 2017), with the result that many projects fail and the communities themselves are then blamed for these failures (ibid.). The fiction of the communal ethos as the core tenet of African village life, which means that all villagers will commit personal time and energy without compensation to village projects, continues to plague rural development work.

In my field site this pattern is repeated — it is presumed, assumed and expected that if schools or communities want libraries they will be self-built, self-maintained and self-managed by the schools and communities, leaving the three libraries without ongoing financial support, at Kande, Macalpine, and Chirifa, often struggling, and frequently closed for long periods of time. The library at Malenga Mzoma FP, Chituka’s primary school, was under construction during my entire time in the field. Being partially funded by BolaBola and partially funded by money from parents at the school, collected by the School Development Committee, the process of construction was very slow. However, the library shows an example where a local elite, Charlie Venga, and a community-led development committee were working together to build a library.

While financial resources are clearly important to keeping libraries ‘intact’, librarians are equally pivotal in the maintenance of the stable formation of a library. They are the ones who give it form, who give its various lines and entanglements, both movement and hold. As described at Tupane, it is the librarians who open the libraries, who set the books in motion by giving people a way to borrow them, who track down books not returned, who shush those who enter the library, who give advice to those looking for books. It is they who, through peopling a library, bring it alive. In my field site the libraries without clearly designated librarians, at Kande, Macalpine, Malenga Mzoma and Chifira, struggled to keep a stable formation. The two continuously functioning libraries, at Tupane and Bandawe Girls Secondary School were also the ones with formally employed, salaried librarians — doing the constant work of keeping the libraries ‘intact’, but also doing the work of giving and maintaining their ‘order’, as will be discussed in the next section.

Libraries as museums and archives: order and power

Libraries are not only spaces that are perpetually being kept ‘intact’, they are also spaces that are produced by and produce particular forms of ‘order’. In his work on The Order of Books (1994) Roger Chartier claims that “inventorying titles, categorizing works, and attributing texts were all operations that made it possible to set the world of the written word in order” (1994:vii). Order, ordering, being ordered, are embedded in the nature of books and libraries; it is a mode of knowledge production and presentation that books call forth and, according to Chartier, is a constituent element of being a library. It is also one of the key ways in which librarians, and those who build, run and manage libraries, keep them ‘intact’ and give them coherence.

Unlike the libraries at Macalpine and Kande, which presented themselves as seemingly ‘disordered’, the library at Tupane presented itself as exceptionally ‘ordered’. As Roger, Impact Africa’s founder, told me,

It’s probably the most organised library in all of Malawi, I would think. And we’re very proud of it […] because I think it’s the best library in Malawi. I think everybody who goes in there probably looks at it and thinks, ‘wow’, they’re not expecting that. And yes, it’s a bit boring going round and listening to all…well, we’ve got this section for this, and we’ve got these records here….[…] but then you look, actually [the librarian] is really proud of his job and it looks really impressive.

As described at the beginning of the chapter, I was given the library tour as my first introduction to the library. The system was set up in the minutest detail by Cillian. As Roger told me, “he set up the system, as it was working in Dublin [laughs]. So everything was properly catalogued.” It is Alfred who is ultimately responsible for the vast paper-network that undergirds the library’s functioning — an ordering he learnt from Mr Kwambili, who in turn learnt it from Cillian.

In discussing the “ordering practices” of museums, which have received far more anthropological attention than libraries, Bennet et al. argue, that the “material technologies” of ordering – the means of accessioning, indexing, using file cards – play a crucial role (2017:4). Of the libraries in my field site, only two had these technologies: the Tupane library and the Bandawe Girls library, the two most fully-functioning libraries. This suggests that the technologies and modes of ordering made available to and used in a library form a core component of the library’s ‘functioning’. Ordering of a particular form is a part of a library’s being and practice, and an important requisite for it to ‘function’ as a library. And librarians, materials, and technologies, such as ledgers, membership cards, filing systems and so forth, are needed to ensure the maintenance and continuation of this ordering.

Before the books in a library can be ordered, however, they first have to be collected. Like museums, which are buildings in which artefacts from across the world are gathered, marked, and displayed, libraries are also “centre[s] of calculation” — where material objects and epistemological frameworks come together through a process of collecting and ordering which create their own grids of intelligibility (Bennet et al. 2017:15-24). As with museums, the ways in which libraries “obtain and order their collections”, who collects what from where and how this is displayed and (re)presented, has an effect on “social worlds” (ibid.:1).

The libraries studied, however, whilst being ‘centres of calculation’ also offer a counter- point to most museums. The ways in which they “obtain and order” their collections is substantially different to most museums: what is calculated and collected, does not “tell our [internally salient] stories [and] foster social cohesion” nor does it constitute people’s own collections of knowledge production as museums are said to do (Stoler 2002, 2009; Thomas 2010, 2016:8). For the collecting for the libraries in my field site does not come from within the communities in which the libraries sit. The books and stories they contain are, in the vast majority of cases, not collected by the librarians or local communities, but are by and large stories-from- elsewhere (although some Malawian stories are present). The libraries are a nexus of identities and stories from across the Anlgophone world. Nicholas Thomas, a specialist in the anthropology of museums, speaks of how museums are very often framed as essentially buildings full of “imperial loot”, in which objects flow into the imperial centres on lines of conquest and conflict (2016). To some degree, the libraries studied are an inversion of this flow, functioning as inverse museums. Rather than being spaces housed in metropoles or in the global north which contain collections of artefacts from the global south or from indigenous communities, they come to house vast collections of objects, in the form of books, which flow from the old imperial centres in the global north into the old imperial reaches in the global south. The libraries are gathering points for artefacts from elsewhere, producing a space within the villages that opens up windows into other worlds. As thirteen-year-old Daniel, one of the most avid readers I encountered in the field, told me one day as we were walking to the Macalpine library, “when you open a book, you open a whole new world”.

In my field site, this ‘elsewhereness’ of the books seemed, in general, to be viewed in a positive light and as one of the more important things that a library could bring to people. Teacher Frank, for example, who taught at Macalpine Primary, told me that he very much liked the imported books in the library, feeling that “some of [those books] are good because they have stories where children can get things from”, things like “English and the meanings of words”. *Silias Luwo, an older man from Kamwala and avid reader who spends many of his days sitting by an old linoleum kitchen table that barely fits onto his tiny mudbrick khonde (porch), reading through his Bible and the many Jehovah’s Witness tracts and booklets that he loves, told me that “reading is really good, because you get to know new things”; you learn about the outside world and “the type of life that is happening elsewhere”.

The fact that the libraries are libraries is key to the collection of these other worlds. Within the African context, the global circulation of books has historically run along the lines of, at first religion, and then schooling. Historically Bibles, tracts, pamphlets, of all religious denominations formed the key textual productions on the continent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Hofmeyr 2001a, 2005; Stoler 2002; West 2016). This meant that the vast majority of textual productions flowing into villages was of a religious nature. Schools have also played an important role in textual production, but this has primarily focused on the circulation of school textbooks. Libraries, however, house and call for books of a different nature — they ‘collect’ fiction and non-fiction books. Libraries, therefore, act as key conduits for the circulation of fiction texts. In the south-east African village context, if one does not have libraries, one will have very few fiction books. There circulation of fiction, therefore, needs libraries.

In line with the tensions of inclusion and exclusion that run through literacy, it is also, however, this very ‘elsewhereness’ within which some of the epistemic exclusions and marginalisations of the libraries are enacted and through which particular relations of epistemological power are at play. The ordering and collecting of the libraries is enmeshed in relations and meshworks of power. Much like colonial archives the libraries in these rural spaces are fragments of “epistemological experiments” which produce an order of things, on which “power relations [are] inscribed” (Stoler 2002:87). What books are placed in a library, how they are placed, how they are categorised and ordered on the shelves, what books they are placed next to, how they are “yoked together in new and often unlikely combinations”, and how they are treated, spoken of, dealt with, and what is inside of them — all create and frame types of knowledge and knowledge interaction (Hofmeyr et al 2001:2).

Much like archives, the libraries are places which represent “monuments to particular configurations of power” and “the fantastic representation of an epistemological master pattern” (Stoler 2002:95-96). The libraries studied are monuments to the power of English and the elevation of the intellectual and epistemological products of the Anglophone world. The libraries are filled with books not just from any elsewhere, but the elsewhere of previous colonisers and of the global north, enacting elevation of certain worlds, worldviews and forms of knowledge. They are not filled with stories which have emerged from, and reflect, the worlds of those who read them. Rather, they are filled with stories, with books that act as epistemological containers that predominantly reflect the “social imaginaries”42 (Taylor 2002) of the Anglophone world.

42 The social imaginary functions as the central master-frame for the interpretations of one’s world which encompasses both the ‘real’, the likely and the possible (Andersson 2010:10; Taylor 2002:91; Vigh 2006:483).

Like archives, libraries show us the importance of the “link between what counts as knowledge and who has power” (Stoler 2002:96).

Not only do the book-flows into the libraries produce buildings filled with artefacts that elevate certain epistemological frameworks and social imaginaries, they also flow into the region on historically contingent lines of connection marked by asymmetrical power relations. As inverse museums, into which artefacts flow, the majority of the libraries are filled with books that were donated: by volunteers, organisations, or international well-wishers. As the District Education Manager (DEM) put it “so we have these whites [who donate books]. Most of [the books in the Nkhata Bay district] they come from well-wishers”. The librarians, the readers and communities thus had little say in the processes of collecting taking place.

In her analysis of the circulation of Anglophone biblical texts through the British and Foreign Bible Society in the nineteenth century, Isabel Hofmeyr argues that the Bible is seen by its distributors as an “imperial gift”, a gift which manages to “choreograph entire nations into congregations of apparently grateful subjects” (2005:92). Unlike a purchased book, the gifted book “interpellates its readers in pre-capitalist forms of obligation and figures them as grateful recipients rather than as [more equal] consumers” (ibid.:92). Hofmeyr calls this relationship, in which consumers of books in one area through their book consumption create the capacity for books to be sent elsewhere as gifts as second-hand donations, a relationship of “textual condescension”, where one group has agency as consumers but the other is drawn into a transnational web of gifting as “grateful recipients” (ibid.:93).

Contemporary book donations carry much of the marker of these ‘imperial gifts’. Critical development scholars have argued that many development relations are embedded in a Maussian framework of gift-giving and symbolic forms of reciprocity, obligation and reception (see for example Heins et al. 2018; Kowalski 2011; Mawdsley 2012; Mauss 2002; Stirrat and Henkel 1997). They argue that in aid-relations gift-giving acts by creating “positions of precedence and honor among a given set of subjects” and shows the “symbolic properties of foreign aid in constructing postcolonial regimes of power” (Da Silva 2008:142; Mawdsley 2011:256). These symbolic-laden aid-relations of reception and reciprocity, of gifting and gratefulness, are encapsulated in the donor-born book flows into the libraries studied.

As recipients of donated books, one could argue that the readers and libraries find themselves in the kind of relationship of “textual condescension” as theorised by Hofmeyr, one in which neither the readers nor the librarians are those in charge of the ‘calculation’ of the libraries, of deciding what books are put into them. Constituted as grateful recipients, those who

79 receive the library books are drawn into relations of obligation towards the gifts — expectations that the books will be gladly received, that they will be housed in libraries, that they will be read, that something ‘useful’ will be made of the gift. While much of the theory looking at donations as gifts focuses on the macro-level of large NGOs donating to country’s governments, my work shows the relations of obligation emerging in donations happening at the most micro-scale, sometimes between individual volunteers and individual readers at libraries. Here I argue that in the micro-relations of gift-giving the donors of books become part of the meshwork of relations that entangles the books, the library, the villagers and the donors. They leave a mark of their thought patterns, their valuings, their heritages and hinterland in the form of a thing, and through this leaving of traces of themselves, also take traces of the libraries with them, traces of connection and traces of affect — with many of the ‘donors’ speaking within terms of deep emotional relations. These micro, interpersonal relations of gift giving not only pull donors and recipients into relations of obligation, but also into ‘affective entanglements’, discussed below.

Books on the move: global and affective entanglements

The physical flow of books as donations from across the globe may encase the librarians, readers and villagers as grateful recipients in a relationship of textual condensation embedded in historically contingent asymmetrical relations of power. However, this flow also produces global connections and relations — thereby transnationally entangling the libraries, readers and villages. Isabel Hofmeyr argues that in exploring books in Africa it is important to look at them as material objects, asking how texts come into places, what routes they follow, in what forms they are circulate and how they “move — through different hands, contexts, and uses” (Hofmeyr et al. 2001:2, 8; Hofmeyr 2001b). Almost all of the books housed in these libraries come from far- flung places across the globe: primarily North America, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. This entangles the libraries, the village spaces and the library readers within a multiplicity of transnational meshworks and within the epistemologies, ontologies and social imaginaries of those places.

Most of the books at Macalpine FP come through the local lodge, primarily from the UK but also from South Africa, the home of one of the lodge owners, and the origin of many of the lodge’s customers. The books at Malenga Mzoma FP predominantly come from the United States, in large shipping-containers. These are imported by Charlie Venga, the head of BolaBola, who manages to get a container filled with sports equipment and school supplies to

Chituka every few years. The books at Kande FP primarily come from a large donation of old geographical books from New Zealand. The result of this is that the library’s fine but small collection of children’s books is completely subsumed by information books from the 1980s on the flora, fauna and geography of New Zealand. In 2001 another volunteer also staying at the nearby Kande Beach tourist lodge, but this time coming from Canada, gave money for shelves to be built for the books and in 2005 sent 300 books from Canada to the library.

In the examples of Kande and Macalpine we see the important role that tourist lodges can play in mirco-scale development practices. The lodges’ flow of visitors bring volunteers and donations to both schools, and were key in the construction of their libraries. Lodges act as nodes through which international lines and connections flow, and schools that are near to these nodes are more likely to become entangled in these lines and can capitalise on them.

The Bandawe Girls library has the cabinet full of Beit Trust books collected by the book

NGO Biblionef in Cape Town, South Africa.43 It also has a large collection of musty old books from Falkirk High School and Callic Academy, both in Scotland. The Falkirk books found their way into the library at Bandawe Girls through what could be called an ‘affective entanglement’, discussed below, between a teacher at Falkirk, Mariot Dallas, and the Banadwe area (Scottish Parliament 2010). Mariot Dallas is the granddaughter of Mamie Martin, the wife of Jack Martin, a young missionary who came to Malawi in 1921 and took over the New Bandawe mission station. One of the things Mamie did during her time at Bandawe, in defiance of the Livingstonia Mission hierarchy, was to set up a girls’ boarding school - the beginnings of Bandawe Girls Secondary School (Ross 2013). In 1928 Mamie died a painful malarial death at Bandawe. Many years later her family and relatives opened a foundation, the Mamie Martin Foundation, to help those living at Bandawe, and through this Mariot re-established a family connection with Bandawe Girls Secondary School. With the books from Falkirk, we see the ways in which the lines which run through and globally entangle the village libraries are not only spatial, but also temporal, colonial entanglements.

The vast flow of parochial Anglophone books into rural corners of south-eastern Africa only makes sense when understood as temporally entangled in colonialism. As Achille Mbembe (2001:14) argues, the colonial is not a temporally locked time period that ended with independence and decolonisation, but continues to temporally spread, or leak, into the contemporary world enclosing multiple durées. Ingold (2010) equally argues that lines and

43 Although the books come from a South African NGO, they are still all Anglophone children’s fiction, primarily by US and UK authors.

81 threads are not temporally locked; rather, they stretch into the past and continue to pulsate with the presence of that past. In the example of the Scottish books at Bandawe Girls we can clearly see how the lines bringing books into Malawi to this day are part of an entanglement that cuts across temporal boundaries from the colonial past into the present.

The Falkirk example also demonstrates another kind of entanglement, one that is not material, but rather what I call an ‘affective entanglement’. Here I suggest that while relations of obligation and reciprocity, foreign policy, liberal agendas, and capitalist inequalities (Mawdsley 2011:258) all play important roles in the production of donor-relations and aid practices, in the small-scale interpersonal relations of aid that I witnessed in Malawi, sometimes between just two individuals, affect also plays a major role.44 As Sara Ahmed notes, “emotions do things, and they align individuals with communities - or bodily space with social space - through the very intensity of their attachments” (2004:119). Affects thereby generate “connections” in which “emotions work to align some subjects with some others” (Sehlikoglu and Zengin 2015:22; Ahmed

2004:117).45 In creating these connections, affects also entangle people, with other people, places and things. This generates affective entanglements.

Ann Stoler argues that the power and role of affect in empire has often been side-lined in favour of a narrative of ‘reason’: “attachments and affections [across the colonial world] - tender, veiled, violent, or otherwise - get cast as compelling flourishes to historical narratives, but as distractions from the ‘realpolitik’ of empire, its underlying agenda, and its true plot” (2004:6). The same is true of the world of the development industry where its ‘realpolitik’, which emphasises things like structural inequalities and multilateral state relations, is seen as its ‘true’ narrative rather than, say, the development worker’s affective connections to the people they have come know in the field.

There are times, I suggest, when affective entanglements are key to producing, or promoting, development oriented action. Particularly when looking at the kind of small-scale, haphazard development work I observed, the affective entanglements between people and places seem to play a significant role, for example, when Roger found himself starting a foundation he had not initially planned, in part for his “love for Africa” shaped by his early life

44 The recent ‘affective turn’ in anthropology has ushered in the rise of theoretical frameworks that acknowledge and explore the “power of feelings, sentimentality, intimacies and emotions in the public realm” (Skoggard and Waterston 2015:110). Affect is a form of bodily/embodied thinking that taps into a vast sensorium of bodily resources, but nonetheless depends heavily on the actions of others (Thrift 2004:60). Affect theory argues that large parts of human sociality occur in the realm of emotions and feelings, and that if we wish to understand human relations and society as a whole, we need to pay attention to them (Skoggard and Waterston 2015). 45 Affects are not always positive, it can also relate to negative affects such as fear, shame or disgust (Sehlikoglu and Zengin 2015:22).

82 growing up in Pretoria. At other times these affective entanglements keep people connected to places in deeply powerful and emotional ways across long temporalities, an example being the continuing affective entanglement Cillian has with Tupane. Cillian worked on the library over thirteen years ago, yet when he told me how, a few weeks after the library opened, a General Village Headman (GVH) had come to him and said, “what you are doing here, is a very good thing”, his eyes welled up with tears and his voice croaked. Kathleen Stewart argues that affects “catch people up in something that feels like something” (Stewart 2007:2). And this feeling something both plays a crucial role in actions of donorship, but equally in keeping people entangled in places, with things, and with other people. Affective entanglements reach through time and space to connect people, and places, and keep them connected and their life-lines intertwined with each other. Not only do these entanglements continue to affectively impact people throughout their lives, but they can also be a powerful driving force that pulls people into the coalescing of threads to produce things like libraries.

In the global circulation of books, we are able to see the ways in which the books that are so generative in the emerging of libraries, are objects that have moved across the globe, carrying with them their own biographies, texts, orderings and epistemologies, and transnationally entangling the libraries they sit in. These entanglements are not only material, but also epistemological and affective, connecting and collecting world views and social imaginaries, but also being the product of and producing relations of affect. Through the circulation of books, the libraries, and their users and readers, are intertwined into lines and threads that spread globally. Scribblings from Scottish students find their way into Malawian villager’s hands, primary school children are inundated with images of New Zealand’s fauna and flora, and the stories the Anglophone world become the stories Malawians find in their libraries.

Conclusion

This chapter has explored the various ways in which libraries, and the books that form them, are part of complex transnational meshworks and entanglements that connect them through threads and flows across time and space. In the building of the libraries at Tupane, Kande, Macalpine, and Bandawe, we see how the libraries came into being without clearly directed development agendas or projects. Roger and Paul both funded libraries about which they were not actually that enthusiastic. At Bandawe this lack of enthusiasm encountered the aspirations and desires of

83 a local teacher. At Tupane, a constellation of threads, coming together at the right time, resulted in a library. The library at Macalpine came into being through a ‘failed’ computer room project. The library at Kande through a volunteer sending a very large collection of books from New Zealand. Development here, therefore, appears in the form of haphazard and sometimes coincidental entanglements of flows, people and things that came into sticky friction with each other.

These entanglements and flows were certainly far from uni-directional impositions from ‘outside’. The aspirations and extraversions of teachers and community members were important in pulling these threads together. These actors and actants consciously chose to participate in the libraries, to become readers, visitors, or librarians, and to have access to books and libraries. James Ferguson argues that this aspiration is not just a “blind copying”, but that it entails “a powerful claim to a chance for transformed conditions of life”, thus in seeking ‘library membership’ the villagers might also be seeking “membership and recognition at a supranational level” in order to make claims for economic and social parity (2006:14, 19).

Whereas in many respects the libraries produce particular types of orderings based on power relations that are deeply informed by the ‘substance of colonial politics’, reinforcing what counts as knowledge (English and literacy) and who has power (those who have English, literacy and money), they also show how their entanglements and the frictions that come with them produced new forms of knowledge or power. Tupane, for example, was a (re)production of one man’s interpretation of the library at Trinity College Dublin. And yet, this is also not the case. As is shown with the example of the membership form, it was in conversations between Cillian and Peter that the library produced a new kind of document, a new kind of testament to membership — one which sought to include chiefs and the ways in which chiefly authority functions in the village. Here we see an example of the emergence of a new form through what Tsing calls frictions across difference (2005).

Yet libraries are also very particular forms of convergence. They create and present particular knowledge hierarchies and forms of knowledge production which can produce new exclusions and elites. In this, they perfectly play out the tensions inherent in universals that draw in “elite and excluded alike” (Tsing 2005:9). To the elites they offer opportunities for entrenching their elite status and for greater global connectivity. To the excluded they hold the promise of becoming included, of being brought into the “global stream of humanity” but cannot bring this into fulfilment (ibid.:1). These tensions will be further unpacked in the following chapters.

In this chapter I have suggested that the libraries studied can be understood as globally entangling the villages they are in. They are both the product of these global entanglements, as threads from across the world come together in knots that allow for the emergence of libraries, and produce global entanglements, epistemologically, temporally and affectively. Whereas the promises upon which the libraries and books rest – of offering English literacy – are something that is locally desired, something “one cannot not want” (Tsing 2005:1), the power relations, colonial and contemporary, within which they are embedded bring with them marginalisations, exclusions, hierarchies and epistemic inequalities. In the following chapter, I examine the production of these marginalisations, exclusions, hierarchies and epistemic inequalities through an exploration of nthanu, a genre of local oral literature, and the elites produced by schooling and English.

CHAPTER 2: Speaking Stories Declining (m)orality? Orature, schools and elites

“Kali, kali” (long ago),46 the woman says to the group gathered around her. “Tilitosi,” (we are together) we reply. It is a pitch-dark November night, but the heat of the season means we can comfortably sit outside around an open fire. The fire provides the only light in the thick darkness as the house behind us has no electricity. There are fourteen of us: eight children, three middle-aged adults, two women and one man, one old ambuya (elder/grandparent), Nola, her daughter Norma, and me. One of the middle-aged women has begun telling an nthanu, Chitonga for a story or folktale. “Nthanu buli, boza buli” (the story is this, this is made-up), she starts. “Kali kali kwenga ndi ŵana wa kuŵawi…” (Long ago, there were two children…).

The story is about a young boy who goes to fetch water for his family. When he arrives at the water, he finds that everyone there is dancing, so he throws away his water can and starts dancing. The story-teller starts singing the song and dancing, and everyone begins to clap and sing along too: “cha kuti, cha kuti” (there is something, there is something). By the second repetition of the song, the old ambuya, who is awfully frail and sick (and who within a few months would become completely bedridden), is so filled with excitement by the song, that despite her age and fragile legs, she gets up and begins enthusiastically to dance along. The children laugh in great amusement and joy at their grandmother’s exuberance. The storyteller continues her tale: a second child goes to fetch water for the family after the first does not return, but also dances instead. And then the mother does the same thing. Until the father decides to go check on his family, with a cane to whip them for being late – but when he finds his family dancing, he decides to join in too. The teller ends the story, as all tales told that night, with “nthanu ndi boza, yamalia penipo” (the story is a made-up/untruth, it ends there) and then tells the lesson: when you are sent to do something, you should do it and come back quickly, not linger.

The role of storyteller is passed around the circle. One of the younger girls begins telling a story, but then cannot not quite remember how it goes and so lets her story disintegrate amongst laughter from the group and embarrassment for her.

46 The call ‘kali, kali’ and the response ‘tilitosi’ are one of the “genre markers” of nthanu (Barber 2007a:78).

When no one can think of more stories, Norma has a go, captivating everyone with a story no one had yet heard about a father eating his wife but dying after eating her. A story about the dangers of greed, she tells us. The older children also tell stories; one said she had heard the story at school, another that he had read the story in a book of Tonga tales a friend had at his house. As the night wears on and the fire dies down, the younger children fall asleep on the plastic sheeting on the floor, one resting her head on her grandmother’s now still legs, the other cuddled up to her sleeping sibling. After an hour of story-telling, Norma, Nola and I bid our farewells and head back to our own home, a dozen metres away. As I walk away from the scene I reflect on the ‘nthanu night’ I just witnessed. The experience of sharing a fireside story-telling session with our neighbour’s family was a wonderful one, but at the forefront of my mind was the fact that the entire event had, to a greater or lesser degree, been staged.

I had previously told my host family that I was interested in nthanu and had asked whether people were still telling them in the village, to which my host family promptly responded that they would set up an ‘nthanu night’ for me. The neighbours’ family, with its old grandmother and many young children, was enlisted to provide me, the researcher, with such a night. It was clear during the night that it was not an entirely foreign experience to the family. People seemed to have a sense of what was expected of them, and a number were able to tell stories. The stories did, however, have to be solicited, with Norma quite actively pushing people to try to remember stories to share. The grandmother was immensely pleased at the event and expressed great joy at being able to participate in a practice which she saw as dear to her. And yet – the whole event was staged for my benefit. In the 10 months I lived near that family, I never again saw them do another nthanu night. This does not mean that they did not do so, as the bush between our houses is thick and, on dark, moonless nights, it is almost impossible to discern what is happening beyond one’s own walls. Still, as with the rest of my time in the villages as a whole, I was not able to stumble upon another nthanu night.

Introduction: stories beyond libraries

In this chapter I move beyond the libraries of Chapter One into village homes — to find the stories that people tell in their homes, unpacking what people do with stories when they speak them. To situate and contextualise the worlds of children’s stories that are circulating in the villages this chapter briefly looks at books in village homes and then looks at a specific genre of local oral literature: nthanu. The books entering into the village spaces through the libraries described in the previous chapter, are not books coming into a storyless, or even bookless, world. In order to understand the impact of libraries in the area, and the ways in which their written texts circulate and are framed, it is important to gain a picture of the textual worlds outside of the libraries — both oral and written. This first half of this chapter outlines this picture, first with a very brief overview of books circulating outside of libraries, and then with a focus on the oral literature of nthanu. The second half of this chapter looks at schools, where attempts have been made to incorporate this literature in the school curriculum. However, as this chapter will show, for Tonga nthanu this falls short.

While libraries are by far the most book-rich environments and bring by far the largest number of storybooks into the villages, there are a small number of books circulating in the villages beyond library spaces. As in most of southern and eastern Africa, in Malawi there is a long history of missionary work connected to the distribution of biblical texts (Hofmeyr 2004, 2005; McCracken 1977; West 2016). The close historical connection between textuality and religion means that while books in the home are incredibly scarce, the majority of homes will have a copy of the Bible in them, predominantly in Chichewa. This close relationship between textual production and religion is continued in my field site by the Jehovah’s Witnesses and their fervent penchant for vernacular publication which they distribute for free in the form of booklets and magazines (masanja). While most homes have incredibly limited reading material, beyond the Bible and a handful of school textbooks, the homes of Jehovah’s Witnesses are often veritably bursting with texts by comparison. In two homes alone in Chituka I counted eighty-three booklets and over two hundred magazines. The large majority of these texts are in Chitonga — a language in which almost nothing is published, except all the Jehovah’s Witness booklets, Awake! (Jani Masu!) and Watchtower (Chigongwi cha Alinda) magazines. The vast amount of material produced and distributed by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, compared to the almost complete lack of any other publications in Chitonga, echoes the nineteenth-century distribution of texts in southern Africa, where in the “expanding world” of book production, “the greatest single

88 medium of mass [written] communication” were religious tracts (Hofmeyr 2005:90). For Chitonga, as a language, this state of affairs still rings true.

School textbooks, as mentioned, form the rest of the bulk of reading material to be found in village homes. In a repurposing that surprised me, both school textbooks and masanja often found their way into people’s toilets as toilet paper. This is also true of (used) children’s school notebooks, which are of less value and with their softer pages make better toilet paper. Toilet paper is enormously expensive, and so, as most people cannot afford it, any forms of paper are used in its stead. This has, as the Primary Education Advisor (PEA) for Bandawe told me, caused some consternation as it can leave schools struggling to ensure that families allow their children to use their textbooks and notebooks for school.47

While many homes have a Bible and a handful of textbooks, almost none have works of fiction. In a survey I did of fifty-five homes in Chituka and Kamwala, I only found eleven fiction books, such as Mrs Grigglebelly is Coming to Tea and The Magic School Bus: Weathers a Storm, but also including Secondary School set-works like Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.48 This shows that while there are a small number of books circulating outside of the library spaces, almost none of these are storybooks. This does not, however, mean that the village spaces are story-poor. Rather, they are filled with stories circulating in a different medium – namely orality.

While very few people other than a small handful of the intellectual elite have children’s books in their homes, this does not mean that the village landscapes are bereft of children’s stories. Stories, and children’s stories, are a rich part of the social fabric of society. The stories that permeate village life are, however, not in books but part of a long-standing oral literature. Orality has long been posited as literacy’s ‘other’ (Collins 1995, 2009). Lying at the heart of the literacy myth, is the idea that societies that are not literate are always considered to be oral, and orality is thus frequently posited as belonging to the realm of ‘tradition’ or a marker of ‘backwardness’ in contradistinction to literacy’s ‘modernity’ (Bartlett et al. 2011:58; Foley 2010:220; Street 2001:7).

In Section One of this chapter, I explore one particular form of oral literature namely nthanu (folktales) to examine the presence and practice of children’s stories beyond literacy, and literacy’s effects on these. I do this not in order to try to recapture some more ‘pure’ or ‘primordial’ form of storytelling in the face of ‘modern’ written stories, as oral literature has often

47 The PEA’s concerns were confirmed by many experiences of seeing notebooks and textbooks in toilets for sanitary use. Although I did see masanja in toilets as well, this was less often. 48 For more detail on the book-audit survey I conducted in a total of fifty-five homes, see Appendix 5.

89 been depicted (Hofmeyr 1996). Rather I seek to unpack the “social significance” (Barber 2007a:ix) of these stories and to ask who has ownership and authority of knowledge over stories, whose stories are being told in what forms, what places, for whom, and for what purpose.

The following discussion of nthanu and their salience and meaning to my interlocutors arose from my continued encounter with their impassioned discourses in the field. I had originally only intended to briefly investigate nthanu as examples of extant children’s stories circulating in the field outside of libraries. However, in the process of speaking to people about these stories, I was deeply struck by the sentiment, desire and loss with which they spoke, and the deep epistemological and ontological value and importance they attributed to nthanu. In this chapter, I suggest that these stories are seen as so valued because they are important facets of local intellectual history and political philosophy.49 I also suggest that they help produce key ontological dispositions and are technologies for the ethical formation of the social-self. This understanding is important for making sense of why parents are concerned about children reading fantasy-fiction, as will be discussed in Chapter Four. I suggest that in their discursive constructions of nostalgic loss, my interlocutors are also performing acts of epistemic agency by which they show the limits of the universals of literacy and education. I end the section by showing how attempts have been made by the government to coalesce literacy and orality in the school system by putting nthano50 in school textbooks, but argue that these are ultimately unable to produce the types of social knowledge formation that nthanu are key facets of. In this I suggest that as the textual worlds of schooling and literacy become elevated the textual worlds of oral storytelling are increasingly marginalised.

In Section Two, I look at the larger structural issues that are at stake in questions of schooling in the region, examining how relations of power, inequality and alienation are at play. I particularly focus on the question of English literacy in Malawi. I argue that the continued emphasis on English in schools, despite the immense difficulties the language poses to teachers and students alike, constitutes the existence of an ‘English Myth’ in the country. In closing the chapter, I turn away from the exclusionary elements of schooling and English and look at those for whom English, schooling and literacy provide emancipatory and economic opportunities and possibilities: the educated elite.

49 For an argument of African oral literature as philosophy from the philosophical perspective see Anoka 2012; as needing recognition in the humanities see Enongene 2017. 50 The Chinyanja/Chichewa spelling is with an ‘o’.

Section One: Nthanu

Telling stories

David Mphande, the recently deceased pre-eminent scholar of Tonga oral literature, outlines eight genres of Tonga oral literature: nthanu (tale/myth), nthanthi (proverbs), vindawi (riddles), ndakatulo (poems), sumu (songs), gule (dance-stories), mwambu (rituals) and vinguzgu (taboos) (Mphande 2014:78). Although Mphande includes rituals and taboos in oral literature, he does not include historical stories (mbiri)51 about the lives of parents and grandparents. Among my interlocutors, mbiri were often understood to take place at the same time as nthanu telling and were therefore considered an important oral literature in relation to nthanu.

In this thesis I focus on one of these eight genres: nthanu. Nthanu consist of short stories in a narrative form, often with animal characters,52 although many also have human characters. Mphande suggests that while the structures of nthanu are varied and fluid, all stories contain some or all of the following elements: “moralizing and generalization, explanation, comparison, whether implicit or stated as an explicit dilemma; and finally, an intention to amuse and entertain by an interesting plot, a shocking episode or character, and a vivid style of delivery” (2014:82). Key, however, is that the ending of most stories “includes reference to some moral truth connected with the subject matter” (ibid.:84). 53

I focus on nthanu for two reasons. First, nthanu are by far the most prominent and numerous genre of oral literature in the area and a genre that people see as being central to

Tongan identity and orature54 (ibid.:80). Second, it is also the genre most often associated with children (ibid.:82). Nthanu are therefore the stories people talk about when discussing education, learning and storytelling with and for children. This is not to imply that nthanu are children’s stories, as this is a particular socially and historically contingent category; they are, however, the most congruent genre to the children’s stories of imported Anglophone books in the libraries, explored further in Chapter Four. In southern African studies, the “infantilization of oral storytelling” (Hofmeyr 1996:90) has been critiqued as a missionary production - in my field site,

51 Directly translated meaning reports/tellings. 52 Like in many folktales, particularly in Africa, the animal characters are “fundamentally symbols illustrating various moral issues” (Morris 2000:32; Mphande 2014:29). Favoured animals in stories are njovu (elephant), nkhalamu (lion), pundu (hyena), and most famously, the clever trickster, kalulu (hare). 53 For an example of an nthanu see Appendix 2. 54 The term orature was coined in the 1970s by the Uganda poet Pio Zirimu to elevate ‘oral literature’ from a sub- category of literature to its own category (wa Thiong’o 2007).

91 however, my interlocutors consistently spoke of nthanu as being an important literature for children whose main purpose is to teach children. Indeed, some interlocutors even claimed that if children were not around, adults would not be found telling nthanu. This is not to say, however, that nthanu are only for children. They are intended as group entertainment for children and adults alike, and their entertainment value, with songs, and jokes, and sometimes ludicrous plots,55 is highlighted by many.

As has been shown to be the case across southern and eastern Africa, my interlocutors tell me that in the past, nthanu used to be told around the fire at night, many times a week (see for example wa Thiong’o 1986). This fireside storytelling, which usually took place after an act of shared communal eating, is often described as mphala.56 While mphala technically denotes only the space where men eat, when most people recollect the telling of oral stories they simply describe the whole event as taking place at mphala. As the evening set in, children and women would gather around to start cooking the evening meal. The meals would then be laid out, at mphala for the men, and at the kukati57 for the women and younger children. Everyone would come eat, with the children respectfully waiting for the adults to choose the best pieces of food first. This was also a time when any punishments that were necessary would be meted out, and children who had misbehaved during the day would be forbidden from joining the meal. Once all the elders had finished eating, the children would gather the plates or dishes and return them to the kukati. After this, if the weather and the mood was right, the fire would be stoked, and people would gather around to tell stories (whether divided by gender or not was different in different people’s memories and experiences).

Disappearing stories

These days, as I was repeatedly told, it is very difficult to find people telling nthanu in the villages. With the coming of electricity and more individualised lifestyles, people have stopped eating food in large communal extended-family groups, now rather eating as nuclear families and thus bringing an end to mphala. Electricity in some houses and battery-operated torches in most others

55 One story I was told was about a young boy being chased by an ever increasing, large ball of faeces. The story teller used my translator James’s name for the main character of the story, which was received with hysterical laughter by the whole audience, including James. 56 Mphala is a multi-layered word in Chitonga. It can mean the boys dormitory, where the boys over the age of 10 would live and sleep until they were married, a place where men gather to talk and chat, often at the lake under a shade structure, the village court, or lastly, the men’s eating place. 57 Kukati is the name for the area with the cooking fire, where women cook and used to take their meals.

92 has meant that fires for light and lounging around are seldom made and few families stay up after eating to tell stories. Whereas many people told me that nthanu are still being told in some villages, particularly more rural ones, I never personally came across an nthanu telling session in my field site that was not at my request.

The feeling that nthanu are no longer being told results in much anxiety among many that they are ‘disappearing’. As Judas, Charlie Venga’s right-hand man, told me, nthanu are “dying little by little, because our grandparents are not used to talking to the little ones anymore.” This anxiety is not only for ‘old’ villagers; Judas is only in his early forties, and many young people in their teens and twenties equally told me that they felt it was not a good thing that nthanu are disappearing. Giles, who is twenty-one and recently finished secondary school, told me that when his grandfather was alive he would tell them nthanu, and afterwards he would ask and answer questions, so “we should grow in intelligence, so that we should know who we are”. But the storytelling stopped when his grandfather died, and despite only being twenty-one himself Giles laments now that without grandparents telling the children nthanu, the youngsters of today have “no one who can guide them”.

Anxiety over a disappearing cultural heritage, particularly oral, has been expressed in Malawi and other parts of Africa since the colonial period. Derek Peterson, for example, tells of Luo intellectuals in 1930s Kenya writing down their oral literature and customs “so that they should not be lost to [their] children” (2012:24; see also Newell 2016; Vaughn 2005). In this and the next chapter, I suggest that the calls of my interlocutors about the loss and salience of their oral literature should not merely be viewed as nostalgic desires for a lost past. Rather, I argue, they can be seen as contemporary calls for particular types of epistemic recognition and elevation. In the following section I show how nthanu are seen to play a crucial ontological and epistemological role, and to be central in the production of moral sentiments and ethical practice. Through this I make clear why their disappearance is felt to be such a significant loss by my interlocutors.

Teaching morals, making ontologies

One of the most important things nthanu are understood to do is to teach young people morality. Karin Barber tells us that “texts are social facts; texts are used to do things: they are forms of action” (2007a:3). Texts are also, according to Barber, key productions of, but equally producers

93 of social relationships (ibid.:29) This thesis is concerned with what nthanu, as texts, are used to do, what forms of action they constitute and what social relationships they are entangled in. Gutamo Manda, a surly local intellectual in his mid-fifties and one of my closest friends in the village, offered an explanation: “mostly, in Tonga, we expect them to teach young children morals. That’s the important one.” The late David Mphande told me in an interview that nthanu “are very powerful for moral education because at the end of the story you can get a sting”. He saw the stories as “vehicles for the good life.” The importance of ‘African’ folktales or stories in the teaching of morals or in teaching tradition has been articulated by a number of authors, particularly African authors (Abraham 1984; Chimombo 2001; Manda 2015; Mphande 1998, 2006, 2014; Elabour-Klemudia 2000).

The morality taught in nthanu is not, however, only one of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ but is also about what it means to be a good person. Barber suggests that in every culture, “texts are central to understanding what it means to be a person” (2007a:103). In my field site nthanu were seen as the key texts that helped people to understand what it means to be a person. Many of my interlocutors, whilst clearly expressing that nthanu taught ‘moral codes’, as described above, also articulated that they teach someone how to be a good person, how to be good to others, how to live “the good life”, as Mphande says. Norma, who had organised the nthanu night for me, told me, “[nthanu] taught us how to live in a society, it taught us how to live, how to communicate, it was stories that told us what was life […] that’s what it taught us: oneness […] Gogu’s (grandmother’s) stories wanted to relate to us that this world is not just for us”. Enoch, a middle- aged barman at the local luxury lodge who had recently moved back to the village after years living in Tanzania told me that nthanu tell you “you have to be a good person, honest person, you have to be an understanding person”. Similarly, an old grandmother, *Agogu (grandmother) Mkhonde, who lived in a house near Macalpine FP, said the stories taught children “how to stay well with people”, but lamented that “nowadays, the stories are disappearing”. Nthanu, it was made clear to me, are an important part of learning what it means to be human, how to be a good person, how to live well among others.

In short, nthanu are understood to act as narratives for the production of “moral sentiment” (Throop 2012) and generating understandings of how to live in society, how to enact “oneness” as Norma says, and also how to be a good person. It is these questions, “‘How should one live?’, ‘What is a good life?’, or ‘What sort of person should one be?’” that James Laidlaw suggests form the basis of ethical considerations (2013:1). In the wake of the ‘ethical turn’, anthropologists in favour of a focus on ethics, such as Laidlaw, have sought to explore people’s

94 attempts to make themselves a certain kind of person, because it is as such a person that, on reflection, they think they ought to live (Laidlaw 2013, 2017; Mattingly and Throop 2018). The ‘turn’ is not uncontentious, with some seeing it as a more explicit and systematic study of morality in anthropology (see Klenk 2019), or the product of anthropology’s problematisation of morality

(see Mattingly and Throop 2018).58 Others, such as Harri Englund, have critiqued this perspective as fixating on the interiority of the individual and negating the crucial element of obligation that lies at the forefront at least of African morality (Englund 2008, 2015). Ethnographies of sub-Saharan Africa, Englund argues, although too often ignored by anthropologists of ethics and morality, are able to offer a counter point to the morality depicted by anthropologists as ‘law-like’ codes, through an analysis of the role that obligation plays in the production of morality (2008, 2015). Through African ethnographies, Englund therefore complicates the interior, individually focused morality of the ethical turn, by suggesting that the questions of what sort of person one should be and how one should live can be deeply enmeshed in questions of obligation and the navigation of situationally changing moral boundaries. Nthanu teach this by offering frameworks through the examples in the stories for how to navigate these moral boundaries and giving guidance how one should live and what kind of person one should be, both individually and interiorly, and in relation to others. Nthanu offer a morality or ethics59 that puts ‘obligation’, or how to live well “with people” as *Agogu Mkhonde says, at the heart of its moral teachings. It is not a given, law-like moral code, but one in which through the oral telling of nthanu, as often ambiguous parables, the question of how to be a good person is presented as a navigation of the “situational nature of moral boundaries” (Englund 2015:257). They do not do this, however, by simply stating moral dictums — rather, they present, in the form of stories, complex cases where the characters in the stories navigate social and moral boundaries and have to deal with the consequences, positive or negative, of their actions.

One example of how nthanu function as core constituents of the socio-political landscape is in their role in teaching respect. Many of those I spoke to said that one of the key things nthanu teach is respect; indeed, Teacher Frank was certain that the most important thing for nthanu to teach is “most especially respect”.60 Archibald, who passed away a few weeks after I left the field, confirmed that mphala, where nthanu are told, was about “teaching good character […] to respect

58 For further discussions of the ‘ethical turn’ as a turn in anthropology of morality towards virtue ethics see Mattingly (2012) and as a misreading of Durkheim and the turn as a shift from the collective to the individual see Fassin (2014). 59 I follow Laidlaw (2017) by seeing morality and ethics as roughly interchangeable, however, with the ethical having a heuristic flavouring towards the interior and the moral towards the exterior. 60 The Chitonga word for respect is mlemu, also sometimes translated as politeness. The majority of my discussions on the topic were conducted in English, where ‘respect’ was the only word used.

[…] respect is number one in Tonga culture”. “Without respect”, I was told, “we should be killing each other anyhow […] we will be killing each other like dogs, that’s why we talk highly of respect”. *Goodman, James’ asibweni (maternal uncle) similarly said, “if we didn’t have respect, if we didn’t have culture, we would be killing each other. But because of our culture and respect we are being controlled”. This brief example shows how what nthanu are believed to teach, such as respect, are moral and ethical values and practices that are seen to be crucial to the maintenance and coherence of sociality. In this I suggest that nthanu are technologies for the production for the ethical formation of the social self.

Not only are nthanu key for learning morality, they are also crucial ontological productions. Many of my interlocutors connected nthanu, and the telling of nthanu, to the idea of a ‘Tonga’ identity and as a constituent part of “who we are”, as Giles put it. In one of our many long chats, ninety-four year old *Msinawana61 told me, that without nthanu “the tribe will suffer, because they will have no identity, because who is Tonga? Tonga are those who speak Tonga. Tonga are those who tell nthanu.” Michael Uzendoski and Edith Calapucha-Tapuy, in their work on storytelling among the Napo Runa, argue that telling stories is “the process by which culture itself is created and practiced” (2012:2). In this we see how nthanu act both at the ontological and epistemological level, teaching morality and ethics, but also giving people a sense of who they might be.

Isabel Hofmeyr states, “when it comes to indigenous intellectual traditions little is known because historians have paid no heed to oral literature forms, the only avenue […] of accessing pre-colonial intellectual activity” (1993:168). Stephanie Newell argues that folktales and folklore are “anything but quaint and archaic” but rather a “vital part of the continent’s intellectual history” (2013:97). In this vein nthanu, in their text and context, their discourse and performance, are a crucial medium for engendering moral or ethical sentiments which are central to the imagination of shared, communal living. Therefore, following Newell, I argue that nthanu are anything but quaint and archaic — rather they lie at the heart of the ethical/moral socio-political project of the communities I lived in and are crucial components of intellectual, social, epistemological and ontological formations. In this light, the significance of their perceived loss becomes emphatically evident.

61 Msinawana means ‘child-pincher’. It is not his actual name, but rather the name given to him in the village. Msinawana sadly passed away a few weeks after I left the field.

Nthanu and school

The previous section has shown how nthanu are perceived to play a crucial role in local sociality and self-formation, but there is a profound anxiety that they are disappearing. I have suggested that this anxiety be viewed not as a nostalgic longing for tradition, but rather as a claim for epistemological recognition and justice that elevates local epistemologies and ontologies. While nthanu have been understood as a core component of local forms of teaching and education, in the following section, I suggest that schooling can act to marginalise these didactic forms. Particularly within the unequal power relations in development spaces and with its emphasis on alphabetic literacy, schooling can act as an epistemological power structure that erodes the didactic valuing of oral storytelling in favour of the literacy-oriented instruction of the classroom.

For many of my interlocutors, schooling is articulated as key factor in the loss of nthanu. Ulrich Nyondo, a local ECD teacher and young father in his early thirties living in Chituka, told me that these days “parents can feel we have nothing to teach our children [because they learn] all from school, nothing from home […] In the days before parents had answers to children’s questions but they answered differently with local knowledge, but that knowledge doesn’t work anymore […] parents feel that school is very much more important than their advice”. Ulrich directly relates the literacy of school books to the loss of intergenerational storytelling, saying, “in the past storytelling was in the hands of the elders […] it [was] the responsibilities of the elders, because these books were not there, so it was just in their heads […] elders had time to think and invent stories, but these days we just read from these books”. Reginald, Norma’s uncle, told me his children did not learn stories about hare and hyena from him, “they learnt those things from school”, but he does not feel they are taught properly there and so “we are losing touch with our culture”.

The late David Mphande poetically expressed this connection in our interview, saying “before the missionaries brought in schooling, there was informal education…under a tree, when an old sage would teach the young children through stories […] if we cannot keep these stories, we will lose our dignity”. The Reverend Nathaniel Zenzi Chirwa from New Bandawe, a highly respected local historian and politically active church figure in the CCAP, expressed a similar opinion of schooling, when he told me that,

the Tonga way of life [is] communally, you bring children up, you educate children communally. So the best place to raise up children was called mphala. So people sat at

mphala [...] to talk to children […] the way they ate their meals had an educative [effect] [..] but the morality, or the education of the children was much at the centre of the community [but] today’s Tonga child…eh…is left to fend for themselves. [In the past] we were listening to what the parents wanted us to live like […], most of it was storytelling […], the art of storytelling, which has completely died now [….] Now it is the school system that is shaping your destiny. […] schools to some extent are cutting the roots […] going to school should not mean you lose your identity, your roots.

Robin, a young temporary teacher at Macalpine told me that parents do not tell nthanu anymore, now it is the teachers who tell them at school “because they are in the books”. As Robin points out, there are some local folktales in the children’s school books. Recognising that nthanu are an important part of the country’s cultural capital, the Government of Malawi has inserted some into Malawian school textbooks. These folktales are all Chewa stories, although as the cross- pollination of oral literature between language groups in Malawi is enormous, and most tales will be known and told across the country, it is difficult concretely to attribute the stories to a single ethno-linguistic group. However, as the official languages of schooling are Chichewa62 and English, all stories are either in Chichewa, in Standard 1 to 4 textbooks, or in English from Standard 4 onwards (unless they are stories in the subject ‘Chichewa’). This was enough for many interlocutors to claim that as none of the stories are in Chitonga they cannot be Tonga stories.

I contest that in my field site local oral literature as reproduced in schools and school textbooks appears unable to fulfil the didactic, ontological and epistemological role of oral nthanu telling as performed in the home. In part this is due to the nature of the ways in which rural schooling is conducted across the global south and the epistemic violences inherent in it. It is also due, I argue, to the way in which literacy is given ultimate prominence over orality in this school system, and in Malawi in particular, literacy in English is emphasised, producing new elites, hierarchies and exclusions.

Performing (m)orality

The first major obstacle to incorporating orature into the school curriculum is the radical shift this produces in one of the key facets of oral literature — its performance. As Ruth Finnegan (1970), one of the most important early scholars of African oral literature, made clear in the

62 The ‘Chi’ means language of. Therefore, Chichewa is the language of the Chewa.

1970s, performance is an absolutely crucial component of oral literature. She went so far as to suggest oral stories “only attain their true fulfilment when actually performed” (1970:3). Karin Barber, another leading voice on African oral literature, states that verbal texts are interwoven into and part of other forms of representation, such as clothing, dance, music, gesture and ritual (2007a:3; see also Barber 1997). Nthanu in school, while still being performed, are, however, performed in a way that is radically different to the way they are performed at home.

At home nthanu are performed as part of a particular embodied set of practices, of voice, gesture, body, sound, display, song, laughter, dance and intergenerational exchange. In his work on nthano told by radio-elders in Zambia as a way of producing moral sentiment, Englund suggests that one pay particular attention to the importance of voice and its power in both its aural and moral aspects, arguing that “how voice is experienced is […] crucial to the ways in which moral sentiments such as sympathy emerge and hold sway over ethical lives” (2015:265; see also Englund 2018). In this he encourages the researcher to explore how elements beyond the discursive realm can be crucial factors in the production of forms of moral sentiment, arguing that “moral knowledge exceeds moral discourse” (2008:41). In the practice and performance of telling nthanu ‘at home’, we see a medium for the production of moral sentiment that not only includes voice, in its multivocality and sonic richness creating a “morally compelling narrative” (Englund 2015:258), but also includes bodies and space - an embodied intimacy and experience of a story. Nthanu telling, therefore, encapsulates a moral performance.

Most nthanu that were told at my instigation were told by ambuya (elder/s). Typically, an ambuya would sit surrounded by listeners, from adults to young children, although women were far more likely to come listen than men (in part because they are more closely connected to childcare). The teller of the tale would remain seated where they were, often on grass mats under the shades of trees, the way in which many elders pass the afternoons. The tellers would begin their stories with a ‘kali, kali’ and the audience would give the ‘tilitosi’ response. Everyone would listen attentively, watching as the teller expressed with their hands, sometimes gesticulating a lot, but often speaking with calm bodily movements. I never witnessed excessive gesticulation or characterisations in tellings; rather, there seemed to be an emphasis on humour, measured retellings and shared singing. Children would lean on each other, or on older relatives, often lying across the laps or legs of older relatives, making themselves comfortable in the shared intimacy the storytelling produced. Some tellers would use the names of children listening in order to bring humour or laughter to their stories. Many would incorporate songs into their tales, clapping and singing verses many times over, so that the audience could join in. On rare

99 occasions, the teller would even get up to dance, and the delighted audience would join. When finished, most tellers would clap their hands together and say, “yamala (finished)”. Sometimes comments would be made about the stories, perhaps pointing out a particularly gory detail, or laughing at a particularly humorous section. Questions of clarification might be asked, and sometimes the teller would be asked to explain the lesson being taught.63

When telling nthanu, then, adults and children spend a lot of time together, in close company, sharing in the pleasure of listening to nthanu, laughing with each other, engaging in practices of intergenerational knowledge exchange and having intellectual discussions and conversations about the nthanu and any other topics that might emerge in the tellings. In this they also engage in close bodily intimacy, with children often cuddling up to grandparents or parents to sleep or lie on them, producing “morally charged situations in which difference and affinity appear as simultaneous conditions” (Englund 2015:252).

Within these spaces of storytelling there is an aural and bodily dimension to the moral discourses of the narratives, one in which the micro-rituals of the practices and performances of respect and care can be seen to resemble Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘bodily automatisms’ (Bourdieu 2000). For Bourdieu these ‘bodily automatisms’ are bodily dispositions and practices that allow subconscious normative practice and enable us to act “as one ‘should’” without needing to rely entirely on cognitive processes of moral decision making (Bourdieu 2000:139). Uzendoski and Calapucha-Tapuy also emphasise the bodily power of the shared practice of social storytelling, believing that “the body has an amazing capacity to create communicative worlds that are complex” (2012:5). In this way, while nthanu teach morals through the contents of the stories, they also engender embodied processes of learning, in which moral and ethical practice become inscribed into the body and ‘bodily automatisms’ contribute to and support the production of moral and ethical behaviour. Equally, in their performance they produce particular types of sociality and social relations, based on hierarchies of respect and moral authority, but also around shared intimacy and communicative care and compassion. It is therefore not only the words of nthanu that produce ethical formations of the social self which underpin the larger sociality, but also their performance.

63 As I saw very few nthanu being told by men, I cannot adequately speak to the gendered nature of performance. Men tended to state that they did not remember nthanu or did not want to tell them. The problem of interlocutors not remembering nthanu was a significant – usually it was only older villagers who were able to remember any, which is in part why most of the nthanu tellers I watched were older.

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The telling of nthanu in school, is, however, completely different to this. An example I observed in the Standard 7 classroom of Mr Madza at Macalpine illustrates this. Mr Madza’s students were reading a story of ‘Hyena and Hare’ in English. This was done by a student being called upon (or volunteering) to read a section from the story in the school textbook. The students were all sitting at their desks, as is usual for school lessons. The first student stood up and read out loud to the class, in halting steps, working her way along the text. Two more students followed until the text was complete. Once the students had finished reading, Mr Madza drew the class’s attention to five comprehension questions placed after the story. A student was called upon to read the questions out loud. The teacher wrote the questions on the board. The class was then asked to answer the questions, looking for the answers in the story they had read. The teacher went through a number of responses from the class until a suitable answer was given, at which point he moved to the next question. Once all questions had been answered, the lesson was over.

This episode illustrates how the performance of oral folktales in school, even when partially re-oralised, is significantly different to the performance in the home. Being situated in school textbooks and part of a school curriculum emphasises the texts as written, giving particular weight to their literacy — here reading ability and reading comprehension take precedence. This brings not only an entirely different kind of attention to the story, but also produces different material forms, requires different skills and practices for producing and receiving them, and different kinds of performances. Removing nthanu from the space in which they have typically been performed not only alters the location of their performative and textual production, but to some degree changes the literature itself. It is the deep importance of this element of performance which makes it very difficult to include nthanu in a school curriculum in a way that produces the kinds of epistemological and ontological frameworks nthanu are intended to produce.

The episode also illustrates a further performative idiosyncrasy that I frequently encountered in the classroom. As the students spend many years reading English out loud, from the board and from the textbook, many are able to read English texts with reasonable ease. When asked to read from books or the board, students display a reading capacity that could easily give the impression of extensive adeptness with the language. However, I consistently experienced a significant disjuncture between reading capacity and comprehension. While translation is strongly discouraged in school in general, in my personal capacity I would often ask children to tell me what they had read in Chitonga. Very often the children told me that they were not really

101 sure what the words had meant, and so could not tell me, even when their performance of English reading was quite fluid. There seemed, therefore, to be a strong performance of English, without necessarily an accompanying comprehension of English.

Many of the learning processes in the schools I visited heavily emphasised the bodily performance of a schooled-subject as an integral part of what schooling is constituted by. In classrooms that can often have between 50 and 100 pupils, particularly in the lower grades, students are quickly taught the bodily comportment expected at school – to sit quietly, to look towards the board and listen to the teacher, to repeat out loud what is written on the board, to raise your hand to give answers. The enactment of schooling, for something to have an aesthetic rendering of schooling, comes to be seen as a crucial part of what schooling as a whole is understood to be.

Part of this enactment of the aesthetics of schooling includes the outward presentation of the child. In a mimicry of British schooling, school uniforms are an essential part of a student’s appearance, and all children are expected to come to school in presentable uniforms, even if families struggle to procure these. This includes haircuts. All children are required, no matter their age or gender, to have their hair shaved down to a very short close crop. If a child’s hair is slightly too long, it will be sent home from school until its hair has been cut to the required length (although the strictness of teachers in enforcing this rule varies). Schooling in Malawi is a very strong imitation of British schooling, from uniforms and assemblies in the mornings, to the arrangement of the school calendar.64

Much of the school system that I observed sought to create particular disciplined subjects within the schooling system. It seemed that these subjects, although in part disciplined as subjects of (almost) all school systems, as state subjects,65 were also being disciplined towards a presentation of a particular educated personhood, one which in its aesthetic and bodily practice resembles the archetype of British schooling, with strict uniforms, emphasis on bodily order and linear arrangements, group based disciplining, short haircuts, raised hands for speaking and a good articulation of English when read from the board or textbooks. To some degree, producing

64 Unlike its neighbours, such as Tanzania and Zambia, where the school year starts in January, Malawi has kept the British academic calendar, starting its school year in September and running till July. This means that the students ‘summer’ holiday fall in Malawi’s winter – the coldest time of year in the country and by far the most amenable to learning as daytime temperatures hover in the low 20s leaving classrooms cool, unlike in the boiling summer months. 65 The power and importance of schools and education systems in creating disciplined subjects who through their practices and embodiment of disciplinary power are formed into docile subjects of the state or of class is seen by some social theorists as one of the most pervasive elements of schooling (see in particular Bourdieu 1989, 2000; Collins and Blot 2003; Foucault 1977,1984, 1997).

102 the picture of education comes to take on the role of being seen as a core component of education and performance can come to trump learning.

Ownership

“Textual traditions”, Barber argues, “can be seen as a community’s ethnography of itself” (2007a:4). These comments throw up the question of the ownership of texts – who produces them, who owns them, who has authority over them, whose ethnography are they producing? The question of ‘ownership’ is very different between nthanu and the stories in school textbooks, and equally, the stories in the libraries discussed in Chapter One. In my field site, written texts (other than Biblical ones) are almost exclusively disseminated within the domain of schools,

NGOs and individual charity projects.66 In the case of the school textbooks, the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, in close collaboration with USAID and UKAID who help print and provide technological support for all school textbooks, decide which stories go into the textbooks, in which language, Chichewa or English, for what grade and with what questions (see Chirwa and Naidoo 2014:341). These textbooks are then sent to schools across the country. In the libraries, as described in Chapter One, the books largely tell the stories of and contain the “ethnographies” of the Anglosphere.

The stories that make up nthanu are however generally ‘owned’ by nobody and everybody. They are ‘owned’ by those who are able to remember them and tell them, whether adults or children. Those who have authority over their production, dissemination, interpretation and telling are, to a large degree, the elders, but to a much broader extent anyone who is able to recount them and who speaks Chitonga can have a degree of this authority. The stories contain the ethnography of the “community itself” in which they are being told — of the people with whom I lived. They are also not firmly connected to particular classes or elites (Barber 2007a) as they are in vernacular and available to all — whereas the written texts in school textbooks, but also in libraries, are strongly connected to class accessibility, and are the providence of the educated elite who have mastered English and Chichewa reading and comprehension.

66 The school system in Malawi is heavily dependent on NGO and charity work. Many school buildings are built by NGOs, many schools are resourced and funded by NGOs, teachers’ salaries are paid by NGOs, and the Malawi Government receives a lot of financial, logistical and intellectual support from NGOs for its school curricula. For example, in 2015 MOEST launched it National Education Standards for all primary and secondary schools in the county. This was done with financial and technical support from GIZ, the Scottish Government, UNICEF and Link Community (Ministry of Education, Science and Technology 2015)

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Different kinds of texts require “specific skills and practices associated with producing and receiving [them]” (Barber 2007a:15). The skills and practice required for receiving written texts, particularly in English, are embedded in the skills and practices associated with schooling and literacy. In the above section I gave reasons why it is difficult to incorporate nthanu into school curricula without changing them in ways that substantially alter what the stories do. As was shown in the example of Mr Madza’s classrooms, these are not only challenges of transposing oral literature into written form — they are also difficulties born of the structural problems embedded in the Malawian school system and its heavy reliance on English. In the following section I explore the broader structures of the Malawian school system, and the ways in which these are able to produce significant exclusions and margnilsations for some, but also possibilities and opportunities for other.

Section Two: Alienation, English and elites

Schools and alienation

In Malawi, schooling carries immense ideological weight as the primary means for socio- economic advancement. Enoch, who had lived in Tanzania for many years before returning to work at the local luxury lodge, told me that “without going to school, you are not going to survive”. Another young man I was chatting to whilst walking through the village one day told me, “without somebody to be educated, you are nothing”. It is primarily through schooling that the possibility of a life with a more or less regular income can be realized, as schooling is a key asset to finding formal employment. However, although the majority of parents send their children to primary school, only the smallest number of children actually progress to secondary school. In 2008, there were 2,693,152 children in primary school in Malawi and only 249,019 in secondary school, and of those who do make it to Secondary School, very few pass (NSoM 2009). In 2019 the Malawi School Certificate of Education (MSCE), the final year exams, had a pass rate of only 50.6% (Nation Online 2019).

In short, whereas parents send their children to school in the hopes that this will offer their children increased socio-economic advantages, only 10% of children are actually able to progress beyond primary school and only 5% are able to obtain a secondary school certificate. For most children, therefore, their primary schooling will be their only school experience, and it

104 is an experience which, if it does not lead to secondary schooling, is very unlikely to lead to any of the socio-economic advances held as the promise of schooling and literacy.

Schools are created, built and championed as avenues to education, to literacy, and to English, which are meant to be the tools that will bring about socio-economic advancement. When, however, schools and the school system, fail to bring about any of these aspirations, they commit a double violence, for they insert and assert themselves as the means towards socio- economic advancement whilst at the same time putting in place immense barriers to precisely that economic advancement (Watson-Gegeo and Gegeo 1992). Watson-Gegeo and Gegeo in their work in the 1990s on the Solomon Islands have argued that in (post)colonial development spaces schools act as the gatekeepers for access to economic advancement. However, rather than being a door to a wider world, students often find that this door remains firmly shut (1992). And whilst most of those who seek to attain literacy in such spaces do so because they want jobs in the capitalist economy, Steve Bialstock and Robert Whitman argue that “school-based literacy programs, nested as they are in a web of neoliberal mechanisms of individuation, testing, evaluation, and rhetoric, create pathways that systematically deny most students access to those [very] wages” (2008:387-388).

In their work, Watson-Gegeo and Gegeo found that the majority of children in the schools had “little notion of what they were expected to learn in school, and assumed taking dictation, filling out work sheets and behaving properly constituted education” (1992:17, 19). Within the (post)colonial African context Francis Nyamnjoh describes this colonially constructed education as “largely a process of making infinite concessions to the outside - mainly western world” (2012:129). The Malawi school system functions in a very similar fashion; as Peter Namphande argues, the nature of the school system might leave children “begin[ning] to think that classroom learning is only meant to prepare them for national examinations and has no bearing on their lives” (2017). In my own fieldwork I repeatedly watched, and taught, in classrooms where students’ primary task was to copy and repeat material from school textbooks, such as learning by heart the answers to particular questions. The teachers I spoke to expressed their frustration at often feeling that their sole purpose was to try and teach children to understand enough English so that they could answer the exam questions correctly.

Not only do many scholars argue that schooling creates hierarchies, barriers and exclusions, Watson-Gegeo and Gegeo argue that it simultaneously also “undermine[s] traditional forms of knowledge and teaching”, instead offering children “limited access to esoteric

105 knowledge,67 knowledge entirely separate from their experience yet held out as superior to what they know” (1992:19-20). Bialstock and Whitman apply this argument to literacy specifically, arguing that many current literacy interventions intended for indigenous communities in (post)colonial societies are “largely reconceptualizations of earlier colonial projects that were tacitly designed to undermine indigenous cultures and epistemologies” (Bialstock and Whitman 2008:381).

Schooling is, however, not only a mechanism of oppression and exclusion. It has achieved its universal status precisely because it can, in the right circumstances, act as incredibly powerful tool for elevation and transformation. While schooling, particularly in post-colonial and development spaces, has a high potential to enact symbolic and structural violence, it also contains immense emancipatory and transformative potential (Freire 2016, 2017; Levinson and Holland, 1996:1; Varenne, 2008:10; Stambach and Ngwane 2011). However, in Malawi, the fact that schooling is almost entirely in English severely hinders schooling’s transformative and emancipatory potential and rather creates a barrier to education as a majority of children do not linguistically understand what they are being taught.68 A 2011 study focused on English literacy and comprehension showed that fewer than 20% of Standard 6 pupils could read for meaning, and fewer than 7% were able to read at a critical, analytical, inferential and interpretive level (Dube 2017:85). The Malawian academic Gregory Kamwendo, who spoke out vociferously against the English language teaching policies in his country, says,

Malawian language policy is counterproductive in that it has a strong potential to silence the majority of the learners, given that most of the learners will meet English for the first time in their lives when they enter Standard 1. It is unrealistic to expect such learners to be able to speak in class and proceed to use the same new language in order to learn subject content. Teacher talk will literally fall on deaf ears (2016:224).

When teacher talk “falls on deaf ears”, it becomes very difficult for education and literacy to perform an emancipatory role, because the information, the learning, the new worlds and ways contained in what is being taught that might be captured, remobilised and reframed, are not ‘heard’.

67 One example of the esoteric knowledge taught in primary schools is that in Standard 5 agriculture class the children have to learn off by heart and in English the technical names for all the parts of an ox-drawn plough, such as mould board, frog piece, share etc. No one in the area uses ox-drawn ploughs. 68 For an example of how much children struggle with English I have collected a number of free-form paragraphs I asked the Standard 7s I was tutoring at Malenga Mzoma to write (see Appendix 4).

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A number of prominent academics in Malawi have spoken out against the English language policies of the country, emphasising the depth of power inculcated in language, specifically in first-language language use, and the importance of first-language literacy learning (Eisenchlas et al. 2013; Essien 2018; Kayambazinthu 1999:34). Nonetheless, even though these academics have spoken out against the language policy in Malawi, and many teachers experience immense frustration at the difficulties of teaching in English, the overwhelming dogma in Malawi is that it is crucial for school to be in English. This, I argue, is due to what I believe to be an ‘English myth’.

An ‘English Myth’?

I suggest here that in Malawi there exists an ‘English Myth’ that drives people to want English curricula in their schools, use English as the civic and public language, and fill libraries with English literature. I argue that the ‘English myth’ acts much like the ‘literacy myth’, discussed in the introduction; it elevates a particular language to elite status as a symbol of intelligence, education and membership of the elite, while crucially presenting the language as the primary means for socio-economic advancement. Like literacy in the literacy myth, English comes to be seen as necessary for, and also inevitably resulting in, “economic development, democratic practice, cognitive enhancements, and upward social mobility” (Graff on the literacy myth 2010a:635). In Malawi English is seen “as vital to one’s socio-economic advancement” and it carries extraordinary status as a prestige language of the elite (Kayambazinthu 1999:35; Matiki 2001:207).

Equally, like literacy in the literacy myth, English also has an almost incontrovertible status that makes it incredibly difficult to question its importance or necessity. According to the 2008 census, only 0.3% of the population in Malawi speaks English as their mother tongue, and of the 6,831,770 literate people in the country in 2008, 3,289,5122 were not literate in English

(National Statistical Office 2009).69 This means that almost half of the literate population in the country cannot read and write in English. Fewer than 20% of Standard 670 pupils could read English for meaning, fewer than 7% were able to read at a critical, analytical, inferential and interpretive level (Dube 2017:85). Statistics show that “many children in Malawi are unable to

69 Of a total of 10,676,345 people over the age of 5, 3,844,575 were considered ‘illiterate’. 70 Malawi’s primary school system is divided up into eight years of schooling, from Standard 1 to Standard 8. The scarcity of secondary schools means one needs very high final exam grades to get in.

107 read even after spending five to six years in school” (MIE n.d.:v). Nonetheless, from Standard 5 onwards, the entire school system in Malawi is in English, including classes in biology, maths, science, and so on. The only class in a local language is the Chichewa language class (no other Malawian languages are taught at school). Therefore, half of the literate population is receiving the majority of their education in a language they are not literate in. Despite these statistics, the dominance of English in the school system and in literacy interventions persists with force.

The immense value people see in English was expressed to me by many. In a discussion with a young man at a village disco, I asked, “do you think it is more important to learn social studies, biology and science or to learn English?”, to which he responded without hesitation, “English!” I pushed him on this, suggesting the others might be important things to learn, to which he replied, “No, it’s definitely English”. This importance of English applies to libraries as well, where almost all the books are in English. But, Elvis Langa, a teacher at Macalpine, told me, even though the majority of children cannot understand the books, “I think it’s good [that the books are in English] because after this, everywhere they go, they only read English books”. Mark Banda, another teacher at Macalpine, feels that “learners should know the importance of a library” and should read the storybooks, because they help that “they have pictures in their minds” and especially they “helped with English”. When Charlie Venga, the founder of BolaBola, was considering what he could do to help his community other than running a soccer club, he thought, “we need a programme that will help them succeed. What’s the hinderance? English! Anything that a child wants to read, I just bring it. So he or she can be intrigued by reading and that will make them feel comfortable in the English language, and maybe they can understand the instructions going forward. ’Cause standard eight is just brutal for these kids, they can’t read English, they can’t even speak it!” Despite these struggles, few people feel comfortable questioning the dominance of English in the country. This is in part because, just like literacy, English carries with it profound aspirations, promises and possibilities of hope and of advancement. As one young girl at Macalpine FP told me while we were discussing the school library, “in Malawi, you need to speak English for a job”.

Teachers, those who have to try and translate and make comprehensible the learning material for children, are often all too aware of the linguistic violence taking place. However, they generally feel unable to protest or act against it. In a sociolinguistic survey conducted in 1999, 76% of teachers in the Nkhata Bay district were in favour of mother tongue education (Centre for Language Studies 1999). Garret, one of the long-term teachers at Macalpine FP who lived next to me for eight months before being moved to a school in Chinteche, told me that he

108 did not like teaching in English all the time: “I feel like I’m being forced to do something which I’m not supposed to do […] it’s not really fair [on the children], other people they teach in their own languages, they are able to learn properly” but in Malawi they have to teach in English due to “donor dependency”. “English is idolised because of the education system”, Garret told me with a disgruntled expression on his face.

Whereas many of the parents and teachers I spoke to could not imagine school being in anything other than English, a number of teachers like Garret expressed frustrations at how difficult English made schooling. The Primary Education Advisor (PEA) for the Bandawe Zone told me that “most learners fail because they cannot understand and read English”, yet he quickly assured me that it was still very important to teach children in English “because the exams are in English”. Even the District Education Manager for the Nkhata Bay District expressed her frustrations with the preponderance of English. In an interview, she told me education is in English “because Malawi was under British rule […] even in our books, they are saying what we are doing is education from the British”. In Malawi teaching is in English because “here in Malawi we are forced to do that”. But, she tells me, were she to challenge the government about English teaching, “you will be labelled a rebel” and life would become very hard for you.

Because English is the main language of instruction in schooling from Standard Five onwards, for a large number of children, those who are not able to master English, schools become a space where rather than absorbing vast amounts of information and learning new things, they learn “simplified bits of unrelated, sequenced information”, focused on learning how to work out the correct answers to try to pass the exams (Watson-Gegeo and Gegeo 1992). During my fieldwork I frequently encountered the great frustrations that children have in learning and understanding English, and that teachers have in teaching in English. Let me illustrate with an example from Mr Phiri’s Standard Four English and Library classes.

Mr Phiri’s classroom was typical for the schools of the area, if not somewhat better equipped than many others I had visited. Housed in a square burnt-brick school block, the classroom’s grey cement floors housed around 30 wooden school benches and desks that recall the classic school benches of early twentieth-century Britain. Laminated sheets of Chichewa and Chitonga words hung from the ceiling, the walls were covered with A3 papers drawn with marker pen (showing and naming things like fruits and vegetables or body parts in English or Chichewa) and an English alphabet was painted across the walls – some decorations provided in part by a UK charity that comes to the region every year, others hand-drawn by the school’s teachers. The classroom walls, whilst having only small open gaps for windows, are ingeniously perforated

109 with triangular openings to let air continuously flow through the classroom. On hot summer days, this design does little to prevent the iron sheet rooves from turning classrooms into veritable ovens, well over 30 degrees and full of profusely sweating children. On this cooler rainy season day, Mr Phiri’s roughly 70 students were sitting three to a bench listening to their teacher as he stood by the chalk board, explaining to the children, first in English, then in Chitonga, their task for the English lesson: “Completing Sentences with Appropriate Adjectives”. The teacher guided the children to read aloud a collection of words in their textbooks, ‘dangerous, various, famous etc’, and a collection of eight sentences with missing words. Their task was to match the adjectives to the sentences. The class began with Mr Phiri asking a student to read the first sentence without the missing word. He then asked the class which word goes in the blank. The children raised their hands, some with much enthusiasm, and said any of the words on the list - seemingly guessing. He continued to ask five children, until one child got the right word – the sentence was then written down and the whole class was asked to repeat the sentence out loud with the missing word inserted. There was no discussion of what the word meant, nor any discussion of why it was the correct word for the sentence. The next sentence went through the same process of guessing. This was repeated for all eight sentences, taking up most of the lesson time.

Once the sentences were done, Mr Phiri turned to the class and said, “Let us read together”. The children did not respond. He repeated it again a few times, raising his voice. Still there was no response from the children; some were looking at their desks, some were fidgeting, many were looking at the teacher, waiting. After a few attempts Mr Phiri, looking frustrated, said it in Chitonga, “Tiyeni tiwerenge”. Upon hearing these words, the children immediately opened their books to read. The teacher explained that we had moved on to the next lesson, ‘Library Lesson’. In this lesson, the children’s task, explained in Chitonga, was to read a short story from any of their school textbooks, alone, in pairs or in groups. Some children chose to read English stories from their English textbook, many chose to read Chichewa ones from their Chichewa textbook. After around ten minutes of reading, Mr Phiri called students to the front of the class to recount the stories they had read to the class. A group of students who had read an English story were called to the front of the class, shy, and reticent, they were coaxed by Mr Phiri to speak. A few broken sentences were given, and corrected or reformulated with Mr Phiri’s help. The next group had read a Chichewa story. They came up to the front, nervous but excited, and began to animatedly recount their story, correcting each other occasionally on the tale, adding character and drama to some of the retelling, and getting raucous laughter in response from the

110 class. This pattern repeated, with the pupils that followed. This small example from Mr Phiri’s classroom is but a brief look into the everyday struggles of teaching in rural classrooms. Teachers and students alike often put enormous amounts of effort into teaching and learning with the resources available, however, as countless teachers told me in great exasperation, the difficulty of language is a constant barrier.

As a volunteer teacher, both at Macalpine and in the after-school programme at Malenga Mzoma, I was fully aware of the severity of this challenge, and experienced how frustrating and painful it can be to watch incredibly bright and talented children consistently fail at school because they have not mastered English, a language most of them only ever encounter within the classroom walls. During my time working with schools, it was clear that some children, whose family and social background provide access to English and support in learning it, do manage to learn the language and make it to Secondary School. This is however a very small proportion; the vast number end their school career at the end of Standard 8.

Most of the pupils I encountered could do little with English, even after years in the school system. This became very clear to me in an exercise I gave to my Standard 7 afterschool class at Malenga Mzoma. Standard 7 is the second to last year in primary school, where students have been learning exclusively in English for three years. I tasked my Standard 7s with the job of writing a short paragraph about their village, or the market, or a story of their choice. In order to help them I wrote a number of words on the board, such as spear, village, market, lion, tree. In a school system in which all grades are based entirely on exams written at the end of the year, students are rarely encouraged to write something of their own that is not directly related to work in their textbooks. My students, as I discovered reading their assignments, had extreme difficulty in composing in English in free form. A selection of the highest graded and lowest graded short stories can be found in Appendix 4. In these we can see that even after years of schooling, the obstacle of English remains so profound that children struggle to write even short free-form paragraphs. This should not be taken as a failing either in the children or the teachers, both of whom work extraordinarily hard within the circumstances they are placed in. Rather, it is an indicator of how much the attachment of the government, the school curricula and many Malawians themselves, to English is maintained despite clear indications that this attachment creates enormous and often unsurmountable challenges to learning.

In examining schooling in Malawi, the question looms large of how it can be that in a school system taught almost entirely in English for the majority of a primary school child’s career, mastering English still remains so elusive to so many students. This thesis is not a work

111 of education theory and will not presume to suggest answers to this question. What remains clear, however, is that English, despite being the language of teaching and learning, is not a language that the majority of primary school children can use. The teachers themselves are painfully aware of this, but they are caught in a system where they must teach in English, both in order to give the students some hope of passing exams, but equally because they are repeatedly told that teaching in vernacular is not allowed. This is something many teachers told me, they are not allowed to teach in vernacular, and even more challengingly, they are very strongly discouraged from using translation as a teaching technique.

This was made explicit to me during a three-day teacher training programme I attended. The programme was part of the training to roll out a new teaching practice for the lower primary grades in Malawi, the National Reading Programme (NRP). NRP is intended to focus on early reading, basic language acquisition and phonics – the new teaching buzzword during my time in the field. In the training, the teachers were shown how to teach children words through demonstrations – for example, a teacher would grab a mop, start mopping the floor and then say the word ‘mop’ over and over again whilst doing it. In this, the teachers were expressly and repeatedly told that they are not allowed to say the word in Chichewa or Chitonga, they must only say the word in English. Some teachers raised concerns about misunderstanding – how, for example, would a child know that the word meant the action of mopping, rather than say, cleaning? The trainers agreed that there was a lot of scope for misrecognition, however, they affirmed that this is what the programme required of teachers and that, therefore, translation was not permitted. The struggle of how to teach children English, and how to navigate their multilingual landscapes in ways that enable the children to successfully understand English, is one that permeates all aspects of primary schooling, leaving teachers frustrated and many children struggling enormously in school.

There are, however, strong factions in the country that argue that the way to confront these difficulties is through an increased emphasis on English only teaching, and a stricter policy against translation and vernacular teaching. Many tertiary educators and academics rally against this claim and for increased local language education. This debate is ongoing in Malawi, and forms part of the broader contestations around language and education that have long marked the country (see Kamwendo 2002, 2010, 2016; Kayambazinthu 1999; Kishindo 1999; Matiki 2001).

Gregory Kamwendo has argued that in Malawi “indigenous languages are not considered worthy as media of education […] they are still victim to a discrimination rooted in Africa’s 500

112 plus years of European enslavement and colonisation” (2010:270). As in many former parts of the British Empire, the dominance of English is rooted in Malawi’s colonial history. As already noted, the colonial encounter produced a normalisation of English as a marker of status, elitism and power (see Collins and Blot 2003; Newell 2006:227; wa Thiong’o 1986, 1998; Watson 2006:72). Language played a powerful role in colonial processes of domination and denigration. Patricia Seed, in her piece on the Spanish invasion of the Americas similarly argues that “the Spanish conquest of the New World also entailed a conquest of language, by language” (Seed 1990:12). Whilst Seed acknowledges that this process included modes of resistance, accommodation and re-utilisation, she emphasises that nonetheless “language became an instrument of domination, a means of coercing speakers of indigenous languages in order to mold their minds, expressions, and thoughts into the formulas, ritual phrases, and inflections of sixteenth-century Castilian culture” (Seed 1990:12). Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1986, 1998) equally has famously argued that the adoption of colonial languages is one of the greatest and most sustained violences of colonialism. This linguistic violence is incorporated in the violence inherent in colonialism, which posits the colonisers as superior to the colonised and produces “symbolic hierarchies” between languages, in which the language of the colonisers sits at the top (Wortham 2008:98).

Colonialism thus put in place a school system in Malawi in which English became the language of status, of the elite and of socio-economic advancement. Independence did not change this. In 1966, two years after independence, there were only 250 native speakers of English in the country (Kayambazinthu 1999:27). Nonetheless, the Banda government continued the colonial policy of teaching schooling in English. Indeed, as discussed in the next chapter, his government reduced the amount of teaching in the vernacular. The independence government’s continuation of the colonial emphasis on English thus “entrenched the hegemony of English” (Matiki 2001:201). Even though a large number of Malawians struggle to understand English, it is not only the language of schooling but also the exclusive language of the “the legislature [and] the judiciary” with all parliamentary proceedings taking place in English — alienating vast swathes of the Malawian population from the core elements of democratic participation (Matiki 2001:201). More insidiously, some of the subtler forms of colonial racial hierarchies remain — for many Malawians, the use of English is still “seen as a measure of intelligence” (Matiki 2001:207). As Kamwendo states, “Africa is burdened by a debilitating dependence on the languages of its former colonisers” (2010:271). This sentiment was echoed by one of my interlocutors, Stanley, my house-mother Constance’s nephew, who finished his

113 secondary schooling a few years ago and was looking for work. When I asked Stanley why all education in Malawi was in English, he said it was because “Britain is the mother country and it is out of respect […] it is from Britain that Malawi was given civilisation, that we came to know what was going on in the rest of the world, so she is the mother, and Malawi is the child”. After some discussion of this and where this sentiment might come from, Stanley eventually sighed and said, “you know, we have a big dependency problem”, echoing the words of Garret.

The question of how and why people bring large numbers of Anglophone literature into rural Malawi and chose to build libraries in order to house and make accessible this literature, cannot be answered without an understanding of the power of the myths of English and literacy. The persistent and firm beliefs that literacy and English bring extensive socio-economic advancement, and that having access to English books, whether legible or not, promotes both, both rest in the myths of English and literacy, and their powers as universals.

Taking hold of (English) literacy: the making of elites

The power of English and literacy cannot, however, be merely relegated to a myth. Whereas for the vast majority of villagers this power tends to create exclusions and marginalisations, a number are also able to grab hold of the possibilities and aspirations it offers, and become part of the local, national or intellectual elite. These elites are a core part of the dynamic of how literacy plays out in the African context. As Karin Barber (2008) and Stephanie Newell (2016) state, any study of print cultures and literacy in Africa will also have to be a study of “local intellectuals”. It is these local intellectuals that the remainder of this chapter looks at.

Literacy, particularly in the colonial language, has a long history of playing an important part in creating elites and elite hierarchies in Africa. As across sub-Saharan Africa, literacy in the colonial language was thus strongly connected to ideas of status and prestige and seen as a “key mode of social and personal positioning” which facilitated membership into a “social world” defined precisely by the possession of that literacy (Barber 2006:5; Newell 2006; Watson 2006:55). In the case of people from the north of Malawi the extensive schooling system the missionaries had set up there, and the concerted efforts of the Livingstonia Mission to promote education, meant that they often possessed “significantly greater educational skills than those of the Chewa migrants from the Central Province” (McCracken 2012:404).

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The Tonga regions produced a particularly high proportion of the intellectual elite in the colonial period. The Overtoun Institute, for example, Livingstonia’s secondary and tertiary education institute and one of the most respected institutes in southern Africa at the time, housed an exceptionally large number of Tonga students. In 1921, although only 9% of the northern district population were marked as Tonga on the census, the Bandawe area provided 35% of the full-time students at the Institute, and over 70% of those in the Upper School (MacCracken 1977:150). Through the intensive English schooling they received at the mission, these (mostly) men equipped themselves with strong intellectual skills that could be mobilised within, and often in criticism of, the colonial government. This educational activity was of such an intensity, that John McCracken, an authority on Malawian history, describes Bandawe specifically as the “hotbed of Malawian intelligentsia” at the turn of the twentieth-century and the Tonga as “the most highly educated peoples in Malawi and the Central African region” at the time (McCracken 1977:294). Tonga people, more than many other groups, were able to take advantage of British penetration into the area, thereby “consolidating their position as […] the intermediaries upon which the colonial system was ultimately based” (McCracken 1977:83). However, the doors that were opened by literacy, were also shut to illiteracy. This created a newly stratified society in the region, with a small elite class (Kayambazinthu 1999:43). While stratifying society and producing a small elite class, literacy and education also created space for the emergence of “counter subjects” who used their education to counter the colonial state and to create identities that incorporated indigenous meanings into colonial discourses that were contra the colonial order (Collins and Blot 2003:122; see also Fields 1982:574; Mufuka 1977).

In Malawi, an exceptionally large number of these ‘counter subjects’ from the late colonial and early independence periods were Tonga intellectuals, for example, Elliot Kamwana (1872-1956), the founder of the Watch Tower movement in Malawi, the forerunner of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and a thorn in the colonial government’s side (Donati 2011; Mphande 2009). A fellow early founder of a separatist church, The Blackman’s Church of Africa, and very prominent early intellectual was Yesaya Zerenji Mwasi (1869/70- after 1940) from Chinteche (MacDonald 1970; Ross 2013:103). Another famous intellectual was Clements Kadalie (1896- 1951) from Chifira, who grew up a few hundred metres from where I lived in Chituka. He went off to South Africa after graduating from the Overtoun Institute in 1913 to found the Industrial and Commercial Union, one of the first great trade unions of South Africa (Power 2010:39). Tonga intellectuals such as Manowa Chirwa, Orton Chirwa, Thamar Dillon Banda and Kanyama Chiume, played pivotal roles in the formation of what was to become the Malawi Congress Party

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(MCP), the independence party of the country (Power 2010:41-42). Thamar Dillon Banda was the General President of the Nyasaland African Congress, the precursor to the MCP, when Kamuzu Banda returned to the country. However, he broke from the party over disagreements with Kamuzu Banda and “took most of Nkhata Bay with him” (ibid.). This move was the beginning of extensive tensions between Kamuzu Banda and Tonga elites, which will be discussed further in the next chapter. In the 1964 ‘Cabinet Crisis’, in which a number of cabinet ministers laid charges against Banda for nepotism and dictatorial behaviour, mostly Tonga politicians were ousted from the government (ibid.).

During the colonial period, schooling offered not only a literacy that could procure clerical and administrative work, but also opened up opportunities for migrant labour migration across southern Africa. Migration has long played a crucial role in the social make-up of northern Malawian society and Tonga people were considered pioneers in the migrant labour system of the region (Douglas 1950:68; van Velsen 1960a). In 1894, Robert Laws estimated that there were 1400 Tonga migrants working for the African Lakes Company and 4000 working in the Shire Highlands; by 1937 60.9% of the able adult male population was absent from the Nkhata Bay district and by 1959 this figure had risen to between 60 and 75% (Douglas 1950:68; McCracken 1977:114; Vail and White 1989:178; Van Velsen 1959:106, 1960a:266). Migration has been a key factor marking the socio-economic landscape of the region since the end of the nineteenth century, and continues to shape the area today. Today most families will have one or two family members working in South Africa — their large new built houses with iron-sheet roofs can be spotted across the villages. Unlike in many other migratory systems however, in the villages I lived in it was very common for people to only be away for a few years, and many want to retire and spend their old age in their home village. To this day, it is also the case that intellectual elites will often have migratory backgrounds, as we saw with Cobra, Alfred and other intellectual elites discussed below.

Nola, for example, with whom I lived for eight months, is perfectly fluent in English and was educated in Zambia, where her father was an accountant for a mine. She lived in Lilongwe for many years doing secretarial work, moving back to the village in 2015 to look after her aging mother. Nola’s education, English fluency, and reasonably stable financial support structure help her to be very active in the village’s intellectual life. She runs a book club from her home, runs an Early Childhood Development centre with Gutamo, runs a small money-lending business, and is a head tutor in Charlie Venga’s after-school teaching programme BolaBola. Nola was not only able to grab hold of literacy and English herself, as a local intellectual she has consciously

116 created avenues for others to have greater access to these through her book club, her ECD centre and her work with BolaBola.

Another example of this tendency was my 68-year-old neighbour in Chituka, Peter Mhone, who was educated in Lilongwe because his father held a political position in Banda’s government. Now retired Peter used to be the librarian for the Nkhata Bay district library 40 kilometres to the north. His first job as a young man, after his father was ousted from the country for upsetting Banda and Peter was forced to find work, was as a library assistant for Chancellor College in 1971. Although Peter had actually wanted to study and had taken the job “purely for the money”, he had stayed in libraries for the rest of his life and fell in love with books. He now describes himself as a “book worm” who loves libraries so much that he told me, “I don’t know how people survive without going to the library.” Peter’s work with the Nkhata Bay library lead Cillian to contact him when the Tupane library was being built, and it was Peter who was instrumental in the creation of the Tupane library membership cards. As a “book worm” and intellectual elite, Peter tells me he had tried to start a library at Malenga Mzoma primary school a few years ago, but to his great disappointment the community had shown absolutely no interest.

In this way, as an intellectual elite Peter had attempted to act as a conduit for literary material into the region, though he did not succeed in this for reasons that are not entirely clear. Peter is a wonderful man with a sharp mind, but he is not very social and can at times be acerbic. As such, he struggles to gain popularity in the village, so it is possible that inter-personal politics complicated the situation. Charlie Venga, however, had also tried to assist Malenga Mzoma in building a library a number of years ago by donating a large number of books to them. But, Charlie told me, the school threw all the books away “because they had no place to keep them and they didn’t know what to do with them”. In the last six months of my time in the field, the school had changed track and had started to build their own library, as described in Chapter One. Charlie had offered to donate close to 4000 books that were sitting in a shipping container near his Chituka home. As Judas, the head of the School Development Committee told me, “we knew it was a chance we could not miss”. As stated, when I left the field, this building project was still ongoing.

Still, English literacy is not necessary for status or power within the local political landscape. It can act as an important tool for personal advancement, particularly in relation to obtaining project and NGO work, like Nola, but in my field site good English skills did not correlate to local political power within the village (although it was still key to national political power). Most of the Village Headmen and General Village Headmen of Chituka, Kamwala and

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Chifira, and even the TA, Malenga Mzoma, were not able to converse in English.71 Thus, while English literacy is given immense status as a tool for personal elevation and advancement, within the internal community structures of power, it does not seem to be a necessary tool for position and power.

Through the local intellectuals and elites in my field site we see the ways in which literacy and schooling have historically been key mechanisms for producing particular types of intellectual classes who were able to grasp hold of the possibilities and opportunities it offered. Historically, in the Nkhata Bay area, these elites and intellectuals played an important role in creating and forming the social and political landscape of colonial Nyasaland and independent Malawi. The contemporary intellectual elites are both the products of (English) literacy, but, as we see with Nola, Peter and Charlie, they are also the propagators of it. These examples enable us to see how literacy can act as a key gate-keeper for socio-economic advancement, but also how those who do have it, specifically in English, also often have higher socio-economic status. The next chapter further explores the ways in which colonial elites worked with literacy, producing local language texts.

Conclusion

This chapter has explored the textual worlds that circulate outside of libraries both to offer a richer picture of the types of textual worlds that people inhabit and how libraries relate to these, and to argue for the salience of these textual worlds as crucial to local epistemologies, social cohesion, stability and moral and ethical ontological productions. I have argued that the oral literature circulating in the communities in my field site must be understood as going far beyond the scope of only being stories. Although these ontological and epistemological underpinnings are couched in stories designed to be understood by children, and entertaining to adults and children alike, it should not elide the significance of their effects.

I have suggested that in the elevation of one particular type of textual world, namely that of schooled literacy as the cornerstone of education and learning for children, another textual world, that of oral storytelling, becomes marginalised. Coupled with this while schooled literacy fails to fulfil its potential and promises for the vast majority of the children who encounter, it

71 The TA, who was very old, passed away after I left the field and was replaced by a TA with a good command of English.

118 nonetheless produces hierarchies of knowledge that limit the engagement children undertake with local forms of knowledge practice. In this way schooled literacy can enact a double violence — it creates epistemic hierarchies that elevate it as the primary means for critical learning and personal advancement, coupled with enormous barriers to entry and use. Simultaneously it marginalises forms of knowledge production and intergenerational activity that are open and accessible to all, able to produce means for critical learning, and key to local social formations and ethical and moral productions. The allure of the promises and aspirations inherent in the universal of schooled literacy draws people into accepting its claims to epistemic superiority. However, in this very process, extant epistemic and didactic systems are marginalised.

Karin Barber asks, “in what ways does verbal textuality arise from, and in turn help shape, social relationships?” (2007a:29). The texts of nthanu, as has been shown, arise from and help shape social relationships that are considered crucial to the maintenance of communal life. They create patterns of respect and intimacy across the generations, as well as providing patterns for how one should enact and produce social relationships, what it means to be a person, and what it means to be a social person. These texts arise from the social relationships that lie at the heart of social life, yet also help shape the form of social relationships that are understood to be key to the overall socio-political project of living together.

The texts that come through schools and libraries, the written textual productions primarily in English, also create different patterns of social relationships. As outlined in the chapter, one is of relations of textual learning that revolve around practising literacy and literacy based comprehension in a classrooms setting. Another is the production of elites, a new pattern that distinguishes between those who are able to grasp hold of the promises and aspirations entailed in English literacy, and those who are not. These elites use the opportunities and possibilities offered by literacy and schooling to produce their own relationships to texts and textual worlds. Equally, they use their command of (English) literacy to engage politically and to take active roles in the larger political relations in their communities, country and beyond.

In closing, with this chapter, I do not wish to suggest a re-inscription of a dichotomy between orality and literacy. Rather, I suggest that how orality and literacy are engaged with - what relations and structures of power lie behind them, which forms they are produced and presented in, which articulations they are given and in what form — is crucial to the ways in which they shape the social. It is also crucial for the ways in which they interact, cross-pollinate and co-constitute each other. In the following chapter, I explore a case of a merging of orality and literacy through the study of a book of Tonga folktales written in the 1930s. There I suggest

119 that rather than seeing orality and literacy as separate, or one as superior to the other, thereby marginalising it, we can see how questions of orality and literacy are as much questions about whose knowledge counts, whose stories are being told and whose knowledge is valued, as they are about what textual forms matter.

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CHAPTER 3: Writing Stories “The wisdom of the Tonga”, a book disappears

It is a hot and sweaty afternoon when I meet Henry and Fred in front of the Chikumbuso (Remembrance) Culture Centre. Henry and Fred, both in their mid- thirties, are enterprising and entrepreneurial young fathers from Chituka, whom I was told to contact if I wanted to see the Culture Centre. I had arranged to meet them here so that they could unlock the centre and let me have a look inside. An unnecessary arrangement, I was to discover, as the door is damaged and does not close properly, so the centre is never actually locked. The Culture Centre is an unusual feature in Chituka. It is based in a tiny cement building with an iron-sheet roof, lying seemingly forgotten on an empty grey-sand path, with no houses in sight and only two ancient gnarled makuti trees opposite its porch. An old wooden sign painted with its name stands in front - the only outward sign of what the crumbling building holds.

We enter the centre, walking into a single, small room. Inside are four long tables displaying a wide selection of objects from daily Tonga life (whether historical or contemporary is not marked): clay cooking pots, wooden hoes, the traditional fishing baskets used by women, dried animal furs, fishing nets, jars with herbal medicines, even two iron links said to be handcuffs used on slaves. The bricolage of objects, often lying unmarked on the tables, has more the air of Victorian “curiosity cabinets” of earlier museums than the interactive displays one finds today (Thomas 2016:16). Sun-bleached strips of chitenje hang over the windows, the information leaflets are peeling off the walls, and dust covers most of the displays. Although ostensibly open to any residents of the village, the room has clearly not seen much use in a long time.

The centre is the brain-child of the late Chief Yakucha, whom Henry describes as “a great man, he had a great dream”. According to Henry, the chief’s dream was to establish a culture centre for his community “to remember how our forefathers were [...] so that our current generation should not forget”. The chief brought his vision to the owners of the local luxury lodge, who helped finance the construction of the centre. Like so many service structures in the village, the centre was brought into existence through the support of project money and international

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volunteers and is a collection of coalescing networks from across the globe: the local lodge, paid for the building, and co-ordinated bringing in volunteers from places like the United States, Sweden and England, to help collect information and artefacts, set up the display and write out the information placards on the walls. The centre was completed in 2006, sadly six months after Chief Yakucha’s passing.

As Fred shows me around the display, I ask him what he thinks of the centre. He replies that the museum, as he calls it, is very important for his community, to “impact the knowledge on our young ones what our great-grandparents were doing, because in our tradition, we say losing your culture is just the same as losing your identity.” The museum plays an important role in stemming this tide and it is a “symbol for our culture” he tells me. With a sensitivity towards the precarity of oral history, he says that “oral history is very tough history, just because it needs someone to memorise it”, but the museum can hold printed information, and importantly for Fred, artefacts, such as the old tools. “Artefacts”, he says, “are history in themselves”.

While the museum markets itself as a cultural centre for the community, in

actuality it is primarily visited by tourists from the local luxury lodge,72 and not much by locals. Despite this, Fred feels it still does an important job getting donations from visitors to be used in the community. He wishes, however, that more people from the village would visit. He wants them to come to value “our traditions and cultures” because “these days people are adopting Western cultures [while] we put our culture as inferior”. Henry agrees with Fred, adding that he does not like that people think of their own culture as inferior, and feels it is important that the museum maintains a knowledge of the people’s history because “it combines all the Tongas in Malawi, and lets people know that this land belongs to the Tongas”.

As we leave the centre, I ask Fred and Henry what kinds of other things they would like to see housed in the museum. Henry mentions that it would be great to have a copy of Nthanu za Chitonga (Folktales in Tonga) because “that book will open people’s eyes”. But we will have trouble to find it, they tell me, because Kamuzu Banda banned it, fearing it would “make the Tonga too clever”. “If you read it, you can become a politician”, Fred says. When I ask him how so, Henry answers for

72 Gutamo said of the centre, with his typically acerbic tone, “it’s rubbish”, saying that no one from the village goes there and that it was “made with an agenda” – for people to get money from tourists.

122 him: “Because it makes people to think twice, to ask questions, why did the Hare do so and so. It makes them to think deep.”

As we end the conversation, Fred tells me that Chief Chimbano had recently had a meeting with the sub-chiefs and one of the things discussed was that the chiefs should get together to make photocopies of Chimbano’s copy of the book “to spread it to the people”, and that I might be able to look at the chief’s copy. I thank them for the tour of the centre and tell them I will try to have a word with Chimbano. I leave my two museum guides deeply intrigued. Only a few days earlier I had heard of Nthanu za Chitonga for the first time when, in a discussion with an elderly man on oral nthanu, he told me that once, long ago, there had also been Tonga nthanu that were written down in a book that everyone read in school. But now the book was long gone, and with it, the elderly man said, went “the wisdom of the Tonga people”.

The discussion with Fred and Henry excited me. I now knew of a book in which the oral stories I had been seeking were written down, a book in which what people considered to be their wisdom was transformed from orality into literacy, an artefact in which the material and epistemological histories came together, in which orality and literacy merged, and which people saw as holding something incredibly important to them. I decided that I had to know more about this book, that I had to find it. And so, after my conversation with Fred and Henry, I resolved to get Chief Chimbano to show me his copy, and spent many months asking about the book – if they had copies of it, what it meant to them, and what they remembered of it.

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Introduction: writing and remembrance

In the Chikumbuso Centre, a small-scale local museum, we see an object similar to the libraries studied, with the difference, however, that the ordering logic, material objects and epistemological frameworks of the centre have been mobilised in order to (re)present particular ideas of what the historical locatedness of ‘Tonga’ culture might be. In his work on museums anthropologist Nicholas Thomas argues that they are not just there to educate people but, importantly, to “tell our stories [and] foster social cohesion”, while the building of museums has often been motivated through “affirmations of ethnicity and renewed interest in national identity” born from a sense that people need to “know their own cultures and histories” (2016:8, 13). However, small-scale local museums often (re)produce monolithic narratives of communal and cultural identity shorn of complexity (Sperlich and Brogden 2016:14). Steven Nelson, in his discussion of two museums in a Cameroonian village, argues that this is particularly true of contemporary museums on the African continent, which “very self-consciously aid in the active construction of heritage, a construction that always revises notions of the past according to present concerns and desires” (2007:23).

This chapter does not, however, look at a museum — rather it looks at something that does similar work to museums, the work of ‘telling our stories’ and ‘fostering social cohesion’, but equally of ‘affirmation of ethnicity and national identity’ according to present concerns and desires and of fostering a sense for people to ‘know their cultures and histories’. In doing this, this chapter looks at a particular artefact – the book Nthanu za Chitonga. As Fred said, artefacts “are history in themselves”. By exploring Nthanu za Chitonga, we see what it means for people when they write stories. On the one hand, I explore the book as an artefact that can shed light into a particular historical period because, written in the late colonial period, it offers a window into the colonial history of the time, which had a significant impact on the Bandawe area. In unpacking the book, I consider both its author, Filemon Chirwa, and further explore topics touched on in the previous chapter. These include the ways in which intellectual elites in the area negotiated with colonial powers and captured the possibilities offered by schooling and literacy, and a more detailed analysis of the chieftaincy structures of the area and how these were constituted in the colonial period. On the other hand, I explore how it also includes the salience of folktales as intellectual history, and the longing for their epistemic elevation.

The book is one of great local significance, the only written version of Tonga folktales in Chitonga. As will be shown, the book is spoken about in terms that are rarely given to a single

124 text not of religious origin. What we see emerging in discussions around the book is a sense of a deeply valued piece of cultural and intellectual history, whose loss is viewed as a significant socio-cultural blow. People speak with great nostalgia and loss about the book, seeing it as holding a key to their ‘wisdom’ and ‘cleverness’. By studying the book rather than the oral nthanu, however, the question of intellectual and epistemic history becomes a question of the merging and interplay between orality and literacy. The chapter thus discusses how these different forms seem to be perceived and mobilised differently within the community.

I argue that as a book, Nthanu za Chitonga offers a different type of knowledge production to the local oral literature, one which creates a perception of a coherent source of ‘Tonga’ knowledge whilst still incorporating the themes pertinent to oral nthanu. In unpacking how the book functions as a political tool for judgement and critical thinking, in the second part of the chapter, I examine how one particular chief, Chief Chimbano, sought to mobilise it at a chiefly council, recapturing the artefact for contemporary practice. Through this I further explore the differences between oral and written folktales and their mobilisation within different political landscapes. I conclude by arguing that, once again, rather than seeing people’s calls for the return of their oral literature in both its spoken and written forms as a nostalgic desire for a ‘traditional’ past, we can reframe them as an attempt to mark a desire for epistemic and ontological parity and self-determination.

Nthanu za Chitonga

Nthanu za Chitonga (Folktales in Tonga) is a book written by Filemon Kamunkhwara Chirwa. One hundred and twenty pages long, the book contains thirty-three stories or tales, such Wajinangiye wenecho (They betray themselves), Mbawa ndi Nyalubwe (Antelope and Leopard), or Mo

Kalulu wabayiyanga nyama (How the Hare hunted many animals).73 At the end is a list of 27 proverbs or sayings.

The book was published around 1938 by the Livingstonia Mission and printed at their mission press. In the 1930s Malawi was under British rule as the Nyasaland Protectorate. The British Government, however, maintained a distanced colonial control over its protectorate. As the home of the Livingstonia Mission, under the leadership of Dr. Robert Laws a United

73 To read the stories mentioned see Appendix 2.

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Presbyterian Church and later Free Church of Scotland missionary (from 1881-1927), the northern region was a central hub of missionary activity during the colonial period and played a significant role in the provision of education for the country, as noted above. Until 1926, when the first Director of Education was appointed by the colonial government and asked to set-up something resembling a centralised curriculum for the three regions of the country (North, Central and South), the education of Malawians was left entirely in the hands of the missions (Chirwa and Naidoo 2014:338). The missions’ emphasis on biblical teaching and their long-time role as exclusive conduits for learning meant that throughout Malawi’s colonial period, “literacy, perhaps the most sought-after aspect of education, therefore remained inseparably associated with the Christian story” (MacCracken 2012:112).

What is significant about Scottish mission education is that while focusing on equipping people to read the Bible, the missions also placed heavy emphasis on teaching in local vernaculars, “often working closely with African intellectuals, on the transcription of dialects into written languages and the provision of translations of appropriate texts” (ibid.:113; see also Brackett and Wrong 1934; Foster 1986). In 1897, the mission station received an Albion printing press, one of the first presses in Nyasaland. It produced books in twelve vernacular languages: Nyanja, Shisya, Wanda, Namwanga, Henga, Poka, Nkhonde, Yao, Ngoni, Tumbuka, Wemba and Tonga (Mwiyeriwa 1978:35). Under the missionaries, schools were divided into three teaching levels: vernacular, Lower Middle and Upper Middle (the latter two taught in English) (Kayambazinthu 1999:41). The vernaculars taught in the mission schools in the North were Nyanja, Yao, Tumbuka and Tonga, but by 1914 Tumbuka gained linguistic dominance in the region through mission imposition, “apart from the Tonga who continued to use their own language” (ibid.).

Whereas the missions in the north emphasised Chitumbuka as the premier indigenous language and printed thousands of texts in that language, they also continued to promote and print in Chitonga, creating the first orthography for the language. The missions’ emphasis on vernacular languages was not, however, shared by the colonial government, which, in the 1930s, tried to make Chinyanja (present-day Chichewa) the language of instruction in all schools after the first four years. Incensed by the degradation this would produce, particularly for Chitumbuka, and having already heavily invested in printing and publishing in that language, the Livingstonia Mission energetically fought against it and were able to convince the government to allow them to continue teaching in vernacular until the colonial period came to an end (Mwiyeriwa 1978).

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It was within the framework of this vernacular and local knowledge based didactic orientation of the missionaries that Chirwa was called upon to write his book, Nthanu za Chitonga. It is not clear exactly what Chirwa was asked to do, but it is clear that Nthanu za Chitonga was produced as a part of the school curriculum as a school textbook for the Nkhata Bay region. From the 1930s until the 1960s, it was widely printed and used as a core school textbook in all Tonga schools. Like all texts, Nthanu za Chitonga is “enmeshed in the immediate context of its production” (Barber 2012:10). The colonial and mission history of the Bandawe area and my field site are thus woven into and entangled in Nthanu za Chitonga. The book’s very existence is a product of that colonial history - a cross-temporal line that connects the colonial past to the (post)colonial present.

Many of the older villagers I spoke to during my time in the field, who went to school during the colonial and early independence periods, remembered reading Nthanu za Chitonga at school. From my conversations with them, it became clear that as students they greatly appreciated having Chitonga as an integral part of their primary schooling. A number of the older villagers remembered having to do four different sections of their schooling in Chitonga — sections which some claim were one academic year, and others claim were one book, or syllabus. What they all agreed on was that they were first taught ‘BCD’, from abcd, learning the alphabet and basic reading in Chitonga; then came Mcapu wa Chitonga, written in 1932, in which they learnt proverbs, riddles and short sayings; then there was Chiswa Msangu, a Chitonga translation of a book of David Livingstone’s life, from his upbringing in Scotland to his death in Zambia; and lastly, Nthanu za Chitonga, Filemon K. Chirwa’s book. This meant that during the colonial and early independence period, those living in Tonga regions learnt alphabetic literacy in their own language, Chitonga.

The author

Who was the man behind the book that came to be seen as containing the wisdom of the Tonga people? Whereas little is written about Filemon K. Chirwa in the historiography, the “Tonga sage”, as David Mphande called him in an interview, is still known to many in the communities I worked in. What we do know about Chirwa is that he was a noted man in his community; he was a teacher, schools inspector and a CCAP Church elder (Mphande 2014:144). The Church of Scotland missionary Jack Martin and his wife Mamie, who spent some years in Bandawe in the

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1920s, mention him a number of times in their letters home. Jack speaks of Chirwa and another man, Sam Kaute, as “the leading elders and both school inspectors and incidentally two of the richest men in the place” (Sinclair 2003:35). Each man had a dhow by which they made money trading rice, cassava and maize across the lake for salt and fish. Chirwa was, however, not only an enterprising business man, but also clearly an imposing and impressive speaker and preacher. Jack describes Chirwa’s sermons as “dramatic and eloquent”, and Mamie gushes over his preaching, saying of one of his sermons that “it was one of the grandest sermons I have ever heard, either here or at home” (ibid.:113). Chirwa also wrote down a short history of his people, however it was never published and remained in the family’s personal possession (Mphande 2014:144).

As a member of the local “literate elites” (Newell 2013:1) Chirwa was uniquely placed to assemble local stories and write them into a book. Through his missionary education and his position as a teacher, rich trader and clergyman, Chirwa was a firm part of the local intellectual elites of colonial Africa who had vexed, contradictory and elaborately performed relations with the colonial powers and were important and “active agents in the making and remaking of their colonial worlds” (Newell 2013:1). While Malawi was not able to boast of the newspaper culture present in much of west and southern Africa that fostered enormous literary growth during the colonial period (see Barber 2006; Davis et al. 2018; Newell 2006, 2013), assisted by a strong mission education local elites were nonetheless very prolific in their negotiations, discussions and interactions with the colonial powers. Chirwa was no exception. Alongside his educational and religious work, he was also very active in precisely this role - vociferously negotiating between the colonial government and the local communities in order to influence colonial policy towards the Tonga.

During the period moving towards indirect rule in the Malawi protectorate in the 1930s, there were two prevailing views on Tonga politics; one posited that Tonga clan leaders were competing but equal, and the other that there was an extant hierarchy of clan authority as was common in other parts of the region. According to the historian Joey Power, Chirwa was the “main champion” of the idea that Tonga clan leaders were competing but equal, and a key player in pushing for the establishment of the Atonga Tribal Council (ATC) (2010:38). Because Chirwa was “beloved by the missionaries” and had the trusted ear of Alexander Macalpine, the Bandawe missionary who advised the colonial government on questions of Tonga politics and customs (and after whom Macalpine FP is named), his insistence that Tonga clan chiefs must be equal was what led to the eventual creation of the ATC (ibid.).

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The ATC was a unique political formation in Nyasaland: whereas the colonial government had been able to create chiefly hierarchies through which they could co-ordinate their indirect rule throughout the territory, the nature of Tonga political structures, “working through dozens of chiefs and headmen whose relative power and authority shifted according to circumstance and personality”, meant that in the their territories there was huge resistance against any attempts to create and ossify chiefly hierarchies (ibid.:35). In its frustration, the colonial government accepted the suggestion, spearheaded by Chirwa, of establishing a tribal council upon which 32 chiefs and headmen would sit, a concession made nowhere else (ibid.:35- 37). By 1947, this experiment in alternative forms of self-governance was, however, dissolved by the provincial commissioner who felt the discursive nature of decision making, purportedly based on Atonga customs of reaching joint decisions through extensive debate, was too cumbersome and slow for the colonial administration (ibid.:40).

It was during this period of political contestation, and the forming and structuring of the Tonga political landscape, that Chirwa wrote his school book. The book was an interjection into a particular political moment, which raises the question of what purpose Chirwa saw his book fulfilling. Chirwa outlines his thoughts on the book in its introduction:74

Buku lenili Nthanu za Chitonga lasimbikiya ahurwa ndi asungwana wa masukulu gha mu uTonga….

This book Nthanu za Chitonga is being taught to boys and girls in the schools of the Tonga. The author of this book hopes that those who read this book will know and understand well (azamziwa ndi kuvwa umampha) all nthanu explained, that they were told a long time ago, with our forefathers, who also found these stories from a very long time ago. Their nthanu were teaching people to settle disputes/make closing arguments and to find solutions through counsel and well-made points (kutseka makani ndi kubowozga fundu zau). Boys and girls, of the year of nowadays, they must learn these nthanu with energy and happiness, and examine/analyse critically (kusanda) every nthanu they read. Some nthanu are short stories, in the way they are written the book hopes that all the boys and girls should lust after learning (aziwunukiyenge kuzisambira). At the end of the book the stories have been described in short form. These small stories, they have their lessons.

74 Translated with James Mpanda.

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The author of this book, he thanks and is grateful to those friends who helped him with the extensive work of this book.

In this introduction, Chirwa suggests that his book is not intended merely as a reproduction of traditional stories. Whilst acknowledging that the stories (re)presented are part of a proclaimed Tonga heritage, he nonetheless specifically describes it as a work for contemporary boys and girls to learn how to think critically within the frameworks made available to them through the knowledge-structures of their elders. Derek Peterson, in his discussions on the patriotic mobilisation of Gikuyu riddles in Kenya, describes those who wrote down these riddles in the mid-twentieth century as “patriotic culture-builders” who chose to put these “locally meaningful puzzles” onto the page to be standardized and widely circulated in order purposefully to create a wider audience for them (2012:23). Stephanie Newell argues that one should not analyse all written folktales as seeking to reify tradition “in the manner of cultural nationalist constructions of a usable past to set against cultural incursions”, but rather as an “effort to produce new versions of familiar material for the consumption of current readerships” that are mobilised “for particular moral and political ends” (2013:90&99). Chirwa’s book seemed to be doing a bit of both, cementing his position as a ‘culture builder’ who standardized locally meaningful stories for wider circulation, and equally offering a re-rendering of oral tales for the consumption of current readerships of school children, with the moral and political ends of teaching children how to think critically and engage politically.

Many east African authors producing texts in the late colonial period consciously saw their texts as performing an educative role and infused them with a “didactic tone” (Peterson and Hunter 2016:11). Like its contemporaneous publications, Nthanu za Chitonga was also suffused with a ‘didactic tone’, one which, whilst clearly being oriented towards its purpose as a school textbook, may not only have come from the missionary emphasis on education but may also have emerged from the didactic nature of nthanu themselves, as outlined in the chapter above. Most striking about Chirwa’s introduction, however, is that he does not set out nthanu primarily as moral teachings, as many of my interlocutors did. Rather, he indicates that nthanu are crucial for teaching a particular way of thinking — they teach children how to think, how to think critically and how to analyse. Chirwa does not mention morals or good behaviour other than the “lessons” to be learned, but he does mention, how to settle disputes, how to find solutions through well-made points and good counsel, using critical analysis, and that they should lust after learning. This is a somewhat different type of framing of the knowledge to be found in nthanu than that which my interlocutors attributed to their spoken version. It is not possible

130 to surmise exactly why Chirwa presented the nthanu in this form – perhaps this was how nthanu were generally understood at the time, as key tools for learning critical thinking and solution building. It is possible, however, given that Chirwa was strongly advocating for an Atonga Tribal Council based on the idea that all Tonga chiefs were equal and disputes were solved by lengthy discussions, that setting traditional Tonga oral literature within a framework of teaching critical thinking and finding solutions through debate played into Chirwa’s bigger political project. Many of my interlocutors, however, also insisted that Tonga people are very discursive and that engaging in critical debate is a key political practice. Chirwa therefore might indeed have equally been reflecting the intellectual norms of his people, rather than merely pursuing a political project.

Whatever the exact reasons for Chirwa’s depiction of nthanu, it seems clear that he wants to present to the younger generations of Tonga children the intellectual tools and epistemological frameworks of their society to make them sharper and more critical thinkers. He was writing the stories mainly as a tool for immediate use rather than only seeking to preserve an oral literary heritage for posterity. This latter view, of his writings as being a stable rendition of lost heritage, is however one that is being mobilised today “according to present concerns and desires” (Nelson 2007:23), about which I will say something in the following section.

A book disappears…

With the end of British occupation in 1963, and the rise of Malawi’s independent government under Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda, came the demise of Nthanu za Chitonga. It seems likely that the book, the only written collection of Tonga nthanu, was pulled from the school curriculum by the new Malawian Government as part of their policy of unification under a national Chewa identity. Prior to independence, the public political discourse in the country was flavoured by tensions built on ethnic regionalism, based in part on the feeling that the peoples from the ‘north’, the Tumubuka, Ngoni and Tonga, were being given favoured political and educational positions through the heavy missionary presence there (Chirwa 1998). The difference in education, and the resulting difference in political and academic opportunities for those from the north during the colonial period, frustrated the Chewa majority of the south and central regions enough that they engaged in public efforts to put pressure on Banda to “redress the balance in favour of their own ethnic group” (Kamwendo 2002:146).

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When Banda came to power in 1964, he decided to appease his Chewa constituencies and counter the growing regionalism by unifying the nation. In order to do this, Banda pursued a national policy of “Chewanization” (Kishindo 1998:256) that sought to limit diverse ethnic identification, and thereby also regionalism, by elevating Malawian unity under a Chewa identity as metonymic for a Malawian identity (Kamwendo 2002:144). As a result, Chichewa, next to English, became the national language. This change also impacted the school system. Under Banda’s new national curriculum, all vernacular languages were removed from the school syllabus, leaving only Chichewa and English as languages of instruction. The possibility of providing any education in the vernacular languages of the minority groups was firmly abandoned with a ban of their use in schools in 1968 (Kamwendo 2002:146). As a result, vernacular books like Nthanu za Chitonga, which had been in print circulation for a number of years, were no longer printed, and so gradually disappeared.

This stood in stark contrast to the earlier colonial period. In their discussion of vernacular literacies, literary theorists James Collins and Richard Blot claim that in “the face of imperial power, the language and literacy of the conquered peoples counted for little, or not at all, save as obstacles to or means for the evangelizing and colonizing efforts of the conquerors” (2003:122). Whereas this was certainly the overall case in terms of language hierarchies in the Nyasaland protectorate, in the details this balance of power was slightly different. During the colonial period the languages and literacies of minority groups were actually given far more valence, credence and support as part of a diverse colonial protectorate than they were during the period of independence under Kamuzu Banda. The result of this was that for minority languages, the language policies of the Banda regime were far more repressive than those of the colonial period.

For Chitonga speakers, this meant they would no longer learn to read or write in their own language,75 nor have access to texts in their own language at their schools. Thus, the only book in which some of their oral literature was written was soon to disappear from the local landscape. Through the political changes brought about by independence, a moment of possibility, in which Tonga people produced a textual version of their own stories, written in

75 While Chichewa and Chitonga are similar enough to allow some understanding they are different enough to be separate languages and therefore much harder for children to learn literacy in. For a comparison of Chichewa and Chitonga taken from the latest Awake! see Appendix 3.

132 their own tongue, by one of their own people, for their own edification and education, was cut short.

Nola’s mother, Bertha, my ambuya (elder) at Nola’s home and a highly venerated woman in the village, shared her sadness of the loss of Tonga books over dinner one evening. We were sitting in Nola’s kitchen, lit with a single solar-powered bulb, on a grass mat laid out on the floor, discussing ancestors (wiskekulu) and how little Nola and Bertha know of their lives. “Unfortunately, the people from long ago didn’t write anything down”, Nola lamented. Bertha then interjected that they did, that there were two Tonga books, Nthanu za Chitonga and Chiswa Msangu. She repeated multiple times that there were Tonga books, written in Chitonga and that the Tonga had their books, until “Kamuzu took them away and forced Chichewa on people”. Since the end of Banda’s reign in 1994, the language policies in Malawi have loosened and become more flexible, but this has not resulted in any re-introduction of vernacular texts into the school curriculum and there are still no school books produced in vernacular languages (Kayambazinthu 1999).

Politics of knowledge

If it is likely that Nthanu za Chitonga disappeared from circulation due to a change in the language policies for primary education, the villagers I lived with have other strong ideas about why their book disappeared. As Fred and Henry told me outside the culture centre, they believe the book was banned by Kamuzu Banda because “it would make the Tonga too clever” and, “if you read it, you can become a politician”. A number of authors working on oral literature in Africa have shown that oral literature can be deeply political, and is often mobilised to provide political dissent and critique and to “interrogate the powerful” (Hofmeyr 1993:168; Newell 2013:7; Vail and White 1991). In oral literature, Barber argues, “things can be said that could not be said in other discourses” (Barber 1994:957). Through its metaphorical language, analogies, innuendos, known themes, genre conventions, and animal characters, oral literature is able to express clear contemporary political critiques, even against powerful figures, without ever directly addressing them. This capacity can be attributed to its orality and its concomitant plasticity which allows it to be obtuse and thereby “safely obscure” and malleable (Vail and White 1991:281).

It was not, however, the capacity of nthanu to make veiled critical attacks that my interlocutors thought Banda was afraid of. They acknowledge that oral literature has a political

133 role to play precisely because it can provide hidden critiques, but the reason they felt Banda banned Nthanu za Chitonga lay more in their belief that the book contained deep wisdom and tools for the production of critical and analytical political thinking. The book is viewed as being able to provide a template for building a political capacity within people that would give them the intellect, power and acumen to threaten Banda’s reign. People’s interpretations and understandings of Nthanu za Chitonga offer insights into how oral literature in its literary form, rather than oral, can come to be politically understood and mobilised.

There is a general story a number of people shared about Nthanu za Chitonga’s disappearance, which goes as follows: When he was young, Kamuzu Banda came to Bandawe to be taught at Macalpine School, the school of the original Bandawe Mission station. According to Fred, while he was studying there, the young Banda “saw that those studying this book, they told that people are very clever. It means that they will grab this government and it will be for them […] Dr Banda, he saw that ‘Tonga people they are very clever, they are competing with me, what can I do? Oh, I better frustrate them. How can I frustrate them? By stopping Nthanu za Chitonga.’” *Mark Phiri told me that Banda “thought it wise to get rid of that book” because the book was used by Kenneth Kaunda to fight the colonial government in Zambia, and so it was clear that it had great political power.76 There does not seem to be any actual evidence that Banda came to the area, though he was born in the north, but his early life is so shrouded in mystery that conspiracy theories abound, among them that the President was not even the real Banda. It is thus relatively easy to insert him into one’s own mythical narratives.

The narrative people build around the disappearance of the book enables us to see how it has become wrapped in the webs of a politics of knowledge. For them the book has taken on a power of symbolic representation for a political struggle that many northerners have felt they have been engaged in since independence, if not before. As outlined above, regional differences have a long history of producing tensions within Malawi, a country which, like most colonies, was stitched together along boundaries that made sense to the colonial authorities rather than to the local people (Chirwa 1998; Phiri and Ross 1998). While Banda ostensibly ‘eliminated’ this regionalism through his project of ‘Chewanization’, many feel that his policies actually strongly disadvantaged people from the northern region, some even claiming that northerners in the Banda era had “myriad […] ethnic and regional discriminations” directed against them and “were subjected to state terrorism or harassment as well as political and socio-economic

76 Kenneth Kaunda was the first president of Zambia. His father was a Tonga man educated at the Livingstonia Mission (Simpson 2003:1).

134 marginalization” (Chirwa 1998:59). Such extreme frustration at what they perceive as Kamuzu’s hate for the Tonga, and the north in general, was frequently expressed. Peter Mhone, whom we met in the previous chapter, for example, told me that Kamuzu forbade Tonga students from studying law, as there were already too many Tonga lawyers and he did not want more. The contemporary bitterness many feel at being regionally disadvantaged is born of this history and exacerbated by policies such as the quota system,77 which disadvantages northerners to this day.

The book is able to act as an object which symbolises this disenfranchisement and marginalisation. Writing about newspaper print cultures in colonial Africa, Derek Peterson and Emma Hunter speak of how print technology provided Africans with “a powerful tool for self- constitution” (2016:6). By constituting a group as ‘the Tonga’ through its folktales and being seen to hold their wisdom the book not only creates its own referents, but also thereby allows for the imagined mobilisation of an attack on ‘the Tonga’ as a result of its disappearance. Whereas historical artefacts such as Nthanu za Chitonga can be integral in creating understandings of and relations to identity, they can also make us “conscious of our fictions”, demonstrating in their transient and contested nature the contradictions present in our social renderings of community and identity (Sperlich and Brogden 2016:9). The ‘banning’ of Nthanu za Chitonga by Banda, supposedly to incapacitate Tonga political competence, fills the role of creating a narrative in which feelings of being intellectually and educationally marginalised during the Banda era can be expressed.

The feelings of marginalisation, and the need to assert a regional identity, are not, however, confined to the Banda era alone, but are also applied to the contemporary political landscape in Malawi. After the end of Banda’s reign, the enforced unification of the country under Chewa identity began to fray (Power 2010). With the weakening of the dominance of Chewa identity, regionalism began to emerge once again as a powerful political dynamic in the country (Kishindo 1998:252; Phiri 1998). This has played out particularly strongly in the elections since 1994, which have been heavily inflected with regional flavours, with politicians vocally pandering to their ethno-linguistic constituencies to garner votes (Chirwa 1998; Kamwendo 2010). In the north, this has produced feelings of resentment, as the very sparsely populated northern areas can never accrue enough support to push candidates sympathetic to the north to

77 The quota system is a university entrance system: in this system, students from the north have to achieve far higher grades by percent for entry than students from the central and southern regions, even though they come from minority ethno-linguistic groups (Malawi Nation 2018a, 2018b; Nyasa Times 2018).

135 the fore. The feeling of political marginalisation, seen through the prism of ethno-linguistic marginalisation, therefore carries substantial weight in the region.

This sense of marginalisation, and even obstruction, is further entrenched through a narrative, popular in the north, in which the northerners see themselves as educationally superior to the south, but struggling more financially precisely for this very reason. Many I spoke to believe themselves to value education, whereas they see Chewa people as valuing money. In line with the way in which education is sold, both locally and internationally, as the key means towards greater prosperity (as described in the introduction), many of my interlocutors felt that their emphasis on education should make them more successful, and yet they remain relatively poor compared to the south. Banda’s persecution, and current policies like the quota system,in short, its political marginalisation, were given to me as key reasons why the north is still economically very poor.

These grievances, coupled with the reignition of regionalism as a political dynamic in the country, have prompted intellectuals who see themselves as Tonga to look for ways to enhance and (re)produce a sense of Tonga heritage, unity and value. One of the key means of doing this was the launch of the Tonga Heritage Foundation on 26 August 2017 at Chinteche, with a day- long event that included stands selling Tonga food, the performance of traditional dances, particularly malipenga and chilimika, and a large number of speeches (Phimbi 2017). This, I was told, was in part a direct response to the fact that the then president, Peter Mutharika, who is Luo, had been orchestrating large Luo cultural festivals in his home region. This clearly shows how practices around local heritage can be embedded in larger questions of regional and national politics. One of the tasks members of the heritage foundation set for themselves, as part of their Tonga heritage work, was the procurement and distribution of Nthanu za Chitonga. Here we can see how the legacy of Nthanu za Chitonga is not only mobilised to articulate and critique the past marginalisation experienced at the hand of Kamuzu Banda, but also plays a constituent part in the re-articulation of Tonga heritage and history in the face of continuing and ongoing regional struggles for recognition, identity and support in contemporary Malawi.

While the contemporary political dynamics of Malawi, as well as simmering frustrations at Banda’s ethnic policies, play an important part in the discourses and emotional attachments people formed around Nthanu za Chitonga, the rather dramatic narrative of loss that the book evokes reflects more than this. It is also the book itself, that it is a book of Tonga folktales in Chitonga and that it is seen to carry the “wisdom of the Tonga” that makes people see its disappearance as a profound loss.

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Eighty-five-year-old *Mark Phiri, for example, with a hardness in his voice, told me that “taking away that book […] the Tonga were really attacked at the neck, because their children will never learn”. Mark sat on the twisted roots of a tree outside his house in Chituka scratching lines and squiggles in the sand with a rusted nail while we spoke. His incredibly thin frame was almost drowning in the large grey jersey he was wearing, as he complained bitterly about his poverty, the state of his leaking roof, his difficulties in finding food. An underlying anger simmered throughout. Mark was also angry that children these days have to learn English and Chichewa at school. He remembered learning from Nthanu za Chitonga at school and felt that children these days cannot connect to anything they learn at school because it is all in a foreign language. “They come from home speaking Tonga” but at school they have to “learn a new culture and new language”, so they “really struggle”. Reflecting on the disappearance of Nthanu za Chitonga, he said, “we lost our culture due to the missing of that book, because it was where we were getting our knowledge”.

During a conversation with Reverend Nathaniel Zenzi Chirwa at his home in response to my asking how he felt about school being in English and Chichewa, he suddenly jumped up and rushed to another room. He returned telling me “we had this book, I don’t know whether you have heard of it,” and handed me a small green booklet. It was a copy of Nthanu za Chitonga, printed by Kachere Books in 2007 with financial support from the Assemblies of God.78 The Reverend gushed on about the book, “if you read that book, you would understand Tonga philosophy, and Tonga way of life. That’s the best that has come amongst the Tonga people. If you ask any Tonga person, they would really yearn for that book. That’s where the wisdom of the Tonga is.” I asked the Reverend how a storybook could contain the wisdom of the Tonga, to which he replied, “that book is trying to make you as a Tonga think critically […] I don’t know how I can explain it, but I’m saying probably something like a Bible of the Tonga people, religious or non-religious. If you read that book you find a road map, you find it develops in you critical thinking.” When the book disappeared, the Reverend told me, “we were robbed of our way of life […] that literature was part of our blood and spirit”. As the Chairperson for the group Mudawuku waTonga (‘Culture of the Tonga’, formerly called Tonga Heritage Foundation), Reverend Mezuwa helped purchase a number of copies of Nthanu za Chitonga and is selling some to wealthier community members in an attempt to reintroduce the text into communities.79

78 Kachere Books is one of Malawi’s leading local publishers. While they briefly brought the book back into print through their 2007 edition, Rev. Chirwa was the only person I met who had a few copies. Many others did not know of the Kachere publication. 79 At 5,000 kwacha a piece (around £5.20) the books are prohibitively expensive for most villagers.

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Maxwell Sanga, an austere and dignified old Village Headman in upper Kamwala, rumoured by some to be a very powerful seketera,80 also spoke of “the Tonga people” as being “lost”, telling me Nthanu za Chitonga showed “why the Tonga people were more clever”, but now, with its loss, the Tonga “have lost their way”. For many, the loss of the book was mapped onto a loss of ‘the way’, a sense of a general ‘lostness’ in the village, as past traditions and knowledge are disappearing. As described in the chapter above, this perception of the loss of an intangible intellectual heritage within (post)colonial spaces is not new.

What Nthanu za Chitonga offers in relation to this loss, in its bookness, its existence as an ‘artefact’ that carries words from the past, is that it creates an object to which a sense of loss and nostalgia can be attached. Equally, it creates the possibility for a thing which is able to do the rather far-reaching work of carrying the wisdom of a people. In their textualized form the oral stories of the community become visible, locatable, tangible and collected - the stories take on the quality of ‘thingness’, no longer abstracted floating ideas that are only emergent in the process of an oral performance, but now offering a clear object of nostalgia whose return can be longed for. Attached to this is the concept that the return of the book will usher in the return of other things that are felt to be ‘lost’ — of wisdom, knowledge and cleverness. Restoring the book is framed by many as an epistemological return that offers the hope of epistemic elevation.

Chimbano’s council

Chief (fumu) *Chimbano gives us a clear example of how the loss of Nthanu za Chitonga and its potential power as a political tool for the restoration of Tonga astuteness and social and political acumen is mobilised and articulated. As Fred recounted, all the chiefs in the area not long before had had a big meeting at the Traditional Authority (TA) Malenga Mzoma’s residence to talk about the state of the villages: “They were talking, ‘oh guys, we are lost’. ‘How?’ ‘We don’t have Nthanu za Chitonga’.” Adding his own analysis, Fred said, “Nthanu za Chitonga, that book shows that we are real Tonga, it shows our culture it shows our cleverness…why can’t we go back, and come up with that book?” At this meeting it was Chief Chimbano who brought up the argument that Nthanu za Chitonga was needed to restore order to the community.

80 A seketera is a high-level mfiti who tends to hunt or fight other mfiti in order to protect people.

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Chief Chimbano is a small and stocky man, who was constantly suspicious of me and my nosing around in the villages. When James and I first approached him to talk about Nthanu za Chitonga, he was suspicious of us and flatly refused us. After some time, however, and the sharing of a few small gifts, he recanted, and we were able to talk to him. These days Chimbano is only a General Village Headman, but his lineage is part of a larger, very old story of contestation around the Malenga Mzoma area. The story goes that when David Livingstone first landed at Bandawe in the 1850s, Chief Chimbano81 was the ‘greatest’ chief in the area, but when Dr. Laws arrived a few years later in 1878 to set up the mission station there, it was Chimbano’s neighbouring chief, Malenga Mzoma, who greeted the missionaries and established diplomatic relations with them (Livingstone 1923). This was, so I am told, because Malenga Mzoma spoke English; so “because of education [Chimbano] went down”, as one interlocutor put it. I heard this version of events many times, even from obvious supporters of Malenga Mzoma, generally with the caveat that it was unjust that Chimbano should be ‘dethroned’ merely due to a language difference. Here one sees how, right from the beginning, English became a key political tool in creating new hierarchies.

The Chimbano chieftaincy had a brief resurgence of power in the colonial period when the chief at the time was able to curry favour with the colonial government and present himself as the potential paramount chief for the region, only once again to be usurped at the end of the period when Malenga Mzoma was made Traditional Authority (TA).82 The current Chief Chimbano is one of the very few people in the village area of Chituka, Kamwala and Chifira who actually has a copy of Nthanu za Chitonga and at the time I spoke to him, the only person I knew with one. Chimbano’s is a photocopy which he guards very dearly. After some extended banter (or covert bargaining) around how I should pay him for the privilege of reading the book, I was able to get him to show it to me.

Chimbano’s copy is a printed version of a pdf of the book held by the University of Edinburgh Library. In a telling example of global epistemological entanglements, the photocopy had been posted to Chimbano from Canada, by a Canadian researcher who had visited him to discuss the political history of the area, after he had told the researcher of the book and how

81 Like Malenga Mzoma, Chimbano is an inherited name. 82 In Malawi, the bifurcation of governance into state and ‘traditional’ political powers instituted during the colonial period remains in softer form to this day, leaving most people to engage with two ‘parallel states’ (Eggen 2011). In the current political hierarchy the highest chiefly authority is the Traditional Authority (the Native Authority during colonial rule). The TA reigns over General Village Headmen, who reign over Village Headmen (ibid.). In my field site two chiefs were women: TA Malenga Mzoma, and GVH Chiweyo. That Malenga Mzoma, however, passed away a few weeks after I left the field – the new one is a man.

139 important he felt it was for his community to have it. The researcher had been able to procure a pdf scan of the book in Edinburgh, Macalpine’s own copy with a dedication from Chirwa in it. The researcher printed this scan in Canada and then posted it to Chimbano. It was also from this researcher, whom I subsequently emailed, that I received my first copy of Nthanu za Chitonga, the same pdf scan, which I printed out in Malawi. Chimbano told us, once having received the photocopy of Nthanu za Chitonga, that he has “learnt the book”, and that he takes it with him to every meeting, using it to help him make better judgements. “Some people use the Bible”, he said, “some nthanu”, echoing Rev. Zenzi Chirwa’s words.

After showing us his copy, Chimbano told us the story of the meeting of the chiefs where he had presented it. At the meeting, the chiefs were discussing how to deal with the increase in alcoholism, violence, misbehaviour and disrespectful and disobedient children in their communities. At this particular meeting, Chimbano recounts, he stood up, brandished his copy of Nthanu za Chitonga, and told his fellow chiefs that this was what they needed to help solve their problems. He explained to them how he uses the book in deliberations and how it “helps us to have cultural wisdom”. He suggested that they make photocopies of the book, and that all the chiefs get a copy to use it in their dealings. To this, we were told, the chiefs heartily agreed. Chimbano’s big dream is to have many photocopies of the book distributed all throughout the village, because he believes “it would make a big difference to the community because it would teach people how to handle things”. Chimbano believes “Tonga books are very, very needed”, because the books at school are “for Chewas, not for Tongas”. Unfortunately, Chimbano has not been able to find funds for his big photocopy project, and so it remains, as yet, unrealised.

“That is a political book”

Chimbano’s story of the uses of Nthanu za Chitonga offers an excellent illustration of the ways in which the book, as an artefact, as a symbol, and as a resource, is mobilised within the community, and particularly by chiefs. As noted, Tonga chieftaincy structures are generally very non- hierarchical and fluid, and therefore the good judgement and decision-making capacities of the chiefs is central to whether they can attain and maintain power. This non-hierarchical, fluid basis of the power of chiefs has been a topic of interest for researchers. Jaap van Velsen, author of the only monograph on the area, The Politics of Kinship (1964), wrote the book to explain how it was possible that a society which seemed to have such fluid chief-structures was still socially and

140 politically highly stable (see also 1962).83 Historians speak of the shifting power and authority of Tonga chiefs (Power 2010) or the highly decentralised nature of Tonga political power during the colonial period (McCracken 1977:62).84

Within this social milieu, Nthanu za Chitonga is perceived as a very useful tool for assisting chiefs in building the skills to judge well. Tony Ballantyne, in his analysis of the impact of paper on indigenous knowledge orders in colonial New Zealand, argues that paper played a central role in the “reorganization of both traditional forms of knowledge transmission and chiefly practice” (2011:236). We see this in Nthanu za Chitonga: a reorganization of the forms of the transmission of traditional knowledge from the exclusively oral form. We also see an effect on chiefly practice — not, though, the effect suggested by Ballantyne, in which chief hierarchies were re-ordered or chiefly rule was paperised and ossified, but rather, a process of drawing on texts as sources or frameworks for critique, judgement and engagement that are perceived as emerging from within a communal cultural heritage and practice.

Particularly interesting about the ways in which people speak about Nthanu za Chitonga is their emphasis on its capacity to make people ask critical questions, be clever, and think in political ways. Possibly this is in part due to the fact that Filemon Chirwa’s introduction to the book states that this is its intention. Whether or not this is the case, the book clearly plays a certain role in producing ideas around political and critical learning. As outlined at the beginning of the chapter, Fred specifically felt that the book has the capacity to make people “politicians [and that it is] a very powerful book [..] that is a political book” (emphasis added). And as Henry said it could make people into politicians because it made them think twice and think deeply. In a later conversation, Fred also told me that it taught people how to make judgements, “if somebody is having grudges with somebody, you can go through it, there are some stories with the judgements, and if you go through it, you can judge the person properly”. But these days, without nthanu, the elders and the chiefs, “they are not judging good […] they really learnt when it was written down”.

Judgement, and good judging, are some of the key attributes of a chief in the area and therefore a primary political practice and skill. “The chief’s job is to keep the peace”, *Msinawana told me, through conflict resolution and through good judgement. Msinawana was one of my

83 The argument van Velsen puts forth is that ‘kinship’ functions as the basis for the political structures of the community (1960:266; 1964:36-37). 84 According to my interlocutors, while Tonga chieftaincies are technically inherited from the chief to one of his/her sister’s sons, there is a lot of scope for manoeuvring in the system — the influential members of the chief’s family convene to choose the next chief, which may be another relative, male or female (see also Power 2010:35).

141 most beloved conversation companions in the villages. He lived in a double-storey brick house, an absolute anomaly in the village, that he had built as a copy of the brick home of the missionary at New Bandawe. At ninety-four years old, with a mind still clear as day, he was bursting with decades of knowledge and stories, and as an ardent conversationalist, he would love telling these. Whenever James and I visited, Msinawana would bring out an old, flower-decorated teapot and offer us highly-sugared milky tea to tide us along as we sat for hours under his mango tree, discussing all and sundry of his world. Msinawana considered himself quite an authority on local politics, and so chieftaincies and political squabbles would often be the topic of conversation. When discussing chiefs as peacekeepers, Msinawana was insistent that they do not use force. “We [Tonga] are not dangerous”, he said, you respect your chief “but your knees do not shake when s/he walks past.”85 A simple chief “can still speak well” and will then be listened to. Chiefs are respected depending on how they behave, how they act and how well they judge — not merely on the basis of their status as chief.

Nola, a fiercely independent woman herself, has no time for chiefs. She would often complain to me that “so many are useless” and vehemently told me, “no, they don’t really have power, they are not the ‘big men’”. But she believed that “it is the chiefs themselves that make it like that”, through their uselessness. Gutamo, who often ranted against chiefs, told me whilst walking through the village that they are “daft, they are all daft!” How useless chiefs are and how annoyed people are with their actions and behaviours, was a constant refrain amongst my companions. Chiefs, I was told many times, only really have influence and power if they are well- respected, otherwise they are not taken seriously.

There is a well-known Tonga saying considered to encapsulate the Tonga attitude towards chiefs and chieftaincy: “Nde fumu ndija” – I am a chief on my own. The saying claims that each person is their own chief. The Reverend Zenzi Chirwa believes that “for [Tongas] an individual is important by himself, as long as he can excel”, adding that “individualism has been characteristic amongst the Tonga.”86 This is something the Reverend thinks “makes Tongas very unique. It has helped us develop independent thinkers”. The idea that Tonga people “sit around and discuss things”, as Peter Mhone put it, is a core part of the narrative self-construction of many I spoke to, particularly amongst the intellectual elite. Whilst discussing the Banda era, Peter told me, “we Tonga, we argue very much […] we are always in a court of law, meaning we are

85 I write s/he as there are no gendered pronouns in Chitonga. 86 In the colonial period the perceived individualism of the Tonga was something noted by many, including missionaries and Van Velsen (1964), often as frustrating efforts at governance.

142 always trying to find the truth”. He told me that older people are allowed to contradict chiefs and argue points they make. “We are very democratic”, he insisted, “we have very political minds”.

In the face of all these less hierarchical power structures, fluid authority, and critical voices, the chiefs must somehow find ways to make good judgements, be respected and keep the peace. Not an easy task, as Maxwell Sanga shared with me. He had become a Village Head a few years before I met him and was not overly happy with the responsibilities of the job. “Our duty is to maintain the peace” but one cannot do that through creating fear, he said. His wife, pouring tea for us at that point of the conversation, jumped in and emphatically said, “no, no, no, we don’t want people to fear us!” As we continued discussing the ways of navigating chieftaincy and the responsibility that comes with it, Maxwell turned to me and said, “there was a book, a book called Nthanu za Chitonga. It was a book that made the Tonga people bright.” I asked him how the book would help, to which he replied by telling me a few stories, including the first story in Nthanu za Chitonga, and proverbs from the book, such as the popular saying, kase luta, kase weku (what goes, comes back).87 He then explained how one can use these stories and sayings to think about how to make decisions. The first story in Nthanu za Chitonga was often told to me as an illustrative example of how the book can help people make good judgements. In this story, Leopard and Antelope have a disagreement about the ownership of goats. The disagreement is brought to the mphala (court) where clever Kalulu eventually settles the dispute (see Appendix 2). This story is essentially a description of a case being taken to mphala where the chiefs and wise animals of the community have to make a decision about the case, showing what the decision was and how it was made.

In a political structure based to a large degree on discussion and debate in mphala-like settings, the book Nthanu za Chitonga comes to symbolise a particular way of discursive engagement and practice that people seem to see as their own, perhaps even ‘unique’ to their socio-political and historical constellation. To some degree, the book is posited as containing something almost akin to a soft-legal code, a set of prescriptions for practice in situations of conflict or difficulty. The comparison to the Bible reinforces this perspective, where the book is presented as a core written text from which to draw guidance on action.

In this way, the oral stories, particularly in their literate form, are not only political tools because they are able to make political commentary through allegorical figures, they are also

87 This saying is proverb number seven at the back of Nthanu za Chitonga. Quite a number of people told me this saying as an important moral teaching.

143 political tools because they are able to teach political practice. Through the book and the stories in it, people claim that one is able to learn how to think critically, how to argue well, and how to make good judgements — all the skills required to be politically effective.

The salience of writing it down

When speaking to Fred at his home one day about why it mattered that the stories are written down in Nthanu za Chitonga, he claimed that stories that are told are “just interesting”, whereas when they are written down “you can get more from there”. Narrated stories are “harder to understand”, but you can read written versions at your own pace, and you can keep going back to the section you do not understand, to re-read and make sense of it. A young man named Giles, who had finished his secondary schooling but could not find any employment and ended up spending a lot of time hanging around on the beach at Kamwala, told me a very similar thing about books. He said that books and nthanu both teach behaviour, but books are actually much easier to understand because you can read them again and again, and they “explain things well”. The book offers ‘scriptural’ means of study by going over their stories, referring back to them, allowing time to reflect on them, and re-reading them. In Fred and Giles’ words we can see how the textual form of written stories is valued for its referential qualities and how this becomes enmeshed in new forms of political engagement.

Textual representations can come to be seen as holding a particular type of authority — as Stephanie Newell elucidates in her discussion of West African print literature during the colonial period: “print was regarded as discursive and yet also as impartial and public” (2013:18). In this way print itself, through its “activist subjectivity of its own” and its disconnection from the “writing body” carries an authority of voice that the more situated and embodied oral literature may not carry in the same way (ibid.). Print, as Newell outlines, creates a different type of public sphere to orality, one which many in her research associated with fairness and freeness (ibid.:19). Drawing on Newell, I suggest that the textual versions of nthanu carry a different type of authority, one that lends itself more to ideas of political practice and judgement that is of use to adults than to moral didacticism for children. While Chirwa may have written down the nthanu with educative intentions to teach the younger generations, the chiefs’ use of the book in the political realm gives a different form to the folktales’ capacities to act as tools of political critique; they re-animate his book and the stories in it in ways that reach beyond the school classroom.

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The stories in the book also seem to carry a different type of relationship to truth. As outlined in the description of the ‘nthanu night’ in the previous chapter, most spoken nthanu are concluded with the phrase, “nthanu ndi boza, yamalia penipo” (this tale is made-up, it finishes here), in order to show that the story is fiction so listeners, particularly children, do not think it is true. However, none of the stories written in Nthanu za Chitonga end thus, indicating a difference in the ways in which the written and spoken word are seen to hold a potential for being mistakenly thought to be true. James told me that Chirwa did not need to write these words at the end of his work because he was,

writing it as an academic […] that’s why it is different from the parents, ‘cause the parents they are agogu (elders), when they tell nthanu they say ‘nthanu ndi boza’ because to them it was meant just to chill [relax] the children, because they sounded dangerous […] and if [the children] will tell each other ‘that’s very true’ that would mean they trying to impart a negative knowledge to the children […] but with Filemon, they wouldn’t say this is not true because it was something to do with academics.

Isaiah, James’ father, added that the reason there was a difference was because “the ambuya (elders) are teaching them the norms and behaviour and how to live […] basing on the stories […] now on the idea of Filemon Chirwa is to teach the children about Tonga stories”. Gutamo told me it was because Chirwa “understood the folktales and the meaning behind their morals, whereas most nthanus were told by villagers who did not go to school, as such to them, nthanu was boza [made-up]”. In the words of these interlocutors it seems the written nature of Nthanu za Chitonga puts it in a different category to spoken tales. The medium in which stories are told becomes pertinent to the ways in which the words are understood to act and have effect. As written words, the words become part of a scriptural world, one which is related to academia, school, and a deeper understanding of the meaning of the tales. In their literate form, written down in a book, the stories are more firmly incorporated into textual worlds marked by literacy — worlds firmly embedded in ideas of schooling and academic authority. The oral versions, however, seem more closely connected to direct teaching from the elders as transmitted to the children, with an inherent ambiguity about the verity of the story that is being told.

Although the writing down, codification and textualization of oral literature, is often seen as an ossification of this literature, it is not a one-way street from orality, with its fluidity and flexibility, to ossified literature. “Orality and textuality, far from being opposite poles, interact in complex and multidimensional ways” and there is a constant interplay between the oral and the literate (Boyarin 1993:3; see also Ballantyne 2011:244; Miescher 2006:45; Newell 2013:94). This

145 interplay is particularly evident around Nthanu za Chitonga — a text of written orality which provides a powerful example that continuously moves back and forth between literacy and orality.

As we have seen, as the colonial period ended literate elites across Africa expressed ever- increasing anxieties about the fear that their communities “would ‘forget’ local histories and lose touch with long-established, but unwritten, customs and legal paradigms” (Newell 2016:427). They feared that without printed versions of their own epistemological heritage it would disappear under the paper-weight of the plethora of colonial documents (ibid.). In response many of them sought to write down their oral stories and thus keep them tangible. Newell has been critical of these elites, arguing that they used the medium of print to “intervene and ‘save’ what they perceived to be vulnerable oral archives or disappearing histories” and thereby relabelled orality as illiteracy (2016:428). While Newell interprets this as a potentially problematic engagement with orality, the case of Nthanu za Chitonga seems to suggest that some works the elites produced actually did play an important role in retaining particular types of oral literature in particular forms. Nthanu za Chitonga also suggests that in their existence as written documents these literalizations can play an important role in becoming a material keystone for creating political, social and cultural movements as well as help regenerate interest and activity around oral stories. These written-down stories produced historical, social and intellectual artefacts which have the potential to become incredibly important to later generations — so important that many compared their book to the Bible, a significant statement for the power and impact of a textual work.

Conclusion

In Nthanu za Chitonga we see the interweaving and emergence of multiple strands of social, political and epistemological relations through a convergence of orality with literacy. With its writing and publication came the creation of a named author and an object-artefact connected to Tonga nthanu in their tangible form. The emergence of the object version of the stories interwove with the didactic and pedagogical aims of the mission education system. In being part of the Scottish missions’ project of education, Chirwa’s book was firmly incorporated into local literacy practices, ones which produced particular types of knowledge orders and practices, and particular ways of knowing. As Tony Ballantyne analogously comments on American

146 colonialism, “the conquest of America was in part a victory of paper and print over memory and voice [and] empire ultimately textualized cultures” (2011:233).

Whilst Nthanu za Chitonga can in part be read as a textualization of culture by empire – and one should not ignore the colonial currents that run through its production – it also offers a more positive reading: of an African intellectual who undertook a project of transcription that not only gave his community a symbol for their intellectual capacities, and resistance against a domineering political order, but also in its remembrance and reinsertion into the community, has provided something tangible upon which people can peg ideas about contemporary political and moral practice. The contemporary uses of Nthanu za Chitonga shows that written texts are not static, and do not ossify an oral literature in a particular moment, but rather extend from the time of their production, and afterwards, in the “making and remaking of culture” (Ballantyne 2011:250). Texts have “afterlives” (Peterson and Hunter 2016:7), and Nthanu za Chitonga has a long and meaningful ‘afterlife’. While traditional ways of communicating and transmitting knowledge were “transformed by the world of paper and writing”, key epistemological frameworks were still maintained, and the world of paper and writing offered new opportunities to produce different ways of transmitting traditional knowledge (ibid.:259).

I would like to close this chapter with a reflection on the insights my interlocutors’ discussions on nthanu (both in their oral form discussed in Chapter Two and in their written form discussed in Chapter one), might give us in understanding how the term tradition is mobilised within the African landscape. On the one hand, a discourse emerges around the deep salience of local intellectual heritages and the epistemological and ontological frameworks contained in them. On the other hand, we have a discourse around a sense of loss and nostalgia for the media in which these are transported, the written and oral folktales.

Oral literature and folktales are often placed within the rubrics of ‘traditional knowledge’. Within this framework it is possible to see my interlocutors’ discussions of loss and nostalgia as a last stand for ‘tradition’ in the face of an incoming ‘modernity’. In this work, however, rather than falling into this age old trap, in which ‘tradition’ is seen as “static” (Hofmeyr 1996:89), “somehow not really of the present; as a symptom of backwardness and incomplete development” (Ferguson 2006:184) and modernity is seen as “change and progress” (Hofmeyr 1996:8), I suggest, with James Ferguson, that one ask what kinds of demands are being made when people mobilise these terms. Ferguson argues that when contemporary Africans speak about modernity and wanting to be part of it, what they are asking for is “a social status implying certain institutional and economic conditions of life”; they are speaking about “what they view

147 as shamefully inadequate socioeconomic conditions and their low global rank in relations to other places” (2006:168, 184). Following this schema, I suggest that when people are speaking about tradition, they are not speaking about a socio-temporal location in the past but are rather speaking about certain ontological and epistemological conditions of life, and what they view as an inadequate recognition of their own frameworks and their low ranking in the global hierarchies of knowledge. Recognition, Axel Honneth (2004) has argued, is a crucial component of justice. To be recognized means to have a place within the global structures, to be seen as legitimate, but also to have the ability to act as a legitimated agent.

Following on this, I suggest that like the discourses on modernity that Ferguson analyses, the discourses on tradition are also “a statement of hierarchy [and] justice” (Ferguson 2006:186). Seen in this light, within the African context, tradition is not “of course, […] modernity’s shadowy companion” (Sanders 2003:338). It is not modernity’s other, and certainly not temporally located behind modernity. Rather, in many cases one could see ‘modernity’ as a social status implying certain institutional and economic conditions of life, à la Ferguson, and ‘tradition’ as implying the elevation and parity of particular epistemological and ontological standings.

Todd Sanders (2003) makes a similar argument for forms of witchcraft in his 2003 article on Ihanzu rain makers in Tanzania, arguing that, unlike theorists who seek to find ‘modernity’ in witchcraft (cf. Comaroff and Comaroff 1993; Geschiere 1995), the rainmaking witchcraft of the Ihanzu might rather be seen as a way of understanding ‘tradition’. For him, the act and process of identifying rain witches, “provides Ihanzu men and women with a way to circumscribe, contemplate, and, ultimately, reassert the veracity and significance of a conceptual category they call ‘tradition’” (ibid.:338). From my interlocutors’ statements it seems Nthanu za Chitonga also provides them with a way to circumscribe, contemplate, and reassert the veracity and significance of what they call their ‘tradition’; as something that has wisdom, but also political and critical importance.

In my field site, I suggest, ‘tradition’ was mobilised as a call for ontological and epistemological parity at both the regional and the global level. As a physical artefact, Nthanu za Chitonga encapsulates a representation of ‘tradition’ of a particular heritage and self- conceptualisation – one which is historically closely tied to a period of prolific and powerful Tonga intellectual and political practice. Of regional importance is the fact that the book was produced during a time when Tonga intellectual elites held immense political power and sway in the country, and was in fact written by a member of those very elites. This imbues the book with a heritage that recalls that particular time in history. The rapid rise and prominence of Tonga

148 intellectuals and their significant political influence in Malawi was squashed by Kamuzu Banda’s ascension – a marginalisation and exclusion which leaves much bitterness to this day. Through their positioning of the book as being actively taken away by Banda, we can see how the loss of the book is inscribed with a perceived loss of place and power in Malawi itself. In the contemporary arena, the book can be seen as acting as a rearticulation of this history, and reinsertion of Tonga intellectual and political claims. Through the chiefs using the book, and organisations such as Mudawuku waTonga seeking to redistribute it, the book is reactivated as a political tool, one that both recalls the political practices of the early Tonga intellectuals of debate and discussion in the chiefs’ hands, but also one that seeks to re-elevate Tonga identity in the Malawian political sphere. In a political climate scarred by the effects of Chewanization, in which regionalism is becoming an ever more prominent dynamic, artefacts of tradition, like a long-lost book of oral folktales, can carry enormous political and symbolic valence. In the discussions of chiefs, clergymen and villagers about the book, we can see an indication of the work being heralded as a tool which contains the potential for Tonga people to reinstate themselves as intellectually and politically important in Malawi.

The work done by ‘tradition’, both in the form of a book like Nthanu za Chitonga, but also in the form of discussion about oral stories, also inserts itself in arguments at a global level. At this level, however, there is a constant tension to be navigated, in balancing the ‘modernity’ of socio-economic living standards and the ‘tradition’ of epistemic and ontological parity. On the one hand, claims are being made “to common membership of a global society” through “mimicry” and aspiration, such as learning English, being educated in an Anglophone-based system, and taking on the modes, manners and markers of those who hold more power within global society (Ferguson 2006:174). On the other hand, one must face the exclusions inherent in universals, and in light of these make claims for “global stature and recognition” (ibid.), not for oneself through mimicry, but for the ontological and epistemological positions that seem to be marginalised from this global society, often couched in terms of ‘tradition’.

Anna Tsing argues that those who claim to be in touch with the universal “are notoriously bad at seeing the limits and exclusions of their knowledge” (2005:8). I would like to suggest that we can see people’s claims about their local stories, about the way they are used to teach outside of school, about the books that have been ‘lost’, as ways of trying to point out and make known these limits and exclusions. In people’s discussions around orality, their folktales and a book that was written in Chitonga, we can see the universals of literacy and school education being contested and questioned, producing frictions which limit the universals ability

149 to seamlessly and smoothly dominate. This is part of the constant navigation of the tensions of aspiration/exclusion embedded in the universal, and a source of its ‘frictions’. In the following chapter I investigate another process of navigation and friction in the engagement of young readers with the fantasy fiction that is imported into their libraries.

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CHAPTER 4: Reading Stories Magical epistemologies and fantasy f(r)iction

Chisomo and I are sitting in an empty classroom in Bandawe Girls Secondary School chatting about fantasy books. It is a cool day, the rainy season has come and we are enjoying the relief the rains bring from the endless beating heat of the dry season. Chisomo and I have an affinity as lovers of fantasy fiction and enjoy discussing stories and characters. Chisomo is a stout sixteen-year-old girl, with a bubbly and engaging personality, who laughs frequently, although there are times when she seems shy or insecure. She is, according to all I spoke to, by far the most avid reader at Bandawe Girls Secondary School, fluent in English, and a devoted lover of fantasy fiction. Chisomo, the teachers told me, also often gets into trouble at school and can be “difficult” according to the Deputy Head.

Chisomo’s parents gave her storybooks when she was very young, because “they wanted me to learn English”. She comes from a middle-class Chewa speaking family in the south of country. Her parents, who have separated, both work in research, and so there were always books in her home. She read her first novel at

age 11 and remembers the title clearly - “The Dragonslayer”.88 “I should say, I believed in fairytales”, she confesses to me, “I believed there was a unicorn, I believed there was a what? A Cinderella?”. Although she no longer believes in fairytales, she tells me that she thinks that dragons could be real, and probably live in Scotland, and still holds the hope that one day she might also have a fairy godmother. She tells her parents about her books, and the stories she reads, but, she says, “most of the time they think I am crazy”, releasing a throaty laugh.

She enjoys reading about vampires and werewolves and how they were mortal enemies. I ask her what she thinks of them. She looks at me a little sceptically and then tells me, “people say these things don’t exist, but these people [who write the books] they were trained to show us that these things do exist, they behave like this […] a person can’t just make up something and then that something everyone knows or could try to act that way”. I ask her if she is not afraid of these things. She tells me, “I am only afraid when I am reading these things during the night….and

88 Dragon Slayer Academy series (1997-2012) by Kate McMullan.

151 most of the time when there is no electricity [but when I am afraid] I sing that song, I feel like my mother is by my side […] and I also pray, ’cause when you pray, you are like taking all your fears and you are leaving them in the hands of God”. Why would she choose to read books that make her afraid? Because she believes “reading is the greatest talent that God gave me [and when I am reading a book] I feel like I am the princess of books, or something. It makes me feel superior or something. And it opens up my mind”.

What about Harry Potter, I ask? Chisomo responds with unbridled enthusiasm, telling me how those books really taught her about the “the power of friendship [and that] best friends always do everything together, and best friends always fight for each other […] and that only makes me love that book, because one day! That will be me, I’m having a friend, a best friend!”. As she says this, her bubbly enthusiasm disappears, and she goes quiet, looking out the classroom window with a sudden sadness in her demeanour. She turns to me and tells me that she used to have a best friend who was always there for her, but then “people started telling her, don’t be walking with that one, she just spends her time reading novels, and things like that”. Her friend is now “associating with a new group […] and when I see her with that group, I think maybe I should just take a novel and just go”. People say she reads too many novels, “You see, people, they thought of me like I am strange, because the novels which like….they say…for example the Harry Potter novels, most of them they thought that maybe…, you know, the way people think, we think in different ways…they think they are going to influence me like…”

She then tells me about another of her favourite series, the Percy Jackson series, “everyone, when they look at that novel, they think, I can’t read that novel, they say, ‘no, that means this girl isn’t right’ [or like] one day, when I was in the library I was carrying Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and a form IV called me and I asked, ‘What’s up?’ and she said, ‘Why are you going to read that novel?’, ‘Which novel?’, ‘The one which you are carrying in your hands. I hate that novel […] it is no good reading that novel, it’s going to influence you, you only dream about those things, there is no truth’...You know, I tried to say, ‘you see, these things are just fantasies’. […]…a number of people here, they are just like, ‘these books are bad’. They are going to teach me to do this and this…but I say sometimes a book is just a book, it’s not like they are spell books for witches! No! There are no spells in

152 that book! It’s just the way your mind is interested in reading that book” she protests, clearly somewhat frustrated by the way in which her fellow school mates make judgements of the books she reads, “but they still don’t understand” she sighs. But, despite her own defences of the books, Chisomo still tells me she thinks much of what happens in Harry Potter is real. “JK Rowling”, she says, “wanted to tell us that witches do exist. I can say, like, they do exist […] and again, wizards, they are indeed here. She wanted to show us that, these people, they are there, they do this.” Chisomo enjoys talking, and our conversation flows for a long time, until we are cut short by the school bell, summoning her to her next class. As she goes out the door, I shout goodbye and tell her I look forward to our next chat.

Unbeknown to me it was the last time I got to talk to Chisomo. Two weeks later she ran away from school in the middle of the night, for difficult personal reasons, leaving a suicide note on her dorm room bed. She was found by police the following day but forbidden to return to the school for “misbehaviour”, as the Deputy Head told me. Chisomo showed me the immense joy readers could find in reading fantasy fiction, but also the ways in which it could isolate a young girl in a world in which there was a moral ambiguity about her reading and an uncertainty among her peers about the nature of the books. She was someone who loved the worlds and characters that fantasy fiction could offer, but in this love had to navigate how to indulge in and make sense of these worlds within the framework of a magic that she believed in and was sometimes also afraid of. Chisomo was by far the most avid and enthusiastic reader I encountered during my fieldwork, but the questions and struggles she faced, the passions she felt for the books coupled with the difficulties of negotiating reading them, were themes I found in conversations with all the fantasy fiction readers I encountered in the field.

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Introduction: reading worlds of magic

In Chapter One, I explored various libraries in my field site, filled with, and sometimes built for, books flowing into them from across the Anglophone world. There I discussed how the universal of literacy, in Malawi English literacy, operates to mobilise and motivate global entanglements that bring parochial English language fiction literature into rural Malawian villages. A large number of these books are Anglophone fantasy and fairytale books. In Chapters Two and Three, I showed what stories mean to people in my field site and how they are connected to ideas of didacticism and morality. This context is crucial for making sense of the concerns and fears that parents and readers have around reading fantasy fiction. In this chapter I turn to those who are reading stories, engaging more thoroughly with the people who choose to go to the libraries and take fantasy fiction books from them. My focus is on how people’s own ontologies affect what stories do – how rural village readers of fantasy fiction take it up and ‘grab hold’ of it through the universal of English literacy, but also reform and reshape it through their own understandings of how stories work, what stories do, and what the possibilities of their worlds are — in witchcraft and magic.

As mentioned in Chapter One, the majority of readers who make use of the libraries available to them, particularly at Tupane and Bandawe Girls Secondary school, use them to access textbooks and school books. The libraries are seen, for the most part, as an extension of the education system, as places where schooling and learning can be expanded through greater access to books. Although most of the readers who come to the libraries do so in order to improve their English and schooled knowledge, some choose to delve into the reading of fiction. In the primary schools, the younger readers at libraries tend to gravitate more towards children’s storybooks with their large, colourful pictures and simple English, rather than novels, textbooks or information books. The older readers, at the secondary schools or at the Tupane library, however, are far more likely to take out fiction novels. Due to the difficulties posed by English, discussed in Chapter Two, very few primary school children can engage with the written texts in books if there are more than a few lines. At all the primary schools there are, however, a number of enthusiastic exceptions, a small handful of children, like Daniel, discussed in this chapter, whose English is advanced enough to access the books, or children such as those at Nola’s book club, who are helped to make sense of the books.

Although other fiction works are read by a number of people, students and non-students alike, I would like to turn to fantasy fiction books in this chapter. Fantasy fiction, like all genres

154 of fiction a somewhat broad and amorphous category, essentially includes magical or supernatural elements, like magic wands or magical creatures such as vampires, witches, wizards, genies, or elves (Nikolajeva 2003:140). Children’s and young adult fantasy fiction provides an interesting ethnographic object of study in my field site for two reasons. First, it is a relatively new genre in the area, which has primarily entered through the books donated to libraries. Second, and most salient for this work, is its overt inclusion of, or reliance on, themes of magic and the supernatural. In Malawi, as in most of southern Africa, magic (masenga) is real for the majority of people, as are various supernatural powers and beings, Satanism (and Satanists),

‘witches’89 (afwiti), or creatures such as ndondocha90 or bloodsuckers (anamapopa), rumours of whose appearance plagued villages in the south of the country in November 2017.

In this chapter, I seek to explore the ways in which people, in particular young people, who live in a world in which magic, witchcraft and the supernatural are real and part and parcel of their daily lives, engage with and understand the fantasy fiction books they read. In Section One, I begin by situating the chapter in the literature of anthropology of reading and the emergence of the genre of fantasy fiction. I do this first in order to show the challenges of doing ethnographic work on reading, and second in order to elucidate how the ontological underpinnings of the genre are different to those found in my field site. In Section Two, I begin by exploring the feelings that parents and villagers have towards fantasy fiction, showing how in a world with magic in which stories are frequently seen as core components of knowledge transmission and teaching, the themes of fantasy fiction produce fears and insecurities in parents. I then turn to the young readers of fantasy fiction, exploring two examples in order to unpack the works the readers engage with and the ways in which they do this. The first example is of readers at Bandawe Girls Secondary School. At this school a number of girls enjoy reading fantasy fiction, but some concerns and fears have come up around the nature of these books,

89 ‘Witches’ and ‘witchcraft’ are both emic English terms used by my interlocutors to speak about afwiti and ufwiti. The terms have a problematic history, with contention over their use waxing and waning. Despite the negative connotations historically associated with the terms in the Anglophone world, and the history of the use of the terms to depict Africans as ‘backward’ or ‘primitive’ and to enact enormous violence against them, following Geschiere and Niehaus I have chosen to use the English terms ‘witches’ and ‘witchcraft’. Geschiere (1995) argues that although witchcraft and sorcery have “strongly moralizing connotations”, anthropologists should nonetheless stick to these emic translations which best express “the fierceness with which the modern implications of these forces are discussed in Africa” (p. 13-14). Niehaus (2010) tells us that these English terms have become ubiquitous in their use across Africa, and have been taken up by many Africans on their own terms in order to articulate “witchcraft as real and appropriate it as a marker of a unique African identity” (p. 66). This term is also used to make clear how readers of fantasy fiction find themselves identifying the ‘witchcraft’ and ‘magic’ they read about in these books as potentially related to their own occult-based belief systems. While the terms ‘witchcraft’ and ‘witch’ are the terms used by my interlocutors and will be used here, this does not mean that the English terms circumscribe the practices, means and methods of ufwiti. Like all African occult and magical sytems, the ufwiti of the villages I worked in is its own unique system. This will be discussed in more detail later in the chapter. 90 Small imp-like magical familiar type creatures that work in service of witches.

155 particularly around the Percy Jackson series. The second example looks at readers of the Harry Potter series, exploring the ways in which readers make sense of the books as part of a world with witchcraft and magic.

What we see with the young readers of fantasy fiction is how young people who are able to enter into the worlds contained within the books in the libraries make sense of and navigate these books, what happens when young people whose world confirms the existence of magic and witchcraft find themselves reading novels that deal heavily with precisely these themes. As Marilyn Cohen states, “literature stimulates a critical sociological imagination by allowing readers to take a fresh look at social norms in their own culture that they have taken for granted” (2013:8). We also see how the readers come to think of the broader world differently, one in which themes familiar to them, but which they were told were local to the African context, are shown to have a universality to them, which enfolds the readers into a larger globality of magic.

Section One: Situating reading, fiction and magic

Anthropology and history of reading

The study of reading and readers has proven to be a significant challenge for anthropologists. While intense engagement with literature as a medium was key to one of anthropology’s more significant turns, the literary turn of the 1990s (see Clifford and Marcus 1986; Geertz 2003), the study of literature as an ethnographic object, or of people’s engagement with literature, has received far less attention in the discipline – particularly when that literature is fiction. Johannes Fabian suggests that while “nothing human” is meant to escape anthropological attention, reading and readers have failed to become a rubric of standard ethnographic investigation (1993:80). In his 2018 review article on ‘Literature and Reading’ in anthropology, Adam Reed notes that the anthropology of literature “remains a puzzling subdiscipline” that is surprisingly underdeveloped (p. 34). And even within this puzzling subdiscipline, Reed tells us, “the field is not principally defined by ethnographic encounters with literary objects or cultures, and it is certainly not defined by descriptions of literature and reading” (ibid.).

In his review, Reed examines “why anthropologists have had so little to say about fiction reading or fiction readers as ethnographic subjects”, particularly of novels, suggesting that perhaps the heavy emphasis on oral literature within anthropology has left engagements with

156 written literature on the margins (ibid.). Equally, as a deeply interior act, reading is difficult to observe exteriorly, even if “inner ‘explosions’, of extraordinary, dramatic events” are taking place in the reader, they are often only “revealed on the surface, if at all, by a stray tear or uncontrolled chuckle” (ibid.:20). Jonathan Boyarin, in his field defining edited volume on The Ethnography of Reading (1993) has argued that the “isolated individual reader” is more a stereotype than a reality, as all reading is “socially embedded” because no individual could become a reader without the skills for reading, access to books, the stories that have been written, and the space and time for reading — all of which are socially derived (Collinson 2009:32).

Historians of reading in the Euro-American context paint a picture of a gradually shifting tension between reading as a social act and reading as a private act. Their history depicts a transformation from a collective experience of literature in the medieval period, in which reading was often a public affair, with a text read out loud to a group of listeners, from the court to the home, to a personal or solitary experience of literature defined by the silent act of individual reading by the end of the nineteenth century (Chartier 1994; Manguel 1997; Reed 2018:35). While the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century rapidly increased the spread of reading, it remained a relatively elite pursuit for the select few until the nineteenth century (Chartier 1994; Manguel 1997:135). In the sub-Saharan African context, where reading and alphabetic literacy were the companions of colonialism, reading as an elite pursuit was the case well into the twentieth century, and still remains the case in some areas today (Davis et al. 2018).

During the nineteenth century, reading came to be seen not only as an important leisure activity for many classes, but also as a key part of public life, “yoking [...] reading and public life” together (Wadsworth 2006:3). It was believed that reading was key to cultivating an “inward virtue” (ibid.) and that this virtue was a core component of producing good citizens of the nation and producing the “moral sentiments” necessary for compassionate living (Englund 2015), a not dissimilar disposition towards stories to that which has been attributed to nthanu as described in Chapter Two (see also McHenry 2002:19). Only at the beginning of the twentieth century, however, did the act of reading aloud, in a family or friendship group or in a reading club, come fully to an end (Wadsworth 2006:19). As books became cheaper and smaller during the nineteenth century, reading privately, reading for pleasure, and reading in secluded spaces shifted from being seen as strange to becoming ever-more the norm (Manguel 1997:189-191).

In my field site, however, silent reading alone is still seen by some as a strange endeavour. As Simon Tinto, a young teacher at Bandawe Girls put it, “our culture does not promote reading as much as we should [if you are seen reading] you seem like someone who is showing off […]

157 and you are associated with English culture. Only English people should be reading on a plane!” By this he meant that for a Malawian to read privately in public spaces would be unacceptable. Simon, who likes to read, says “most of the time I like to isolate myself to read”, so that others cannot see him in the act.

Simon’s words encapsulate a key duality of reading. Reading has the capacity to simultaneously divorce us from the world around us, putting us “alone together” (Manguel 1997:6) in conversation with words on a page, whilst also bringing us into a new world, into a world of shared readerships, shared tales, and intimate engagement with the minds and experiences of others. It both separates us and brings us together: in the case of Chisomo, we clearly see her struggling with this tension.

This tension is also one which makes the anthropological study of reading challenging. While Boyarin’s (1993) ethnographic work shows that the reading of many canonical texts, such as the Talmud or Gospel, is part of deeply shared and often oral and ritualised reading traditions, and therefore more frequently studied by anthropologists, readers of fiction tend to lean towards being those stereotypically isolated individual readers. This means that for ethnographers trying to study fiction reading, the methodological challenges of an ethnographic exploration remain formidable. In my own field site, the vast distances between homes and their relative privacy, meant that I was seldom able to ‘catch people in the act’ of reading. At the book clubs and library reading hours, I could observe young people in the act of reading, but outside of this it was very hard to ‘follow’ the readers. As a result, much of my work on reading comes from discussions and from readers’ own thoughts and explanations about their reading. This follows the format of numerous other ethnographies of readers and reading, in which the readers discursive constructions take primacy as ‘data’ (see for example Collinson 2009; Radway 1997; Reed 2011).

Fantasy fiction: the making of a genre

In the African context there has been a recent surge in interest in the print, text and book cultures of southern Africa, seen for example in the publication in 2018 of a special issue on ‘Print Culture in Southern Africa’ in the Journal of Southern African Studies (Davis et al.). The majority of this work, however, lies mostly within the field of history and focuses on non-fiction texts such as newspapers or periodicals (see for example Mkhize 2018; Newell 2013; Peterson et al. 2016).

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Fantasy fiction, the genre that lies at the heart of this chapter, has received almost no ethnographic attention on the continent.

Fantasy fiction as a genre emerged in mid-nineteenth century Europe from its much older precursor, the fairy tale or folktales (Atterby 2012; Knuth 2012; Nikolajeva 2003). It is likely that fairy tales first emerged in written form in sixteenth-century Italy and were then refined in seventeenth-century France and given their nomenclature: ‘Contes des Feés’ (Zipes 1997:16- 17; 2006; 2012). Despite now being seen essentially as a genre for children early written-down fairy tales, whose dark themes were seen to “fall outside the bounds of moralized tale-telling maternal instruction”, were often seen as inappropriate for children (Rowe 2005:57; see also Townsend 2003:30; Webb 2006:72). This substantially changed in the nineteenth century, widely considered to be the ‘golden age’ of children’s literature, where fiction moved from being a niche interest to the most popular genre being published (Grenby 2009; Rudd 2010; Wadsworth 2006:17). As the bourgeois middle-class expanded so did literacy and consumerism. As a result, adult and young readers began to emerge as separate readerships with separate books and genres being produced for them — children became a new literary consumer class for the publishing industry, and books were increasingly written for their taste and consumption (Briggs 2005:74; Knuth 2012:3; Townsend 2003:13; Webb 2006:72). The concomitant emergence of children’s literature as a genre was both the product of, and helped produce, a huge shift in the social construction of childhood (Wadsworth 2006:18). In the course of the nineteenth century, ideas of childhood in Euro-America changed from seeing children as mini-adults who had to mostly be physically taken care of until mature, to seeing them as innocent beings possessed of a Lockian tabula rasa which needed to be delicately shaped and formed (Grenby 2009; Immel 2009:19; Locke 1824; Stevenson 2009; Wadsworth 2006:17). This changing conception of children not only hugely influenced the literature that was published for them, but equally undergirds the school system that emerged in order to shape and form these children (Collins and Blot 2003:7; Knuth 2012:11).

It was in this world of a changing construction of childhood, a growing middle-class, and a developing market of children’s literature that Lewis Carroll published Alice in Wonderland (1865), considered by many to be the first children’s fantasy fiction book (James and Mendelsohn 2012; Nikolajeva 2012:50). Fantasy fiction, it is argued, was only able to emerge as a genre of children’s literature within a very particular historical and social contingency: against the backdrop of Enlightenment rationalism, industrialisation and the scientific revolution (Coats 2012; Rudd 2010; Zipes 1985). With the firm establishment of the idea of scientifically provable

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‘fact’ within scientific discourses, ‘fiction’, and particularly fiction which dealt with supernatural or absurdist themes, was able to expand as an acceptable realm for the dalliances of the child’s imagination (Coats 2010; Rustin 1986; LarWebb 2006).

The gradual shift in the conception of the imagination was also pertinent for the emergence of the genre. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century the imagination was seen primarily as a “‘mirror’ of the external world”, but with Romanticism the idea of the mirror became supplanted with “a view of the imagination as a ‘lamp’ illuminating the unseen worlds beyond perceived reality” (Wolfe 2012:8). The result of this was that things that may previously have been considered out of bounds for children – such as magic or the supernatural - became firmly entrenched within their literature. Contemporary children’s and young adult literature is saturated with magical and supernatural themes, evident in some of the most popular children’s literature works of the twenty-first century, such as Harry Potter, and the Twilight series.

Within the African context, however, this ontological division does not manifest in the same way. As Francis Nyamnjoh states in his discussion of the Cameroonian “popular epistemological order”, “under the dominant western import reality is presented as anything whose existence has, or can be, established in a rational, objective manner” creating a dichotomous world of “the real and the unreal” (2001:29). However, Nyamnjoh argues, “most of Africa does not subscribe to the same dichotomies” (ibid.). In contrast, the epistemologies of the continent build “bridges between or [marry] the so-called natural and supernatural, rational and irrational, […] visible and invisible, real and unreal” (ibid.). In those parts of the African landscape marked by this kind of epistemology, or ontology, therefore, the divisions that facilitated the burgeoning of fantasy fiction as a literary genre for children, do not exist. The ontological worlds in which fantasy fiction emerged are thus very different to the ontological worlds into which it is being brought in rural Malawi.

Magic and witchcraft in Africa

Questions of magic and witchcraft and other constituent occult elements have formed a core part of the anthropology of the African continent. Like much of the discipline’s relationship to the continent, anthropology’s interest in and explanations of witchcraft have been fraught with contention. From James Frazer’s classification of magical and occult beliefs as the ‘primitive’ precursor to formalized religion, through Edward E. Evans-Pritchard’s rationalisations of

160 witchcraft as natural and moral philosophies, to the general avoidance of the question in the 1970s and 1980s, the discipline has sought to make sense of witchcraft in ways that often resulted in it being seen as backwardt or primitive (Evans-Pritchard 1935, 1937; Frazer 2003; Mills 2013; Niehaus 2005; Pels 2003).

In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, anthropological work in Africa aided the colonial imagination in pitting ‘witchcraft’ against European rationalism as one of the defining features of African ‘otherness’. African ‘witchcraft’ was seen by many as a strange and superstitious belief system, the supposed foreignness of which cemented the alien nature, and often congruent ‘primitiveness’, of African subjects (Fields 1982; Pels 1998, 2003). Through this, witchcraft, which had long been part of Europe’s own history, was separated out from the European self-imagination, depicted as incongruous with European rationalism and

Enlightenment thinking, and made exclusively the purview of the ‘primitive’.91

With the creation of the colonial ‘Witchcraft Ordinances’, the valence of this ‘otherness’ was fully and violently entrenched. The Witchcraft Ordinances were part of the early twentieth- century British colonial governance in Africa, intended to “stop both the accusation of witches and their trial” (Fields 1982:576). The Ordinances turned witchcraft into a crime, focusing particularly on making it illegal for anyone to accuse anyone else of being a witch or to hold witchcraft trials – a practice which had a long tradition as an important part of local judicial systems.92 The Ordinances, however, were also clearly worded and stated to give witchcraft the status of “a superstitious belief”, a non-reality, a clearly false or mistaken worldview which one could legally punish people for holding (Fields 1982:576). The Zambian Ordinance of 1914, for example, stated, “Whoever holds himself out as a witchdoctor or witch finder or pretends to exercise or use any kind of supernatural power, witchcraft, sorcery, or enchantment shall be guilty of an offense” (ibid.). Some of the more severe ordinances also meted out heavy punishment for any mention of occult forces, any knowledge of charms, or even merely just being present at a witch-trial (Browne 1935). The punishments for these ‘crimes’ consisted of imprisonment for years, extortionate fines, or even public lashings of up to twenty-five lashes (ibid.). Through these severe and often heavy-handed punishments, the colonial authorities

91 It has been argued that this separation, while managing to convince many Europeans that they did not ‘suffer’ from superstitious occult beliefs, was an entirely false equivocation, as occult, magic, and witchcraft beliefs continued to be present in Europe, are so up until this day (see particularly Pels 1998, 2003). 92 In Malawi, the 1911 Witchcraft Act instituted by the British Government is still in force and the basis for witchcraft law in the country, although it has undergone numerous review processes, the most recent of which was in 2018, in order to reconsider the law (Kumwenda 2018; Malawi Law Commission 2009). Until it is fully reviewed the law remains in force, something that my interlocutors seemed to be aware of, as I was often told by people in the village that in Malawi witchcraft does not exist according to state law.

161 instrumentalised African indigenous beliefs and ontologies against Africans, as a political tool of oppression used to enact enormous physical, psychological and epistemic violence upon, purportedly, ‘irrational’ African subjects.

The lumping of African occult beliefs under the singular term ‘witchcraft’, all of which could equally be persecuted under the laws of the Witchcraft Ordinances, committed a further violence upon African beliefs – it erased the complex diversity of these beliefs across the continent under a singular term, eliminating not only the possibility for vastly different beliefs but also the possibility that these beliefs might not always be directly related to occult powers or magic (for example the conception that witchcraft can also mean mundane acts done with the intention to harm others). Compounding this was the use of the English term ‘witchcraft’, which has its own long history with its own assumptions and beliefs. The colonial renderings of African belief-systems as witchcraft embedded the complexity of local practices in extant European imaginaries, on the one hand allowing a further self-distancing of Europeans from their own witchcraft history as something primitive and past, and on the other, cementing African belief- systems as based in negatively tainted magical practices that have no hold on reality.

This complex and difficult history of the term witchcraft, which was enmeshed in the study of the practices by anthropologists, and then mobilised within colonial rubrics, led the discipline to shy away from any intensive study of the theme of witchcraft in the 1970s and 1980s (Masquelier 2004; Mills 2013). In the 1990s however, particularly with the work of Jean and John Comaroff (1993), there was a resurgence in interest in the subject, which sought to bring witchcraft beliefs into the fold of modernity by positing witchcraft discourses as a way to engage with the challenges of modernity. This approach, which was continued by other scholars, received significant push-back for limiting the possible modalities and meanings of witchcraft on the continent (see for example Englund 1996; Kapferer 2002; Moore and Sanders 2001; Sanders 2003). It has been argued that rather than limiting witchcraft to being about modernity, witchcraft’s multiple modalities need to be recognised and researched (Englund 1996), that witchcraft should also sometimes be understood as being about tradition (Sanders 2003), or that it can be synonymous with either tradition or modernity (Smith 2008). Following this work, some anthropologists have argued for witchcraft’s own ontological possibilities (Goslinga 2013) or its discursive nature (West 2007; see also Niehaus 2005) or as a space for scepticism and laughter (van Dijk 2001). On the other hand, some African scholars have critiqued anthropology’s normalisation of the discourse of witchcraft as harmful to the continent’s desire to “move toward modernization” (Ngong 2012:144). Other scholars have sought to show how

162 magic and magical thinking is, and always has been, a part of all human societies and remains culturally at home within modernity (Meyer and Pels 2003).

The question of whether witchcraft is ‘real’ or not, and in what ways it could be understood and ‘explained’ is one which underpinned much of twentieth-century anthropological research. This question also lay at the heart of the much of the colonial violence against and othering of African belief systems, in which the clear determination that witchcraft cannot be real was used to legitimate colonial violence.The intention of this work, however, is not to question whether or not witchcraft is ‘real’ in Malawi and why people do or do not believe in it. Nor is it to provide an explanation for witchcraft as a phenomenon in the region. For this work, questioning the ‘reality’ or ‘non-reality’ of witchcraft already imputes that there is something which must be questioned. Here, in line with the calls of the ontological turn to take the ontologies of our interlocutors seriously,93 and following Martha Kaplan’s argument that the question itself of whether magic is real is steeped in particular rationalities, constellations of power and “colonial knowing and classifying” (Kaplan 2003:186), I choose not to be “bound to the problem of reason” in the discussion of witchcraft and magic (Kapferer 2002:2). Rather, I keep open the agnostic acceptance that that witchcraft and magic could be possible, and that for the majority of my interlocutors they are real. What is of interest in this work is not to explain witchcraft but to understand the ways in which parents and young people articulate their thoughts and fears about magic and witchcraft in relation to its presence in fantasy fiction.

Section Two: fearing fantasy, reading fantasy

Fantasy fiction is “a very bad thing”: transgressing boundaries

Fantasy fiction, with its magical and supernatural themes, is a genre that seems to travel with greater difficulty than most. While the majority of adults I spoke to were in general very happy for their children to read imported English books, they were, for the most part, very unhappy for their children to read books if they had anything magical or supernatural in them. For the majority of Malawians who share a similar “epistemological order” as the one outlined by Nyamnjoh, the magical and the supernatural are not elements that have been designated ‘non-

93 For discussion of the ontological turn and taking interlocutors’ ontologies seriously, see Goslinga 2013; Holbraad 2010, 2012; Holbraad et al. 2014; Mol 2002, 2014; Pederson 2012, 2014; Viveiros de Castro 1992, 2003, 2014a.

163 real’ and therefore ‘safe for the consumption of children’ as in Euro-America, rather they are very real and potentially rather dangerous.

The magical and occult themes of fantasy fiction produce a lot of anxiety and fear in many parents and adults. In the words of *Orton Mwase, a man in his eighties living alone in an almost completely bare mud-brick hut at the bottom end of Chituka, reading fantasy fiction books “is a very bad thing” because “you go on trying to search how can I practice what I read from the book [and] at the end you become a witch”. His statement reflects one of the most prominent concerns of parents and adults in relation to fantasy books — namely the fear that they would teach children magical practices. Many of the people I spoke to believe that children will copy anything they hear or read in a book or story. As sixty-three-year-old *Maud Phiri told me, books with bad themes are a problem because, “the children reading that book will practice the very same thing they are reading.” Or Teacher Frank, who despite very much approving of imported books in general was very concerned by the thought that some of them might contain magical elements, claiming that “after reading, it’s like theory […] the children will practice what they read, and if they read about magic, they will practice that”.

A very similar concern was expressed by Luando, a volunteer ECD teacher in his mid-thirties and a father of two. He felt that:

if [a child] look these stories which doesn’t exist, so when they see maybe some pictures of these things, the example you give, somebody with four legs [my attempt to describe aliens], maybe they will go to their parents and ask, ‘Mother and father, who has four legs, how can somebody have four legs, and how should I? Maybe I need to have four legs.’ So because of the magic system and the practice of witchcraft, the kids will be taken to be taught something like that which we physically never see [….] maybe they will be taken to start practising witchcraft [because they want] something which we don’t see here, so they will create their own things, maybe having the wings to fly or something like that…[…]…because of reading such books, they will start to make their own things, so because of the magic system maybe they will go and ask, I want to make this….

*Silias Luwo is an elderly villager in Kamwala who loves to read, particularly Jehovah’s Witness materials in Chitonga. Silias also draws a firm line at the reading of books with magical or supernatural themes. He feels that imported books are good if “they teach good norms, good behaviour”, but some books teach bad behaviour, like pornography or karate, and “if they are

164 coming in [to the community], meaning the children might imitate those behaviours”. And magic books are even more worrying. Silias shakes his head when thinking of them and says that even if those stories are not actually true, “if they have been occupied by the minds of the children” then the children “might think it’s real”, and they might “come to fear what is in those books”, and at this point, he reiterates, they might be “eager to put into practice what they have read about”. In Tonga culture, Silias reminds us, it is advised to parents to bring up their children in good behaviour, but if they read about magic they will “be planted with two values of life”, the good values of the community and the bad values of magic.

The fear that children might copy what they hear in stories or might be confused about what is real and what is not, is already present in the telling of oral stories. As discussed in the previous chapter, stories are not necessarily seen as evidently or immediately separate from truth – as is made clear when nthanu are ended with the phrase “nthanu ndi boza, yamala penipo” (the story is falsehoods/made-up and it ends here). This phrase is akin to the phrase ‘and they lived happily ever after’ – it is a “genre marker” (Barber 2007a:78) that is intended to signal that the story being heard is an nthanu and made-up, and therefore should be understood within that framework. When I asked Norma the day after ‘nthanu night’ why people always say this at the end of nthanu, she told me, “they don’t want people to really like believe, they should know it’s a tale and not something that really happened […] we tell those stories to kids, and kids want to practice the things we tell them, so they just say, nthanu ndi boza […] so that they don’t start thinking chickens would actually work”. Another version of this ending that I heard was ‘nthanu yaboza ndi ya uneneska, yamala penipo’ (the story is falsehoods and it is true, it ends here). It was explained to me that this is to indicate that some parts of the story are true, such as the lesson it teaches, and some are false, such as the idea that a monkey and hyena can talk and be friends.

Stories’ potential for being interpreted as truth and being something that children would want to copy if they felt there was truth to it, makes adults very concerned that if children read about magical things, they would seek to put these things into practice. These fears of parents also complicated the division articulated in the previous chapter between the truth of oral and written stories. It seems that although Nthanu za Chitonga does not state that its stories are ‘boza’, the divide between written truth and spoken truth may not be simple or clear cut.

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Witchcraft is taught

Another element that makes parents fear that children would “put into practice what they have read about” is due to the way in which children are expected to learn. In my field site, one key way in which skills are imparted from parents, elders and community members to the next generation outside of school, is through a process of observation, followed by copying and repetition (but generally not much questioning or verbalisation) — a way of learning that has been documented in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa (see Chirwa and Naidoo 2014; Lancy and Grove 2011:286; Lancy 2017:48-49; Montgomery 2009; Stevenson-Hinde 1998). Children are very much expected to try out the things that they see adults doing, something that is often encouraged in their imaginative play, where they pretend to cook, often with real fires, or hoe gardens, or build houses, among many other things, as part of their learning process. When expanded to books, this way of learning opens up the possibility of concern that children will copy what they hear in stories or read in books.

This problem is compounded by the way in which witchcraft is understood in Malawi. In Malawi, witchcraft is seen as a “learned practice” (Englund 2007:301), rather than an inherent or born trait as in many other places, such as among the Azande or the Akan in Ghana (Evans- Pritchard 1937; Reis 2013:624). In West Africa, Ria Reis claims, it is clear that the “evildoing at stake [in child-witch accusations] seems to be an ontological one: the issue is not so much about doing evil as about being evil” (2013:628). In Malawi however, the case is quite different – there is it very much about doing evil, and not being evil. For example, someone can have occult powers, but if they do not use them to do evil, then they are not a witch. An example from the other side comes from my ambuya, Nola’s mother, who told me witchcraft is anyone doing something malicious to harm or kill another person, whether they use magic or not. Witchcraft, therefore, is the act of doing evil.94

This difference, articulated in the ways in which the ‘evils’ of witchcraft is understood, highlights an important point about African ‘witchcraft’, briefly touched on in the discussion of colonial imaginaries of witchcraft. While ‘witchcraft’, as a general form (and English term) is ubiquitous across the continent, and used emically by many Africans when speaking English, as noted previously, there is no such thing as an ‘African’ witch and ‘African’ witchcraft – these

94 James Howard Smith identifies a similar argument on witchcraft in Kenya where, when asking whether a woman who had used occult powers in blessing was a witch, he was told “no! a witch is a person who hates others” (2008:95).

166 must continue to be seen as pluralities which can have radical differences across the continent (Sanders 2003). In the same vein, there cannot be a singular macro-sociological argument which seeks to encompass all modalities and meanings of witchcraft across the continent (Bonhomme 2012). Each country and each case must be understood and analysed as its own, within its own contexts and meanings.

In Malawi, therefore, magical powers are not something one is born with but rather something that is learned. As James told me, “magic is about your ancestors and the types of trees they tell you to use”, teaching you about munkhwala wa vimiti, medicine from trees. This is how, I was told, ng’anga receive their magical knowledge. All three ng’anga I visited told a story of not having any magical powers or knowledge until they went through a period of illness or madness, in which they met their ancestors’ spirits, were shown around the forests and told about all the plants around them and their magical qualities and healing powers. James also used the logic that magic involves a lot of knowledge about trees that comes from the ancestors to explain to me why there was much less witchcraft in Europe. He argued that because the trees that are needed for magic do not grow there, and because Europeans do not honour their ancestors and therefore cannot communicate with them, it is difficult for witchcraft and magic to be as powerful and present there. He was later, however, as shall be discussed below, quite convinced through his reading and watching of Harry Potter, that Europeans clearly have some rather similar magic to Malawians.

This type of learning and teaching leads to the path of becoming a ng’anga (although the magic learned can be used to do witchcraft). Witches are, however, commonly taught their powers by other witches. This is particularly the case, I was told, for children. Children are considered especially vulnerable to witchcraft as they are weaker and more impressionable than adults and more likely to be easily tempted or coerced.95 As a result, children are believed to often be the pawns or acolytes of witches. Witches achieve this by coming into the houses at night to steal children away while they are sleeping. What exactly they do with the children varies according to whom one asks. Many told me that the children are taken to foreign countries such as Mozambique, Tanzania or Zambia, where they play football with the severed heads of the witches’ victims. The owners of these heads would then wake up the next day with a severe headache, or with psychological disturbances or potentially fatal injuries (see Englund 2007 for

95 Boys, one interlocutor claimed, are more likely to be able to resist the witches than girls because they have stronger will power, and so “it is easier to make a girl child to do magic”.

167 similar tales). Others told me that children were taken to graveyards where they would eat human flesh.

What witches do with the children they take is ultimately only known through the stories that the children themselves tell. Generally, families find out that children have been taken through the children’s own confessions, when children come to their parents or relatives to tell them of their night-time escapades. Others find out through what I have been told are tell-tales signs, such as a child being constantly fatigued during the day, waking up with bruises or suddenly behaving aggressively or disrespectfully. When pushed these children may confess to being taken at night. Ultimately, it is believed, if they have not managed to fight the witches but end up co- opted by them, they will eventually murder their parents, an outcome many parents fear (see Englund 2007:300 for similar fears in Chinsapo township in Lilongwe).

If witchcraft is, by its nature, something that is taught, and learned, then it already slips into close proximity to ideas around learning and didacticism — and, as Englund notes, makes every and any child vulnerable to becoming a pupil (2007:301). This means that parents must take particular care with their children, as they have the potential to learn to become witches, among other things by keeping them away from anything that might make them more interested in learning about witchcraft. This suggests that people live in a world in which the boundaries of the ‘fantastical’ have to be very strictly policed, firstly in order to protect the young people themselves, but secondly also in order to protect their parents and communities. As outlined in Chapter Two, one of the primary roles of parents is to teach their children good moral behaviour — behaving morally is central to community life, and parents and other adults are tasked with ensuring not only that their children know how to behave morally, but also that they stay within the expected moral boundaries. By opening up interest in and information on magic and witchcraft, fantasy fiction however, carries within it the possibility, and for many adults the threat, of transgressing these very moral boundaries.

In his work on Wataita communities in Kenya, James Howard Smith argues that Wataita witchcraft beliefs are about maintaining social boundaries and that examining these beliefs allows us to understand “where [Wataita people] understood threats to order and the good life to emanate from” (2008:91). For the Wataita, Smith argues, witchcraft is synonymous to the breaching of social boundaries, as well as an indicator of the “ambivalence of power and the need for boundaries” (2008:93). In my field site, fantasy fiction with its themes of magic and the occult contains this threat to the social boundaries that are being delineated and through this comes to carry the same kind of boundary breaking potential as witchcraft. This stands in stark

168 contrast to the oral literature stories, nthanu, discussed in Chapter Two, whose purpose is to police these very boundaries. These stories are not only considered to be morally descriptive, but also to be morally normative and to produce ethical ontologies. It is expected and assumed that children take the lessons learnt from stories very seriously and inculcate the morals they carry.

When stories are understood within this rubric, as often containing important moral and social lessons, then stories which contain descriptions of morally deviant behaviour are understandably problematic. In many instances this does not require any form of fantasy, a number of parents articulated a strong dislike for books with sexual themes in them, or portraying forms of crime. Fantasy fiction, however, presents a particular kind of moral deviance, one that threatens to draw a child or young person into the very dangerous worlds of masenga and afwiti. In her work on children mobilising idioms of witchcraft and spirit possession in Uganda as a way of engaging with trauma, Ria Reis suggests that for many children throughout Africa, witchcraft is an essential part of the “moral universe” they are navigating, and that a core tenet of this moral universe is the idea that “being born human, one is immediately partaking in a moral universe where the intrahuman (the intrapsychic) is inescapably intertwined with the interhuman (the social) and the suprahuman (ancestors, spirits, witches)” (Reis, 2013:628). Fantasy fiction inserts itself into this world, one in which children are already constantly navigating the boundaries and possibilities of their moral universe.

One of the ways in which stories transgress moral boundaries is through the imaginative possibilities they open up for children. In his piece on ‘Witchcraft and the limits of mass mediation in Malawi’, Harri Englund suggests that witchcraft should be seen as “one modality of mediating the imagination” and as such can be “reconceived as being about the possibilities of the imagination” (emphasis added, 2007:297, 306). Although Englund’s work focuses primarily on the imagination of sociality, one can stretch this idea to encompass the mediation of children’s imaginations. If witchcraft is entangled in the ‘possibilities of the imagination’, then one could argue that it is also entangled in the possibilities of children’s imaginations, which, as such, must be kept guard over by the adults around them and should not be given the wrong kind of stimulus.96 Englund goes on to state that witchcraft is “one of those unrecognised grounds on which rests the conduct of human lives” surrounded by “moral ambiguity” (ibid.).

96 Children are, for example, encouraged to imaginatively play house (kubaza), play farming, or cooking, or “play to be a doctor or a nurse”, as a one parent said. But, as many of my interlocutors insisted, they should be strongly discouraged from imagining things that are not real, or that they have never seen.

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From my own work it seems clear that witchcraft is very firmly seen as a ‘ground on which rests the conduct of human lives’, steeped in moral ambiguity. It is this centrality in the realm of conduct, and the inherent moral ambiguity that makes witchcraft such treacherous terrain for children, and it is its role in the play of the ‘possibilities of imagination’ that make it so easy for imaginative reading to transgress the boundaries of morality.

Children thus find themselves constantly navigating a ‘moral universe’ imbued with moral ambiguities and possibilities of imagination. In the following section I explore the ways in which young people do the work of this navigation in relation to fantasy fiction through the example of fantasy fiction readers at Bandawe Girls Secondary School.

Bandawe Girls Secondary School and Percy Jackson

One of the primary spaces in which I encountered young readers of fiction of any sort, and fantasy fiction in particular, was at Bandawe Girls Secondary School (BGSS). As described in Chapter One, of all the libraries I studied, this one was by far the busiest and most regularly used. This is hardly surprising, as the library is the main study space for the girls. The fact that the girls also have to read fiction texts as part of their set-works for school, such as Nadine Gordimer’s Country Lovers (1972), also means that they frequently take books out from the library. In the corner stands the cabinet full of young adult fiction books described in Chapter One. It is filled with over 100 young adult and children’s books, the majority of which contain some form of fantasy elements, such as magic, vampires, demons or demigods. It contains five of the

Percy Jackson97 novels, most of The Hunger Games series,98 His Dark Materials (The Northern Lights series),99 A Song of Ice and Fire (the Game of Thrones series),100 the Twilight series,101 The Mortal

Instruments series,102 and four of the Harry Potter books,103 to name just a few of the more famous fantasy books present.

As noted in Chapter One, the books in that particular cabinet were all part of one large donation, made to the school in 2014 by the Beit Trust, through a connection set up by the

97 Rick Riordan, 2005-2009, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Disney Hyperion. 98 Suzanne Collins, 2008-2010, The Hunger Games, Scholastic 99 Philip Pullman, 1995-2000, His Dark Materials, Scholastic. 100 George R.R. Martin, 1996- , A Song of Ice and Fire, Voyager Books 101 Stephanie Meyer, 2005-2008, Twilight, Brown and Company 102 Cassandra Clare, 2007-2014, The Mortal Instruments, Walker Books 103 J.K. Rowling, 1997-2007, Harry Potter, Bloomsbury Publishing

170 school’s previous head teacher, Lawson Kulungila – the man who was responsible for the construction of the library. Lawson explained to me that he gave those books their own cabinet “so they would not be lost in all the other books”. When I asked Lawson how he felt about having a cupboard full of fantasy fiction in his library, he told me, that overall, for him, fantasy fiction books are fine, but “they become dangerous if the child cannot critically think, who is the villain…and what”. By this he meant that those kinds of books could lead to bad things for children who are unable to determine “what is the moral of the story”. In response to my slightly quizzical look, Lawson continued, “if you look at Malawi as a country, our constitution says there is not magics, but there’s a lot of magic belief,104 but these students who come from such a home they will find them [interesting], because they are reading about what they believe, so what happens is that you are going to produce a leader in future who thinks more about magic and that’s dangerous”. According to him, this would damage their decision-making processes, and let them believe “anything bad coming my way is because of magic”, leading them to be suspicious of everybody.

To give an example of how thinking about magic can be very detrimental to young people, Lawson told me the story of his arrival at Bandawe Girls Secondary School. As a highly respected educator and disciplinarian, he was called to Bandawe Girls to help the school in a period of great difficulty. As one of the oldest missionary schools, the school had enjoyed a good reputation and good performance for many years. In the few years before Lawson’s arrival, however, the school had been plagued by significant troubles. As mentioned in Chapter One, one of the key issues faced was the negative impact of the girls’ fears around Satanism and magic, and their accusations against each other.

Matthew Mwase, the Deputy Head Teacher who had been at the school at the time, explained the situation to me:

When I joined the school, in terms of performance, the school was not doing well. So when we sat down as to establishing the reasons as to why students were not performing well, we realised that the…..ah….the girls had beliefs that they were indeed

104 In Malawi, the question of ‘belief’ in witchcraft is ambiguous. Many of my interlocutors, when asked, would tell me that they did not believe in witchcraft. This should not be mistaken as meaning that they do not think witchcraft exists. The way in which belief in witchcraft is mobilized resembles the medieval use of the term, where to ‘believe in God’ was understood to mean “a loyal pledging of oneself to God, a decision and commitment to live one’s life in His service” (Good 2010:70). God was known to be real, and so belief was not a statement of opinion on his veracity, but rather a statement of orientation and commitment. For my interlocutors believing in witchcraft, as adherence to it, is something many of them renounce, either by simply stating that they do not believe in witchcraft, or by professing the counter argument that they are Christians who believe in God. Some say things such as “I am a believer/non-believer” to outline the duality of the notion of the belief.

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failing exams just because of the bad dreams that they had, the mysterious things that they were experiencing […]. Of course, then, they had the belief, because in Africa, here, ah, there are some cases where people say, no, there’s witchcraft, there’s Satanism, there’s something like that. So them too, some of them, not all of them, had that belief, and that could bring fear amongst the students. And that fear again, could also contribute to their failures.

Many girls at the school would have very bad dreams in which they would encounter strange things happening in the school. Although none of the girls currently at the school had been there during the years of troubles, Constance’s daughter Felicity, who had spoken to older girls when she first arrived at the school, told me that they had related stories of girls seeing the Head Mistress’s car in the middle of the dormitory halls at night, hearing her high-heels clacking down corridors, or even seeing her disembodied shoes walking down the hall. The head mistress at the time, I was told, was a very strict woman, and rumours circulated amongst the girls that she was involved in Satanism.

Another prevalent belief, Matthew told me, was that the school’s central mango tree was bewitched. At the opening of the school’s inner quadrant stands a beautiful, old, and very large mango tree enfolding the courtyard in its dark shade and wonderful earthiness. Its size, and the fact that it is the only tree in the middle of the school grounds, lends it a distinctive grandeur. These days, the tree is ringed with benches that are always filled with chatting girls in the afternoons. But, I was told, during the times of trouble at the school, the students were terrified of the tree. Matthew tells me that they believed that it was “a meeting place for the witches and wizards [and that] when someone passes by that big tree, then that tree could get all the[ir] wisdom, all the[ir] intelligence”.

One of the key ways in which these fears caused problems at the school was through the extent to which girls were throwing accusations at each other, but, as Lawson tells me, “even the former Head was saying the girls are satanic”. The girls would accuse other girls of coming to them at night, threatening to harm or kill each other. As Matthew says, it was often the more beautiful girls or the ones who were performing better who were accused. The case has some similarities to cases of ‘mass hysteria’ or ‘mass psychogenic illness’ (MPI).105 However, while

105 For a similar case of students panicking due to believing that there was an evil spirit in their school, see the 2016 case at a Malaysian school (Ewens 2016; Wong and Asher 2016). For examples of ‘mass hysteria’ diagnoses in East and Southern African schools, and an analyses of how stress relates to MPI see Chen et al (2003), Dhadphale and Shaikh (1983), Ebrahim (1968), Govender (2010), Kokota (2011), MacLachlan et al. (1995), Pringle (2015).

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‘mass hysteria’ has often been used to describe incidences of ‘abnormal’ behaviour in African schools, and particularly in girls’ schools, I would refrain from describing the case at Bandawe Girls as such. Not only was the duration far too long, there were also no signs of conversion or any other direct physical responses of hysteria. Equally, the idea of ‘mass hysteria’ is not unproblematic, emergent as it is from scientised discourses around gender, mental health and presumed social norms (Bartholomew 1990, 1994).

This was the atmosphere at the school when Lawson came to take up the position of head teacher. Things completely changed, however, with his arrival. In his four years as head, Lawson managed to totally turn the school around, returning its excellent pass rate and getting many girls into university. He claims that one way he did this was by building a library, as outlined in Chapter One. The other, was by suspending dreaming. On his first day, Lawson called all the girls to assembly in the hall and told them, “from now onwards I have suspended dreaming”. That year was Felicity’s first year at the school, and her very first assembly. She remembers how shocked she was to hear the new head teacher give such a strange order. Lawson could, of course, not actually suspend dreaming. What he did do was forbid any girls from speaking to their friends or gossiping about what they had seen or heard in their dreams – those found doing so were immediately suspended and sent home. Lawson’s strategy was highly effective. All the teachers agree that after his edict the rumours stopped almost immediately, and by the time it had been in force for a few months, the school was completely free of any rumours of Satanism, or accusations of witchcraft. By silencing the girls’ capacity to share rumours with each other, Lawson helped bring to an end years of turmoil and struggle at the school.

Within the African landscape the link between witchcraft, rumours and gossip is one which frequently makes an appearance. Pamela Stewart and Andrew Strathern argue that “rumor and gossip tend to form networks of communication in which fears and uncertainties emerge and challenges to existing power structures can be covertly made or overtly suppressed,” often through witchcraft claims or accusations (2004:xi). This dynamic is visible in the Bandawe Girls case in which it could be argued that the girls’ fears around their academic struggles and insecurities at school coalesced with their challenges against the oppressive strictures of a harsh head teacher. In curtailing the avenues of gossip, by forbidding students to discuss their dreams and therefore fears, it seems Lawson was able to interject into a core component of the accusations at the school. The example at the school lends weight to the argument that gossip plays an important role in witchcraft accusations, including their fermentation and their spread.

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This story of troubles with Satanism at the school provides an important part of the context of a school that now houses a library with a large collection of fantasy fiction, a library that was built by the same head teacher who brought an end to those accusations. In discussing the troubles that the school had been through, Lawson concluded, “I could see how problematic it is to have girls at a girls’ school thinking too much about things like witchcraft and Satanism”. But despite this, Lawson was not overly worried about having a cupboard full of books with magic at the school. He told me, “the good thing is that not many girls are reading those novels”, they prefer to read about love. Then, to my surprise, he added, “if it was a boys’ school, I would be expecting that most of the boys would be reading those novels.” I asked him why, to which he replied, “because boys want to be seen that they are strong, they can do that, girls are more tender.” He then returned to his earlier argument that so long as the girls are aware of the conditions of the books they are reading and able to keep in mind the morals and the lessons of the books, it is alright for them to read them. Echoing Lawson’s perspective, Matthew felt that when the girls read stories about magic or witchcraft, “they can know what happens […] it is their right, their right, to know what is happening out there. Their right. We cannot deny them […] the girls that read [those books], they just take them, and they just understand from the point of view”. In her work on African readers, Karin Barber notes that for many readers the distinction between fictional and informative writing is permeable and many readers of fiction read it precisely in order to “extract a moral and apply it to their own lives” (2001:15), much as they would for nthanu. The following section looks at some fiction readers, exploring how the girls at the school felt about their library and the fantasy fiction books they read from it.

The readers and their library

For many of the girls, the library at the school is the first one they have ever entered into, and often the novels and books they encounter there are the first pieces of fiction outside of their school curriculum that they read. For Samantha, a Form IV girl from Chifira, stepping into a library for the first time made her “feel good” because she felt “I can get more knowledge seeing all of those books”. Samantha’s parents are small-scale farmers, who work hard to keep their daughter in secondary school, an awareness that Samantha does not carry without difficulty, as she speaks with a sense of sadness, but also responsibility, about this. Samantha has come to love reading novels and brings them home to share the stories with her parents. She tells them the English stories in Chitonga, “so them, they can be changing in their daily lives, they should

174 not just be staying”. When she read her first magic story she said, “I was scared”, but then “I realised it’s got a lesson, I thought, its ok”. Samantha’s own understanding of her fantasy reading ties into the statements made by Lawson and Matthew, who both feel that reading fantasy fiction is acceptable as long as there is a lesson to be taken from it. The idea of containing a lesson gives a hold on the fictional account, shows its purpose, and shows that it is not one of deviance. In providing a lesson, fantasy fiction can be slotted more easily into known genres of storytelling, such as school books or nthanu, where the key component of the genre is the lesson it teaches. Once fantasy books are placed within this framework, it becomes easier to navigate their potentially dangerous and deviant themes.

Not all girls from the area were, however, new to libraries and books. One of the very few village girls familiar with books by the time she reached Bandawe Girls was Clara, a Form III girl, whose family live on the western side of Chituka. Clara’s family are subsistence farmers who live quite isolated in the folds of a valley, up a thickly grown marshy path, more isolated and with less wealth than Samantha’s family. Although Clara’s family have no books and are not readers themselves, as I found out when I went to visit them, Clara grew up near enough to Chituka Homestead, the home of Charlie Venga, owner of BolaBola, to be able to benefit from his interest in children’s education and book reading. Charlie Venga, Clara told me, had many books at his home, and would often call the children living nearby to come for reading sessions. He would read aloud to them from “baby books”, as she calls them, but they were not allowed to take the books home. She became “addicted to enter there” and listen to the story telling - even now she still prefers “baby books” to longer novels. Clara was disappointed that Malenga Mzoma, her primary school, did not have a library, but when she came to Bandawe Girls she was excited to discover one. She told me that she likes novels, and that she “want[s] to be addicted to reading […] because I want to know stories, but mostly I want to hear the English language […] because nowadays there is no job without the English language.” She likes to read “books from outside our country…because in our country, like Malawi, I know more things like cultures, so I want to know the cultures from outside”. This desire to ‘know cultures from outside’ mirrors what many parents said about the benefits of reading. As to reading about magic and witchcraft, Clara has nothing against it as she thinks it would be “very interesting […] to get the point” of what the book is trying to teach, again showing the idea that as long as one gets the point of a story , it is ok to read it.

Some of the girls, although avid readers, did not like fantasy novels at all. In a conversation I was having about magic stories with Eunice, the library prefect, she told me,

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“magic stories, ah, I just hate them!” Eunice, in Form III, is a petite girl, with a very alert and engaging character, bright and very ambitious. She comes from Chifira where her parents are subsistence farmers, but her good grades have meant that she has a bursary for her studies. When she first arrived at the school she had felt very suspicious of the school library, saying in her first days in Form I, “I hated the library, I was scared to follow the rules there”. But wanting to do well, she had asked the top achievers in the higher forms what their secret to good grades was - and they had told her it was spending time in the library. And so Eunice had diligently worked and read in the library, with such success that she achieved the highest grade of all in Form II – and was therefore given the privilege, and duty, of being library prefect.

Although Eunice had come to like novels, she had a fervent dislike of fantasy fiction. She told me that such books are “somehow frightening…they make somebody to fear somehow, to be afraid of that….”. She struggled to articulate exactly what ‘that’ was, and in searching for how to explain it she decided to tell me about her classmate: “This other girl who is here”, she told me confidingly, “she likes reading those kinds of novels, so the way she behaves…she behaves strangely, she has changed her behaviour due to those magic things which she reads from those novels….it’s somehow not good.” Eunice then looked at me, seeming to test if she could trust me with the next piece of information, and then stated, “like, most people, they think she is a Satanist”. I tried not to show too much of my surprise, as Eunice looked at me earnestly, and said, with an air of sharing a secret, “ja, and they say there is the other novel she reads, they say, if you continue to read this novel you will become one of us [Satanists]”.

The novel that supposedly turns people into Satanists was mentioned to me by a number of other girls who spoke of a ‘Satanic book’ that would make you ‘one of them’ if you read it, even though most did not know the book’s name. Eventually, I was able to find the name of the book: Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. The Percy Jackson and the Olympians series is a very popular children’s and young adult fantasy fiction series by American author Rick Riordan.106 The books follow the life-story of Percy Jackson, a demigod boy, the son of Poseidon and a human woman, living in current day USA, who has to save the world from Kronos. I had been startled by the girls’ insistence that this particular fantasy book, more so than any other, could “make” its readers satanic. It seemed to have the capacity to do this beyond the idea, encountered more frequently, that reading about magic might make people practice it. As Eunice had said, “they [the people in the book] say, if you continue to read this you will become one of us”. Very

106 By 2014, the first series had sold “upwards of twenty million copies” (Mead 2014). The books have been lauded as a way of introducing young readers to the Greek classics (Morey 2015).

176 curious to find out how exactly the Percy Jackson book does this, I went to the school’s library and started reading it. The very first page of the book seemed to give an answer. The book starts:

Look, I didn’t want to be a half-blood.

If you’re reading this because you think you might be one, my advice is: close this book right now. Believe whatever lie your mom or dad told you about your birth, and try to lead a normal life.

Being a half-blood is dangerous. It’s scary. Most of the time, it gets you killed in painful, nasty ways.

If you’re a normal kid, reading this because you think it’s fiction, great. Read on. I envy you for being able to believe that none of this ever happened.

But if you recognize yourself in these pages – if you feel something stirring inside – stop reading immediately. You might be one of us. And once you know that, it’s only a matter of time before they sense it too, and they’ll come for you.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

It is not difficult to see how the girls came to the conclusion that this book was inviting its readers into dangerous rituals. Not only does the author directly deny the claim that the book might actually be fictional, he also uses language which clearly denotes danger. Particularly the use of ‘half-blood’ in the books could lead to ideas of Satanic implications as blood is very closely connected to Satanic ritual in Malawi. In her work on books in Africa, Isabel Hofmeyr calls upon the researcher to examine the “metaphors around books”, and the type of metaphorical language that is engaged in order to speak of them in order to understand the “greater sphere[s] of sociality” in which they circulate (2001:104). One could argue that the metaphor of ‘Satanic object’, or ‘Satanic gateway’, ascribed to the Percy Jackson, gives us a sense of the “greater sphere[s] of sociality” within which these books circulate. Even though many of the children and young adults I spoke to professed an interest in reading fantasy fiction, the books still circulate in a space of deep moral ambiguity in which it is not clear how dangerous the books are, nor where the line between their ‘reality’ and their ‘fiction’ lies. This is a line that the readers of the books have to continuously navigate.

The tactic employed by Rick Riordan to directly address children in the text to offer the stories presented as a quasi-real escape from their own daily reality, is a literary trick to engage readers that has been used since the early years of the fantasy genre. In the blurb for the British edition of The Hobbit, one of the early greats of the genre, J. R. R. Tolkien, “specifically invites children on a fantastical adventure out of ‘the comfortable Western world, over the edge of the

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Wild, and home again’” (Knuth 2012:8). Many fantasy books, such as Harry Potter or Narnia, incorporate the theme of children in the world as we know it suddenly discovering that this world is part of, or connected to, a fantasy world.

The employment of this tactic, however, rests on a known distinction between the realm of fantasy and the realm of the ‘real’. As outlined in the discussion of the emergence of the genre, this playing with the realms of the fantastical required a stable representation of a particular type of reality in which it was clear that these books were just imaginary. Riordan’s opening page is made possible by his knowledge that the majority of his readers will not take the words literally, and even if they might, their parents will inform them otherwise. The gamble that the introduction rests on plays out quite differently in a world in which the realm of Riordan’s explorations is not as clearly delineated as impossible, and is therefore able to produce the kinds of concerns and fears expressed by the girls at Bandawe.

The close connection between what is written and what is potentially real was clearly articulated by Patience, a girl in Form III. Patience is from Kamwala and did her primary schooling at Macalpine FP, where she fondly remembers going to the library in her last year of school there. She has read magical books from the Bandawe Girls’ library - in particular one book sticks out in her mind, a book called ‘Friend of a Vampire’. Reading it, she tells me, “I was just feeling fear, like, it was happening to me, because I know that vampires are bad, they always kill. So, I was feeling fear”. Despite her fear, she continued to read the whole book, “because I wanted to know what happens to that boy at the end”. Having finished it, Patience felt it showed her “there are some vampires that are good ones, but some they kill…so my fear, like it reduced”. When I asked her if she thinks there is witchcraft in the world, she believed that there must be, otherwise where would the word come from? As she explained, “they say if the word has come, that must mean that thing is true, because that’s why I do believe again that maybe ufwiti it is there, because how come the word is coming if they are not there?” Not only is Patience expressing an ontological theory about the relationship between the nature of things and language, she is articulating an intimate relationship between being and language that is deeply embedded in ideas around witchcraft. In Malawi, witchcraft itself is closely connected to language: speaking in detail of witchcraft is tantamount to practicing it, or at least to engaging in it to some degree. This is a relationship anthropologists have found elsewhere, such as Jean Favret-Saada who wrote about witchcraft in France, where she argues the act of speaking of witchcraft cannot be disentangled from the act of doing it (Favret-Saada 1980). Similarly, Harry West wrote of the Muenda in Mozambique, “one cannot speak sensibly about witchcraft without

178 entering into the social and verbal exchanges that constitute witchcraft” (West 2007:56). This intimate relationship between language and practice is also part of what drives parent’s fears around their children reading magic books, because it means the children enter into a discursive domain of witchcraft and magic and thereby already implicate themselves in the practices.

This context in which fantasy fiction is received, where it circulates in a realm of moral ambiguity and uncertainty also impacts the ways in which readers of fantasy fiction are perceived by others. This is made clear in the example of the girl that Eunice was telling me about who “most people [think] is a Satanist”. The girl Eunice was referring to was Chisomo. The staff and the other students know her as the person who reads the most novels of anyone in the school and does so with a passion. But, as we see with Eunice’s comments and Chisomo’s own elaboration of her isolation in the vignette, she is also seen with scepticism by some of her peers. Not only does Chisomo read a lot of fantasy novels, she was also pulled into a further Satanic controversy at the school the year before I arrived. Simon Tinto, a young thirty-five-year-old science teacher at the school, told me the story.

Simon and I were discussing reading fantasy novels, when he told me that fantasy fiction was fine, as long as the girls did not associate it with Satanism. When I asked him what he meant by that he asked me to turn off my Dictaphone. He told me that the previous year, the Student Christian Organisation Malawi (SCOM) had sent some students from Nkhata Bay to preach. They had, unbeknown to the school, brought a prophet with them, who apparently sent girls into hysterics, screaming and crying after speaking to him. Simon said that the prophet told the girls, “you are reading bad books”. He said the accusations, “negatively affect[ed] the reading culture” at the school. Now many girls are afraid of reading fantasy novels, and “will hide them”. Lucy Banda, who was the chair of SCOM at the time, told me that it was Chisomo who had gone to the prophet and told him about the books she liked to read, and the prophet had then come and told all the girls that they read bad books at the school. According to Lucy, Chisomo had left the occasion in tears.

Through Chisomo’s story we can see how, as a fluent reader, and English speaker, she was not excluded from literacy, but she was somewhat excluded through literacy. Through her ‘strange’ love of reading, and specifically of reading novels that could not easily be ordered into clear didactic practice, she became an outsider at the school. In the example of Chisomo, we can see the dualities of reading at play — putting you ‘alone together’ with words on the page whilst isolating you from the world around you. In the context of colonial West Africa, Stephanie Newell and Karin Barber explore this dimension of reading through the ways in which reading

179 mass vernacular print media such as newspapers and the emergence of reading groups, created shared readerships and new publics, particularly among young African men who wanted to align themselves with the language and cultures of the colonial elites (Barber 2001, 2007a; Newell 2013, 2016). They also explore, however, how readers, and particularly writers, were often positioned as outsiders in their communities, those whose passions and desires did not necessarily align with social expectations, and so they found themselves on the peripheries (Barber 2006; Newell 2006). In his ethnographic work on readers of the Henry Williamson Society, Adam Reed also discusses the degree to which for many of his interlocutors books “provided a degree of genuine sociability”, with readers claiming things such as that as long as they have books with them they are never alone (2011:43).

As described in the vignette, the books Chisomo reads provide her with companionship or being part of a great many exciting worlds, filled with characters that make her feel like she is part of their lives. And yet, equally, the act of reading, the solitariness of it, the foreignness of it to many of her peers, isolate her — not just momentarily in the act of reading, but socially; in separating herself to enter into the worlds of fantasy books, she also makes herself separate. Reading can, as outlined by researchers such as Alberto Manguel (1997) prove fertile ground for those who seek solace and companionship when they cannot find it in their social circles. This is something we see Chisomo enacting when she tells me that seeing her old best friend ignore her makes her just want to “take a novel and go”. With Chisomo, we can see how she mobilises the privacy and companionship in stories that solitary reading offers. However, we can also clearly see the ways in which this private reading is read as unusual by her peers.

Chisomo’s case particularly shows how the genre of fantasy fiction rests in a place of moral ambiguity and deviance and how engaging too deeply or thoroughly with it fosters isolation and produces suspicion in those around her. Through her one can see how difficult it can be for young lovers of fantasy fiction. It also, however, shows the ways in which young readers of fantasy fiction negotiate these moral ambiguities, how they find their own ways of accessing and working with the genre, and making meaning of it that works for them. This taking-up of the genre and the ways in which readers reform its modes and meanings and reflect upon their own world through it is discussed in the next section with an exploration of the example of Harry Potter.

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Harry Potter

The Harry Potter series is the most successfully selling book series of all time and has been described as a global “phenomenon” (Fitzsimmons 2012; Heilman 2009). The books have been read by more children in more languages than any other children’s book in history (Heilman 2009). Unsurprisingly, these books that have spanned the world also found their way to northern Malawi through book donations and the hands of well-wishers.

I spied my first Harry Potter book within a few days of arriving at my field site — lying in the piles of books at the Macalpine School Library. This particular book was soon to create one of the greatest Harry Potter fans of the area, fourteen-year-old Daniel. After I reopened the library, Daniel read the library’s copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and fell completely in love with it. He would shyly ask me if I could get hold of the next books in the series, and when he found out that I had copies of the films on my laptop, he persuaded me to allow him to watch them all.

Like Chisomo, Daniel is a little bit of an outsider in his community. He lived at Macalpine with his paternal grandfather, Mr Malota, who was a teacher at the school at the time. When I met Daniel, he had only been in the village for two years. Originally from Tanzania, he grew up in Dar Es Salaam, where he had had a “white sponsor”, as he called it, who paid for him to go to the expensive Dar Es Salaam Independent School. Unfortunately for Daniel, by 2014 his sponsor was no longer able to support him, and so he was sent by his parents to live with his paternal grandfather. At his arrival, Daniel had had an excellent command of English, making him very successful academically, but his knowledge of Chitonga, his father’s native tongue, was poor, and so he struggled to integrate well and make friends. Daniel’s schooling and movements around various language zones means that he sees English as his first language, telling me “when I am imagining stories, it is always in English”. He therefore has no difficulty reading the English novels in the school libraries, an activity that he loves. Daniel, already an avid reader by the time he read the first and second Harry Potter books, felt that they were the most special he had ever read making him “want to read on and on”.

A few months after I arrived at Macalpine, I came home to find Daniel outside his house, with his grandfather and grandmother and a couple of neighbours all mingling around. Daniel was curled up in a ball on a large grass mat, sobbing but, under the admonishment of his grandfather, trying to stop his crying. Daniel’s mother had tragically passed away in Tanzania, leaving him stricken. A few days later Daniel and I were discussing Harry Potter again because

181 he wanted to watch the films to distract him from his sadness (he knew I had them on my laptop). He told me that he felt very sorry for Harry, because Harry had lost his parents, a pain that Daniel could now relate to. But he was comforted by the fact that, despite all of his hardships, in the end Harry Potter was ok. He told me that “Harry got through it [all his struggles], so I know that one day I will get through it”. Ranjana Das, who did fieldwork with teenage readers of Harry Potter in London, found that the teenagers would continue to engage in introspection in relation to the books long after they had read them, and would “[draw] parallels between relationships in their own lives and those they read about” (2013:454). This is of course not unique to the Harry Potter books, but research seems to indicate that these books are able to provide a particularly relatable framework for children and young adults (see Witschonke 2006).

Although seeing Harry suffer without parents was hard, Daniel felt that for “other parts [of the books] I was very excited…I wanted to see him do his magic”, adding, “my favourite bit was where Harry learnt to use magic”. Daniel finds the magic parts the most exciting in the book, despite believing in witchcraft and magic “a lot”. In fact, Daniel believes that it was magic that killed his mother. She had suffered for a long time from an illness, which a local spiritual healer in Tanzania had said was brought upon her by a neighbouring relative. Despite this, Daniel does not feel afraid reading about witchcraft and magic in Harry Potter. In part, he said, Harry Potter actually made him less afraid, “because Harry was always protected”. In the book, Harry faces immensely powerful magic, and yet he is always protected and perseveres. Daniel also does not think that the magic in the books is like the magic he knows. He tells me that he thought “just for a little bit” that it might be the same, but then he realized that Harry uses potions and wands, and that is not the magic he knows.

It was, in fact, the snakes that made him the most afraid, and that from the films, not the books. The richly rendered CGI Nagini, Voldemort’s pet python, was truly frightening for Daniel. Just a few days after watching her in the film, we were called to the neighbour’s house to see a large, decapitated python that had gotten into the chicken coop. Daniel said of the experience, “they said [the python] was just a young one, and I was thinking [when remembering Nagini] – ‘how big can the mother and father be!?’”. He then added, that after watching Nagini brutally kill a character, “I see how [snakes] can really do to people”. Snakes are something all village children have to contend with, without protection. Magic and witchcraft however, although also parts of their daily lives, are things that one can, to a degree, be protected from.

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Although a number of the readers I spoke to were nervous about the magical themes in Harry Potter, many, like Daniel and Chisomo, also expressed a deep desire to continue reading them due to the excitement and pleasure they gained from the experience. Cynthia, a Form III girl at Bandawe Girls, has read all of the Harry Potter books that are still in the Bandawe Girls’ library.107 She feels the books are “interesting…, kinda mysterious but interesting”. Although Cynthia enjoyed reading the books, she did feel somewhat apprehensive about reading books with such a clear magical content. “I had to tell my parents”, she says. Her parents generally encourage her to read books, but they said to her “as long as they are similar to the world you live in, you can read them, as far as it is very different and mysterious and scary, please don’t read them”. Cynthia’s mother told her not to read Harry Potter, and although this made Cynthia sad, she also felt her mother was telling her something important and should be respected. Contrary to her mother’s wishes, however, she chose to “disobey a liiiitle bit”, and finished reading the novels in the library “because I enjoyed it so much”, but she has not picked up a fantasy book since. Now she only reads non-fantasy novels, “but it’s not as much fun as Harry Potter”.

Studies have shown that parents’ perception of whether something is real or not, or good or bad, play a vital role in children’s relations to fantasy (Taub and Servaty-Seib 2009:15). Yet although many parents object to their children reading books with magic in them, as discussed above, it seems the children themselves are far less concerned and will often continue to read the books despite their own fears and anxieties because they enjoy them so much.

In her work on female romance novel readers in the United States, Janice Radway speaks of how the women see reading as a “fundamentally ambivalent activity” in which they feel both pleasure, in their enjoyment of them, and guilt, in the social disdain of them, in reading the novels (quoted in Collinson 2009:23). The readers of fantasy fiction I spoke to expressed a similar fundamental ambivalence, one in which fantasy fiction proved enticing and exciting, but in which the question of how to navigate its themes and whether these made the books dangerous or prohibitive was one with which they had to continuously grapple. This is an ambiguity, between fear and excitement, enjoyment and moral transgressiveness, that the readers of fantasy fiction have to continuously navigate.

The young readers seem to adopt several mechanisms to do this. All the children I spoke to, when asking if they were not afraid at night due to the fantasy stories they had read, said no,

107 These are Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

183 because, like Chisomo, if ever they were afraid, they would pray to God and their fears would ease. Across the board, children told me that God not only protected them, but also kept them from being afraid. The Christian God, and the act of praying to him, seem to be a central coping mechanism for children to deal with fear induced through worries of witchcraft or bad dreams.108 In this we can see how children and young people mobilise certain ontologies in their worlds, the power of the Christian God in the face of witchcraft, to help them cope with the potential difficulties posed by reading fantasy fiction. Their extant ways of coping with fears induced by witchcraft and magic are mobilised to help them navigate the act of reading fantasy fiction.

Others, like Daniel, found strength in seeing children face and conquer frightening magic. Another approach was that of Stanley, Constance’s 20-year-old nephew who would often come to visit, who felt that reading about witchcraft and magic actually helped him to get to know it better and therefore made him less afraid of it. Stanley read Harry Potter in high school, when he was 16. He told me, “because I have grown up in Africa, I believe in that Harry Potter, because I believe in that witchcraft”. But even though he believes in Harry Potter, it does not make him afraid, because he is “used to magic”. In fact, like Daniel, Stanley felt that in some ways the books made him less afraid. After reading the books, he tells me, he felt like “I know the magic”, by which he meant that he had gained a greater understanding of how magic works. This, he felt, makes him better at “witch-hunting”, which he explained to me as knowing when a witch story is true and when not.

Although the genre of fantasy fiction as such is not well known in my field site, it is possible that the fact that magic and witchcraft are very intimately known actually helps readers to engage with and relate to the texts. Wolfgang Iser has argued that “a piece of fiction devoid of any connections with known reality would be incomprehensible” (quoted in Cohen 2013:12). Whereas in many ways the Harry Potter novels seem to have very little connection to the known reality of children in my field site, I argue that the fact that he is a young boy who goes to school to learn about magic and witchcraft, rather than being alienating, is actually a point of entry and understanding. Equally, the books seem to provide some comfort by providing greater understanding of something that is generally shrouded in mystery. This knowledge, rather than turning readers towards witchcraft, as adults fear, seems to give some of them a reduced sense of fear around questions of witchcraft and magic.

108 After hearing many children tell me that if they awoke at night from bad dreams or frightened, they would pray to God, I adopted this mechanism myself. I had numerous terrible witch-nightmares in the field, but began to recite the Lord’s Prayer whenever I awoke from such nightmares and found it had a profoundly calming effect.

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Stanley initiated our conversation about Harry Potter when we were having a more general discussion on witchcraft. We were chatting about what he thought of witchcraft, when he turned to me and asked me, “Do you know Harry Potter?”. I told him that yes, I definitely did. He then asked me with great curiosity, “can it really be true? Are these things in Europe as well, or is it just fiction?” Stanley had always thought that Europe had no witchcraft, but after reading Harry Potter, he changed his mind. When I told him it was indeed just fiction, he seemed only partly convinced. He told me that he had also learnt in history that “one of the Kings called Henry” had banned witchcraft in England. If he could put a ban on it, then it must have been something that existed. I confirmed that people in Europe had indeed previously believed in witchcraft, but most no longer did. Rather than seeing this as confirmation that Europe did not have witchcraft, Stanley took my statement as an affirmation that there was witchcraft in Europe. He felt that a ban combined with a book which clearly depicted elements of magic and witchcraft could not have come out of nowhere.

The idea that Harry Potter confirms the existence of witchcraft in Europe was also very strongly advocated for by my translator James. He had watched some of the Harry Potter films with Daniel and myself and had read the first book (after hearing about it from me). Watching the films, he had immediately been struck by the similarities he saw. He turned to me in astonishment when watching the scene of Harry dashing in a magical bus through London, and said, “that’s exactly how the witchcraft thing happens, that witchcraft aeroplane, they travel that quickly”. After the film ended, he told me, “in Africa we have these things, witches and wizards […] it is showing things that are practices in Africa…. we really practice those things…you know, a child going to school, training how to be witch, that is how it is done here.”

But what most astounded James was that, for him, it showed that Europeans have witchcraft exactly like Africans do. “It shows the relations between here [Africa] and there [Europe]”. “There are so many parallels”, parallels such as people being transported instantly, or the ways in which dementors are the wizard police, “just like the seketera, the seketera are the boss of the witches”, or “the way [dementors] steal your soul, it is just how they do it in witchcraft”. James then brought up the same argument Chisomo had, that it was not possible for JK Rowling to simply invent all the things she depicted in the books, particularly not things that so closely mirrored the magic and witchcraft he knows. James thought that it might be possible that JK Rowling was a very powerful seketera herself, and that the books were her way of educating Westerners about magic and witchcraft. She knew they would not believe her if she simply came

185 out and claimed these things were out there, but through her books she could bring them to learn about them.

In his ethnographic work on the readers of the Henry Williamson Society, Adam Reed suggests that many scholars of literary criticism see a simple relationship between the author, a text, and its readers as “an illusion” and insist that focus should be placed on the text as an “autonomous whole” (2011:22). For Malawian readers of Harry Potter, however, JK Rowling’s intentions and depth of knowledge of witchcraft are important questions about the text. Why she wrote it and how much she knew when writing it are not auxiliary questions, but ones that bring to the forefront the possibilities of knowledge and insight that the text might offer. For them, the stories in the book cannot be separated from the knowledge that the author may or may not have. This is not to argue that texts cannot be autonomous wholes, or that authors and authorial voice and presence must be central to the meaning that is made of them – but rather that there can be instances where the author and the authority of their voice are important components of the ways in which people seek to make meaning of texts.

In their discussions of reading Harry Potter, many interlocutors also expressed a sense of connectivity to ‘Europeans’ through shared engagement with the books in the exploration of magical worlds. Historical-colonial theories of reading have discussed how reading books, particularly in transnational networks, create transnational reading publics, which make people feel connected to publics and readers far beyond their personal geographical limits (Barber 2007a; Hofmeyr et al. 2001; Hofmeyr 2001a, 2005; Newell 2013; Reed 2018). One can see the readers of Harry Potter taking great interest in feeling that they are part of an extended community of those who engage with magic and witchcraft.

It has been argued that ‘witchcraft’ is often conceived of an identity marker that sets Africans apart from whites (Englund 2007; Niehaus 2010), but with their engagement with Harry Potter, Stanley and James, as well as others like Chisomo, have found a challenge to that division. In their re-readings and re-formings of the texts to have meaning within their frameworks of an ontological existence of witchcraft, these readers are able to see in the books a new configuration of their own standing in the global order, one which allows them new insight into a global interconnectedness and perhaps acts as bringing them further into the “global stream of humanity” (Tsing 2005:1). Engaging with transnational media, Brad Weiss (2009) argues, can give young Africans the chance to insert themselves in a cross-cultural imagination which provides an opportunity for them to “redefine [their] value and belonging in the larger global context” (Ntarangwi 2011:91). The readers of fantasy fiction mobilise extraversions, reaching

186 outwards to connect and entangle themselves globally in order to reconceptualise their own standing and relationship to the global sphere. Employing “modes of fantasy”, young Africans establish themselves in global flows and “imaginatively articulate and act on a world remade” through their re-renderings (Weiss 2009:2).

Perhaps even more profoundly, through the reading of these books the young readers are also able to counteract centuries of epistemic violence committed against Africans for their belief in witchcraft. As outlined above, within the colonial context in Africa ‘witchcraft’ came to be a term that exemplified one of the core constituents of African ‘otherness’ and primitiveness. It was also a term and concept used to enact enormous colonial violence on African subjects, through the Witchcraft Ordinances, the violent suppression and punishment of witchcraft discourses and practices, and the epistemic denigration of the belief system.

In the fictional renderings of magic and witchcraft read by young people in my field site, we see this act of othering and denigration being overturned – the stories in the fantasy fiction novels declare a universalist rendering of the occult, one which posits magic, and witchcraft, as existing in precisely those places, Europe, the United Kingdom, from which the violent othering of the colonial period emanated. Peter Pels (2003) has argued that one of the epistemic violences of colonial renderings of witchcraft was the parochialisation of the occult, the (false) ascription of occult and magical beliefs as being something that Europeans do not have, but that superstitious and unreasoned Africans do. In this, the potentially universal nature of ‘magical’ thinking is vehemently denied, and thus the denigration of this type of thinking becomes a mechanism through which to other and oppress African peoples. For the readers I spoke to, fantasy fiction offered a platform from which young Africans could subvert this old narrative and confidently make a claim that many have long held – namely that magic and witchcraft are not only African afflictions, but a part of the condition of being human, and that Europeans share in this condition, even if many seek to deny this possibility.

In re-inscribing ‘witchcraft’, the very term that lay at the legal heart of the Witchcraft Ordinances, as the purview and practice of Europe and Europeans in fantasy novels, witchcraft can no longer be held as the marker of African otherness and the justification for (often violent) judicial action against African subjects. In Harry Potter, and books like it, witchcraft and magic become something whose latent possibility lies everywhere, and are used as terms that are freely applied to European subjects. Through fantasy fiction, young African readers are able to turn the long history of the violent othering and parochializing of witchcraft into a universalising coevalness of witchcraft, with a new understanding and confidence that those living in Euro-

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America are troubled by similar magical and supernatural concerns. In this, fantasy fiction has the potential to create a feeling of positive liberation in young African readers, one in which their ontological worlds need no longer be the marker of their otherness to Europeans, or their unreasoned thinking. Through their reading of fantasy fiction novels, these young Africans are able to understand themselves no longer through the lens of colonial denial of the reality of African witchcraft, and the denigration of African beliefs and ontologies, but rather through the feeling of a shared universality of magical thinking.

Conclusion

Fantasy fiction travels into schools and community libraries in rural Malawi on the back of the universal of literacy and the English myth – under the assumption that English literature is desirable, important and necessary it is “collected” in village libraries from across the globe. The books, however, emerged from a “social imaginary” (Taylor 2002) in which an epistemic shift had separated both the child-world from the adult-world, and the magical and fictive from a world that was determined to be factual and ‘real’. The world into which these books enter in Malawi does not carry the same bifurcations — the fantastical is not separated from the real, the invisible not from the invisible. This produces particular difficulties for fantasy fiction.

For parents there is a fear and a worry that comes with the moral ambiguity of the books. As discussed in Chapter Two, stories, particularly stories told to children, fall into the realm of teaching moral and ethical sociality and are meant to act as a key tool for policing and maintaining precisely those social and moral boundaries that fantasy fiction threatens to transgress.

While the readers of fantasy fiction clearly carry some of these fears themselves, they find ways to navigate the ambiguities of the fiction — they do not allow their fears or anxieties about the material they are read to prevent them from reading it. In fact, in reading the stories they both give the stories new meanings and shapes that make them legible for them, for example, as a part of a larger project to familiarise Western readers with the themes of magic and reconsider their own magical worlds. Patience, Daniel, and Stanley, for example, gained a sense of confidence and security in reading the books — a feeling that in coming to know worlds of magic more intimately they were able to see that, for example, not all vampires are evil, or

188 that Harry Potter is always safe despite the magic used against him, or that in acquiring greater knowledge of magic they gain a better sense of the possibilities of witchcraft.

When setting out for the field, I had thought that importing children’s fantasy fiction into a world where magic and witchcraft are real, and where stories are meant to police social and moral boundaries not transgress them, contained a potential for producing fear and confusion, or even epistemic violence. The navigations and negotiations that the readers I spoke to undertake, seem, however, to show that this is not the case. The fact that reading about magic and witchcraft seems to have produced less fear and greater confidence for many suggests that these books are able to offer what Kimberley Reynolds calls “the radical potential” of fantasy literature — a reworking and rethinking of one’s own world and the possibilities it contains (2007:1). Reynolds argues that children’s fantasy literature often contains subversive or radical scripts, and “offers alternate possibilities and ways of thinking about and constructing society” (ibid.:2). While parents may be concerned about the ‘radical’ potential of fantasy fiction, it may also be offering children new ways of thinking about themselves and their world in relation to realms of magic and witchcraft.

For a number of readers, the stories also gave them a sense of ontological validation – having been told by many that witchcraft and magic are not a Euro-American belief, reading Euro-American texts that so clearly contain these narratives provided a sense of there being a larger world of magic and witchcraft, one which is indeed known by some in Euro-America. These interpretations helped people to makes sense of the books — of how and why someone like JK Rowling, for example, could and would write books about witchcraft and magic. The process of making sense of the authors knowledge coupled with the work of finding lessons in the books, helped readers to align the texts more closely to known genre conventions and thereby made the books more legible and acceptable.

Although parents were afraid of the moral ambiguity of the texts, the readers mobilised various discourses and understandings in order to navigate the books’ moral ambiguities in ways that they felt protected them from their potential dangers. The children exhibited far more confidence in their capacity to do this than the parents. In his work on an elite missionary school in Zambia, Anthony Simpson speaks of the ways in which the children there, “rather than being trapped within one discourse” were able to “switch […] between discourses and part-discourses” (Simpson 2003:4). The readers I spoke to were equally able to switch between discourses of fear and danger and those of excitement and curiosity, and developed ways through which to navigate the ambiguity that this switching produced. In this they also reframed and reformed the texts

189 that they were reading — creating a different type of reader-relationship to fantasy fiction texts, one which positions the texts as commentaries on the extant world, as mechanisms for teaching familiarity with magic and as means through which to find comfort through understanding and greater shared global connectivity.

With the readers of fantasy fiction discussed in this chapter we are able to witness examples of people who have been able to “grab hold” of at least some of the possibilities offered by the universals of literacy and education. As outlined in this thesis, literacy and education in (post)colonial societies, even when in English, does not only create exclusions and marginalisations. It also facilitates the production of new hierarchies and elites and does open up possibilities for a lucky few. As James Howard Smith argues about development projects in Kenya, many projects have “allowed particular groups of people to realize their ambitions” (2008:5). Those who were able to develop an advanced command of English were able to engage in the reading of fantasy fiction and through this found themselves engaging with and navigating larger worlds of magic which brought new ideas about the transnational scope of the phenomena, but also made them reflect upon and reconsider their own magical worlds and how they navigate these.

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CONCLUSION

The power of universals such as literacy and education, and the enormity of the promises they entail, can weave disparate forces together from across the globe to produce quasi-development interventions in rural communities. They pull books and people, materials and things, ideas and epistemologies together to produce libraries, to generate transnational flows of books, and to bring fantasy fiction into worlds of witchcraft and magic. In Malawi, this power of universals includes the enormous influence of the ‘literacy myth’ and what I have termed the ‘English Myth’, through which one can still clearly see the colonial as present in, and determining of, the (post)colonial reality. The aspirational desire to gain “global membership” (Ferguson 2006) and to become part of the “global stream of humanity” (Tsing 2005) is so forceful that these myths are sustained even when they might be harmful to those who are not able to grab hold of them or might marginalise local stories and forms of knowledge production and teaching.

In light of these dynamics, this thesis has sought to answer the question of what happens when Anglophone fantasy fiction children’s stories enter rural communities located in south- eastern Africa on the back of the universal of (English) literacy. In doing so it has explored the libraries that have emerged in one part of Malawi as the primary avenues through which these books enter communities. It has shown how these books are brought into circulation and the libraries that emerge on the coattails of the universals of literacy and schooling, and how they are enmeshed and entangled in the power relations undergirding these universals. In looking at extant oral literature in the communities, it has argued that while the universals of literacy and schooling rest on the remainders of the epistemic supremacy of colonialism, these assumptions do not go unchallenged. In arguing for the ontological and epistemological valence of local stories, members of the communities studied make claims and demands for epistemic recognition and justice. This is not, however, a simple binary of local villagers standing against imported frameworks. In exploring local elites and the readers of fantasy fiction, this work has also shown the possibilities and opportunities that are offered by these texts and universals — including how readers navigate complex themes with moral ambiguity to reconstitute them for their own purposes without feeling they are in danger of transgressing valued social and moral boundaries.

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In this thesis, I have used children’s stories as the window through which to explore the features, contestations and potentials around the spread of the universals of literacy and school-based education in the context of Malawi. I claim that children’s stories provide a rich, but oft ignored, departure point from which to examine and unpack questions of epistemic (inter)actions and justice and to explore “knowledge that travels” across the globe (Tsing 2005:81). Through the prism of children’s stories, we can see how people work to facilitate the production of material and epistemological technologies and formations, such as books and libraries, which could bring them closer to grabbing hold of these universals. Libraries filled with English language books become desired and largely uncontested because they are seen as tangible means through which to draw closer the potential for the fulfilment of the promises of the universals. They offer to open up avenues of aspiration for those who are able to make use of them.

The act of embracing these formations and technologies does not, however, automatically include imaginative blueprints of how exactly to make these things – libraries and imported English language books – work to fulfil the promises of (English) literacy. In Chapters One and Four, I have shown how at different libraries this process of putting libraries to use and making them ‘work’ followed different paths and trajectories, with sometimes radically different outcomes: from a busy and loved library at Bandawe Girls, to a beautifully presented but never used library at Kande FP, to a closed and almost abandoned library at Macalpine FP. These paths seemed partially dependent on how the library emerged in the first place – who wanted it to be built and why, and who held what kinds of stakes and investments in its emergence and its continuation.

What I have shown is that rural small-scale libraries can emerge without any directed, large scale development projects. Rather, they emerge through the entanglement of lines – each with their own unique story, with some ‘working’ and others falling out of use. What these literacy interventions produce and create, both ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, seems to be quite fluid – without overarching development projects to sustain the libraries (in some form or another), and determine their conditionalities, they tend to be much more responsive to the communities they are in. Thus, when people cannot take hold of the libraries in ways that work for them and come from them, the libraries fall into disuse.

In this, I have suggested that it is theoretically fruitful to examine the emergence of rural libraries through the lens of lines and entanglement, particularly as theorised by Tim Ingold. Entanglements help us to visualise the ways in which things come together when they are ‘assembled’ – what brings certain lines together, what makes certain people become part of

192 assemblages, how and why things become knotted in particular places at particular times to produce things like libraries. This helps us to see how this assembling can often be the result of “stickiness” (Barber 2007b) and can produce “frictions” (Tsing 2005) and how they can “leak” (Ingold 2010). When lines make “sticky” contact with each other, when they rub against each other and grab hold of each other, they become entangled and knotted. This can happen at many levels, including the material, epistemological, social, or as I have argued in this thesis, also the affective level as ‘affective entanglements’. The entanglement of lines in turn produces further and more complex entanglements that pull evermore lines into a rich weave – further entrenching libraries in communities, bringing books into flows of circulation, globally and in the villages, reinforcing hierarchies and exclusions, opening new worlds through fiction books, generating a new sense of one’s relation to the world, and re-enforcing the dominance of English and the epistemologies of the global north.

This thesis has contributed to research on development projects in Africa by showing how a number of rural libraries come into being in rural communities without over-arching development agendas, and by illuminating how and why this happens. In combining the work of Tim Ingold on lines and entanglements with that of Anna Tsing on universals, it contributes a lens for unpacking and understanding the dynamics of micro-development initiatives happening at an interpersonal and non-directed level in ways that include both materiality and affect. It also suggests that using lines and entanglements as a lens through which to look at libraries offers a way of connecting the ‘global’ and the ‘local’ in the village space — of seeing the local not as separate and elsewhere, but as globally entangled.

Dualities of universals

This thesis has demonstrated how universals operate in the realm of dualities. They contain within them a constant tension, between desire and aspiration on the one hand, and its concomitant exclusions and marginalisations on the other. Perhaps more so than any other universals, these tensions come into sharp focus in literacy. Navigating this tension, trying to make universals fulfil their promise rather than being excluded by them, is a matter of constant effort that characterises the life of the communities I lived in. Holding the Janus-faced dualities of universals, libraries and literacy do offer some possibility for a door to open that enables a select few to grab hold of the promises of the universal – to capture it and gain authority over it. These few are then able to delve into worlds of new possibility, and sometimes opportunity,

193 and reform and reshape what the universals bring and enact. For children who already have some English language confidence, for example, the libraries and books can open new horizons, as Daniel said, “when you open a book, you open a whole world”.

When fantasy fiction texts are the subject matter, however, they throw their readers into a realm of moral ambiguity – one which alienates many parents and even some readers. Perhaps surprisingly, navigating this tension and friction is nonetheless something many readers feel rather confident about. Through reading these books the readers find themselves incorporated further into the “global stream of humanity” and recognise globally shared themes and practices, such as the magic and witchcraft in the Harry Potter books. Chapter Four showed how the readers of fantasy fiction find immense joy and excitement in the door to new worlds opened up by the books they read, whilst equally finding material through which to rethink their world. In doing this they also reform what the books themselves show, how fantasy fiction functions and what it does with its readers. As fantasy fiction shapes the readers so, in turn, they shape it.

In contemplating young readers of fantasy fiction this thesis contributes to writings on magic and witchcraft in Africa. It offers an insight into how children navigate living in a world with witchcraft and magic, how they engage with the possible fears this might induce, how they make meaning of the occult in relation to themselves, how they establish countervailing sources of comfort and strength, and how they work to order and place new inputs, such as fantasy fiction stories, within this world in a way that makes them feel confident to negotiate the ambiguities and potentials dangers of witchcraft and magic.

Besides opening up new worlds, libraries, literacy, and schooling, as shown in the history of Bandawe, can also foster the production of powerful and influential local elites that are able to take up the tools and opportunities gained, and use them to shape and form the world around them, historically often against the intentions of the colonial powers. These elites are also more likely to gain salaried employment, such as the librarians at Tupane or Peter Mhone, to enjoy slightly better economic positions, such as Constance and Nola, or to engage more heavily in local project work, such as Gutamo Manda.

In line with the dualities of universals, whereas libraries across the globe open up avenues for the fulfilment of aspirations of the promises of new worlds for some, they also re-inscribe the overall nature of literacy and education, particularly in the African context, in the process creating sharper and more distinct elites and social hierarchies. For many contemporary Africans “there is a widening breach between the actual and the possible”, and libraries are “places where

194 the gap between the actual and the possible [is] deeply felt” (Weiss 2009:9, 14). It is this very ambiguity, of knowing of the vast possibilities of the universals and the global order, whilst experiencing oneself to be increasingly disconnected from them, that James Ferguson describes as “abjection” (2006:166).

Contra the universal promise contained in the idea of universal education – the promise of literacy, learning and knowledge for all – the still strongly vibrating threads of colonial power structures in the (post)colonial world result in the libraries and their books re-inscribing exclusions and marginalisations. I have argued that in Malawi, the ‘English Myth’ plays a particularly powerful role in this. The possibility for only a very small number of children in the country to reach secondary school and thereby master English and their school subjects, results in the vast majority of the rest being subjected to a school system in which, rather than gaining knowledge, they are caught in a continuous, but often futile, battle to gain comprehension over the language of the colonisers. As a result, while a lucky few ascend through the promises of literacy, schooling and English, the cost for this ascendancy is that the majority of Malawian children are robbed of the full opportunities for learning at school.

We should not, however, take this to be a dichotomy marked by a clear line between those who grab hold of universals and those who are excluded; many people live in the grey area in between, able to both grab hold of some of the offerings and opportunities of the universals even as they also experience exclusions and disappointments.

Challenging universals

The “epistemic supremacies [of] European categories” (Stoler 2008:349) embedded in universals are not, however, something that go wholly unchallenged. In this thesis I have shown how in their discussions of their oral literature, people confront this state of affairs by engaging in discourses of questioning this epistemic inequality and by making claims for the valence and importance of their own epistemological and ontological frameworks. As Pierre Bourdieu so astutely states,

the social world is both the product and the stake of inseparably cognitive and political symbolic struggles over knowledge and recognition, in which each pursues not only the imposition of an advantageous representation of him or herself […] but also the power to impose as legitimate the principles of construction of social reality most

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favourable to his or her social being (individual and collective, with, for example, struggles over the boundaries of groups) and to the accumulation of a symbolic capital of recognition” (2000:187).

The above quote encapsulates many of the key dynamics at play in my field site, and articulates the deep social salience of the claims made by my interlocutors for nthanu. I argue that in their statements on the importance of nthanu for teaching ‘Tonga culture’, good behaviour, how to be a good person, humanity and respect, and the role prescribed to Nthanu za Chitonga in containing the wisdom of the Tonga people, we see an “inseparably cognitive and symbolic struggle […] over knowledge and recognition” (emphasis added). This is a struggle that, whilst perfectly cognisant of the profound promises contained in the universals of (English) literacy and schooling, nonetheless seeks to negotiate some power to establish as “legitimate the principles of construction of social reality” that are most favourable not to English speaking foreigners, but to Chitonga speaking villagers, and to bring into the hands of villagers some “symbolic capital of recognition”. It is important to take seriously that what is at stake in struggles over knowledge and recognition is “the social world” itself.

In these struggles the epistemic violence of the colonial encounter still reverberates to this day in the knowledge hierarchies and epistemic supremacies that it produced. As argued in Chapter One, these libraries are filled with Anglophone stories – they are inverse museums, ‘centres of calculation’ where the worlds, stories and epistemologies of the Anglophone world are gathered and presented as universal stories, stories that should be read by all, and their epistemological frameworks and narratives become posited as the overwhelming ideological norm. This colonial epistemic violence, as this thesis has shown, is not only part of the past but temporally entangled in the present and it produces, as Mudimbe puts it, “alienations” (1994:209).

In unpacking the role of imported stories, I have suggested that in arguing for the ‘nostalgic’ loss of their own stories, their ‘traditional’ stories, my interlocutors are countering this alienation and the epistemological dominance of Anglophone stories. It is thus helpful, even vital, to think of ‘tradition’ being mobilised not as a call to a past, but as claims to “knowledge and recognition”, to ontological and epistemological parity and self-determination, to closing the gap of alienation and to “recognition [as] justice” (Honneth 2004). This is not however a question of for or against. People want both tradition, as epistemic and ontological recognition and valence, and modernity, as socio-economic claims (see Ferguson 2006).

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I have shown that this question of contestation cannot be understood as one of literacy against orality. While many of the claims for epistemic and ontological recognition and value lie in discussions of oral literature, the example of Nthanu za Chitonga (Chapter Three) shows that this does not rest on the orality of these stories – rather it rests on their provenance, their genre conventions, their language and what they do. The core contestations revolve around whose stories they are, whose knowledges, whose ways of being and whose language they privilege. This is more important than the distinction between oral and written.

This has significant implications for justice. In her work on Friction, Tsing tells us that “the principles of justice are multiple and contested: those who feel the effect of injustice continually stretch the categories through which justice is understood” (2005:87). It is my contention in this work that one of the ‘categories of justice’ that I have presented here is that category of stories. Whose stories are told, and in what language, is, I argue, a question of epistemic justice. In this claim this thesis contributes to broader questions of social and structural justice and equality across Africa, arguing that questions of epistemic justice are key to questions of social justice, and that stories form an important part of these questions.

Further investigations

Whereas this thesis has looked at the emergence and use of rural libraries, it is significant in itself that there are libraries at all. As there has been little research done on rural libraries in Africa, it is unclear how many libraries there might be in communities across the continent. Given that these libraries can and do emerge without any overarching development projects or agendas, it would not be possible to know about their existence without actually spending time on the ground in the field. This suggests the need for more ethnographic work that takes rural libraries into account. This thesis has already begun this work. However, as it focused on an exploration of libraries as part of larger global dynamics, the depth to which the libraries could be explored in the minutiae of their daily life was limited. Further detailed work on what libraries do in villages and what they mean to people could open up a rich picture of texts and knowledge in rural sub- Saharan African communities.

Equally, in looking at literacy and schooling in conjunction with children’s stories, this work has focused specifically on books and not on other available media. Some of my interlocutors’ understandings of Harry Potter were gained from watching the films, but to study

197 other media, including television, was beyond the limits of the scope of this work, and my own time in the field. Whereas televisions, and even radio, were still reasonably scarce in my field site at the time, the influx of these media, and the dramatically increasing presence of smartphones, means there is a wide scope for more ethnographic work to be done on fantasy fiction in newer media forms than books — this includes the increasing number of WhatsApp videos that people send around which claim to show recordings of witchcraft and magic.

Final remarks

Contemporary African life is marked by rapid accelerations and changes, opening communities and markets, and growing opportunities. In this it is equally marked by ever increasing precarity and instability, and by advancing exclusions and marginalisations. This precarious living is often shaped by “contradiction, dynamism, and fragility” (Weiss 2009:14), by a “condition of temporariness” (Mbembe and Comaroff 2010:659) and by a “dispossession of the future and of time, the two matrices of the possible” (Mbembe 2017:4-5). In this context, many African subjects seek a “tenuous hold on the process of temporal unfolding” in an increasingly interconnected world, one which is, however, configured implicitly “in coordination with the simultaneous sense of spatial incorporation and marginalization in a new global order” (Weiss 2009:238).

On the northern shores of Lake Malawi, these dynamics of contradiction and dynamism, of hope and despair, of inclusion and elevation or exclusion and marginalisation, play out in relation to stories, literacy, and libraries. While these dynamics are often studied in the urban spaces across Africa, I have examined them at play in a rural village. Here, I have argued that alphabetic literacy, particularly when conjoined to English and schooling, can act as one of the “abstract invisible forces” Mbembe speaks of, against which people have to do the work of producing their own humanity.

In exploring this I have chosen to look not only at local libraries and literacy as well as what I have called ‘the English myth’, but also at children’s stories – both local and imported – and at the role of fantasy fiction in that context. I suggest that because children’s stories are fundamentally about knowledge, ontologies and the making of the self and the social from the youngest age; they offer an exciting and enriching lens from which to asks questions about power, epistemology and universals. In the unpacking of the life-worlds around fantasy fiction

198 and children’s stories, we see the ways in which rural villagers negotiate and navigate the competing and contesting knowledge hierarchies and frameworks of their contemporary world and seek to make space for themselves in the global world order. As Anna Tsing writes at the end of her book on the promises and exclusions of universals – “here, hope and despair huddle together, sometimes dependent on the same technologies” (2005:269). In the technologies of (English) literacy, libraries, books, schooling and stories, we see hope and despair huddle tightly together, offering both vast possibilities and violent exclusions.

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Figure 11: Tea being served at Msinanwana’s house.

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APPENDIX 1 Library statistics from Tupane Library *put into a pie chart by a staff member of Impact Africa

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APPENDIX 2 Three stories from Nthanu za Chitonga

Frist Story in the book: Mbawa ndi Nyalubwe (Antelope and Leopard) Translated with James Mpanda and Nikolas Mwakasula

Mbaŵa yinguweta mbuzi yinthukazi ndi kuyizenge likutu….Mbawa (Antelope) reared a female goat and built a goat pen for her. Leopard also reared a male goat, but he did not build a pen for his goat. When Leopard heard that Mbawa had a pen for his goat, he brought his male goat to Mbawa to be kept in Mbawa’s pen. After sometime, the female goat bred a lot of baby goats. When Leopard heard that the goat of Mbawa had a lot of babies he sent a messenger to Mbawa asking for his goats, who said “Leopard said that the goats of Leopard must be taken to their owner, he wants them because there are many”. Mbawa was very shocked by Leopard’s request. “Did Leopard bring two goats into my house? Why is he asking for more goats?” The messenger carried the questions back to Leopard. When Leopard heard these questions he got angry and said, “Does he not know that it’s the male goat that breeds and makes the female goat to have many? Mine is a male goat, does he think a female goat can breed without a male goat?” After a long quarrel between Mbawa and Leopard, they decided to take the issue to the local court of the chief. Mbawa said, “I have made an mphala (court) with Rhino, with the aim to hear the head of the story.” Leopard accepted to be accused and to be taken to the mphala to meet there. Early in the morning, they went to the chief, who was Rhino. The owners of the mphala [those who have authority in it] greeted them, “we see each other Leopard! We see each other Mbawa! We have a black heart [we are worried], so who has something from the throat that must start, the ears are wide open” [who wishes to speak, we are listening]. Mbawa answered and said, “I have called the mphala because I have something to say that has hurt my heart. The one who has hurt my heart is leopard. I have a female got and I built a pen for it. The plan was to buy a male goat, but then I did not fulfil my wish, and there came a friend called Leopard, directing his male goat. When I greeted him he said, ‘I have come here for you Mbawa, upon hearing that you have a pen for a goat. I have brought my male goat for you to keep in your pen. Please keep it well. When things are better, I will come.’ When I heard the speech of my friend, I accepted and received the male goat and put it in my pen. After a few months had passed, I saw my goat multiplying [having kids]. I was shocked with the message that he sent, that friend of mine, Leopard. When he heard that I have many goats, he sent the messenger, the one who said to me I should give all the goats to Leopard, because his goat has made the goats to multiply.” Then the chief asked again the Leopard to explain his part. The Leopard said “I am partly agreeing with Mbawa, but I don’t agree with some of what he has said. I had a very strong male goat that helped Mbawa to breed a lot of goats and I know that all these goats are because of my male goat.” Now all the elders and the chief were quiet not knowing what to say about the issue. Then suddenly, the Hare appeared and he asked what the issue was about in the court. The other elders explained everything to the Hare. “We are glad you are here, you might have the wisdom to judge the case that we have here”, the Chief told the Hare.

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The Hare replied, “my chief and everyone sitting here, I have heard what you have said, but I don’t have time right now, my Father is very sick because he has delivered a girl child.” Everyone in the meeting was shocked including the Leopard. “You are fooling us Hare how can that happen?” Leopard asked. “Are you also shocked Leopard? Why are you looking for more goats from Mbawa when you know that your goat is a male? Does a male goat breed? You are the one to pay Mbawa because he kept your goat all this time.” All the court were happy for the Hare’s wisdom. The case was over and everyone went home.

Mo Kalulu wabayiyanga nyama (How Hare hunted for animals) Translated with Nikolas Mwakasula

Kalulu (Hare) used to kill a lot of animals and remove their skins. One day Himba (Jackal) was surprised to see the skins of animals that Hare had killed. Jackal asked, “How did you manage to kill all these animals since you are a small animal?” Kalulu answered, “It’s true I have killed a lot of animals, a variety of them, small and big animals, let’s keep moving and I will show you how I hunt for animals”. Kalulu further told Jackal, if I were you Jackal with long and sharp teeth, I could be catching a lot more animals than me.” After hearing this Jackal told Kalulu that he wants to see how he hunts for many animals, so that he can also gain some skills on how he could also hunt for animals. The two went together and reached near a hill. Then, Kalulu showed Jackal the blood of the animals that he had killed. “I stand here and open my mouth and show my teeth and close my eyes”, Kalulu explained. So Kalulu left Jackal there with his mouth open and his eyes closed. Then Kalulu went up the hill. While on top of the hill, Kalulu lifted up a big rock and rolled it down to where Jackal was. Kalulu shouted, “Jackal get ready the animal is coming and please don’t open your eyes!” The stone rolled down and hit Jackal on his head and he fell down. Then Kalulu came down and found that Jackal was dead. “How did you think I kill animals?” he said to himself. He carried dead Jackal and removed his skin. One day, Leopard met Kalulu and said, “How do you hunt for animals? I see you have different skins of different animals at your house? People are saying I am the one killing all these animals in this forest, but looking at all these skins, it’s clear that it’s not me who is killing these animals. You seem to be more genius than me, would you please share me your skills so that I can also hunt for many animals.” Kalulu told Leopard, “Follow me and I will show you how I hunt for these animals.” Kalulu told Leopard to wait near the hill, and that he should close his eyes and open his mouth. Kalulu then went up the hill and found a big rock. He rolled it down where Leopard was waiting. “Leopard get ready the animal is coming, remain steady and don’t open your eyes!” shouted Kalulu. Leopard was surprised, what kind of animal is it that is not afraid of me, instead it’s coming to me? Then Leopard decided to open his eyes to see. As he opened his eyes, he saw a rolling stone coming, he ran away from it and hid himself. Then, Kalulu came down from the hill thinking that Leopard had been killed.

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“I am done with you, you thought you were clever” Kalulu said to himself. As soon as he finished saying this, Leopard jumped over Kalulu. “I have caught you, today all your tricks are gone, you can’t cheat me!” Lesson: If you cheat your friends, one day you will betray yourself.

Wajinangiye wenecho (They betray themselves) Translated with Nikolas Mwakasula

Once upon a time there were girls who built their homes near the river - nearby there was a huge tree with lots of branches and leaves. In that tree there lived Crocodile, who had natural salts. The girls were cooking their food without putting salt in. The first day they cooked the food on the fire and went to the river to bathe. The crocodile came down and put salt in the beans, while putting the salt in he was singing a song: ‘They have betrayed themselves!’ When the girls came back and tasted the food they found that there was salt in the food. They were all surprised and asked each other who came secretly to put salt in our food? The all did not know and said where could we have found the salt? They cooked their nsima and ate. In the next morning they came again to their homes carrying their maize flour and beans. They cooked the beans and went to the river to bathe. The crocodile came down and put the salt in the beans, while putting the salt the crocodile was singing the song: ‘They have betrayed themselves!’ The girls came back and they found that that their beans tasted salty. All the days that they cooked their food the crocodile was putting salt in for them. One day they agreed to choose one of them to hide and see who was putting salt in their food. They cooked their beans on the fire and one hid while the rest went to the river to bathe. The crocodile came down and put the salt in the beans then went back in the tree, when they came back from the river they asked the one who was hiding if she saw the one who was putting salt in their food, so she said I saw the crocodile putting salt in. The girls went and explained to their parents how the crocodile applied salt in their food. The parents came and cut the tree. After cutting the tree the crocodile ran away and was gone for good. The next day as usual they cooked their food and went to the river again, when they came back they found that the food had no salt. Then the girls said to one another: we have betrayed ourselves!

LESSON: Do not mistreat those who help you.

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APPENDIX 3 Comparison of Chichewa and Chitonga Taken from the latest version of Awake! available online. CHITONGA Kumbi Musuzgika Maŵanaŵanu? (Do you have difficulties with your thoughts/Are you stressed?) ‘Kumbi Musuzgika Mawanawanu?’ “Munthu weyosi wasuzgika mawanawanu pa vinthu vinyaki, kweni ndiwona kuti ini ndini nde panambala wanu. Pe vinthu vinandi vo ndisuzgikanavu mawanawanu. Chimoza mwaku ichu nkhuphwere mulumu wangu yo watama matenda ngakuzunguliya mutu kwa vyaka vinandi.”—Jill.

“Muwolu wangu wakundithawa, ndipu ndakhumbikangamkuphwere ndija wanawawi. Venga vakusuzga ukongwa. Kusazgiyapu yapa, ntchitu yingundimaliya ndipu ndengavi ndalama zakuti ndinganozese galimotu. Pa nyengu iyi, ndazi wanga cha cho ndingachita. Ndingusuzgika ukongwa mawanawanu. Ndazi wanga kuti mbuheni kujibaya,kweni ndingupempha Chiuta kuti nkhanthu ndifwi waka kuti ndiluweku masuzgu.”—Barry

Nge Jill ndi Barry, kumbi nyengu zinyaki namwi musuzgika ukongwa mawanawanu? Asani ndi viyo, nkhani zo ze mu magazini iyi zikuwovyeningi kweniso kukupembuzgani. Zikonkhoska vinthu vo vichitiska kuti tisuzgikengi mawanawanu, vo vingatichitikiya kweniso vo tingachita asani tayamba kusuzgika mawanawanu.

CHICHEWA Kodi Mumavutika Kwambiri ndi Nkhawa? (Do you struggle with anxiety?)

“‘Kodi Mumavutika Kwambiri ndi Nkhawa?’ “Ndimadziwa kuti aliyense amakhala ndi nkhawa, koma zanga ndiye zawonjeza. Munthune mavuto andichulukira. Mwachitsanzo, nthawi zonse ndimafunika kusamalira mwamuna wanga yemwe sangakwanitse kuchita chilichonse payekha komanso ali ndi vuto la muubongo.” —Jill.”

“Mkazi wanga anandithawa, ndipo ndinkafunika kulera ndekha ana athu awiri. Kuchita zimenezi sikunali kophweka. Kuwonjezera pamenepo, ndinachotsedwa ntchito moti ndinalibe ndalama zokwanira zoti n’kukonzetsera galimoto yanga. Sindinkadziwa choti ndichite moti ndinkada nkhawa kwambiri. Pa nthawiyi ndinaganiza zoti ndingodzipha. Ndinkadziwa kuti kuchita zimenezi n’kulakwa choncho ndinapempha Mulungu kuti andithandize kuthana ndi mavuto angawa.”—Barry.

Kodi nthawi zina nanunso mumakhala ndi nkhawa ngati mmene zinalili ndi Jill komanso Barry? Ngati ndi choncho, nkhani zotsatirazi zikuthandizani. Nkhanizi zikufotokoza zimene zimachititsa kuti anthu azikhala ndi nkhawa, mmene nkhawa zimakhudzira thanzi lathu komanso zimene tingachite kuti tisamakhale ndi nkhawa kwambiri.

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APPENDIX 4 Writing assignment for Standard 7

These are short stories from the Standard 7 class I was tutoring as part of the BolaBola after school programme. Usually students write their work in direct relation to stories or texts in their textbooks. I asked the students to free-form write a short story either about the village, the market or the town. I put some words, such as ‘spear’ or ‘market’ on the board. Here I record some of the students’ stories. I do not show these stories in order to denigrate the incredible hard work that both students and teachers put into learning. Rather, the stories demonstrate the enormous difficulties English poses to students, even after six and a half years of schooling. The first two stories received the highest grades in the class. Story 1: Our Town: The name of our town is chengautuwa. It is found in Mzuzu. There are many things like in this town such as buildings, schools, market place and hospital. We love our town because the school and hospital doesn’t have far away to reach. Story 2: It was my first day to go to town. And I went to the market which name Kande. When I was in the market I was a boy who was drunk alcohol and the bus were coming from Mwaya and the bus killed him so that it was an accident. Story 3: In this Malawi the many village in this became spear. So in the became lion in this is happy lion this is killed many spear became happy and killed animals. Story 4: I am to the market. I will buying the clothes and shoes. After that I will see the car push on my legs. My sister are also went to the market. The sister I will be buying the fish and soap. The market are so very beautiful. The end my story. Story 5: One day our Chituka village accident. Accident she very bad because one day my mother go to the market so our minibus she broke down after kapesa river. Story 6: In our village we can see anything, will be happy for you anything your village was do something lake water, eat sima, go to garden, reading anything and doing something we go. Story 7: Town at is the beautiful town, the house is very ship but it is like the town enking is beautiful town. My mother is going to town but my grandmother is go to seling clothes in to town.

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APPENDIX 5 Book audit data Taken from a book audit done over 55 houses across Kamwala and Chituka.

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