From Place to Placelessness: Malawian Musicians, Commercial Music, and Social Worlds in Southern Africa by Richard Michael Deja

FROM PLACE TO PLACELESSNESS: MALAWIAN MUSICIANS, COMMERCIAL MUSIC, AND SOCIAL WORLDS IN SOUTHERN AFRICA BY RICHARD MICHAEL DEJA DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Musicology in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2016 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Donna Buchanan, Chair Professor Emeritus Thomas Turino, Director of Research Associate Professor Gabriel Solis Associate Professor Teresa Barnes ABSTRACT This dissertation examines how social belonging and community ties among Malawians and other individuals in southern Africa articulate with multiple geographic and social scales. As an ethnographic study focusing on musicians, this work demonstrates how musical sounds and practices are integrated into the construction of individual and group subjectivities. Using musical practices as tangible references to various social worlds among specific individuals, this study illustrates the complex multiplicity of Malawian subjectivities and identities. In conjunction with a substantial literature, this study is also intended as a corrective to social analyses that are overly binary in scope: global-local, African-Western, Cosmopolitan-non- Cosmopolitan, modern-traditional. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful for the research support of the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship and the Group Projects Abroad program. I would like to express the deepest gratitude to my ever-growing extended family, musical and otherwise, whom I have met over many decades of travel, and whose impact on my social world I will always treasure. In particular, I would like to thank: the Makhala and Kwilimbe families for remarkable hospitality, decades of musical guidance, and a lifetime’s worth of musical memories; the extended Migogo family, especially Mpilo in South Africa, and Frank in Malawi; Joe Mizere, Michael Phoya, Felix Nyika, and Maky for inspiring intellectual exchanges, hospitality, and continued friendship; Romeo, Erik, Chris, Wazza, Irmine, Watson, Peter, and Faith for your love of music and life, and the honor of sharing in those things together. A special thanks goes to Gene Kierman, Wongani Katundu, and Nathaniel Chalamanda whose presence beginning in my teenage life, radically influenced its trajectory, and ultimately, its articulation with the music of southern Africa. I would like to express sincere thanks to my academic mentors, professors Tom Turino and Donna Buchanan. Your intellectual and emotional support has been unparalleled throughout my academic pursuits. Each of you has had such a profound impact on me as an individual, words alone are hardly sufficient to articulate this. I would also like to express thanks to committee members Gabriel Solis and Terri Barnes, not only for your insight and comments, but for serving as role models for creating meaningful voices in academia and beyond. The pursuit of higher education is one which taxes individuals in ways difficult to explain to those who have not shared in that experience. My colleagues at Illinois have made the journey not only bearable, but unbelievably rewarding. Thank you, Eduardo, Hilary, Holly, Hollis, Jessica, Yannis, Priscilla, and a host of others in this adventure. Finally, to my family, I can’t imagine how this would have been possible without you. It is with the deepest and most profound humility that I thank my parents, my brothers Beau and Patrick, and my Uncle Rick and Angie. Thank you! iii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ……………………………………………….………………………........….1 CHAPTER 1: Commercial Music in Malawi: Into The 21st Century…………………………...34 CHAPTER 2: Commercial Music in Malawi: Nested Scales and Historical Routes……………72 CHAPTER 3: From Place to Placelessness: Sonic (Dis)Associations…………………….…...106 CHAPTER 4: Afropolitan Remix: Circuits of Interchange…………………….……………...135 CHAPTER 5: Manyasa Remix: Sites of Convergence………………………………………....175 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………………....224 APPENDIX: List and Definitions of Musical Terms and Genres…..….………………………230 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………235 iv INTRODUCTION In 2013, early on during my stay in Malawi, I became aware of the drafting of a national cultural policy initiated by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. I witnessed several discussions among musicians I worked with, came across opinion pieces by journalists in the print media, and attended informational meetings initiated by government representatives about the proposed policy. Many of my musician friends were optimistic that it would help them in their individual music careers as well as being good for the state of the music industry in Malawi more broadly. Others I met were more skeptical; some viewed it as a complete waste of time. Regardless of opinion, one issue that repeatedly arose in conversations relating to the national cultural policy was that Malawi lacked a musical identity. Malawi, musicians told me, lacks a distinctly Malawian music when compared to countries like Zimbabwe, DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo), or South Africa. I found the frequency of this matter-of-fact assertion troubling, especially because it was not the first time I had heard it. The very same issue arose just over twenty years earlier while I was a study abroad student at the University of Malawi. Again, musicians stated explicitly that Malawi had no musical identity, and would compare the situation in Malawi negatively to that of Zimbabwe and other nearby countries (Interviews 1992: Phwandaphwanda, Dulanya, Zondetsa). As problematic as I find this opinion, I have come to better understand the reasoning behind it and the conditions that generated it. The Malawian musicians I met wanted to achieve financial success with their music, ultimately on an international level. In general, I have noticed that many African musicians who live outside dominant commercial centers like the U.S. or U.K. have had to confront the idea of nationality more directly—either as a marker of difference to 1 leverage in a competitive marketplace or as something to downplay in order to secure equal participation. The musicians I worked with in Malawi, it seemed, were actually lamenting the lack of a competitive international brand of Malawian music.1 At the same time, I could not help but think that the idea of Malawi lacking a musical identity was odd. During many years of listening to and working with musicians from Malawi, I have come to associate small audible details and musical nuances (i.e. a guitar strumming pattern, a drum machine production technique) with these musicians and musical practices, in this sense understanding them to be recognizably Malawian. It is also true, however, that when asked what music Malawi is known for, I have found myself at a loss for words and consequently searching for comparisons to other more commonly recognized African musical genres like soukous, mbaqanga, benga, or Afrobeat. The discourse associated with the development of an official cultural policy in Malawi encompasses a sentiment I heard repeatedly during my stays in both Malawi and South Africa, which was that too many musicians copied foreign influences and that there was a need for contemporary music representative of these countries on the international market. This was significant to me because I found it necessary to re-examine my original hypothesis. Initially, my research findings suggested an emerging southern African pan-regional subjectivity as opposed to a national one. That is, various individuals and groups were identifying or behaving as members of a southern African cultural formation or social world. This large-scale community included characteristics and practices from multiple countries in southern Africa, such as South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Malawi, rather than a single state. It does turn out that there are a few 1 Though no one ever articulated it in quite this way during my stay, after watching the 2011 documentary Deep Roots Malawi, I noticed there is an unnamed MBC Radio 2 presenter (around minute 42:55) who does describe the need for Malawian musicians specifically to come up with a “brand” of music. 2 musicians who either explicitly or implicitly assert a perspective that embraces southern Africa as a marker of identity and social belonging. Countries in this region are interconnected historically and continue to be through the interchange of people for job opportunities or through access to mass media. The legacy of this is evident in part by the formation of the Southern African Development Community (SADC)2, which is an economic partnership comprised of fifteen member states in the southern portion of the African continent. Geographically, the region begins with South Africa as the southernmost country, and includes those countries just to the north (e.g. Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia), and continuing onward to include the Democratic Republic of Congo and Tanzania as the northernmost countries. Given this broad group of interconnected countries making up southern African, part of the challenge of forging a state- level national identity is rooted in the ongoing translocal interchange among these countries. The twin paradoxes of nationalism become relevant here. While constructing a national consciousness is at once dependent upon and jeopardized by embracing widely shared cosmopolitan ideals (Turino 2000, 15-16), the other paradox arises out of the fact that local distinctions are needed to mark difference

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