Singing Morality: Initiation Songs, Imagery, and Moral Education in Rural Malawi

Initiation rites in Africa mark a transition for the initiates from one stage in life to another, and are aimed at imparting knowledge and moral values  that help them embrace and ably perform their new roles and responsibilities in society. One avenue through which lessons are conveyed to the novices during these rites is songs. In this article I examine and discuss the texts of selected songs used for moral education during the circumcision rite called Jando as it is performed in Muwawa village, Senior Chief Ngokwe, in Malawi’s southern district of Machinga. I wish to show that the messages in the songs reflect the agrarian context within which they were composed and are performed. I also attempt to show that in their  reference to animals and animal imagery, the songs reveal the people’s embeddedness in their environment. I argue that while the songs are specific to their context in terms of the human behaviour alluded to and the imagery used, they aim at promoting values whose significance  transcends time and space. My analysis of the songs is informed by a Functionalist approach to oral literature which focuses on the utilitarian value of a cultural activity for a particular society. Keywords: Jando, initiation, song, imagery, moral education, tradition, Yawo, Lomw

Evocation of the dramatic in David Rubadiri’s poetry

James David Rubadiri (1930-2018), poet, playwright, novelist, academic, diplomat, and political activist, is no stranger to many literary scholars in Africa and beyond. His popularity is not a result of his thespian skills—he acted Othello once—or skills in fiction writing (although he did try his hand at novel writing, producing No Bride Price), but mainly a result of his teaching and his skills in poetry. Although he is famous as a poet, his poetic harvest is rather minimal—his only collection, An African Thunderstorm and Other Poems, boasts only twenty-three poems. What the poems lack in numbers, they more than compensate for in the energy and beauty that they radiate, beauty that has seen most of them translated and anthologised around the world over the years. It is also this energy, the beauty of composition, and their tackling of relevant themes, which have made his poems the staple of many poetry classes in Africa and beyond. In this paper I analyse Rubadiri’s poems that appear in the collection An African Thunderstorm and Other Poems. I argue that the success of Rubadiri’s poetry is primarily based on his evocation of the dramatic, which is in turn reliant on his economic use of language, his descriptive skills, and his use of vivid and evocative images. These aspects do not only render the poetry enduring and memorable, but they also make the poems and the action in them spring to life, cementing the legacy of the poet as one of the accomplished poets of his generation in Africa. The discussion in this paper is divided into three parts. The first part examines how Rubadiri infuses a sense of the dramatic in poems that address issues of colonisation and blackness, the second part discusses how the poet evokes drama in poems about neocolonialism and postcolonial disenchantment, and the final section shows how Rubadiri’s use of imagery and  diction in poems about African life and the environment give the poems a vividness, sense of immediacy and a dramatic quality.Keywords: Rubadiri, Malawian poetry, style, language, evocative imagery, Africa,colonialis

Faces of an African city: versions of Harare in the poetry of Musaemura Zimunya and Chenjerai Hove

No Abstrac

Human-animal relationships and ecocriticism: a study of the representation of animals in poetry from Malawi, Zimbabwe, and South Africa

Ph.D. Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, 2011This study analyses the manner in which animals are represented in selected poetry from Malawi, Zimbabwe and South Africa. It discusses the various modes of animal representation the poets draw on, and the ideological influences on their manner of animal representation. It explores the kinds of poetic forms the poets employ in their representation of animals and examines the manner in which ecological or environmental issues are reflected in the poetry. Further, the study determines the extent to which the values expressed in the poems are consistent with, or different from, current ecological orthodoxies and the ways in which the metaphors generated in relation to animals influence the way we treat them. The study shows that in the selected poetry animals occupy a significant position in the poets’ exploration of social, psychological, political, and cultural issues. As symbols in, and subjects of, the poetry animals, in particular, and nature in general, function as tools for the poets’ conceptualisation and construction of a wide range of cultural, political, and philosophical ideas, including among others, issues of justice, identity, compassion, relational selfhood, heritage, and belonging to the cosmos. Hence, the animal figure in the poetry acts as a site for the convergence of a variety of concepts the poets mobilise to grapple with and understand relevant political, social, psychological and ecological ideas. The study advances the argument that studying animal representation in the selected poetry reveals a range of ecological sensibilities, as well as the limits of these, and opens a window through which to view and appreciate the poets’ conception, construction and handling of a variety of significant ideas about human to human relationships and human-animal/nature relationships. Further, the study argues that the poets’ social vision influences their animal representation and that their failures at times to fully see or address the connection between forms of abuse (nature and human) undercuts their liberationist quests in the poetry

Book review: Jack Mapanje’s And Crocodiles Are Hungry at Night

Brutal Hand of Dictatorship: Jack Mapanje’s And Crocodiles Are Hungry at Night. Oxfordshire: Ayebia, 2011, pp 435