Born-free poets

Robert Chiwamba and Evelyn Pangani were among the first to start performing poetry in a deliberate effort to dispense with some of the aesthetic features of modern Malawian poetry. Both were born around 1990 and were thus young children when political and constitutional changes took place. Their trajectories are not identical. Chiwamba, a graduate in public administration at Chancellor College of the University of Malawi, owes more than he may admit to the legacies of literary ferment in that institution. It is Chiwamba who has done the most to represent the new poets as a movement, and his entrepreneurial approach has helped convene the poets for live performances and, since 2016, on the internet platform sapitwapoetry.com, which by 2019 had featured work by over 130 Malawian poets. Pangani, whose highest academic achievement is a diploma in journalism, has been a popular voice in the movement and one of the few female writers and performers. Between 2011 and 2015, she did her part to lend coherence to the new movement by hosting a poetry-reading show on Joy Radio, a commercial station broadcasting from Blantyre. Towards the end of the 2010s, she ceased to release and to perform new poems despite continuing to write them. She cited her becoming a mother and her lack of funds to record the poems as reasons for her withdrawal.

Chiwamba was born in Balaka in southern Malawi to Lomwe and Yao parents. Despite some efforts at ethno-linguistic revivalism since the democratic transition (Kamwendo Reference Kamwendo and Englund2002; Kayira et al. Reference Kayira, Banda and Robinson2019), colonial and postcolonial policies had consolidated Chichewa as Malawi's most widely spoken language by the 1990s, and it was the only language spoken at Chiwamba's home. He found his calling as a poet when he was a student at Chancellor College, initially as a way of entertaining his fellow students with colloquial verse on mundane topics, but he soon developed an ambitious agenda for the new movement. Although he audited lectures and workshops led by academic poets, Chiwamba perceived a gap between what they took to be poetry and the kind of language that would make poetry resonate with Malawi's populace. The more some of his lecturers questioned the status of his and his peers’ writing as poetry, the more determined he became to assert the need for new poetry for new times. Apart from the diminishing need to deploy elliptical expression for political reasons, as discussed below, Chiwamba felt that by the twenty-first century Malawians were generally living in a world of instant communication where proverbial wisdom was becoming obsolete. In one of our conversations, he claimed that proverbs (miyambi) and esoteric idioms (mikuluwiko) had largely disappeared from everyday language. He described the question he posed to himself as follows: ‘If people don't understand proverbs, what will I benefit from using them? [Ngati miyambi samva, ndipindula chiyani?]’

Pangani had begun to write poetry as a teenager in her home district of Blantyre and did not share Chiwamba's formative experience as an aspiring poet in a university. She wrote verse in English as a secondary-school student but switched to Chichewa in 2008 to reach a wider audience on the radio. Pangani soon found herself in the company of like-minded writers who, assembled both virtually and in live sessions by Chiwamba and his peers, experienced unprecedented fellowship. Pangani's passion was to write verse about women and girls, particularly about the importance of schooling and the need to reduce the domestic chores that hampered many girls’ education. Such messages proved popular among governmental and non-governmental agencies, which invited Pangani to perform at various functions. It is a vocation she has pursued as a teacher of poetry among schoolchildren, sponsored by Save the Children.

The opportunities to perform offered by various organizations are another facet of the movement's public presence. Chiwamba has been a prolific contributor to such events, his portfolio of collaborators including Malawi's ombudsman, UNESCO and the World Bank, along with a number of NGOs. In some cases, the organizations have commissioned poems on particular topics, while in others the poets have performed work from their existing repertoire. Never slow to seize opportunities, Chiwamba has also had the movement adopt annual themes in recent years: gender-based violence in 2017 and discrimination against people with albinism in 2018. Despite their potential to generate income, these campaigns and functions have not made anyone a full-time poet. Pangani sells home-made furniture in Lilongwe, while Chiwamba works for the Malawi Revenue Authority as a tax collector in the remote northern district of Karonga. He prefers the permissive attitude of his superiors there to the more restrictive regime that might prevent his travels if he worked in Malawi's urban centres.

A new aesthetic

Chiwamba and his peers pursue their vision of a poetry movement in the aftermath of the Malawi Writers Group, which nurtured literary talent during the one-party era led by the ‘President for Life’ Kamuzu Banda (Mphande Reference Mphande1996; Vail and White Reference Vail and White1991: 280–98). Some of its members came to enjoy international publishing success – notably Frank Chipasula, Jack Mapanje, Lupenga Mphande and Paul Zeleza – but the origins of the group lay in youthful enthusiasm not unlike what drives the current movement. Its early interventions in the 1970s also included comparable efforts to bring, through open-air recitals and plays, literary works to wider audiences than could be achieved through its academic base at Chancellor College and the other constituent colleges of the University of Malawi (Mphande Reference Mphande1996: 94–6). Such was the stranglehold of Banda's regime on creativity, however, that poetry became the group's principal medium for, as the members saw it, its propensity to disguise politically sensitive observations in indirect and elliptical expression. By the same token, the texts were written rather than spoken, save for the meetings between a select group of insiders, and English became the principal language in which the poetry was written.

The conditions under which the attendant aesthetic arose were severe enough, as attested by Mapanje's imprisonment in 1987–91 and by the exile of older writers, such as Legson Kayira and David Rubadiri. No sooner had Malawi celebrated its independence in 1964 than Banda's autocratic impulses came into view. The 1965 Public Security Regulation gave him the powers to detain without trial anyone accused of holding dissenting views, while legislation in 1968 established the Censorship Board to criminalize possessing, importing, publishing, distributing or displaying any text or other printed matter deemed ‘undesirable’ by the regime (Mphande Reference Mphande1996: 81). As Mapanje (Reference Mapanje and Englund2002: 184) has recalled, the poets developed a language in which to elude the omnipresent censor by, among other strategies, coining new words such as ‘to accidentalise’. A shared ‘code of imagery’ (Vail and White Reference Vail and White1991: 281–2) was key to the poets’ work.

The challenge the twenty-first-century spoken-word poets have issued concerns both the aesthetics and the purpose of poetry in the so-called new Malawi. Immediately after Malawi's first multiparty elections in over thirty years in 1994, Mapanje welcomed the new era from exile in the United Kingdom by announcing the need to ‘reconstruct the stories of thirty years of Banda's autocratic rule without fear’ (Reference Mapanje1995: 14). He insisted on ‘de-autocratization’ as the necessary condition for such reconstruction, not only in the structures of government but also in the imaginative resources that writers would draw on. Malawians seized on the new freedoms, however, in ways that the country's internationally best-known poet and the founding member of the Writers Group found hard to condone. A few years after calling for fearless writing, Mapanje bemoaned that the mushrooming newspapers had become ‘ebullient to the point of being irresponsible’ (Reference Mapanje and Englund2002: 178). Poems, written in English and Chichewa, were a striking feature of the more than a dozen newspapers that began appearing as soon as the political situation allowed (Kishindo Reference Kishindo2003). Few of the poets had published before, let alone were members of the Writers Group, but this period ‘actually saw the greatest number of published poets in the literary history of Malawi’ (Chimombo and Chimombo Reference Chimombo and Chimombo1996: 78). Yet while Mapanje regretted the abuse of freedom of expression, the newspaper poets’ academic critics noted the ‘very uneven quality’ that ranged from ‘plain statement to true poetry’ (ibid.: 86). It is the academic critics’ propensity to place themselves as the arbiters of poetic taste that the new spoken-word movement has sought to challenge.

Many of the poets of the early 1990s disappeared with the short-lived newspapers, but Chiwamba, Pangani and their peers would have been too young to participate then. Nor, as mentioned, do newspapers or other print publications play a significant role in the dissemination of their poetry. It was private radio stations rather than newspapers that proved resilient in the media landscape of the new Malawi (Englund Reference Englund2011: 31–6). Most stations aired regular programmes of poetry recitals, and these contributed to the growth of the spoken-word movement. The spoken-word poets’ thematic range in the 2010s was also considerably broader than the preoccupation with politicians and electoral politics in the poems of the early 1990s. Yet the apparently limited aesthetic and technical command of poetry has continued to draw derision from academic critics.

One of those critics is Benedicto Malunga, the long-time registrar at the University of Malawi and a renowned Chichewa poet. Although he published his first poem as a student at Chancellor College in 1981, his preference for writing in Chichewa made him a somewhat marginal figure in the Writers Group. Over the years, his poetry has featured many times on the radio, in the Chichewa curriculum in secondary schools and even on the internet platform curated by Chiwamba, making him the best-known poet in Malawi – ahead of, as he proudly told me, Mapanje, whose fame is largely international, beyond the country's small academic community. He does not, however, see Chiwamba and his peers as carrying forward his legacy in Chichewa poetry. In my conversations with him, Malunga described the new spoken-word poetry as deploying a ‘bastardized language’ and ‘campus humour’. Every generation of students, he asserted, had its campus jokes, but they could hardly become the stuff of poetry. He also dismissed Chiwamba's claim that proverbs no longer featured in Malawians’ language by pointing out their frequent use by political and religious leaders. Malunga saw himself as maintaining high aesthetic standards in Chichewa poetry, citing as examples imagery and diction in one of his anthologies (Malunga Reference Malunga2001) and the translations he had prepared. They include the epigraph of W. B. Yeats’ poem in his translation of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (Achebe Reference Achebe and Wokomaatani Malunga2004). In 2018, he was also hoping to finalize his translation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar before the 2019 presidential and parliamentary elections.

The teachers of literature at Chancellor College have not been more receptive to the new movement. A lecturer in Chichewa told me that he had assigned Chiwamba's poems in the classroom to provoke a debate on what constituted ‘real poetry’. Chiwamba's poems served as examples of how not to write poetry, although the lecturer admitted that interesting discussions could ensue when students were confronted with such examples. For this lecturer, Chiwamba's poems were often too long and repetitive, evidence of the poet's inability to use idioms and proverbs to shorten his text. The lecturer saw this lack of technical mastery as a consequence of Chiwamba's study of social sciences rather than literature. The very popularity of his poetry, the lecturer felt, threatened the development of creative writing in Malawian languages. Inspired by Chiwamba, many others could adopt his low standards.

Chiwamba's response to these criticisms was twofold. On the one hand, he was keen to convince me of the care with which he had considered the aesthetic and technical aspects of his poetry. He had attended some of Malunga's lectures on poetry and cited him saying that not all the elements that constituted poetry needed to be present in any given poem. Chiwamba also regretted that all types of poetry were talked about in Chichewa using just one word, ndakatulo. What would, he asked rhetorically, ‘spoken word’ be in Chichewa? On the other hand, Chiwamba was also anxious to assert a difference between the new movement and the poetry favoured by academics. He was explicit about the entrepreneurial spirit in his efforts to galvanize a spoken-word movement as an expression of views and concerns held by the majority of Malawians. It not only entailed accepting topics that may have been too mundane for more high-minded poets; it also required the kind of language people spoke in their own lives, although, crucially, this was enlivened by the poet's humorous and inventive uses of words, some of which were non-standard Chichewa. Repetition was another deliberate aesthetic feature for poems prepared to be performed, not a sign of the poet's incompetence. That critics would continue to dismiss his poems as ‘cracking jokes’ (kuseketsa) and ‘only telling stories’ (kungokamba nkhani) was of little consequence to Chiwamba. The popularity of his poetry was his reward.

Debating mathanyula

Unbeknown to each other, Chiwamba and Pangani prepared poems against homosexuality in the wake of the 2009 controversy over the ‘gay wedding’ mentioned earlier. Chiwamba's poem Takana mathanyula (We Refuse Homosexuality) was actually his second on the topic, prepared hard on the heels of Mudzafa imfa yowawa (You Will Die a Painful Death), which had described in graphic detail the gruesome demise that awaited homosexuals. The idea for this poem had occurred to Chiwamba before the events in 2009, but its original subjects were armed robbers rather than homosexuals. It may be a measure of the poet's opportunism that he changed the subject as events unfolded, but both Chiwamba and Pangani insisted to me that they stood fully behind the homophobic mood of their poems. Despite his ambition to bring his performances to various national and international stages, Chiwamba even claimed that he would not be deterred by organizers’ threats to boycott him. The popular demand for these poems drove their defiance. They enjoyed plenty of airtime on various radio stations, and Takana mathanyula has been one of the most downloaded poems on the movement's website for years. Chiwamba's live audiences have come to expect it as the boisterous finale of his performances, not unlike a pop star belting out his or her greatest hit.

Whether Chiwamba and Pangani met the popular demand simply by parroting what people wanted to hear is a more complex issue than it may seem. On the one hand, they have not used their poetic licence to reform the language in which homosexuality is talked about in Chichewa. The connotations of mathanyula are hardly neutral, let alone conducive to a sympathetic attitude. It summons images of sodomy, and it conveys a sense of coerced sexual acts. Before the current controversies, mathanyula was used for what senior men did to their younger male companions in the same-sex settings of prisons and mines. It was also the word for male rape in other contexts. Activists have struggled to translate ‘gay sex’ into Chichewa and have often preferred to use English words. On the other hand, Chiwamba and Pangani diverge from the popular norm by de-emphasizing the alleged Christian case against homosexuality. In her poem Ndalama za nyansi sitikuzifuna (We Don't Want Dirty Money), Pangani mentions the issue early on in order to move on to other observations. Both of them did mention to me their Christian faith as one reason for their anti-gay attitudes, but as an Anglican (Chiwamba) and a Roman Catholic (Pangani), they have had no direct association with evangelical and Pentecostal preachers most commonly found to voice public condemnation of homosexuals. In Malawi, as Chiwamba pointed out, the influence has gone the other way, with some pastors citing his poems in their preaching.

Nor would ‘hate speech’, or indeed ‘homophobia’, exhaust the contents of these poems. To be sure, Pangani's poem evokes disease and filth in ways that can only be regarded as demeaning, while Chiwamba's ends with what appears to be incitement to violence. Yet the bulk of both poems addresses Malawi's colonial legacies and its more recent democratic experiments. Chiwamba summons an overwhelming consensus on the anti-gay sentiment by repeating the question about what everyone is saying in the various contexts of everyday lives. He achieves this mood also by deploying Chiyao and Chitumbuka, Malawi's other major languages, to ask the same question, and by listing several different names for God, as though the sentiment cut across religious divides. At the same time, his poem mimics the new democratic era by conveying the debate on the views one can hold on the issue. They include the claims that anti-gay Malawians are hypocrites for not admitting vices among the heterosexual majority, that Malawi has no distinct culture of its own within which to regard homosexuality as alien, and that consensual sex between adults is no one else's concern. It is Malawian activists and their foreign sponsors who appear in both poems to kill all debate. The crux of both poems is a warning against taking Malawians for granted, however ‘polite’ or ‘mild-mannered’ (ofatsa) or ‘poor’ (osauka) they may seem.

The vitriol aimed at Malawian activists is consistent with popular suspicions about NGOs as strategies for self-enrichment in the new Malawi (Biruk Reference Biruk2018; Englund Reference Englund2006). In her conversations with me, moreover, Pangani explained her urge to write Ndalama za nyansi sitikuzifuna as a response to what she saw as President Joyce Banda's weakness in resisting foreign demands for gay rights. Although Banda never implemented new policies or laws in this area during her short reign, the female poet felt compelled to protest because of the female president's perceived feebleness. The poems also draw on historical notions to express critical thoughts. Pangani mentions ‘colonialist’ (mtsamunda), while Chiwamba goes further back in history to summon slavery (ukapolo). In a particularly striking verse, Chiwamba swears that if homosexuality represents freedom, Malawians will choose to return to slavery ‘in Egypt’.

Some of the claims and imagery in Pangani's poem derive from her internet searches, such as the evocation of ‘twelve diseases’ and the emphasis on ‘anal cancer’. They indicate the origin of her objections to homosexuality in anxieties that cross national boundaries, whatever the violation of national self-determination that her poem highlights. Indeed, the connotations of sodomy in mathanyula may resonate with popular reflections on sex and power more widely in contemporary Africa (see Geschiere and Orock Reference Geschiere and Orock2020; Meiu Reference Meiu2020). On the other hand, some of the imagery in both poems, despite Chiwamba's claims about disappearing proverbs and idioms, deploys well-established Chichewa tropes. Among others, they include, in Chiwamba's poem, maliro a njoka (lit. a snake's funeral) for disrespect, kwa mtu wa galu tatemetsa nkhwangwa pamwala toto (lit. hitting a rock with an axe by the dog's head) for ardent refusal, and, in Pangani's poem, kampeni kumphasa (lit. a small knife hidden in a mat) for plotting. Alongside such established idioms are more recent ones, some of which require knowledge possessed by Malawians living in urban areas, such as chintuwitsa mbali inayi for a ‘four-sided scone’ in Chiwamba's poem. The challenges that these phrases present to the translator are a measure of the ambitious language that the spoken-word poets pursue despite their opposition to academic poetry.

Gender equality

The themes of neo-imperialism and neo-colonialism, pitting homosexuality against patriotism, had become common in African anti-gay discourses by the early 2010s. While the two poems described above may have added little to these themes, their popularity helped raise the profile of spoken-word poetry in Malawi and vindicated, for the poets themselves, the aesthetic orientation they had chosen for the movement. As mentioned, however, these poems must not be considered in isolation from their writers’ other works. Chiwamba and Pangani have also penned and performed love poems, whose evocation of gender relations unsettles the association often made in the activist literature on homosexuality that anti-gay sentiments uphold a ‘heteropatriarchal’ social order (Epprecht Reference Epprecht2012: 228). Homophobia, in this view, tends to correlate with conservative attitudes to gender relations in heterosexual relationships. Yet when considered with regard to Malawi's male-dominated, often misogynistic popular music, Chiwamba's and Pangani's love poems can appear positively countercultural. Men and women have remarkably similar feelings in Chiwamba's Takumana pano pamsika (We Met Here at the Market), while female desire gets woven into a poem about love and devotion in Pangani's Ngati mawa sindifika (If I Don't Arrive Tomorrow).

Takumana pano pamsika describes a chance meeting between old flames in a market place. Both of them have arrived with their spouses and children, only to become acutely aware of how past desires are not easily extinguished in the present. The symmetry between male and female cravings not only introduces rhythmic repetition to the poem but also asserts an equivalence between the genders. For each gesture, thought and feeling that the poem attributes to one party, it finds the same for the other. The poem's narrator assumes responsibility for failing to marry his old flame in the refrain ‘dilly-dallying, my dilly-dallying / Stupidity, my stupidity’ (Koma chidodotu ine chidodo / Kupusa ineyo kupusa). The refrain is consistent with the man's role as the active one in courtship, marked in Chichewa by the active tense ‘to marry’ (kukwatira) for a man and the passive tense ‘to be married’ (kukwatiwa) for a woman. Yet the poem's egalitarian ethos is such that even this convention gives way to some debate about who bears responsibility for the unfulfilled union. In the end, the couple resolve, as ‘religious people’ (opemphera; lit. ‘those who pray’), to accept the burden of convention in a tearful farewell.

Intimacy between two lovers outweighs any other consideration in Pangani's Ngati mawa sindifika. More lyrical in its praise for romantic love than Takumana pano pamsika, it centres on the prospect of the narrator's sudden death – ‘If I don't arrive tomorrow’ – and deploys several bodily and natural metaphors to convey the depth of her love. Her heart leaps with joy because of her lover; when closing her eyes, she sees only her lover's image; if the lover is disappointed in politics, she is too. Towards the end, this comparatively short poem gives counsel to the lover in the event of death before it returns to the present bliss in remarkably sensual imagery.

The expression of female desire, written by a female and delivered in a female voice, breaks convention where Takumana pano pamsika appears to suppress emotions for the sake of convention. Yet both poems convey countercultural courage. Ngati mawa sindifika asserts the woman as the active partner in an intimate, sexual relationship. Takumana pano pamsika reveals that even ‘those who pray’ – and a deacon at that – can harbour extramarital passions, not because of wanton lust but as subjects infatuated with memories of past intimacy. The significance of these poems when discussing their ‘homophobic’ counterparts is not simply the seriousness with which they explore the meaning of romantic love where it often seems absent (Thomas and Cole Reference Thomas, Cole, Cole and Thomas2009). If the ‘homophobic’ poems acquire, in addition to what critics might consider their intrinsic hate speech, a hypocritical quality when compared with the poems written for international organizations, these love poems may help cast some doubt over the charge of opportunism.

Both Pangani and Chiwamba explained to me the autobiographical nature of these poems. Pangani penned hers to be performed at her own wedding. While its origins in celebrating the matrimonial bond may mitigate misogynistic misgivings about female sexuality, the poem nevertheless delivers an alternative to the common trope in Malawian middle-class weddings – the bride as her groom's helper. The hapless narrator in Chiwamba's poem, on the other hand, is to some extent the poet himself. The personal circumstances contribute nuance that the ultimately impersonal attacks on homosexuality lack. The aesthetic of people's poetry shows itself capable of questioning convention.