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Eng. Lit., my sister, was more than a cruel joke--it was the heart of alien conquest Felix Mnthali, "The Stranglehold of English Lit.")
As a party of Europeans
watched the rhythm and dignity of the dances they were so favourably impressed that they asked the Paramount Chief to send senior men to teach the songs and dances to the boys in the mission schools....
The songs were subsequently
sung in the churches, the tunes of the well-known songs were used in the churches of the Scottish mission with different words written for them. Margaret Read, The Ngoni of Nyasaland 44-45
According to Edward Said's thesis in Culture and Imperialism, there is a reciprocal relationship between culture and the maintenance of imperial dominance. Critical to his analysis is the definition of a discourse of imperialism in the canonical literature produced at the "Center," and the way it functions at the periphery in the service of the empire. In the African situation, and in many other colonial outposts, imperialism, however, was mediated not just from the center of the "mother-country" to the periphery but also within the periphery itself. In other words, the "Center" had a shifting axis where selected places within the periphery acted as sub-centers from which the canonical cultural expressions of the mother country were reproduced for the purpose of global imperialism. It was through these sub-centers that indigenous institutions were destroyed and their cultures appropriated for the maintenance of global capital and imperial domination. To the extent, then, that Said tends to focus on the (metropolitan) circulation of elites, he is, really, of only partial use here.
For the purposes of this study, the origins and evolution of The Malawi Writers Group will serve as an example of the sort of independent and autonomous cultural and socio-political group that can emerge from the colonial experience, emerge, in effect, to interrogate the imperial foundations of a hegemonic politics of domination. On the other hand, a counter-location will be identified through and in Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda, former Life President of Malawi, whom I propose to present as the enigmatic cultural embodiment of a stifling sub-center of imperial gestures and structures. Appropriately, Banda will be displayed in all his "enigma"--with his origins shrouded in mystery,...