2 History and Sociability
2.4 Theorizing the Sociology of the Malawi Society
2.4.4 Differential Access to Power: the Malawian Historical Canon
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hegemonized State-Society, embedded in his own personality by rehearsing Banda’s authoritarian script (Lwanda, 2002). The resource of history permits therefore the actuation of action upon a context everywhere punctuated with contextual appropriateness.
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expression of such incisions into new annuls of power comes with the arrival of the powerful Malawian Judiciary, whose powers are broad in their ability to interfere with any situation under contention, but are limited by the manner in which they are grounded in a symmetrical code governing their application. Such power is thus perceptively, and within the pragmatics of contesting for political space, less of an affront to the collective because of its inherent formalistic regulation, as opposed to the more arbitrary ones such as those of parliament and the executive, which are drawn more excessively from the creative appropriation of the contents of a malleable historical canon. The extents to which the powers of the judiciary seem to be without bounds and are at the same time restricted depict the standardizing role of that institution. This way of looking at that institution could perhaps reduce the usual puzzlement over its mysterious ability to appear independent when all other institutions seem too apparently interfered with.
These prior arguments are important because they parallel vividly with the structure of power within the Malawian society and state. Both the institutional order and social normative draw excessively from the historical canon, while at the same time, due to the room accorded to the actor to defend themselves when questioned by others, the historical canon continuously incurs distortion to the benefit of expanding the historical content of the canon so as to allow more actors to appropriate its elements to undergird their own performances. This emphasis here is on expanding the canon even though in actual effect, the appropriations of that canon’s contents more accurately describe efforts to keep as much of that canon’s malleable content available to self, and largely unavailable to others.135 To act seems to imply therefore the intention to prevent others from acting with regard to a certain material or symbolic thing, or outcome.
Interesting debates regarding gender equality for instance could stem from an interrogation of this relationship between the canon of history (inclusive of all its tales and their malleability) and power relations between men and women in the Malawian society. Also, such a view would assist in understanding why the Banda regime for instance had an obsession with conformity that even regulated the way people styled and presented their very own bodies. Lwanda (2006) shows for example that Banda’s face was imprinted on the very clothing worn by people and hang in the rooms in which people worked and lived. The State even prescribed what an appropriate presentation of the Malawian body should be; short and kempt hair for the men, and long dresses that preserved the female body’s decency for women. These conformity obsessions could be understood as the violent attempts to prevent people from participating in the
135 This has elsewhere been described as the obsession to see everyone conform totally while wanting to rebel completely.
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appropriation and projection of the nation’s histories, by denying them access even to personal aesthetics. This monopoly over Malawian history was in actual practice tantamount to keeping people from creeping into those spaces of creative appropriation which necessitated political citizenship; a type of citizenship which could have undermined Banda’s dictatorial regime.
Political inclusion, therefore, just as it was denied in the Banda dictatorship and the time before that, inheres in the Malawian context almost entirely in busting open the historical canon in order to permit more and more people to have a string to attach to their performances, and to load it with newer content. At the same time, while busting the canon is intensely and inextricably the content of individual performances, the flux it creates contributes to an ever increasing instability in the both the institutional order and the social normative to the extent that the Malawian public begins to unwittingly demand for stabilizing features in both these arenas of state and society.136 In some instances, certain contents of history or call them norms sensed to contain excessive political power are frozen and kept out of the discourse, and are therefore effectively turned into a set of standardizations. They remain parts of a known out-of-reach historical resource. This keeping out-of-reach too is an appropriation geared towards silencing certain contents and therefore denying certain others from tapping into their legitimating power.137 In other instances, bureaucratic processes become emphasized to reduce the flexibility of the institutional order, and therefore help to ascertain higher levels of predictability. In both cases, the totalizing effect is a commitment to greater formalization at the societal level while the creative impulses at the individual and other localized levels continue to contest that canon.
136 For instance, the Malawi Judiciary. Also, Coleman’s (1994) arguments pertaining to social exchange strongly suggest that while there is a lack of individual commitment towards the collective, the shared stakes resident in the society from which livelihoods and community derive account for the commitment towards maintaining a stable social order with set rules for living.
137 An example of such a resource could be the parental connotations attached to the office of the president of Malawi. So overpowering is this connotation that it caused the young freedom-fighters to request Banda to return from Ghana in 1957 to lead the MCP because he was an older male person who could be entrusted by the public with the role of leadership. They thought Malawians would not rally behind “boys”. Secondly, these parental connotations also dispel strong criticism because parental connotations are closely related to the norms of respect and reverence for the elderly. They also depict the elderly as the stores of wisdom – the knowers of Malawi’s history. Thus a fierce critic of the incumbent is easily brushed aside for showing no respect for the parent of the nation as well as possessing less knowledge about Malawi than the incumbent leader. The sheer political force that could be unleashed following the dislodgement of this element of the canon in relation to the position of the president and their establishment causes it to be appropriated as an element of history which is self-evidently and irrefutably Malawian – but only as a result of recognizing it as a historical resource whose power is best left alone.
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Under such a condition, formalities ought to not necessarily be glorified as the unintended and yet beneficial happenstances of a confused social situation. Instrumental formalities of this kind are and remain highly prejudicial and asymmetric rooted in – in the best case – the individual or localized tendencies to perform only that aspect of action which is rememberable by the collective, and – in the worst case – the aspects reproduced and actuated by those with the highest platforms for their voices to be heard, who claim to supposedly possess the greatest access to and most accurate reading of history, and who are backed by the rewarding and punishing forces of the State. Such a society could pessimistically be typified as representing a structurally entrenched commitment to the status quo.
While this commitment to the status quo is not completely dispelled by this dissertation, it is neither completely embraced. As already mentioned, the status quo continues to be that as the result of the total effect of actors who in principle have no real commitment to it as a trusted grand order from which they obtain a livelihood, so to speak (see Coleman, 1994). Rather this superficial commitment is attributed to the social turbulence from a great amount of fluidity arising from the discord afforded by isolated or individualized performances seeking to cement and dispel the semi-temporal statuses quo of contexts. This ambivalent commitment is however thought in this dissertation as being somewhat diluted by the possibilities of what is imaginable and appropriable; the chances of that which is imaginable and appropriable to break into the public domain; and the potential effects it would have in the on-going contestations for a legitimating narrative of power for anchoring any kind of performance (Bhabha, 1984). Social change can therefore be seen as an inherent feature of consciousness, truncating itself in thoughts to produce recognizable performances, without a grand, everywhere symmetrical, commitment to the status quo beyond just the social contexts or sets of social contexts in which actions must result in desirable outcomes. Admittedly, as shown in the historical presentation, the ramifications of these actions or performances can culminate in grand momentums favourable for change, seemingly orchestrated in a given direction, and undergirded by a legitimating quasi-ideology even when essentially most people could rightly be seen as acting entirely for their own purposes and ends.