Introduction

Between 1964, when the government of newly independent Malawi was torn apart in the so-called Cabinet Crisis, and 1975, when the Secretary General of the Malawi Congress Party, Albert Nqumayo Muwalo, and the head of the police's Special Branch, Focus Gwede, were arrested for plotting to assassinate President H. Kamuzu Banda, a traumatic rearrangement of the Malawian political order occurred. The language in which the politics of this period was discussed increasingly drew upon a store of ethnic symbols and stereotypes. The restructuring of relationships of power that occurred was seen explicitly as a campaign against the Yao-speaking peoples of the southern part of the country and all the peoples of the Northern Region. These attacks were coupled with an affirmation of the special authenticity of the culture of the country's Chewa-speaking people. These events, accompanied by repeated purges of the Party's leadership and a steadily declining real income for Malawi's workers and peasants, were responsible for the destruction of sentiments of national unity which the campaign against the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland had inspired during the late 1950s and early 1960s and encouraged the fragmentation of the country along ethnically defined fault lines.^[4]

Why political discourse should have been carried out in this way requires explanation, the more so as the thrust of Malawian anti-colonialism was seen in virtually all the substantial literature it generated as having tended teleologically towards ultimate independence and national unity.^[5] From the earliest written 'tribal histories' and 'tribal associations', which were judged to have been manifestations of pride in African culture and hence as 'resistance' to colonial control, the jump to a fully nationalist perspective was assumed to be merely a matter of greater education and modernization, a process finally consummated by independence in 1964.

Yet in many ways earlier forms of parochial consciousness have proved more enduring. Tensions expressed in terms of ethnicity exist in Malawi, as they do elsewhere in the region, and they have assumed a potent reality, focusing attitudes and specifying actions. To understand why they possess such power, one must go beyond the older historiography, with its emphasis upon the nationalist dimension of resistance against colonialism and its stress on ultimate national unity. One must instead seek the varied origins of current ethnic and regional consciousness in the uneven nature of the country's colonial experience. Malawi is a particularly apt country for such an approach. Since 1921 it has been divided into Northern, Central and Southern Regions. These divisions have reflected not merely administrative convenience, but also different economic, social, and intellectual experiences dating from before the turn of this century. They thus provide a useful framework for a study of the manner in which ethnic politics has varied from area to area and from period to period.

Our hypothesis is that colonial authorities, for reasons of administrative convenience, imposed from above parameters of political debate that centred upon the assumed reality of the 'tribe' as a taxonomic unit and accepted the existence of local powers for chiefs and their advisers. A full-blown ethnic identity came into being, however, only when and where a group of African intellectuals were available to give specific cultural definition to the supposed 'tribe' and to communicate this vision through education. Because of the unevenness of the availability of education in the country, such crafting of ethnic identities and propagandizing for ethnic consciousnesses were themselves necessarily uneven.