LEADERSHIP FAILURE AND THE HISTORICITY OF SELECTED POSTCOLONIAL MALAWIAN PROSE NARRATIVES

Abstract

Leadership failure is a perennially vexed issue in African postcolonial discourses, particularly in Malawi where Kamuzu Banda’s dictatorship held sway for about three decades. Existing studies on leadership in Malawian literature are mostly motivated by the neocolonial binaries which hold Western colonialism largely responsible for most of the woes linked to leadership crisis, with marginal attention paid to the role of Africans in postcolonial leadership failure. This study was, therefore, designed to examine the issue of leadership in selected prose narratives that focus on Banda and post-Banda eras, as well as their aesthetics, in order to establish the shifting paradigm in current postulations on Africa’s postcoloniality. New Historicism was adopted as framework, while the interpretive design was used. Seven Malawian prose texts were purposively selected based on their reflections on postcolonial Malawi. The texts are Jack Mapanje’s And Crocodiles Are Hungry at Night, Paul Theroux’s The Lower River, Tiyambe Zeleza’s Smouldering Charcoal, Felix Mnthali’s Yoranivyoto, Steve Chimombo’s The Wrath of Napolo and Hyena Wears Darkness and Al Gibson’s Mother of Malawi. The texts were subjected to literary analysis. Leadership failure manifests in all the selected texts in varying degrees. The dynamics of the social world constructed in the texts are dependent on the disposition of the characters in leadership positions. In the texts, both the Banda and post-Banda dispensations are shaped by the nature of leadership that is mostly devoid of colonial interferences. Dictatorial leadership, as portrayed in And Crocodiles Are Hungry at Night, Smouldering Charcoal, Yoranivyoto and The Lower River, is detrimental to the general growth and development of the citizens and society. This is reflected in the survival conditions of the people who are depicted as living in constant fear and abject poverty, and yet being coerced into silence and threatened with imprisonment and death by their leaders. The Banda regime denies the followership their basic rights as women are oppressed, children are not catered for, while the men who speak out are arbitrarily thrown into detention, murdered or are made to disappear in mysterious circumstances. The reverberating effects of the Banda leadership are depicted in The Wrath of Napolo, Mother of Malawi and Hyena Wears Darkness which narrate how the three decades of dictatorship by Banda continue to haunt post-Banda Malawian history and politics. Political power absurdly revolves around the same personalities in new political and ideological cloaks, while society is plagued by moral decadence, insecurity and political corruption. All the texts manifest postmodernist tropes such as dark humour, irony, paradox, parody, pastiche and magical realism to sharpen the aesthetic texture of the narratives. The Banda and the post-Banda Malawian prose narratives deployed postmodernist tropes to demonstrate the tragic consequences of leadership failure on the postcolonial trajectory of Malawi.