Emmanuel Ngwira

Social media played a crucial role during the COVID-19 pandemic both as a tool for communicating COVID-19-related messages and as a platform for sharing lighter moments during the distressful time. My article focuses on these lighter moments in the form of internet memes. My interest is on internet memes shared by the cyber public in Malawi. I contend that besides the humour, the memes carry insightful commentary on and criticism of society’s reaction to and handling of the pandemic. The memes poke fun at petrified and distressed Malawians, at some politicians who took advantage of the pandemic to further their own interests and how the outbreak widened the gap between the rich and the poor. Some sinophobic memes accused China of infecting the world with virus. My methodological and theoretical approaches are based on netnographic studies and theories of humour (nature and function) respectively.

This article examines how gardening in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light is symbolic of efforts to cultivate white identity. It argues that gardening is a significant trope in the novel where the Campbells’ meticulous tending of their garden echoes their efforts to cultivate and nurture white identities by repressing their coloured past. The article employs Zygmunt Bauman’s idea of “the gardening state” to appreciate the Campbells’ attempts to cultivate whiteness in an apartheid environment that encouraged the cultivation and maintenance of whiteness as a superior racial category. The article also refers to Hellen Lynd and Gershen Kaufman’s postulations about the visual/public nature of shame as well as Freudian idea of the uncanny to explain a sense of shame and fear of the repressed that underlies the Campbells’ passing for white.

This paper analyses how selected stories from Zoë Wicomb’s The One That Got Away (2008) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck (2009) explore transnational migration from women’s perspectives. The paper explores how the African woman migrant’s experiences allow alternative readings of migrant existence. Significantly present in the stories analysed in this paper are cultural and historical artefacts that protagonists engage with in ways that offer new perspectives on cultures and histories that such objects represent. Drawing on post-colonial readings of migration, material culture and the exotic, I posit that, through migrant women’s stories, Wicomb and Adichie offer unconventional readings of transnational experience that unsettle the meanings of the objects, histories and cultures encountered in transnational spaces.

This article examines how gardening in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light is symbolic of efforts to cultivate white identity. It argues that gardening is a significant trope in the novel where the Campbells’ meticulous tending of their garden echoes their efforts to cultivate and nurture white identities by repressing their coloured past. The article employs Zygmunt Bauman’s idea of “the gardening state” to appreciate the Campbells’ attempts to cultivate whiteness in an apartheid environment that encouraged the cultivation and maintenance of whiteness as a superior racial category. The article also refers to Hellen Lynd and Gershen Kaufman’s postulations about the visual/public nature of shame as well as Freudian idea of the uncanny to explain a sense of shame and fear of the repressed that underlies the Campbells’ passing for white.

Row art project by Ozhope collective consists of performances and temporary sculptures with dugout canoes used by fishers on the shores of Lake Malawi. The sculptures and performances feature the ephemeral, play, bricolage, and site-specificity to engage the lake as a space for contesting extractivism, and for dealing with issues of the ecosystem. Using the lens of racial capitalocene, Row plays with the ongoing wrangles around Lake Malawi, fuelled by the spectre of oil speculation on the lake. Through temporary sculptures the work seeks to read the dugout canoe as text by focusing on the sedimentation of paint, tin, plastic and tar on the canoe’s body as traces of the histories of its transformation. The dugout canoe is considered an artefact of contemporaneity on which can be read narratives of biography, aid, trade, and capitalist extractivism and the ecosystem. Besides racial capitalocene, thinkivism and biopolitical collectivism underpin Ozhope’s subject-centred, collaborative ...

The last decade has seen increased attention to the treatment of people with albinism in several African countries, particularly the peril they find themselves in due to stigma and superstition. As a way of countering these misconceptions, there has been educative activism from legal, medical as well as religious perspectives. In this paper, we draw upon a different discourseliterary representationarguing that in selected African novels, the authors employ a variety of strategies that counter harmful stereotypes about albinism, and in the process act as literary interventions that enable an appreciation of the person behind the skin condition. Drawing from insights in Literary Disability Studies, the discussion examines the representation of albinism in four African novels: Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory (2015), Meg Vandermerwe’s Zebra Crossing (2013), Unathi Magubeni’s Nwelezelanga: The Star Child (2016), and Jenny Robson’s Because Pula Means Rain (2000), and highlights the way...

The Ivorian writer, Gérard AkéLoba, once stated that Africans laugh when they are happy, angry or unlucky. This hints at the psychological role of laughter in African contexts. This paper focuses specifically on Malawian humour with the aim of appreciating how Malawians portray themselves in everyday contemporary jokes. Our main focus is on what we term contemporary Malawian humour in the digital age, by which we refer to humour such as comic videos and internet memes whose production and circulation has been aided by technology. More specifically, our study draws on humour that Malawians share through social media and other forms of digital circulation. Drawing on insights from debates on Malawian humour initiated by Steve Chimombo and Enoch Timpuza-Mvula as well as on the discourse on humour and self-esteem especially as espoused by Stefan Stieger, Anton Kormann and Christoph Burger, among others, we observe that Malawian humour is often self-directed. While we appreciate that mak...

Abstract Cities in Africa and beyond have been sites of conflicting and contradictory associations in human cultures from their very beginning. Some regard the African city as a place of hope and fulfilment, freedom and opportunity, while others view it as an emblem of cultural decay and a nexus of corruption, perversion, greed, destruction and death. In this article we explore these ambivalent attitudes towards the city and urban life by focusing on Malawian popular music. We examine ways in which the city and what it stands for is depicted in the music. We also analyse attitudes and associations that converge on the city as a place and how such attitudes reflect the heterogeneity and complexity of individual and collective human experience and emotions contained by the city. We address questions such as: What images of the city and city life emerge in Malawian popular music? What do these images tell us about notions of community, inequality, and poverty in postcolonial Malawi? How do the economic, structural, or material settings of Malawian cities shape perceptions of the city? In addressing these and related questions, we use concepts drawn from cultural studies and urban studies.

Abstract This article focuses on how the issue of authorship of history is portrayed in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun. Particularly, the article focuses on how Adichie's novel portrays the actual writing of history: how events of the Biafran war are turned into historical narrative. The article argues that by reflecting on the actual moment of writing history, Adichie's novel draws the reader into a position of witnessing both the events of the Biafra war and, more importantly, the process of turning those events into narrative. The novel reflects upon the moment of writing history through a metafictional element known as self-reflexivity, which in postmodernist thinking, refers to how a text reflects upon its own making. Half of a Yellow Sun achieves such self-reflexivity through a book that is being written in the novel. Besides reflecting on the making of the text, these mise en abyme moments of writing that appear in the novel present an interesting dilemma for the reader for whom it is not immediately clear who is writing the book.

Abstract This article analyzes how the relationship between fathers and daughters is portrayed in Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. The paper observes that in these texts, daughters occupy spaces, both in and outside the home, that are usually considered reserved for sons who are often groomed as heirs to their fathers’ worlds. Drawing on discourse on women, history and the nation, particularly the work of Tiyambe Zeleza and Elleke Boehmer, among other scholars, this paper argues that by placing daughters in spaces often thought to be for sons, both Wicomb and Adichie challenge the marginalization of women in history and narratives of the nation. The paper further shows that instead of perpetuating their fathers’ legacies, daughters in the two texts chart for themselves paths that divert from their fathers’ aspirations. In that way, the daughters’ lives become counter-texts not only to their fathers’ lives and aspirations but also to the general patriarchal imaginings of history and the nation that the fathers represent.