“Carving Their Place in History”: Reconstructing Public Memories of Anti-Colonial Struggle Through Malawian Women’s Writing

Many female African scholars have observed that in most national narratives about the liberation struggle against colonialism, the contributions made by women seem to have been erased from the historical record as post-independence countries tend to “neither defend the spaces women create[d] during struggle nor acknowledge[d] the ingenious ways in which women [bore] new and additional responsibilities” (Meintjies et al. 8). Similarly, the dominant narrative of the liberation struggle against colonial rule in Malawi privileges male actors, and this narrative was particularly prevalent during the one-party, dictatorial rule of Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda whose regime reconstructed public memories about the liberation struggle by focusing on him as the sole father and founder of the Malawi nation. These exclusionary practices of sidelining women from this history are further highlighted in memory-making practices such as naming of streets and other mnemonics. This chapter focuses on Vera Chirwa’s autobiography Fearless Fighter and Rose Chibambo’s biography Lomathinda: Rose Chibambo Speaks, which was written by Timwa Lipenga. These two icons in the struggle against colonialism give a voice to women’s experiences which have been marginalized and silenced within the public memories of the liberation struggle. I argue that these women’s narratives are revisionist and that they give an alternative version of history, hence challenging the dominant version of Malawian national history which had been advanced by the Banda regime and other regimes which have come afterwards. In the making of memory, to heal and to remember, is also to find the freedom to ask more questions, to let the unspeakable, both then and now, filter in, to disturb, to open out consciousness. (Nuttall, 1998:85)