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A Continuing Legacy of Song 25

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a shift in their lyrical tradition, but one not entirely unknown to a significant
number of them going back many decades to their Zulu forbearers.
Those Ngoni soldiers - though not as numerous as the Yao askari who
through the first half of the twentieth century were the favoured British recruits
20
for Nyasaland battalions of the King’s African Rifles - brought with them a
tradition of ngoma lyrics, which were soon fused into the King’s African Rifles
asilikali tradition. Those ngoma songs sometimes had a pointedly political bent,
as did one frequently heard as the First World War began, protesting the
punishment meted out to Ngoni Paramount Chief Chimtunga Jere for declining to
support World War One recruitment:

Inkosi Chimtunga Jere
Has been publicly humiliated!
The chief of the land! ...

We publicly denounce it!
This desecration of the land.
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We publicly denounce it!

Capturing such stridency in asilikali lyrics first served to translate its power to the
soldiers’ immediate tasks, and through later transference, added what Lupenga
Mphande describes as “the potency of song as a tool in African political
22
discourse.” Many such lyrics mobilized popular sentiment in the campaign to
end colonial domination in British Central Africa.
The most significant of those newly refocused marching songs which
came to serve a new and overtly political purpose was “Tiyende Pamodzi” [Let’s
March Together], with lyrics calling out for encouragement by name, one after
another, key political leaders in the new struggle for “dziko la Nyasaland”:

Let's march forward in one spirit!
Let's march forward in one spirit
Banda, let's march!
Chipe, [Chipembere] let's march!
Let's march forward in one spirit

19 Shepperson, “‘They Went Singing’,” 261, 259.
20 See Risto Marjomaa, "The Martial Spirit: Yao Soldiers in British Service in
Nyasaland (Malawi), 1895-1939," The Journal of African History 44, 3 (2003):
413-32.
21 Song recorded by Lupenga Mphande, “‘If You’re Ugly, Know How to Sing’:
Aesthetics of Resistance and Subversion,” in eds. Hervé Maupeu and Kimani
Njogu, Songs and Politics in Eastern Africa (Nairobi: l’Institut Français de
Recherche en Afrique, 2007): 395-396.
22 Mphande, “‘If You’re Ugly,’” 378.