Page 36 - 2020 SoM Journal Vol 73 No 1 FINAL_Neat

28 The Society of Malawi Journal

While others were just eating.
Uncle you hid money in the bank,
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While your people are dying of hunger.

And little more than a year later, without any sense of deference to Bakili Muluzi,
the newly elected President, Lucius Banda was again tapping into the same “Sole”
lyrical praxis:

Yesterday, and the other day, we’re being killed.
Today we are being cheated.
What can we do since it is the same people?
They’ve only changed ways of torturing us.
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They have their own ways.

In a new era of multiparty democracy, such lyrics seem to have touched a not
unexpected cord within the populace, as without a doubt Lucius Banda’s intent
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was “to inform … audiences of the realities of life in Malawi” through his songs.
This new stridency expressed in the popular music sphere seems to have
spread far more widely. A song offered by a women’s dance troupe from Malawi’s
Northern Region - taunting the government of Bakili Muluzi himself as he later
campaigned for re-election - illustrates the extent of the form. The dancers sought
to express directly the troubles they were facing by focusing their lyrics in a
similar fashion:

We are suffering, the government is watching, we are suffering
We are suffering, people are watching
People are watching
We are suffering, yes, the government is watching
We are suffering though the government is ours
They are being arrested, the government is watching
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The government is watching

Although a shift in the political winds was clearly evident, all the while the same
lyrical tradition prevailed, though if anything becoming harsher still in describing
conditions faced by many of Malawi’s citizens.

28 Song recorded by Ruben M. Chirambo, “Mzimu wa soldier,” 107.
29 Song recorded by Harri Enguld, ed., “Democracy of Chameleons,” 3.
30 Aaron Lewis Rosenberg, Eastern African Popular Songs: Verbal Art in States
of Transformation (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2011): 231.
31 Song recorded by Lisa Gilman, The Dance of Politics: Gender, Performance,
and Democratization in Malawi (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009):
160-61.