Page 37 - 2020 SoM Journal Vol 73 No 1 FINAL_Neat

A Continuing Legacy of Song 29

Only a decade later Soja Lucius Banda’s forceful lyrics once again raised
the bar still higher in very pointed opposition to President Peter Mutharika’s
government:

These are crimes against humanity
We shall fight against oppression
These are crimes against humanity
These our cries shall demand our freedom
We shall demand our rights
We shall demand our humanity
We shall demand our freedom
32

Given the fractious developments following Kamuzu Banda’s removal from
government, the political sphere seems to have been an especially fruitful forum
33
for the transference of the lyrical elements of the asilikali “Sole” tradition. Yet
similar musical mores concurrently were emerging in other performance
situations.
For example, Laurel Birch de Aguilar records a nyau society graveyard
performance in which the lyrics of one song refer specifically to a troubled
situation following a 1990 earthquake in the country:

Sorry the bereaved
The tremor has done wrong
To have come all of a sudden
Our relative would not have died
He could have run away
From the house.

Despite its reference to a specific situation, this lyric was popularly
“understood as a song of the dead in general terms, remembering others and the
34
grief for those members of the community who have died.” Perhaps more than
many other categories of song performance, the nature of nyau (or gule wamkulu)
dances encourage more extemporaneous lyrical expressions, fitted to situational
complexities of time and place. Thus it seems likely that similar themes of sorrow
and trouble - though not specifically recorded - likely arose from this prevalent
asilikali tradition as well, especially given the important historical connections

32 Lucius Banda, “Crimes,” 1 February 2018,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwNBbWwkOT8, accessed 28 August 2019.
33 See Deborah Kaspin, "The Politics of Ethnicity in Malawi's Democratic
Transition," The Journal of Modern African Studies 33, 4 (1995): 595-620.
34 Song recorded by Laurel Birch de Aguilar, Inscribing the Mask: Interpretation
of Nyau Masks and Ritual Performance among the Chewa of Central Malawi
(Fribourg: University Press, 1996): 163.