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The Society of Malaŵi Journal

THE GENIUS OF EMERITUS PROFESSOR GEORGE SHEPPERSON

Muti Michael Etter-Phoya.

No Malawiana reader nor scholar is the same after reading Shepperson’s opus,
Independent African: John Chilembwe and the Origins, Setting and Significance of
the Nyasaland Native Rising, 1915 (1958). No Africanist for that matter. Over 50
years before the current movement to decolonise the curricula (against the far-
reaching tangles of colonialism, imperialism and racism and how these have shaped
academic knowledge and disciplines over the last two centuries), Shepperson’s
seminal work has stood as a model for scholarship of a different kind. In Chilembwe,
Shepperson would paint a nuanced portrait of a figure whose story perhaps best
encapsulated the “significant and dangerous consequences of cultural contact and
conflict…an absorbing account of the complex and titanic struggle between western
imperialism and culture, and [African] integrity and self-respect on the other.”
(Franklin, 1959).
At independence, from a Eurocentric framework of reference, the new
construct called Malawi had no historiography beyond the Empire. Mbembe (2001)
would later further this by noting that it is in relation to [countries like Malawi] that
the notion of “absolute otherness” has been taken farthest (On the Postcolony,
Introduction). That concepts like [Malawi] have “historically served, and continue to
serve, as a polemical argument for the West’s desperate desire to assert its difference
from the rest of the world” (Ibid). Kalinga (1998) points to the heavy footprint that the
Society of Malawi Journal, and by extension, Harry Johnston’s British Central Africa
(1898) would bear on the early research and publications by Malawian scholars in
post-independent Malawi. Kalinga further observes how, by painting his subjects,
Johnston would play a key role in “objectifying African peoples” with emphasis put
on showing differences between Europeans and Africans (p.529). But surprisingly,
Kalinga would fail to dwell on Shepperson’s opus as a model, despite it having come
out to much acclaim a few years before, and Shepperson himself having been one of
the early examiners of history students in Malawi.
Shepperson’s work had the genius of wrenching the likes of Chilembwe out of
this two-dimensional view, giving them much depth and nuance. For the Malawians,
Chilembwe would be freed from limits of legend (the same legend that would reach
Shepperson during his time with the Kings African Rifles during the Second World
War). For Shepperson himself, the Chilembwe story would derail his academic
trajectory, from reading English to reading History. For the coloniser and the
colonised, Shepperson perhaps captures some of what Fanon (1961) classified as an
“enslavement” of the [Bantu] by his “inferiority”, and of the white man by his
“superiority” and how these “behave in accordance with a neurotic orientation”
(p.60).
It will be as late as 1988 when V.Y Mudimbe’s definition of Africa would
assert that there are “natural features, cultural characteristics, and, probably, values
that contribute to the reality of Africa as a continent and its civilizations as
constituting a totality different from those of, say, Asia and Europe” (The Invention of
Africa p. xv). Reading Mudimbe, Kresse (2004) reminds of an obvious hermeneutic
principal: the “variety of biographical conditions determines the interpretations that
individuals develop”. This was perhaps Shepperson’s best gift to global Africanist
scholars and, by extension, Malawiana scholars. And Africanist is used loosely here to

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