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The Society of Malaŵi Journal

encompass all including (especially) African American experiences ante- and post-
bellum, another of Shepperson’s main scholarly interests. The genius of Shepperson
was to bring this out, in the process, unsettling parameters set by the limited (but
fashionable) blueprints laid by the likes of, say, Alice Werner’s The Natives of British
Central Africa (1906), which closely followed in the footsteps of Johnston’s British
Central Africa – the very gist that drives efforts to decolonise the curricula today.
In connecting the stories of, say John Dube and John Chilembwe and their
entangled legacies during their time in the US, long before African independence was
a notion (colonialism had to be brought to bear, to define/redefine independence),
Shepperson was very much pan-African. Dube would go on to be a pillar of what is
now the African National Congress party in South Africa, and Chilembwe, through
his failed uprising, would quickly ascend to the status of a national legend spoken in
hushed tones. For Chilembwe, Shepperson would free him from that limited but
nonetheless powerful role and ascend him to a unique place in the global systems of
knowledge production. Kamuzu Banda, in a very calculated move, would violently
de-perch Chilembwe and subjugate his complex character through, among other ways,
promoting a very simplified (almost childlike) narrative of Chilembwe that favoured
him, at the expense of Shepperson’s seminal work. It may be of no wonder, then, that
in trying to map the historiography of university education in Malawi in the 1960s,
Kalinga does not dwell much on Shepperson’s opus as an influence.
In working within the Eurocentric framework of reference, now under very
strong attack, Shepperson modelled for us the possibilities of an inclusive scholarship.
Kings Phiri (2003) rightly observed that Shepperson “enormously enriched our
understanding of the key actors of Malawi’s modern history”. And yet we have not
fully followed through, for in 2015, in remembering the centenary of Chilembwe’s
uprising, Shepperson would implore Africana/Malawiana scholars to move beyond
John Chilembwe, to the Njilimas, and the Kufas, etc. In other words, to decolonise
whatever framework we are working in.

Papers cited:
Fanon, F., 1967. Black skin, white masks. London: Pluto, London.
Franklin, John Hope. ‘The Intercontinental Implications of American Negro History –
George Shepperson and Thomas Price, Independent African, John Chilembwe and the
Origins, Setting and Significance of the Nyasaland Native Rising of 1915.
(Edinburgh: University Press, 1958, 50s.). Pp. x, 564. 34 Photographs. 2 Maps.’
Bulletin of the British Association for American Studies 9 (November 1959): 25–28.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0524500100001364.
Johnston, H., 1898. British Central Africa: an attempt to give some account of a
portion of the territories under British influence north of the Zambezi, Second edition.
Ed. London: Methuen & Co., London.
Kresse, Kai. ‘“Reading Mudimbe”: An Introduction’. Journal of African Cultural
Studies 17, no. 1 (2005): 1–9.
Mbembé, J-A. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
Mudimbe, V.Y., 1988. The invention of Africa: gnosis, philosophy, and the order of
knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Bloomington.
Kalinga. Owen J. M. ‘The Production of History in Malawi in the 1960s: The Legacy
of Sir Harry Johnston, the Influence of the Society of Malawi and the Role of Dr
Kamuzu Banda and His Malawi Congress Party’. African Affairs 97, no. 389 (1998):
523–49.
Phiri, K., 2003. [Degree Award Oration — Emeritus Professor George Shepperson].
The Society of Malawi Journal 56, 1–4.
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