Page 33 - C:\Users\Owner\Documents\Flip PDF Professional\SHEPPERSON MEMORIAL SoMJ working copy\

The Society to Malaŵi

REFLECTIONS ON PROFESSOR GEORGE SHEPPERSON’S INFLUENCE
ON THE HISTORY DEPARTMENT IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MALAWI

Owen J. M. Kalinga

On a hot and humid afternoon in late 1959 or early 1960, my mother
whispered to me an almost sworn secrecy that my father was reading a book that he
did not want anybody to see, and that he was hiding it under the pillow on his side of
bed. Belonging to a generation when girls were discouraged from going far with
school, her ability to read was limited, and I have often wondered if, in effect, she was
asking me, her eldest child, to find out more about this book. My curiosity aroused,
and confident that my primary education had provided me with enough English at
least to decipher its title, I went to their bedroom, lifted the pillow, and quickly
memorized the author and title, although I soon forgot parts of the latter, it being too
long, especially for someone with my level of education. Two words in the title stuck
though, John Chilembwe. 1 A year or so earlier, I had heard the name but not much
else. I think it was from Jack, a much older cousin who was quite politically aware,
and whose co-operative union had housed Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda during his visit
to Chitipa in 1958. Jack had referred to Chilembwe as a hero.
Be that as it may, I understood my father’s reason for hiding the book. Was
this not the person who, according to Jack, had killed some Europeans in the southern
province and was hanged as a result? This was the time of the state of emergency in
Nyasaland after all, and everyone was being extra careful not to fall foul of the laws
and regulations governing the times. I have never understood how my father, a civil
servant then based at Karonga, the northernmost district in the country, got hold of the
book. Nevertheless, this was my first introduction to George A Shepperson and his
work. Little did I appreciate his real significance to Malawian, African and African
American historiography, nor in my wildest imagination did it occur to me that I
would meet him one day, and that he would have a part to play in my future.
This short paper is not about how I came to discover Professor Shepperson, it
is primarily a reflection on his contribution to Malawian historical studies mainly
through the prism of the first few years of the life of the History Department at
Chancellor College, University of Malawi. It does so in three stages beginning with
Shepperson as the department’s first adviser, then as a producer of history and,
finally, as an adviser of two key founding members of the department.
The task of assembling the University of Malawi administration commenced
in 1964 and, by the end of that year, its basic structure was in place at Chichiri, the
location of what was later to become the first site of Chancellor College. By the
middle of 1965, the university had appointed most of the teaching staff, and the
interim head of the history department was Bridglal Pachai, a South African, born and
brought up in an Indian community near Ladysmith in present day Kwazulu-Natal.
Pachai had just spent a few years in Ghana lecturing at the new University of Cape
Coast which, in terms of personnel, syllabus and ideas, had benefitted from the more
established University of Ghana, Legon. The latter, like others in the earlier
generation of African universities such as Ibadan, Nigeria, and Makerere in Uganda,
had begun to move from a largely Western concentration in their BA programmes to
ones that paid attention to African history. So, when he arrived in Malawi, there was

1 George Shepperson and Thomas Price, Independent Africa: John Chilembwe and the Origins, Setting and
Significance of the Nyasaland Native Rising of 1915, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1958.

25