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Political Culture and Nationalism in Malawi: Building Kwacha. By Joey Power. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2010. Pp. 332. $85.00/£50.00.
Historian Joey Power probes the ways in which Nyasaland's colonial past shaped late colonial and early postcolonial political processes during and just after the liminal transition to independent nationhood. In so doing, Power historicizes local and territorial political issues and practices during a period of nation-building, and describes the interactions between political leaders of territorial notoriety and their constituents: women, youth, laborers, planters, traditional chiefs, civil servants, and cultural or religious associations. But rather than start after the Second World War, Power begins Chapter 1 with an account of popular anti-colonial uprisings or rebellions that took place in the early twentieth century, culminating in the Chilembwe rebellion of 1915. She does so with an eye to establishing the factors that pushed inhabitants to protest colonial injustices. These included the artificiality of "traditional chiefs" appointed and sustained by the colonial administration; the expropriation and unequal distribution of land; systems of taxation that penalized African entrepreneurs and planters while favoring white settlers; and colonial policies that funneled the labor supply onto white-owned farms while leaving African planters unable to compete. Power begins here because the Chilembwe uprising is part of the collective memory rekindled on the eve of Nyasaland's independence as protests of the injustices of colonial rule resurfaced in 1953.
In Chapter 2, Power demonstrates the overlap between "native authority structures" comprised of chiefs, and the Western-educated elite involved in interethnic, "native associations" during the interwar period. In 1944, the latter formed the Nyasaland African...