Heavily trafficked (and contested) lakeside property for centuries, what we now call ‘Malawi’ was once christened ‘Nyasaland’ by the British in 1907. A puzzle piece in the Empire’s Central African Federation, the picturesque protectorate was initially conceived as a migrant labour pool for massive industrial projects in Northern and Southern Rhodesia—the rural foil to the resource-driven urbanism in what is now Zambia and Zimbabwe. Nyasaland’s reputation as something of a hinterland didn’t change much following independence in 1964, as paternalistic Life President Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda maintained that Malawians were, almost by divine decree, natural-born farmers. As such, he constructed a national agenda rooted in cash-cropping (tobacco and tea) and subsistence farming (corn). To be a good citizen in Kamuzu’s Malawi generally meant to stay put, keep quiet and cultivate your maize. Cut to 1994 and the dawning of something resembling multi-party democracy and free-market capitalism, and watch scores of Malawians leave the proverbial village for town in hopes of finding ‘greener pastures’ (a phrase not uncommon here). These are the historical forces that have made southern Malawi one of the more densely-packed, rapidly- urbanising areas in all of Sub-Saharan Africa. These are the spaces that van de Merwe casts as setting for Malawi 2010 –key spaces which suggest that urban and rural are sometimes best understood as inflections of one another. The choice of fashion photography as a way to grapple with rural urbanism is appropriate when we consider that concepts like self-fashioning 2 and cultural style 3 have emerged as indispensable tools for theorising these pivotal, open-ended, up- for-grabs geographies. ‘Fashion’ and ‘style’ not in the sartorial sense exactly, but dynamically, in terms of the productive and creative capacities associated with the manipulation of available resources at particular times and places—be they corporeal, entrepreneurial, linguistic, material, social, spiritual or even virtual. Any good philosopher will tell you that the world is not entirely made for us, nor do we entirely make the world. What we think of as reality is always the product of a series of tugs-of-war saddled as much by chance as by desire and intent. That’s the fraught double discourse I think van de Merwe’s series indexes with his out-of-place, homeward-bound subjects set against these betwixt and between locations. Though (and here’s the rub) I somehow doubt this was his intention. Having shared Malawi 2010 with friends in African studies, I discovered that some found it to be tired and perhaps even a bit dangerous. Here is one response: I can’t say that I had high hopes after that description of the blending of the traditional and the modern. I just guess I’m baffled that we’re still talking about Africa in this way. The pictures are cute and all and I love fashion as much as the next gal, but there’s nothing about this that strikes me as particularly interesting or as any real deviation from the conventional script that thinly veils a racist (or at least paternalistic, and uncalled for) shock that African people act and experience life in ways that we call ‘modern’.
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arjen van de merwe
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