Arts no aside
Art lovers, my lamentations of the country’s abhorrently prosy poetry have irked the kindred I love heartily—the poets.
Comparing the current crop of Malawian poetry with the golden generation of Jack Mapanje and Alfred Msadala, they say, is paying a blind eye to worsening education standards and an unfolding struggle to carve new styles and themes.
Of course, beginners, even those who wholeheartedly imitate Gospel Kazako and Benedicto Okomaatani Malunga’s recitation rhythm, cannot become Mapanjes over night.
Always open to diverse viewpoints, here is my this and that on emerging perspectives of substandard education.
Truly, the Mapanjes grew up during an era literature was an in-thing and agents of Kamuzu Banda’s dictatorship were relentless in cracking down dissenting by-products humanities stimulated in some scholars. Mapanje himself was jailed and exiled for his ‘bad verses’. Also detained was Mpasu who supposedly attacks the tyrant in Nobody’s Friend. Steve Chimombo cocooned himself in the endless mythology of Napolo.
However, what made Mapanje, Chimombo, Frank Chipasula and Felix Mnthali world class poets was the burning urge to practice what they had learnt in school and to beat the repressive system’s narrow view of literature.
Nowadays, the youth sleep on their hands and cry: “Freedom kills the mind.” However, cross-examination of the education system shows just why government is blameworthy for this mediocrity.
Aren’t Malawians sick and tired of clueless cabinet ministers touting science as the gateway to national development? Isn’t it one-eyed that science subjects will become compulsory in the country’s schools?
Making humanities an aside strikes me like an ill-advised attempt to align the curriculum with prevailing needs and it is typical of government system which once detached English Literature from language skills.
And this is the reason the system is squarely blameworthy for the influx of the prosy poems and substandard creative works that aren’t as lyrical, condensed and imaginative as Buy From Me and many others we used to recite at Ukwe Primary School back in the days.
If you think freedom really kills creativity, drop a stanza and fight for learners right to choose arts over sciences.
