Kujoni: South Africa in Malawi’s National Imaginary

This article recovers the literary and political value of Legson Kayira’s novel Jingala (1969), dismissed by earlier critics as lightweight. I argue instead for the seriousness of its engagement with a significant aspect of Malawian life, namely the country’s historical reliance on the export of migrant labour to its mineral-rich neighbours, especially South Africa. Between 1900 and 1988, the country was the second-largest supplier of contracted labour to the South African mines. Kayira’s novel offers significant new insights into the effects of migrant labour on Malawians’ consciousness of South Africa and themselves. In the light of South Africa’s current membership of the BRICS (the economic collaboration of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), as well as the BRICS’ claim to provide an alternative to the imperial legacy of Africa’s relationship with the west, a fresh look at Jingala will allow us to reconsider Malawi’s relationship with South Africa, that country’s historically imperialist role in the region, and the legacy of ‘kujoni’ – labour migration to Johannesburg, the city that represented South Africa’s opportunities. Using a broadly cultural materialist approach and Edward Said’s notion of imaginative geography, and a world-systems theory approach nuanced by recent work in globalisation theory, the article maps the imagined geography of South Africa represented in the novel and considers how it intervened in everyday life.