By Chisomo Phiri
Born on December 27, 1949, Emily Mkamanga was a Malawian writer and social commentator. She was one of the few well-known women writers in Malawi.
Biography
Emily Mkamanga was educated at Livingstonia, Uliwa, Lilongwe Girls’ Secondary School and the University of Malawi, where she studied in the Bunda College of Agriculture and graduated in 1971.After working at Chitedze Agricultural Research Station, she worked for fifteen years as Agricultural Information Officer at the National Bank.While still there, in 1990, she published The Night Stop, a novel about “the long-suffering wife of a promiscuous lawyer”.
Social and political writing
Her retirement from the bank in 1993 coincided with the end of Dr Hastings Banda’s 30 years in power. In 2000, her account of those years was published by John Lwanda’s publishing firm Dudu Nsomba. Called Suffering in Silence: Malawi women’s thirty year dance with Dr Banda, the book was described as “an analysis of the obsessive psyche of a modern tyrant” and a “polemic” that became “a form of prosecution of Banda”. The “dance” of the title refers to the women’s dancing arranged at political rallies praising Dr Banda.[While the dancing had once been associated with female activists it came to be required of all women and controlled through the Malawi Congress Party leadership.Mkamanga said women were coerced and exploited to satisfy the ruling dictator, even though he presented himself as a guardian to women: as a nkhoswe, meaning an authoritative uncle or brother in Malawian matrilineal cultures.Many people in Malawi would describe the dancing as a traditional part of their culture, an idea promoted by Banda,while Mkamanga considered that women in Malawi are generally guided by “patriarchal traditions and cultural norms”.In the same year that Suffering in Silence appeared, she also co-authored Road to Democracy: role of the media in the 2000 Malawi local government elections: final report.
She was a regular columnist for the Nyasa Times, and also wrote political and social opinion pieces elsewhere.She had been called a “social historian”as well as commentator or journalist. In 2013,the President of the Malawi Writers Union described her as one of the only three “known” women writers in the country.(The others were Walije Gondwe and Janet Karim.) She served on the boards of various institutions including ActionAid in Malawi, the Media Council of Malawi, the Journalists Union of Malawi, Youth and Society, and the Institute for Investigative Journalism.
Mkamanga died on November 28, 2021 at the age of 72 at Wezi Medical hospital after a short illness. She is survived with a husband, three children and a grandchild.
