Entebe as Idi Amin issues the pass, releases. (31)Such a pre-journey excitement, which substantially relies on the deployment of dramatic
monologue in acknowledgment of the communal goodwill about the journey, is also
significant in the sense that looking back at post-independence Malawi, one realizes how
the modernity of Western Europe has become consciously infused into the national
psyche by the state. For instance, Lupenga Mphande (1996: 80) engages what he calls the
“(un)making of cultural tradition” in the Malawian milieu. In retrospect, he suggests that
within this context there is a sense in which Edward Said’s contention about the
mediation of imperialism as manifesting not only from the centre of the mother-country
to the periphery, but also within the periphery, finds cogency in the Malawian situation
during the autocracy of Banda. This he argues further is manifest in many areas, which
among other things, includes the making of Banda as an enigma with respect to his
fastidious English style of dressing even when the tropical weather of Malawi is not
propitious for it (81). But perhaps a more telling attitude that reinforces this contention is
Banda’s view on who should qualify to teach in Kamuzu Academy and the University of
Malawi. Says Banda himself: “when I built Kamuzu Academy and the University of
Malawi, I decreed that anybody who does not know Lation, Greek and Ancient History
cannot teach at this school” (87). In this case, it should then be understandable why the
knowledge of the prospects of encountering western education from what is considered
its “source” should bring about so much excitement. It is the more so as western
education in this context is regarded as a vital harbinger of modernity.
To elaborate further on the pre-journey excitement and the unequalled multiplier effects
that it creates, it is apposite to consider the issue as captured in the poem from the angle
of the creation and maintenance of difference which modernity through colonialism
foisted on the colonizer and the colonized. With precise reference to colonial knowledge
and its categorization, the response it creates in the colonized is nothing but that of
inferiority. This is because such knowledge as acquired in the colony “had the power to
make us see and experience ourselves as “Other”... this kind of knowledge is internal,
not external” (Hall in Loomba 2000: 182). Therefore, an opportunity to become part of
the privileged few to benefit from the place-based benevolence of western knowledge