Harri Englund, ed. A Democracy of Chameleons: Politics and Culture in the New Malawi. Stockholm: Elanders Gotab with the Nordic Africa Institute, 2002. 208 pp. Tables. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. $29.95 Paper.

Abstract

Harri Englund, ed. A Democracy of Chameleons: Politics and Culture in the New Malawi. Stockholm: Elanders Gotab with the Nordic Africa Institute, 2002. 208 pp. Tables. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. $29.95 Paper. Though South Africa has garnered much of the attention, 2004 was also the tenth anniversary of multiparty democracy in Malawi. The election of President Bingu wa Mutharika in May of last year has only underscored the equally complex and contested nature of democratic development there. This collection of essays stems from a conference held in June 2000 at the University of Malawi, but it easily speaks to this recent watershed. Edited by Harri Englund, an anthropologist based at the Nordic Africa Institute, A Democracy of Chameleons proposes to take stock of the political transition over the past ten years. It also has broader ambitions. In the introduction, Englund outlines a notion of chameleon politics, which is drawn in part from Jack Mapanje's poetry collection, Of Chameleons and Gods (1981), but also is aimed at capturing the mercurial nature of alliances and animosity that have characterized contemporary Malawian politics and postcolonial politics generally throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Far from being transparent, the democratic political landscape ushered in since the end of Hastings Kamuzu Banda's autocratic regime, Englund argues, has been marked by an array of continuities, institutionally and ideologically, as well as uncertainty: When a Malawian casts his or her vote for a particular party or individual, he or she must be prepared, it seems, to observe baffling manoeuvres before the next opportunity to vote arises (13). This volume seeks to piece together why this is, why democracy remains unfinished in Malawi and so often in other places. As one would expect from an anthropologist, a cultural approach to politics underpins this volume, an understanding that politics are situated and shaped (20) by a number of complementary and competing social discourses and practices. Englund and his contributors are wary of the determinism that can befall such an approach, but they also understand the strength of insight and analysis that can result when a populist, rather than party, approach is applied to the analysis of democratic transitions. For example, in the first chapter on the persistent problem of poverty, Blessings Chinsinga discusses how President Bakili Muluzi rhetorically seized upon a culture of poverty, albeit with little indication of alleviating it. Indeed, monitoring suggests that poverty is on the increase, although it continues to be defined more often politically rather than economically. …