I am a lecturer at Chancellor College. I majored in English and French literature at university, and I’ve always loved books. Before becoming a lecturer, I was a journalist with The Nation (one of Malawi’s major newspapers.). Then I moved on to Chancellor College, where I teach mainly in the French Department.

Several Malawian academics, all men currently in the Malawian diaspora, approached me and a couple of my women colleagues at Chancellor College to say that they would like to hear more about Malawian voices, especially voices from Malawian women. They felt women would be better placed to research those voices and to speak to people.

So, we were given a list of people to interview and were told to add to the list. We were told that they would find funding for the project if we identified women who we wanted to interview, but finding that funding proved to be difficult, and the project was eventually suspended.

But by the time it was suspended, I had already fallen in love with one of the subjects, from the little that I could dig up on her: Rose Chibambo. And I said, Okay, even if there’s no funding, I’m going ahead with this, because I want to know more about her. And that’s how it started. I read a bit on her, and then I asked people if they knew where I could find her. Once I got in touch with her, I discovered she was also eager to tell her story. So, I would say it worked out perfectly for me in that way.

When the suggestion was made to us—this suggestion to go out and interview the women we had identified—we decided to read around the project, read around what happens in a biography. So, there I was, reading and coming up against debates on whose voice comes through in a biography: whose story is it, really? That really shaped how I did things, because I remember reading one particular book where they said some people write someone’s story, but it’s their own voice in the end. So, I said, Okay, how do I make it her voice? I’ll still have to speak in there, but I want it to be hers. And that’s why I decided to opt for the interview structure.

From the word go, it was in English. Because when I called her and introduced myself, it just happened that I opened the conversation in English. So, we started speaking in English before we’d even met in person. Then, when I first went to her home, I asked her what language she would be most comfortable in, and again, she said she would be comfortable in English.

I didn’t ask her why, but I think I can figure out why. She came from a community where mostly Tumbuka and Ngoni were being spoken, whereas my own mother is half-Yao, half-Nyanja, and I’ve grown up speaking Chichewa. So, I think there would have otherwise been a conflict of languages! We struck a happy medium with English.

It was a series of interviews over time. I would call her and say, I am coming this weekend, and would spend both Saturday and Sunday, speaking with her. Then some months would pass, and I would call again and ask to go over again. As all this was happening, I was still doing outside reading about her, and would sometimes call her and ask what she thought about something in the book I’d read. Sometimes she would confirm what was said, and sometimes she would tell me that wasn’t what had actually happened.

Regarding editorial decisions: there were times when she said, “I don’t want these names in the book.” So, when I submitted the first draft to the publisher, I replaced those names with “X.” My publishers made a different decision. They replaced the X’s with pseudonyms. That was something that was done on the editorial side.

I think there were definitely things she didn’t want to talk about. I think it was a painful period, because of her husband’s death in 1968, the way it happened in particular [that she was not permitted to return with his body to Malawi to bury him]. Her son tried to come and visit them, and he was arrested for that. She did not see her children again until her return in 1995. So, I think there was a lot of trauma in that time; the whole story is traumatic, but there was a particular kind of trauma tied up in the period in Zambia. And I think that’s why she didn’t really want to talk about it that much.

No, it wasn’t deliberate. The book would have come out earlier if not for how long it took to find the right publisher. And back then, we didn’t even know that MCP would be back in power. The book actually came out when the previous government was still in power.

My response to anyone concerned about political critique in the book is this: you will see that she’s not just criticizing the MCP. She’s looking at the country as a whole; she’s looking at what came afterwards, what they had expected versus what actually happened. Yes, the MCP is criticized, but so are the other parties, and so are the other events that took place. She was simply talking about Malawi as a whole.

There were things about Malawi she now found disappointing. She returned and found people weren’t the same people she remembered from the 1960s, who would protest like they did back then. Now they were people who seemed resigned.

There must have been hope, certainly, and the joy of returning home, but there was also the sense of “What did I come home to?” She talked about finally returning, and about the stares she was getting as she was coming in through immigration; the feeling of being regarded with suspicion. But then she also talked about the warm welcome in the family now that she was back, about the joy of seeing her mother and children again, especially. For Chibambo, there was ultimately the determination to rebuild. She literally rebuilt her house, and the rebuilding was what was most important to her.

I got to learn from one of my colleagues about the whole Herstory movement; how it gave voices to women, and how history at some point focused on women in order to let them tell their story. If you look elsewhere, the idea of Herstory is decades old—but in Malawi we haven’t done it. We’re still in the process of recovering women’s voices. And that is important, and you can never recover them enough.

If we then connect it to the gender-based violence—especially the days of activism—when you hear some of those stories you wonder, are these really happening in this decade? Are they really happening now? Happening during a time when women get university educations and get good jobs? Are there still women who think in a certain way? Or is there still a certain kind of violence that’s perpetrated against women, regardless of where they find themselves?

Only two months ago, I met a woman who talked about having been forced into marriage: how she was actually dragged from home and so on. To her, it was just something that had happened; that’s the life she was living, and she had accepted it. But I said to myself— how many women are going through this, now? How many women today are forced by their families to leave school and get married? You’d have thought by now we would be more evolved. So, we do need all these voices telling women’s stories.

I think it has a place in history. But, interestingly, I’ve had students coming from the Department of English to say they’d like to do their dissertation on the literary devices in the book. So, maybe it’s somewhere in between! Some people will see it as literature, in the sense of African literature; others will see it as history. But the ones who have organized panels at Chancellor College were from the Department of English. So maybe there is more of an interest in the literature.

I think she always wanted to tell her story. It’s just that no one had thought of asking! I know that people would interview her when they wanted to talk about the cabinet crisis in Malawi—way before I came in—and she would tell them her story, solely in connection to the cabinet crisis. But I think no one had come and said, “Tell me about you.” She wanted to talk about Malawi; she really wanted to talk about her experiences. She wanted them to count for something.

Way before we even had a publisher, in fact, she would talk about it as “our book.” So, she believed, even before the manuscript was accepted for publication that there would be a book. Even when I told her I hadn’t found a publisher yet, she would talk about that. When she died before I even found a publisher, that was hard. She would have loved to see this. She really wanted to tell her story.

When it comes to voices: some of the stories I attempted to get were rather disappointing. I would go out and approach someone, and the response would be “Just send me a questionnaire!” They wanted no interaction. So, there were women out there who were suspicious, who just thought this person was trying to dig into their private life, and would just clam up. But with Rose Chibambo I was fortunate. She didn’t ask to see the questions beforehand. We would just talk.

Recovering women’s voices remains important. Telling a woman’s story is important. Because behind that silence a lot is happening, and we need to keep speaking out. Even if we look at our society, there are more women than men and yet most of the decision makers are men. And because of that, sometimes, some of them don’t understand when you say certain things, for example around violence. So any voice that can speak out on anything that concerns society is important.

An emptying, if that makes sense! There was a point at the end, when I was going through it again and again, asking myself if I had represented her faithfully. And then of course you bring it to your editors, and there’s a process of negotiation around what they want and don’t want in the book, which was its own struggle.

For example—at first, my title was “Lomathinda: Journeys and Interruptions.” But my editors said, “No, that’s too dense: you’re thinking like an academic. I really loved “Journeys and Interruptions,” but I had to give in. So, we found common ground with Lomathinda: Rose Chibambo Speaks.

One thing that I was always insistent on, however, was the idea of the last word. At the beginning of the project, I had said, I want her to have the last word. But at the end there was a chapter that my editors kept insisting needed to be rearranged, I think they had some kind of commentary they wanted to include, but I insisted that she have the last word.

I am trying to do something academic. I’m reading more on biographies, and what happens if I write a biography, then someone else writes a biography of the same person, and so on over the years? What is it that they are looking for? What do they stay faithful to? I’m actually working on a project where I want to compare four authors who wrote a particular biography on a particular person; I want to see what they kept and what they left out, and why. And I’m trying to specialize in that area.

Maybe the most poignant parts of the interviewing process. There was a moment we shared when she was talking about the courtship between her and her husband. When she was telling it, she burst out laughing, and I started laughing too. That was quite a moment; I loved that moment.

I also loved the fact that there was no self-pity, where she was involved. She would talk about her suffering, talk about the good times, but it wasn’t “poor me, poor me.” She just told her story. And as a listener, I just encouraged her to speak.

They usually say when you’re writing a biography, you shouldn’t get too close to your subject, because that means you forget how to be objective. And I will confess that was difficult for me—really difficult. Because I just thought she was such a great person!

I definitely had a great experience, yes. Maybe because I do literature, but I had the profound sense of someone passing down a narrative to a different generation. Maybe I just put a romantic spin to it, but it was truly an unforgettable experience.