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Youth and Politics in Malawi: The Case of University Students Since 1965

2010; RELX Group (Netherlands); Linguagem: Inglês

10.2139/ssrn.2626625

1556-5068

Innocent Gondwe,

African history and culture studies

Despite being an active player in national politics, university students in Malawi are not well represented in history literature on the country’s political development. In most cases, they are mentioned in passing and sometimes as a footnote. The current study accords this youth group the attention it deserves by discussing the multiple roles the group has played in Malawi politics in half a century. Largely, such is achieved through tailoring together fragments of the varsity students’ undertakings that are offered in major works on Malawi’s political development; and through the incorporation of views obtained from close to twenty interviews with individuals who have walked in the corridors of Chancellor College, University of Malawi’s main campus at different periods from the 1960s up to the first decade of the twenty first century. This has allowed the study to establish that students in the University of Malawi have played a vanguard role in national political movements and changes since the time of independence. They started by offering clandestine dissent to the dictatorial regime of Dr. H. K. Banda up to the late 1970s; becoming more open in this cause as of the 1980s through to the early 1990s when they helped to fun the wind of change in national politics that brought about democratic party pluralism. The group has since remained an entity that guards against unpopular policies of any government administration in this age of multiparty democracy, of course to a different degree on each occasion.