Orality Music and HIV/AIDS: Interrogating the Malawi Popular Public Sphere

This paper argues that Western derived research models have sought, and continue to seek, to situate gender and sexual discourse in overt forms, especially when emphasising public health aspects. Using these models many issues pertaining to culture, politics, sex and other personal and communal issues become hidden or invisible. Using qualitative and quantitative evidence from the author's PhD research of popular discourse in Malawi, and using some evidence from Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa, he argues that these perceived secret or invisible issues can be explained by the historical, social and cultural modes of communication, allied to other factors like male/female and intra-female power relations. Significant issues of sexual and medical concerns, for example, were ‘hidden’ in the easy to decode public social sphere.

Using a historical model of the colonial and postcolonial construction of this social public sphere in southern and central Africa the paper demonstrates that key messages relating to sexuality and sexual behaviour can be easily found in social discourse, from where they can be exploited for health promotion purposes.

This essay, part of a larger study, argues for the concept of a musical and oral public sphere where contesting and convergent received, perceived and emerging cultural ideas and concepts are both deposited and withdrawn. This musical and oral public sphere, functions - apart from its entertainment role - as a tool of cultural continuity, re-invention, hybridity, diversity and social-cultural reproduction, construction and expression.

The paper concludes that Malawi retains a largely oral culture the concept of an oral public sphere has to be dominated by considerations of how it is filled. A public sphere is an area of contesting received and developing formative and normative as well as subversive cultural beliefs, ideas and wisdoms. The various historical, social, economic, educational, medical and cultural factors shape responses to HIV/AIDS and are reflected in this oral and musical public sphere. Beliefs and factors that impact on HIV/AIDS are manifested in many features, practices and discourses of daily life. This daily discourse reflects basic socio-economic realities as well as moral and higher concerns; hence its social situation.

The paper concludes that as mass communications and ‘musical transfer of function’ processes are dislodging some of the contextual uses of traditional and popular music in Malawi, and literacy lags behind orality, an attention to what is posited in the public sphere can be illuminating and worth exploiting in the fight against HIV/AIDS.