Abstract
In this paper, we deploy the comparative approach in exploring the conditions of women and children caught in Hitler's dictatorship of Nazi Germany and that of Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda of Malawi. The paper is motivated by the need to centralise the traumatic experiences of women and children in dictatorial spaces and how these experiences are remembered and represented in contemporary academic culture. Leaning on theoretical approaches drawn from cultural memory and cultural trauma, among other related concepts and frameworks, we base our analysis on Paul Zeleza's Smouldering Charcoal and Marsha Skrypuch's Making Bombs for Hitler. The analysis of the primary data sources reveals striking commonalities in the portrayal of women and children in Malawian and Western (Nazi) cultural spaces which reminds everyone about the structuralism of dictatorship irrespective of space or the ideologies that undergird it. We also find out that women and children were not only victims of dictatorial rule, they were also agents of resistance, whose invaluable, but little acknowledged, contributions led to the end of dictatorship in their domains.
Introduction
The vulnerability of women and children in any dystopian setting and situation has been rarefied in many existing discourses. This is not unconnected with the positions of Otherness occupied by women and children in society and in textual practices. When it comes to dictatorship, women and children usually are the hardest hit due to their vulnerability and helplessness. However, when discussing the menace of dictatorship in society, women's and children's suffering and roles are often residual in significance. This explains the decision to, in this paper, centralise the effects of dictatorship on women and children within the context provided us by the Nazi and Malawian cultural spaces. Though it is not likely that Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda, the Life President of Malawi, adopted his dictatorial methods from Adolf Hitler, we have noted the intersections in the dictatorial narratives of Nazi Germany and those of Malawi under Dr Banda. These intertextual relations are most striking in terms of the representation of women and children as at once victims and agents of resistance in their different political spaces
Content
and children in Nazi Germany and Banda's Malawi. Jennifer Llewellyn et al (2020) report that Hitler believed in securing the loyalty of children through intense propaganda. In order to achieve this goal, the education system was carefully calibrated and designed to inculcate ideals of racial superiority, the supremacy of the Aryan race, loyalty to Hitler and the need to serve the Nazi regime selflessly in any assigned capacity. Erin Blackmore (2023) has equally reported on the place of young people in Nazi Germany, especially the activities of the Hitler Youth which draws parallel with the Malawian Young Pioneers, the paramilitary Youth wing of the Malawi Congress Party (MCP). Blackmore (2023) maintains that children who had been raised in Nazi ideologies became obedient and fanatical in the service of the Fuhrer.
Conclusion
In this paper, we have attempted to illustrate the perpetration of trauma in dictatorial spaces using the Nazi and the Malawian examples. The study utilised ideas and concepts in cultural memory and cultural trauma to discourse the representation of women and children in Nazi Germany and Banda's Malawi especially as documented in Marsha Skrypuch's Making Bombs for Hitler and Tiyambe Zeleza's Smouldering Charcoal. Though there are marked differences in the two research contexts, we are stunned at the striking commonalities that exist between the two cultural objects analysed. The women and children in both spaces interrogated are thrown into traumatic circumstances which are traced to the actions of the dictatorial forces in their domains. Skrypuch's Making Bombs for Hitler mostly exposes us to the traumas that the Ostarbeiter are made to go through while Zeleza's Smouldering Charcoal captures the traumatic conditions of women and children during the Banda dictatorship. The researchers can then safely say that there appear to be predictable patterns that characterise dictatorships across spaces which are made possible by the similarities in structures built and sustained in these police states.
References
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