Abstract

This study examines how Malawian indigenous oral cultural forms reveal people’s environmental consciousness or indigenous ecological knowledge and how that knowledge can be utilised for natural resources management. The study analyses the representation of animals and human-animal relationships in Malawian folktales. It assesses how animals are represented in Malawian proverbs in seeking justice when settling disputes and personality building where animals are used as measures of human behaviour and vehicles through which the people traverse the environment. The study also explores the roles of animals in introducing children to their local environment through the Yawo people’s jando and nsondo misyungu songs. The use of animals as carriers of cultural values in jando and nsondo songs reveals the people’s embeddedness in their environment. Furthermore, the study evaluates the representation of traditional animal masks in Gule Wamkulu among the Chewa as the embodiment of their cultural and environmental values. The findings of this study reveal that since oral discourses derive from the repertoire of the collective community, they reflect the people’s collective cosmovision and indigenous ecophilosophy. The findings also reveal that the indigenous oral cultural forms mirror the people’s ecological thought and thereby making animals reflections of how people imagine the environment. I argue that the representation of animals in Malawian oral cultural forms does not only reveal people’s environmental consciousness, but it also shows their familiarity with animals and their acknowledgement of the interconnectedness and interdependence between humans and animals and/or nature. Further, the depiction of animals in oral cultural forms reflects people’s cosmovision consisting of an indigenous ecophilosophy which considers the physical, spiritual and natural forces as intertwined, an attitude that can be harnessed to promote environmental sustainability and resilience. However, since animals embody people’s values, some of those values undermine the integrity of animals. What this means is that animals are sometimes used to ridicule humans in ways that belittle them. This implies that human-animal relationships are richly textured with complexities. My approach is, therefore, analytical and my use of ecocriticism, zoocriticism and deep ecology is modified to fit into the cosmos of Malawian indigenous perceptions about the interconnectedness of ecological entities.

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School	: School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Issued Date	: 2022

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