ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects on umunthu life politics, which defines the aesthetics of Ozhopé, a Malawian art collective that has been active along the shore of Lake Malawi since 2017. To revitalize its aesthetics, Ozhopé draws from and links with potent forms of local cultural resistance against forms of capitalist dispossession and marginalization. The analysis reflects on how Ozhopé’s life-affirming aesthetics is informed by umunthu as a social relation emphasizing intersubjectivity and mutuality of being among humans and between humans and nonhumans valued in most southern African societies since precolonial times. In a time when privatization, exploitation, and privation threaten life along the Lake Malawi shores, this enduring form of life-centered, subject-empowering practice of care gestures toward other possibilities. This chapter, therefore, reflects on umunthu as an empowering praxis of existence and re-existence. Notably, this chapter demonstrates how Ozhopé reads the surfaces of the dugout canoe textuary in its praxis of umunthu re-existence where humans are empowered by the everyday object-world of sustenance around them. For Ozhopé, the dugout is a “texxt” on whose variegated skin is inscribed the histories of a people, narratives of the ecology and ecosystems threatened by racial capitalist extractivism, neoliberal do-gooderism, and resistance from below.
