Mchape'95, or, the sudden fame of Billy Goodson Chisupe: healing, social memory and the enigma of the public sphere in post-Banda malawi

Abstract

From February to June 1995 approximately 300,000 people attended an anti-AIDS healing cult in Malawi. The name given to the cult wasmchape. The article investigates the so-called ‘mchapeaffair’ and compares it with the anti-witchcraft movements which swept Malawi during the 1930s under the very same name. Against the background of this linguistic identity, the article reflects on the politics of healing, social memory and the public sphere as the national space in which the affair assumed its distinctive shape. Focusing on the perception of AIDS as encoding decay, it is argued that themchapeaffair can be understood as a negotiation of the limits of power and the meaning of suffering nourished by the moral imagination of post-Banda society.