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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Mungo Murray Chisuse and the early history of photography in Malawi |
Author: | McCracken, John |
Year: | 2008 |
Periodical: | The Society of Malawi Journal |
Volume: | 61 |
Issue: | 2 |
Pages: | 1-18 |
Language: | English |
Notes: | biblio. refs., ills. |
Geographic terms: | Malawi Central Africa |
Subjects: | photography colonial history biographies (form) History, Archaeology Photography--History Photographers--Malawi--Biography Chisuse, Mungo Murray Malawi--History |
About person: | Mungo Murray Chisuse |
External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/29779264 |
Abstract: | No portrait in Malawi is better known today than that of the image of John Chilembwe that stares out from all Malawian banknotes. Yet, Mungo Murray Chisuse, the photographer upon whose portrait the image on the banknotes is based, is virtually unknown. This article redresses the balance by setting out the evidence currently available on Chisuse's career and his emergence not only as the first African photographer in Malawi but also as the finest portrait photographer ever to have worked in the country. One element of the story concerns the tangled fate of the first generation of Malawian Christians nurtured by the Scottish Presbyterian, David Clement Scott, at the Blantyre Mission. The second focuses on the enthusiasm with which Europeans of all types, missionaries, settlers and administrators, took to the new craze for photography. Mungo Murray Chisuse was in an important sense a pioneer, making images of a type that had never before been made in colonial Malawi. Notes, ref. [ASC Leiden abstract] |