Samuel Josia Ntara

Samuel Josia Ntara (24 September 1905 – 1976) was a pioneering writer and teacher from Malawi. He wrote in ChiChewa and several of his books were translated into English.

Ntara's name is spelled in various ways. In his early publications, his middle name is spelled 'Yosia' and then later anglicised to 'Josia'. Occasionally it appears as 'Josiah'. 'Ntara' is also sometimes spelled 'Nthara'. He is often credited simply as S.J. Ntara.

Life
Samuel Yosia Ntara was born on 24 September 1905 in the British Central Africa Protectorate. His father was Josiah Kamfumu, a teacher at the Dutch Reformed Church Mission in Mvera, and his mother was Margaret Sungani. His parents were both AChewa.

Ntara's early life was shaped by the Dutch Reformed Church missions at Mvera and Nkhoma. The missions were unusual in their promotion of local languages, including ChiChewa. This included the creation of a magazine in 1909 called Mthenga, which would continue until at least the 1950s.

At Mvera, Ntara passed standard three before becoming a teacher in local village schools. In 1927, he travelled to the Nkhoma Mission to undertake formal teacher training. This allowed him to continue his career at schools in Lilongwe and elsewhere. In 1932, he was posted back to the Nkhoma Mission as a teacher. He continued to study during this time, enrolling on a correspondence course at Union College in South Africa, and marrying in 1934. In 1944 Ntara was posted to Kongwe School in Dowa, another Dutch Reformed Church school. In 1951 he returned to Nkhoma.

Ntara was a member of the Nyasaland African Congress since its inception in 1943. At the inaugural meeting of the Congress held in Blantyre in October 1944, Ntara represented Lilongwe alongside Levi Zelilo Mumba, George Simeon Mwase, and others.

Ntara retired in the early 1960s to a home in Kamphata, near Lilongwe. He served as an Elder of the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian, became a founding member of the Malawi Censorship Board in 1968, and in 1975 became the first chairman of the National Monuments Advisory Council.

Samuel Josia Ntara died in 1976.

Work
Ntara published fictional and non-fictional biographies, an oral history, and a collection of idioms over a 30-year period.

Nthondo or Man of Africa
While teaching in Lilongwe, Ntara saw an advert for a literary competition sponsored by the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures in London. In 1932, he submitted a manuscript to the competition, alongside other works in ChiChewa by George Simeon Mwase and Steven Kumakanga. Ntara's manuscript was entitled Nthondo and it won a prize in the biography category.

The original ChiChewa version of Nthondo was published in 1933, and in the following year an English translation appeared with the title, Man of Africa. The English translation was undertaken by Thomas Cullen Young, a missionary who promoted the work of a number of local writers, and featured a foreword by Julian Huxley. It was positively reviewed on publication.

Nthondo is a fictional biography set in during the latter half of the nineteenth century. The eponymous central character grows up in a traditional rural setting before experiencing a religious crisis and converting to Christianity. In trying to interpret Man of Africa, Sadhana Naithani concludes: '' 'Was Ntara trying to conform to the image already present, or was he writing under the influence of his adopted faith—these are questions difficult to answer from the materials we have. It is also possible that his images are being misunderstood completely. An analysis of this text awaits the attention of an Africanist-folklorist'.''

Ntara entered the same writing competition a decade later with a manuscript entitled Colembera Bukuli, although it did not win and was never published.

Mbiri ya AChewa or History of the Chewa
Following the success of his novel, Ntara turned his attention to the history of the AChewa. Ntara collected his first oral history from Reverend Namon Katengeza, the first African to be ordained by the Dutch Reformed Church Mission at Nkhoma. The resutling seven-page document was published in 1944. Further research with other informants led to significant revision and enlargement, with a second edition appearing in 1949. A third and final ChiChewa edition, enlarged again, appeared in 1965. It was this final edition that was translated as History of the Chewa and published in 1973. Reviews of the English edition are extremely critical, questioning the translation itself and the commentary. The choice to use the 1965 edition as its source is also criticised, as it omits important content found in the 1949 edition.

Nchowa
In 1949, Ntara published Nchowa, which is seen as the counterpart to Nthondo. Nchowa is another fictional biography, this time of a Chewa woman. It was published in an abridged form by Longmans, Green and Company. In spite of coming into contact with Christianity, the novel's eponymous main character does not have a religious crisis like that experienced by Nthondo.

Msyamboza or Headman's Enterprise
1949 also saw the publication of Ntara's first non-fiction biographical work. Msyamboza was a village headman at Chibanzi, a few miles from Kongwe where Ntara had been teaching since 1944. In his biography, Ntara recounts Msyamboza's reactions to the influence of religion and colonialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Msyamboza's conversion to Christianity marks the climax of the book.

The book was published simultaneously in ChiChewa and English, with Cullen Young again undertaking the translation as he had for Man of Africa. The full English title is Headman's Enterprise: An Unexpected page in Central African History.

Other works
Following his transfer back to Nkhoma in the early 1950s, Ntara was commissioned to write a biography of Reverend Namon Katengeza, who had provided him with the first oral histories for his Mbiri ya AChewa. It was published in 1964 by the Nkhoma Mission Press.

In the same year that his biography of Namon Katengeza appeared, Ntara also published a book of ChiChewa idioms entitled Mau Okuluwika.

In 1946, Ntara also translated a manual on soil erosion written by John Clements and Paul Topham into ChiChewa under the title Madzi ndi nthaka.