In 2004, Malawi's own National Commission for UNESCO published a nine-minute film titled "the People Chewa: Gule Wamkulu / Chew Nyan," part of the documentation record that carried Gule Wamkulu to a 2005 proclamation and a 2008 inscription on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The film sits in UNESCO's Multimedia Archives today, and the practice it documents has its own separate entry on UNESCO's heritage list.
What both records describe is an institution before they describe a dance. Gule Wamkulu, "the great dance," is performed by the Nyau, a secret brotherhood of initiated men tracing itself to the Chewa Empire of the seventeenth century. Chewa society is matrilineal, which leaves a married man's formal role comparatively marginal; the Nyau brotherhood gives men across villages a counterweight to that. Its members conduct young men's initiation into adulthood, and Gule Wamkulu marks the end of that process, celebrating entry into adult Chewa society.
The dance is performed in costumes and masks representing wild animals, spirits of the dead, and other figures, each one, UNESCO's own record says, expressing a form of misbehavior and teaching the audience a moral lesson through it. Those masks are the one thing this record and the rights determination governing this tradition's page both agree stays undrawn. UNESCO's film shows them; this atlas does not reproduce them, because the masks are Nyau property and the right to show them is not this atlas's to exercise.
What survives that restriction is the institution's own shape and purpose: a masked dance UNESCO judged significant enough to document twice, performed by a brotherhood whose real subject is how Chewa men become part of an adult society together.