By: Rashid Suleiman

In the days before the Second Liberation, there were African presidents. Then there was the African president. His name was Kamuzu Banda.

Banda confounded both friend and foe. He blew cold and hot, played saviour and the devil all once. He was considered one of Africa’s most influential leaders in the last 50 years. Yet, he was among the last despots of the last century.

In sartorial elegance, he was more steadfast than Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire. He was never seen in public without his trademark black three-piece suits, flywhisk, walking stick, homburg hat and handkerchief.

In education, he was as learned as Dr Agostinho Neto of Angola or Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah.

Banda’s penchant for a flashy life saw him construct a sprawling 300-room palace, with a school and a supermarket.

In brutality, he was matched by Idi Amin Dada of Uganda, Sekou Toure of Guniea-Conakry, Michel Micombero of Burundi, Macias Nguema of Guinea-Malabo, and Mengistu Haile Mariam of Ethiopia.

In effecting a personality cult, he overshadowed accomplished purveyors of the art like Mobutu and Eyadema. He was the personification of eccentricity. He had battalions of women dancers who entertained him wherever he went.

He caused a stir in the early 1980s when he banned American pop group Simon and Garfunkel song Cecilia from the radio. This was at a time when his relationship with his mistress, Cecilia Tamanda Kadzamira, was going through a rocky period, and he clearly did not like the lyrics of the song (”Cecilia/I’m down on my knees/I’m begging you please to come home“).

Because of his conservatism, Malawi was one of the last countries to have television, in the 1990s.

In amassing a personal fortune estimated at $320 million, Banda proved that he was as greedy and fabulously wealthy as Mobutu.

Like Houphouet-Boigny or Mobutu he constructed a sprawling 300-room palace, complete with a school and a supermarket.

He was also a man of unprecedented feats. He is the only African who left his country and stayed out for 42 years but returned to lead it to independence and rule it for 33 years. He refused to return home at one time in fear that his newly found financial resources, earned as a doctor in England, would be wiped out by his extended family.

Man of many feats

Banda is the only first generation African president who remained a ‘bachelor’ till death. His lifelong partner Cecilia Tamanda Kadzamira was just a mere live-in official hostess.

Only Algeria’s Houari Boumedienne shared with Banda the dubious distinction of never having appointed a vice-president.

Banda is one of the few African presidents with multiple birthdays. For long, his official birthday was given as May 14, 1906. But when he died in 1997, his death certificate stated that he was 99 years old, meaning he was born in 1898. Oxford University Press record that he was born in 1902.

Banda was the only African president to establish diplomatic ties with apartheid South Africa. In 1972, he became the first foreign potentate to visit apartheid South Africa since King George VI of England in 1947.

Even by the high African standards, Banda was considered a dictator par excellence. Between 1970 and 1971, he declared himself president for life of both Malawi and the ruling Malawi Congress Party. Like Amin, it is said he murdered his enemies and fed their corpses to crocodiles. In a BBC interview in the early 1990s, he threatened that should Malawian exiles calling for introduction of multipartism return home, he will feed them to crocodiles.

At the height of his power, it is said only one person in Malawi rubbed Banda the wrong way and lived to tell the tale. It is still a mystery how Gwanda Chakuamba survived the bloody purges of the dictator. He was jailed for 22-years for treason and was released at the advent of multipartism in the only presidential pardon granted by Banda in his 33-year-rule.

Banda presided over a police state where any form of dissent brought sudden death, torture, exile or deportation.

The former dictator closely monitored and controlled his peoples’ lives. It was compulsory for all adult Malawians to be card carrying members of MCP. The party cards were to be carried at all times because of random police checks. The cards were sold even to unborn children. No picture, poster or clock was hanged higher than Banda’s official portrait that adorned walls of official buildings. He prescribed a dress code for men and women in Malawi and forced foreigners to conform to it.

Women were not allowed to bare their thighs or wear trousers. Men were banned from growing beards or long hair because it signalled dissent.

Male visitors to Malawi could be seized and forced to have a hair cut. Those wishing to get visas to Malawi in the 1970s were met with the following notice: ‘Female passengers will not be permitted to enter the country if wearing short dresses or trouser suit, except in transit or at lake holiday resorts or national parks. Skirts and dresses must cover the knees to conform with government regulations. The entry of hippies and men with long hair and flared trousers is forbidden‘.

Control Freak

Any foreigner who violated the rules was deported.

Moviegoers had to watch a video of Banda first before the main course. Kissing was not allowed in public and state agents cut out scenes that contained kissing in movies.

Picture - Kamuzu Banda, Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie, Kenya’s Jomo-Kenyatta and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt - In The 60’s

All the movies were first viewed and edited by Banda’s censors before they were shown. The same was done to books. The secret police frequently opened private mail for editing. They tapped phone lines and cut off calls when a speaker said a critical word against the government. During Banda’s reign, TV was banned in Malawi.

His censors ripped out pages of publications like Time and Newsweek that they considered offensive to him. History that pre-dated Banda’s rise to power was discouraged and publications on the era were destroyed.

Despite his bad side, Banda is respected in some quarters and ranked with such luminaries like the late Sir Seretse Khama of Botswana, Kenyatta, Kaunda AND Houphouet-Boigny for the prestige they brought to their countries through the sheer force of their personalities and character. He has been hailed as a national and African hero though others denounce him as a despot.

It is said that Malawians will never achieve the unity they had under Banda. He is still remembered as a man who loved and cared for his people. He is credited with developing Malawi’s education, health, infrastructure and agriculture. Under his rule, the country became self-sufficient in food.

He has been hailed as a champion of women’s rights at a time when this was not fashionable in Africa. He founded an organisation to cater for women’s rights and needs. The Chitukuko Cha Amai m’Malawi was tasked with encouraging women to excel in government, education, the community, church and other spheres of life.

Though his date of birth is in dispute, there is little doubt that Banda was born in Kasungu in Nyasaland (the colonial name of Malawi) to Mphonogo Banda and his wife Akupingamnyama Phiri of the Chewa tribe.

In 1905, he was baptised by the Church of Scotland and took the name Hastings. Later he would add the Ngwazi (lion) as part of his name. Either in 1916 or 1917 he left with an uncle, Hanock Msokera Phiri, on foot to then Southern Rhodesia – the modern day Zimbabwe.

Young Banda

In 1917, he trekked from Zimbabwe to Johannesburg where he worked in the mines till 1925 when African Methodist Church Bishop WT Vernon offered to pay for his education so long as he made his way to America. He left for New York the same year and did his high school at Wilberforce Institute, the current Central State University in Ohio.

   Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda’s Mausoleum [Enlarge]
He graduated in 1928 and started earning money through public lectures organised by a Ghanaian educationist he had met in South Africa. During one of the lecturers, he met a Dr Herald who helped him enrol as a premedical student at Indian University. He transferred to University of Chicago and graduated with a B Phil, majoring in history, in 1931.

He studied medicine at Meharry Medical College and qualified as a doctor in 1937. He was forced to get a second medical degree to qualify to practise in the British Empire. He got the degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1941. He practised medicine in Newcastle and London but in 1946, he was prevailed upon to represent Nyasaland African Congress at the 5th Pan Africanist Congress. That marked his entry into politics.

While in England, he was fiercely opposed to the proposed federation of Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and Nyasaland (Malawi) that became a reality in 1953. Two years earlier, he had been expected to return home but he chose to move to Ghana after a scandal in which he was accused of adultery with his receptionist. He moved together with the receptionist to Ghana.

After pleas from prominent Malawi politicians, Banda returned home in 1958 – 42 years after he left – to take up the leadership of the independence struggle and Nyasaland African Congress - the forerunner to Malawi Congress Party.

Strangely, he could not speak his mother tongue Chichewa and needed an interpreter. The job first fell to John Msonthi and later John Tembo, who became his strongman till death.

After stirring trouble in the colony, Banda and several of his colleagues were arrested in 1959 and jailed in Gweru in modern day Zimbabwe. He was released in 1960 and shipped to Britain for talks leading to independence. He became Prime Minister in 1963 and led the country to independence a year later.

Fall from grace

Right from the start of his political career, Banda made no secret that he was dictator. When a number of his ministers presented him with suggestions on how to reduce his powers a month after independence, he responded with tough action. He sacked four of them while two others resigned. All ‘detractors’ fled to exile.

In 1966, a new constitution made the country a one party republic with Banda as first president. He proceeded to rule the country as an unchallenged despot till the wind of change swept him out of power in the 1990s.

First, a special assembly stripped him of his powers in 1993 before Bakili Muluzi of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in the country’s first multiparty polls gave him a comprehensive whitewash the following year. He passed away in South Africa in 1997.

In his will, he instructed his long time companion, Cecilia Kadzamira, known throughout his rule as the “official hostess” to turn part of his home in his hometown of Kasungu, into a museum.

Popularity: 11% [?]

When Senator Barack Obama steps onto the stage on Thursday, next to Berlin’s Victory column, the world will be expecting a momentous speech.

   Great speakers: Enoch Powell, Mikhail Gorbachev, Barack Obama

   Great speakers: John F. Kennedy, Nelson Mandela, Margaret Thatcher

A team of Telegraph writers has compiled what they believe are the most significant addresses of the 20th and 21st centuries. The first tranche, speeches 25-13, can be viewed here. The top 12 are published here.

They limited the list to one speech per historical figure – otherwise, Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King would have appeared more than once…….and, I think Obama’s speech on race relations delivered in Philadelphia on March 18, 2008, deserves to be in this list.

Notes: Video and Transcript of Senator Barack Obama’s Speech on Race - in Philadelphia on March 18, 2008

Popularity: 16% [?]

Great Britain ruled parts of the Caribbean twice as long in duration as she ruled much of Africa.

When Kenya became a British colony, Britain had already been ruling Jamaica for more than two centuries. Indeed, when Jomo Kenyatta was born in the 1890s Kenya was not yet a crown colony. Yet, when he died in 1978 Kenya had ceased to be a British colony. Kenyatta had lived right through the country’s entire colonial period. He survived British rule by 15 years, having ruled Kenya himself as its first post-colonial President.

While British rule in Kenya was a matter of a single lifetime, British rule in Jamaica traversed the reigns of about 10 British monarchs. By any measure, therefore, Jamaica and much of the British West Indies were more deeply Anglicised than Kenya was. But since independence is the Caribbean getting de-Anglicised? If so, what are the causes?

A number of factors may have contributed to such a process of post-colonial de-Anglicisation. One is the surprising phenomenon of Britain’s cultural abdication. This is in sharp contrast to the missionary zeal of the French in the realm of culture. British commitment to cultural diplomacy is much weaker than that of France-both in Africa and the Caribbean.

The United Kingdom spends the equivalent of only a fraction of the French budget for cultural diplomacy. The very success of the English language globally has reduced Britain’s need to promote the language in other lands. That there is an English-speaking power mightier than Britain (the United States) also helped to dwarf Britain’s cultural role in promoting Anglo-Saxon culture.

The French language, on the other hand, is on the defensive against the devastating competition of Anglo-American cultural and linguistic expansionism. There is no French-speaking super power the equivalent of the United States. France tries to play the cultural roles of both Britain and the United States.

But the United States is itself another reason British influence in the Caribbean continues to decline. In the post-colonial era, the sheer proximity and size of the United States have been felt more directly than was possible under British imperial rule.

American investment, American tourism, American television programmes, American goods and services, and even Caribbean membership of the Organisation of American States, have all played their part in tilting the balance towards Americanisation in the Caribbean experience.

Then there is the phenomenon of American education as compared with the old colonial infatuation with the prestige of British education. There was a time when West Indians and Africans asked themselves whether being educated in the US was a more radicalising experience than being educated in Great Britain.

In the first half of the 20th Century the evidence seemed to support that proposition. Kwame Nkrumah was mainly educated in the US; his rival in Ghana, Kofi Busia, was educated in Great Britain. Nkrumah captured the torch of radical nationalism, while Busia moved to the right.

In Nigeria, the younger Nnamdi Azikiwe (Zik) was the voice of nationalist militancy. He was American educated. The leading British-educated Nigerians in the 1940s and even the 1950s were mainly to Zik’s right ideologically.

If it was true that American education in the first half of the 20th Century was a more radicalising experience for Africans and West Indians than was British education, what were the reasons at that time?

One factor in the first half of the century was that the United States was not only a much more racist society than Great Britain but American racism at the time was still highly institutionalised. African and Caribbean students in the United States were therefore more subject to racial humiliation and harassment than their counterparts in the United Kingdom. African and Caribbean students in American colleges were as a result more liable to get radicalised in response.

Also contributing to this radicalisation was African and Caribbean intermingling with Black Americans and being exposed to a more intense pan-African experience. Indeed, African students in the first half of the 20th C moved even further to the left.

Middle class Caribbean Blacks could go either way when highly educated. They could move more decisively to the left (going even Marxist) or become more eloquent defenders of the capitalist status quo. Less privileged Caribbean Blacks educated in the United States were more likely to go nationalist rather than socialist — often emphasising race rather than class, although their own origins were often rooted in class disadvantages.

By the second half of the 20th Century some of the most eloquent voices of the socialist left in Commonwealth Caribbean were British educated. Even Eric Williams of Trinidad was initially a product of British leftism.

George Padmore flirted with communism. And C L R James was both highly anglicised and highly leftist to the end of his days when he was nearly 90.

Today, more and more positions in journalism, the bureaucracy, politics and education are gradually occupied by the ‘Americanised’ West Indians.

The statistics are shifting in favour of the American educated. But in reality they are only narrowing the gap between them and the more influential British-educated. The de-Anglicisation of the Caribbean has not yet gone far enough to dethrone the Anglophiles in the Commonwealth Caribbean completely.

Afterall, Michael Manley in power was more prominent than Edward Seaga was in office. Manley symbolised Anglophilia; Seaga was a product of Pax-Americana.

For the products of the American experience it is still too early for them to celebrate the following: The stream of experience meanders on in the vast expanse of Caribbean time. The new will come and the old be gone. Let’s toast the fortunes of changing clime.

Popularity: 30% [?]

Reports - Macharia Gaitho

Delegates attend the ninth summit of African Union in Accra on July 3, 2007. African leaders have reaffirmed their common vision of a future continental union under a single government, but agreed to study the details and timing of how to achieve it.

African heads of state and government who recently attended the ninth African Union Summit in Accra, Ghana, to discuss regional integration agreed in principle on the need for the formation of the United States of Africa.

But they raised concern over the modalities of such integration, with many advocating economic and social cooperation rather than political union.

Here are excerpts from sample speeches:

President Kibaki, Kenya

We are gathered here today to focus our minds and exchange views on an issue that preoccupied the minds of the founding fathers of Africa’s independence and democracy movements.

The creation of a supranational union will require enormous resources and consensus on the modalities of achieving such a goal. Towards this end, the views of non-state actors and the common citizenry are of paramount importance.

This is principally because the desired union government must be a union of the African people, and not merely a union of states and governments.

Opinions were, however, varied on the pace this process should take. That notwithstanding, the predominant view underscored the need to accelerate integration through the regional economic communities as the building blocs of a united Africa.

We in the East African Community have made major strides in our integration process. As we forge forward towards unification, I wish to underscore the need to reinforce our shared history, language, culture and a common heritage.

Umaru Yar’Adua, Nigeria

Nigeria has consistently supported and advocated the imperative of the ultimate goal of the African Union being full political and economic integration leading to evolvement of the United States of Africa. The critical issue at this point is whether to fast-track the process or to pursue the same objective through gradual incrementalism.

Of critical importance is the identification of the vital institutional and operational challenges which the concept of union government throws up, and principles approaches to meeting this challenges. This makes a strong case for gradual incrementalism.

There are clear and present threats and challenges which we must face up to. We cannot ignore the social, economic and political inequalities within and among our member states, which if not bridged would pose daunting obstacles on the march towards the union.

Yoweri Museveni, Uganda

While economically I support integration with everybody, politically we should only integrate with people who are either similar or compatible with us. The whole of Africa has got some obvious incompatibilities when it comes to political integration. In East Africa we have been talking about fast-tracking the political federation.

East Africans are compatible, they can and should integrate economically and politically. Other areas of Africa that feel they have got a comparative degree of similarity or compatibility could also work for political integration.

Insisting on political integration at the continental level will bring together incompatible linkages that may create tension rather than cohesion.

Our recommendation is that we take a functions-based rational approach. What functions can most rationally be done at what level – village, district within Uganda, national, regional or continental?

There are definitely functions that can be done at the continental level, such as environment, trade negotiations, defence pact and common market.

Pakalitha Mosisili, Lesotho

The world has become a global village. In a globalised world “splendid isolation” has no place. The more countries, especially in Africa, remain as individual countries, the more marginalised they shall remain. United we stand, divided we fall.

But even as we pursue this noble objective, we cannot ignore the factors that militate against it. Full political integration presupposes total surrender of sovereignty. To some of us this may indeed be a tall order. Partial surrender of sovereignty in some areas may be the best option. The most appealing form of integration would be economic integration.

Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Liberia

In 1959 Liberia called for a more measured approach [in the creation of a United Sates of Africa] through an association of African states which would focus attention on building institutions as a path towards President Kwame Nkrumah’s dream of one Africa.

These two movements led to the formation in 1961 of the Casablanca Group promoting the views of President Nkrumah and the Monrovia Group representing the views of President Nyerere and Liberian President William Tubman. In 1963, adopting the Monrovia alternative, the OAU was born.

Today, 45 years after the Casablanca and Monrovia movements, we are back to the challenge, we are in the country of President Nkrumah to discuss, once again, the unity of Africa. Today, Liberia, this promoter of African liberation, lies in ruins.

When Liberia was in the throes of self-destruction, West Africa and Africa generally intervened to save us form ourselves. We lost our sovereignty.

Liberia believes that this meeting should endorse without further study the concept of the United States of Africa.

REFERENCES:

1. Marxism and Anti-Imperialism in Africa.
2. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa — Walter Rodney 1973.
3. Dates of Major African Events — From 1500 CE to 2000 CE | 1501 First black slaves in America [BEGINING OF A GENOCIDAL TRANS-ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE] ……………..PRESENT.
4. Education for a New Reality in the African World — Dr. John Henrik Clarke

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Popularity: 38% [?]