Malawi: The Dictatorship that Nobody Noticed...

Introduction

It’s a nation that even well-studied global citizens struggle to place on a map, a small, quiet expanse of land that ranks among the world’s least developed countries on nearly every metric. But under the cover of its profound obscurity on the global stage, the small southeast-African nation of Malawi has a secret: a decades-long legacy of totalitarian rule so complete, and so oppressive, that few nations other than North Korea can even hope to match it. And if Malawi’s first secret isn’t shocking enough, then the second certainly is: that Malawi, after decades of devastation, found a way to survive…and come back stronger than it ever was before.

Exploring Malawi

To find Malawi on a map, you’re going to have to look closely, to locate a winding sliver of land wedged between Tanzania and Zambia on the northward side, and cupped firmly into the confines of Mozambique to the south. It’s a landlocked country, and one whose geography is defined by what happens below the Earth’s surface. There, the great tectonic plates under the African landmass pull apart, in a great north-to-south boundary that forms what’s known as the East African Rift. On the surface, the consequences of that tectonic divergence give Malawi its two most distinctive features: the lake, and the grand plateaus that rise above the landscape.

First, there’s the lake, known to other countries in the region as Lake Nyasa, and known here as Lake Malawi. In terms of the volume of water that it holds, the lake is the fourth-largest freshwater body on planet Earth; in terms of its land area, it’s still in the top ten, clocking in at ninth place. Because of the powerful and ancient forces at work below the Earth’s crust, the lake descends to incredible depths; Lake Malawi’s deepest point is a full 706 meters, or 2,300 feet, below the water’s surface, making it the second-deepest lake in Africa, and the seventh-deepest across the whole world.

In its northern reaches, it’s fed by the Ruhuhu River, cutting a long path across Tanzania; in its south, it flows outward to a river valley that eventually feeds the mighty Zambezi. Although Malawi is landlocked, Lake Malawi affords it a long water border with Mozambique and Tanzania, a feature that’s important enough that Malawi is one of only a handful of landlocked nations to feature its own navy. It’s not necessarily a spectacular naval force; instead, it fields just 220 personnel, one patrol boat, a few rigid-hulled inflatable dinghies, and a single landing craft.

But, we suppose, a navy’s a navy regardless.

Then, there’s Malawi’s highlands, running from tip to tail across the country. They’re separated from Lake Malawi by the Great Rift Valley, a long but narrow lowland, before the landscape rises into plateaus many thousands of feet tall. Atop the plateaus are vast expanses of tree-less rolling hills, an abundance of flowering plants, and, toward the south, forests that have spent decades ravaged by deforestation.

When it comes to wildlife, Malawi’s lions, rhinoceros, and zebras still dot the landscape, while Lake Malawi hosts not only gigantic crocodiles and hippopotamus, but up to a thousand species of cichlid fish, well over half the total number of identified cichlids across the entire world. The species diversity of those fish suggests that Lake Malawi might gain at least one, and possibly several new one-of-a-kind fish species over the course of a single human lifetime.

But Malawi’s fish, and the rest of its wildlife, are related only tangentially to the real story of this country and its people. Those people, known in aggregate as Malawians, are estimated to number somewhere around 21 and a half million at the time of writing. Malawi is a very young nation, with nearly half of all Malawians under the age of fifteen. The population is growing by over three percent each year, and projected to hit a number upward of forty-seven million by the year 2050. That’ll be more populous than countries from modern-day Argentina to Poland to Saudi Arabia to Canada. Most people live in relatively rural areas, getting by on subsistence farming, while even the country’s largest city, Lilongwe, hosts less than a million people. In fact, only five population centers in the entire country number more inhabitants than sixty thousand. Most people live in small rural villages called mudzi, each of which tends to organize around an extended family, although more and more in recent years, the landscape has begun to be built up toward urbanization. Despite Malawi’s relative lack of cities, it’s a population-dense place, and its rising population means that Malawi is rather quickly running out of room.

Across the country, most Malawians are part of at least one of four ethnic groups: the Chewa in the central and southern regions, the Lomwe in the watersheds of the southeast, the Yao in the country’s eastern regions, and the Tumbuka across the northern highlands. By and large, most Malawians are Christian, with a sizeable Muslim minority and a wide range of people, across the population, who mix in traditional and animist practices to their faith as well. Traditional dance and music, mask- and wood-carving, and both poetry and literature make up important elements of Malawian culture, as does football, in a holdover from the country’s days under British colonial rule.

Malawians’ national identity, as it exists now, is that of a rather conservative and strictly nonviolent rural or pastoral population. Malawi’s nickname, “the Warm Heart of Africa”, draws its source not from Malawi’s landlocked location or its hot weather, but from the generosity and the loving nature that Malawi cultural identity prizes. Ethnic rivalries rarely spill over into violence, and while the region does have a history of ethnic conflict, that past has largely been left behind.

By and large, the Malawi of today is a lagging nation on the world stage. It battles with a decades-long HIV/AIDS crisis, it’s painfully underdeveloped, many people there still get by on subsistence agriculture, and the national government is highly dependent on foreign aid. Its infrastructure to support education, healthcare, environmental protection, economic engagement, and higher-level industry all lag far behind most of the rest of the world.

Take a brief glance at Malawi, and on the surface, there’s not much to see: an underdeveloped nation like many others across the globe, trudging through a mess of crises, lagging indicators, and future headaches that seem, when taken together, as if they’ll prove utterly unconquerable. But pull back the curtain on Malawi’s history, and it quickly becomes clear that the present day, in this particular country, might not be anywhere near perfect…but it’s a far cry from when Malawi used to be something much, much darker.

A Colonial History

The first record of Homo sapiens in the land now called Malawi pops up in the form of fossils somewhere between four and ten millennia ago, although evidence of human culture can be dated to times tens of thousands of years earlier, and other hominid fossils have been found there, at an age of millions of years. Those ancestor cultures are thought to have settled around Lake Malawi for an exceedingly long time before an event called the Bantu Expansion, a migration of early Bantu-language-speakers across sub-Saharan Africa. The Bantu-speakers arrived in Malawi somewhere between the first and fourth centuries of the Common Era, and settled across the modern-day Malawian landscape. Who these Bantu-speakers were, and which part of the surrounding Bantu-settled landscape they came from, is hard to say. Whether they assimilated all the people who’d been there before, or wiped many of them out, is tough to say, but archaeological evidence indicates that these early Bantu settlers spread their slash-and-burn farming methods and their iron tools across the land. Another wave of Bantu-speaker migration arrived between six and eight hundred years ago, integrating into the communities and cultures that had been there when they arrived, and with that new group of tenants, came a couple of major developments: an oral history, and a political structure.

During the late 15th century, today’s Malawi became host to the so-called Maravi Confederacy, an arrangement of ethnolinguistic groups across southern Africa. Its name, Maravi, is thought to refer to flames, possibly because of the many kilns for iron-ore work that would have dotted the landscape in that time. The Confederacy’s power center was on and around the shores of Lake Nyasa, today Lake Malawi, and was ruled over by a series of kings, who would appoint subordinates to take over and occupy new territories. The confederacy expanded outward, it formed trade relations with Portugal and the kingdoms of the Arab world, and, eventually, its component parts became more physically and ideologically distant from each other, forming the less unified, but largely peaceful ethnolinguistic landscape of modern Malawi.

But a second, hidden hand behind the collapse of the Maravi Confederacy, was a far more nefarious one: the slave trade. At first, the Confederacy trafficked in slaves on its own terms, taking advantage of their access to the African coast to trade people just like they’d trade iron or ivory. The people who were trafficked around that time, could expect to work in brutal conditions on plantations in Mozambique, or endure a voyage halfway around the world to Brazil.

But as a wave of incoming, northbound migration disrupted the Maravi Confederacy, courtesy of a great exodus of people fleeing the rule of Shaka Zulu, and another wave of new arrivals came from eastward across Lake Malawi, the Confederacy began to fracture. The arrivals who’d come fleeing Shaka Zulu used the Zulu leader’s own tactics against people previously unexposed to them, and the ones who’d come across Lake Malawi first formed relationships with Confederacy rulers to trade for slaves, but eventually sought to enslave the entire Confederacy too. The people who’d come from across Lake Malawi, the Yao, were for a time the only proficient users of firearms in the region, conferring an advantage upon themselves that the other groups of the region simply couldn’t deal with head-on.

Over the following decades during the 1800s, tens of thousands of people each year were taken from their homes in modern-day Malawian territory and enslaved. While some still went to the Portuguese, most went to the then Arab-ruled archipelago of Zanzibar, where powerful sultans ruled up and down much of the east coast of the African continent. Resistance by the Maravi was occasionally successful, but usually fruitless.

During these same years, missionaries started to arrive from the British isles, and before long, traders and hunters began to follow. As the culture of the region began shifting, and many of the local tribes started converting to Christianity, the influence of the slave trade eventually diminished. The ethnic Yao population in the area, which read and wrote in Arabic and have continued to practice Islam to this day, would end up fighting against the British during the Crown’s early attempts to establish colonial rule, and they’d be left out of the resulting English-language literacy projects and other colonial initiatives in education.

That cultural divide, between the Yao and the rest of Malawi, still exists to this day.

By the late 1880s, the area around Lake Malawi—again, at this time, known as Lake Nyasa—was under the direct authority of the British crown. Not only had much of the region been converted to Christianity, but a trade-and-transport operation, known at that time as the African Lakes Company Limited, had built a thriving commercial economy in and around the lake in order to both secure major resources, and offset the economic influence of the slave trade. In 1889, fearing that Portugal might occupy the land around Lake Malawi that was, at that time, under British control, British officials on the territory decided to declare it a British protectorate.

When Portuguese soldiers did, indeed, make a push through part of that informal protectorate, the local officials made it bigger, and though their whole designation had been carried out without the approval of the British Foreign Office, it was recognized by the Foreign Office anyhow. As for why…well, the British had very recently found a channel that allowed them access to the Zambezi River without going through Portuguese territory, and this new, unofficial protectorate that Britain apparently had, just so happened to cover it. This led to a bit of a diplomatic spat with Portugal, and more broadly, many of the tribes living on this same land didn’t take particularly kindly to being informed that they were now under British authority, but by the turn of the twentieth century, Britain had largely consolidated control.

The area would become known as the Nyasaland Protectorate in 1907.

Unlike other African and global British protectorates, the British colonial structure in Nyasaland had very little intention of working collaboratively with the locals. Instead, Britain ruled the area predominantly through imposition of military force, and several major and minor uprisings were crushed in the early years. Plantations began to crop up across Nyasaland, growing coffee, tea, tobacco, and cotton, and British taxation models were designed to push more and more locals into work directly under the plantations.

While slavery was outlawed under British rule, black workers on the plantations faced frequent beatings and persistent, even proud discrimination by European settlers. The local plantations encouraged manual labor by the locals as a form of rent, a system that allowed them to very easily blur the lines between consensual and forced labor using the local families’ own homes as leverage. When World War I kicked off in 1914, the situation only got worse, as massive numbers of black Africans were recruited to work as porters in support of the Allied war effort.

Not only were those porters forced into despicable living situations in which disease and death were commonplace, but the departure of so many working-age men placed incredible strain on Nyasaland’s already-strained plantation economy.

Enter one John Chilembwe, a man whose mission would lead to seismic change in Malawi, and ultimately bring about both the freedom, and the dictatorship, of the decades to come. Born in or around Nyasaland well before it was called Nyasaland at all, Chilembwe was a Baptist church minister who’d spent time in the United States, learning that nation’s lessons of its own post-Civil-War, post-Abolition years. Chilembwe disdained the institution of British Nyasaland, after well over a decade working to build a fair and equitable landowning estate for African workers to escape the British system.

By the time the Great War kicked off, he was already deeply embittered against the British, and the recruitment of the people of Nyasaland, into a war that Chilembwe deeply felt had nothing to do with them, was a bridge too far. His overtures to the colonial government not to recruit black porters went un-heard, and by the end of 1914, Chilembwe and his followers had their plan for an uprising.

The revolt came in the late night hours between the twenty-third and twenty-fourth of January, 1915. Chilembwe delivered a speech, urging his followers not to expect that they would survive the violence and reprisals to come, but emphasizing that their sacrifice was, as he believed, the only way to begin the long process of destabilizing the colonial order. Then, Chilembwe’s rebel forces spread out across the countryside, attacking several targets, but most importantly, one plantation called Magomero, where thousands of locals were subject to the same rent-based forced labor system we mentioned previously.

They lived under a particularly harsh regime, one where the plantation managers were known for their underpayment of workers and their physically brutal repression. The attack on the plantation saw both the main manager and the estate official killed, although their families were spared, and reportedly, treated with care. Other colonists were killed during the attack, and a second rebel raid saw Chilembwe’s followers capture several rifles, adding to an arsenal that previously included only melee weapons.

A couple of days later, a group of rebels would attack a Catholic mission, resulting in one guard of the mission and one young girl killed.

By and large, that was the end of the revolt; follow-on uprisings failed to materialize, and nearby tribes that had said they’d join in, ultimately decided not to. Within a day of the first attack, colonial reservists and British military units were marching to respond, and by the twenty-fifth, they began launching counterattacks. Chilembwe eventually fled to Mozambique, and his attempts to solicit help from Germany went unanswered—probably for the best, as Germany had a well-known reputation among the people of Nyasaland as being just as oppressive as the British.

He would be shot dead just over a week past the start of the uprising, by members of the Nyasaland Police force. The reprisals, as Chilembwe had expected, were brutal; hundreds of rebels would be imprisoned, dozens executed, and perhaps fifty more killed extrajudicially, during the counter-raids of the colonial military. The local population of plantation workers was punished en masse, many by the burning-down of their homes and the levying of new taxes against all residents.

Non-British religious organizations were banned or tightly restricted, public gatherings were outlawed, and the effects rippled across other British colonies, where locals were pre-emptively repressed in retaliation for revolts they hadn’t yet started.

But in the long view, the brief revolt had exactly the impact that Chilembwe had foreseen. Despite the brutal reprisals, the revolt also led to talk of reform among the British, who began to pivot toward methods of indirect rule in which local tribes could, once again, wield power. Africans across Nyasaland began to more actively pursue a range of individual and collective rights, and internalized a growing animosity toward the colonial system. An inquiry after the fact led Britain to condemn the systemic discrimination and lack of respect for the locals that had contributed to such poor conditions on the plantations, and although its attempts to abolish the rent-leveraging system were unsuccessful, the next generation of Nyasaland intellectuals and anti-colonial activists used Chilembwe’s uprising as an emblem of continued resistance.

The inter-war years passed quietly in Nyasaland, with local tribes able to benefit from a somewhat loosened colonial grip, but still broadly enmeshed in the same labor-for-rent system that the British had created. Eviction without cause was a constant threat, with little land available for resettlement once a person was kicked off a plot—which, frequently, would be done in efforts to avert overcrowding. Although most of the black African population lived rurally, over ninety percent lived on lands held by the colonial government, and the territory’s rural landmass was becoming quite densely populated.

During the World War II years, hundreds of people evicted from the land they lived on would simply refuse to leave—not because they had any real desire to stay, but because there was no open, usable land left. The colonial system relied on individual farmers and families tending to individual plots of land, and by that time, there just weren’t any more plots left. Riots would break out in both 1943, and 1945, without success.

After the war’s end, a British commission on Nyasaland found that the colonial government had to address the land issues somehow. What the commission proposed, was that any plots of European-owned land that was going under-used or abandoned should be made available to African farmers. The move incensed European landowners in Nyasaland, and it would take several years to go into effect, but by the early 1950s, the change had made a real and tangible impact on the African population. By then, an organization called the Nyasaland African Congress had already secured African representation on Nyasaland’s Legislative Council, and for a moment, things were looking up.

Then, catastrophe struck Nyasaland in 1953, when it was merged into a federation with the nearby British self-governing colony of Southern Rhodesia. That was a major problem for the black Africans of Nyasaland, who were now subject to the far more repressive political domination exerted by Southern Rhodesia’s white minority, and the expansion of Southern Rhodesia’s segregation laws into Nyasaland. The federation was heralded by riots and mass protests by the black African population, and federation officials responded by gutting the already-insufficient development proposals that Britain had been intending for the territory. Fortunately for Nyasaland, the new status quo wouldn’t last long; within a few years, opinions back home on the British Isles had shifted when it came to the future of Britain’s territorial holdings, and because the federative government hadn’t yet had enough time to squash Nyasaland’s political opposition, the colony’s nascent independence movement was able to take hold.

But it’s here, in the course of today’s story, that we’ve got to stop in our tracks, and turn our focus from an entire territory, to one man who would soon come to dominate Nyasaland completely. His name was Hastings Kamuzu Banda, and he would eventually prove to be the sort of man who could warp history itself, forcing the story of this place called Malawi to be told not in terms of pre-colonial history, its colonial years, and its independence. By the time he was through with it, Malawi’s story could be told only one way: Before, during, and after Hastings Banda himself.

Meet Hastings Banda

Malawi’s future despot was born sometime around the turn of the 20th century, near the modern-day town of Kasungu in what would have, at that time, still been called British Central Africa. There, no official record of his birth would ever have been documented, and later estimates on when he was born range from 1898, on the early end, to 1906, a year that Banda himself typically provided, but was almost certainly late. He grew up with his maternal grandparents, and in 1910, he was baptized into the Church of Scotland, taking the Christian name Hastings in honor of a missionary he quite liked, who’d been working in and around his village when he was a boy.

In 1917, he traveled to Johannesburg, South Africa, to work in a mine for a few years, but during his time there, he met an African Methodist Episcopal bishop named William Tecumseh Vernon. The bishop was an American, the son of former slaves in Missouri, and during his missionary years, he’d apparently seen something in young Hastings Banda that he liked. Vernon offered Banda a deal: if Banda could get himself to the United States, then Vernon would pay tuition for him to attend a Methodist school in the US.

In 1925, Banda was able to put the money down and pay for a voyage; he arrived to New York that same year.

Half a world away from the British colony he’d once called home, Banda made his way to the Wilberforce Institute in Ohio, today known as Ohio’s Central State University. It was an African-American college, and Banda would spend several years in the institute’s high school section, graduating with a diploma a few years later. Then, he moved on to Indiana University, studying as a pre-medical student while writing about his native Chewa tribe back in Africa. He’d transfer to the University of Chicago, collaborating with a linguist to build a grammar book on the Chewa language, and he’d eventually graduate from UChicago, with a degree in history. He then went to Tennessee for medical school, graduating six years later, and becoming the second Malawian ever to receive a medical degree, twenty years after his lone predecessor, a man named Daniel Sharpe Malekebu. During his time in the United States, he received money from a wide range of benefactors, including the family responsible for Pepsodent toothpaste. He also met his wife, one Robertine Edmonds.

By the time that he finished his degree, Banda’s name was already known back in his homeland, where he eventually intended to return, but he’d run into a problem. In order to practice medicine across the British Empire, he needed a British medical degree, which he eventually picked up in 1941 from the University of Edinburgh. During that time, he received stipends from both the government of Nyasaland and the church of Scotland, although neither organization knew that the other was providing funding too, and he may have still been receiving funding from a third, private donor as well.

He refused to be conscripted as an Army doctor during World War II, citing conscientious reasons, and instead spent four years working as a doctor in the north of England. Eventually, he moved to London, and bought a medical practice of his own. Dressing daily in a three-piece suit and a distinctive Homburg hat, Banda became popular in London, at a time when racism was often quite overt across the British Home Isles.

Unusually for a black doctor at that time, he drew clientele of all races, and he grew a reputation for his way with children, his courtesy during house calls, and his willingness not just to treat poor patients for free, but even pay some of their rents when times were particularly lean.

When the Second World War ended, it seemed unlikely that Banda was going to return to Nyasaland anytime soon. He’d become politically active, and made himself into a sought-after influence in Nyasaland as well as the pan-African independence movement. In London, he frequently played host to visiting leaders from across the pan-African movement, and he represented the interests of the Nyasaland African Congress, often finding his way into conversations with the British Colonial Office and with parliament members to advocate on Nyasaland’s behalf.

When the British government began working to create the federation we spoke about earlier, between Nyasaland and Rhodesia, Banda advocated fiercely against the plan, denouncing it as a, quote, “stupid” scheme to ensure that white supremacy remained in central Africa even if the British colonial government was no more. Banda was on the losing side of that particular battle, at least during the 1950s, but before the federation was eventually created, he’d been critical in bringing together the chiefs and the ordinary people of Nyasaland into a consensus to act. In 1953, Banda left Britain for good, but he didn’t return home right away; instead, after an adulterous scandal with his receptionist, Banda chose to travel to Ghana.

A delegation from Nyasaland had come all the way to Liverpool to attempt to get him to come back to their territory right away, but he refused, and went to Ghana anyhow.

While there, Nyasaland developed something of a Hastings-Banda-fever. This American-educated doctor, long a resident of Britain, hadn’t been home in so long that he would eventually need a translator to speak to his people in his native Chichewa tongue. But he had developed into a beacon of hope for Nyasaland anyhow, and his years in Ghana only made the fervor swell even more.

At one time, rumors had spread that Banda was going to be on a flight to Nyasaland’s Chileka Airport, drawing crowds that very nearly stormed the plane that he was supposed to be flying in on. Without ever waving hello to his countrymen, Banda had become Nyasaland’s version of 2024’s Taylor Swift, and while Banda didn’t rush to return, he took full advantage of the incredible power and leverage his people were now trying to foist upon him. The nationalist party he ultimately crafted, operated under a clear policy of one-man rule, a degree of authority that the rest of the Nyasaland African Congress was, at that time, pleased to accept.

In 1958, Banda finally chose to return to Nyasaland, where he very quickly took over leadership of the Congress, shifting authority away from a beleaguered prior president colloquially known as TDT Banda—no relation. At this time, Nyasaland was still part of the federation Banda disdained so powerfully, and he embarked on a speaking tour across the territory to rail against the colonialists and recruit the black Africans of the region to his political movement. In those days, support for Banda’s ideas and hunger for independence had grown so strong that he commanded large crowds everywhere he went, and it wasn’t long until the federation government realized that he was an existential threat to their survival.

Within months of Banda’s arrival, Rhodesian troops were flown into Nyasaland, spreading across the countryside under a state of emergency and locking down whatever they could of the country. By March of 1959, Banda was imprisoned in what was then the city of Gwelo, in Southern Rhodesia, modern-day Zimbabwe.

Banda wouldn’t spend long in prison. At this point, the mood in Britain had shifted sharply toward decolonization as the Crown found itself increasingly less able to justify its continued projects in Africa and elsewhere, and although the federation in central Africa certainly had continued economic promise for Britain, it wasn’t sustainable in a rapidly evolving world order. Meanwhile, the federation government had begun to realize that there would be no peace from protest or demonstrations until, and unless, Banda was let out. He was released just over a year after he’d been incarcerated to begin with, on the first of April, 1960, and from Gwelo, he went almost directly to London to take part in negotiations toward independence.

The next four years would be a whirlwind for Banda, who would play a pivotal role in the establishment of an independent nation where Nyasaland had once been. His work in rallying the people, in leading the political and intellectual conversation toward independence, and in negotiating with the Rhodesians and the British were all critical. When it came time to hold a first set of elections, still under British rule, Banda was only given the title of Minister of Land, Natural Resources and Local Government, but it was clear to all involved that he was the one who held the levers of power inside Nyasaland.

He even gave the nation its new name, Malawi, after seeing the name on a French map, where it had corresponded to the lake that was so synonymous with his land. In 1963, Banda was officially granted the title of Prime Minister, a role he’d informally held for quite a while already, and with his newfound authority, he set about a process of court, education, and trade reforms that laid the groundwork for a sovereign state. Even Malawi’s date of official independence held personal significance for Banda, be it intentional or unintentional; that day, the sixth of July 1964, was six years, to the day, after Hastings Banda had returned to Nyasaland to set it on the course of independence.

On that day, Nyasaland ceased to exist; this nation was now called Malawi, and Hastings Banda was the man holding the reins.

Malawi Under Banda

Now, up to this point, we’ve discussed Hastings Banda primarily through his education and his work—first as a doctor, and then as a political advocate toward independence. But now, it’s time we discuss the man himself, because just like a whole range of dictators before and since, Banda’s character and his perceptions of the world would play all too important a role in his people’s lives for decades.

Banda existed at the intersection of rigid morality and moral superiority, in ways that became evident early on during his work with the independence movement in Malawi. Even while he lived abroad, Banda seemed to develop something of a superiority complex, belittling and acting imperiously toward not just Nyasaland’s political leaders, but of other pan-African leaders as well. In London, he was known for his disdain of lax morals during wartime, of couples dancing together in public and consummating their affection in private. He was known to have only limited trust for his fellow Malawian politicians, preferring instead the counsel of friends from Britain, yet he seemed to relish the reputation of extremism that he had gained in the eyes of the colonialist regime. Said Banda in one article he wrote for Africa Today, quote: “Nowhere in history did the so-called Moderates accomplish anything.” In 1962, he had made it abundantly clear to his own Legislative Council that he saw himself as Malawi’s sole policymaker, with every other government official being expected to faithfully make his vision into reality, without dissent or criticism. But so, too, did he prove more than willing to break the rules or even flip his views on a dime when it suited him. Starkly opposed to abortions in London, he may have run an abortion clinic in Ghana; publicly, he disdained infidelity and extramarital relations, but he and his secretary back in London had a child, who he left and refused to support throughout his life. He was, again, a proud anticolonial extremist, but he had zero qualms about cooperating closely with South Africa’s apartheid government when it suited him. Call him a narcissist, call him a psychopath, call him a hypocrite…really, call him whatever you like, but whatever factors shaped his worldview and his approach to politics, they were about to become exceedingly important for every person in Malawi.

The first signs of real trouble came during the Cabinet Crisis of 1964, just seven weeks after independence. By then, Banda’s reputation as an authoritarian was already well-established in his own circles; he had made it abundantly clear that disagreement or criticism of his policies would not be tolerated under any circumstance, and back in 1962, the suspicious death of a high-level official in a car crash had raised fears that Banda might have orchestrated his demise. The man in question, Dunduzu Chisiza, had written a pamphlet just before he died, arguing that after Malawi became independent, its administration should no longer submit to a single leader, and Chisiza had been the most outspoken dissenter in Banda’s leadership structure at that time.

Amidst a wave of violence against opposition politicians and Jehovah’s Witnesses, including over 1,800 individual incidents in the first two months of 1964 alone, most of the true anti-Banda opposition had left the country by the time of its independence. Meanwhile, Banda had been floating the idea of arbitrary dismissals of his own ministers quite transparently in front of them, and had even gotten rid of one minister for, at that time, unexplained reasons. In his public speeches, he slighted and berated the members of his own cabinet, and he privately accused several of forming a secret alliance to undermine him.

At the same time, he took on more and more government responsibilities for himself, to the point that his own appointed underlings—a more trusted group of loyalists, in his mind—were being assigned most of the day-to-day work of running the country.

The real trouble began around the time of independence, when the vast majority of Banda’s ministers agreed that they would push Banda to sever his relationships with South Africa and Portugal, grow closer ties to other African nations, solicit aid from China, define the ministers’ positions, and take other actions to bring Malawi back in line with the standard for other nations. Banda was reportedly surprised by how hard his ministers pushed back at him, but while his ministers initially thought that their push had been successful, Banda had made up his mind in the opposite direction. In another meeting, Banda made his opposition to the cabinet crystal-clear, and when the cabinet attempted to force him to resign, Banda instead dismissed several of the ministers, prompting others to resign.

With two cabinet ministers left, Banda railed to his parliament that his ministers had been conspiring against him, abusing their positions, and harboring true loyalties to the Chinese ambassador in the city of Dar-es-Salaam, outside of Malawi. By the end of Banda’s play for power, not even the parliamentarians who were family members of the former ministers would support them; violence spilled onto the streets by supporters of both camps, and when the ex-ministers realized that they had no actual plan to resist Banda nor even a clear vision on what should be done at him, the group split up and fled the country. During the entire crisis, Banda had kept Britain’s backing, with the Crown clearly preferring the idea of a pro-British autocrat over a government that might ally with communist China.

In the aftermath, there was only minor violence, and most of the ministers who had fled Malawi would either never return, or come back only after Banda had died. One would be kidnapped back to Malawi, and would die after nearly eleven years in solitary confinement while awaiting execution.

In one fell swoop, Banda had devastated the political opposition inside Malawi so badly that it wouldn’t rear its head again for decades. The results were precisely what one might expect. With power now fully consolidated within his grasp, it would be just a couple of years before a new Malawian constitution was passed, transforming the nation into a republic. Banda would run as the only candidate for the Malawian presidency, and install himself at the head of Malawi’s only legal political party. For all intents and purposes, he wrote his dictatorship into the constitution itself, and with the support of the parliament behind him, he granted himself a wide range of executive and legislative authorities that went well beyond the scope of any non-dictatorial world leader. A few years later, parliament would make a move that was all too predictable; Banda was made His Excellency the Life President of the Republic of Malawi, and granted the title of Ngwazi, a word that in his native Chichewa language, can alternately mean savior, or conqueror.

With a title like that, perhaps it should be no surprise that Banda’s cult of personality rose to a level rivaled only by the craziest dictators of history. Like members of the Kim regime in North Korea, every commercial building in Malawi was required to hang a picture of Banda on the wall, displayed higher up than any clock, any other picture, any piece of artwork, or anything else deemed decorative. Banda insisted that all films screened in Malawi be preceded by a movie trailer of sorts, playing the national anthem while showing footage of Banda waving to an adoring crowd.

When he flew into any of Malawi’s airports, he expected to be greeted by companies of dancing women, dressed in cloth that depicted Banda’s own face. Discussions of his age were strictly prohibited, as were references to him that called him by any name or title other than “Life President”, and when he drove around the country, Malawians were expected to leave their homes, lock up behind them, and wave to the president as he drove past. Calendars bore his face, coins bore his face, stamps bore his face.

Without fail, he always carried around a fly-whisk, waving it emphatically when he spoke in front of crowds. In public, he worked hard to tie his own personal mythology to the legacy of the Romans and Greeks, deliberately eschewing connections to Africa at the same time. And running through Banda’s entire ethos, was his claim to absolute power.

In his own words, quote: “Everything is my business. Everything. Anything I say is law…literally law.”

And if the personality cult was one side of the Hastings Banda coin, censorship was the other. In terms of the dress he expected of his citizens, he was practically Victorian; women couldn’t wear pants or show their knees, they couldn’t wear see-through clothing or sport visible cleavage, and when they were able to break those rules, like they might at a resort or at the shores of Lake Malawi, they were forbidden from letting any other person see them. Men were prohibited from growing their hair longer than collar-length, and that rule didn’t just apply to Malawians; foreign nationals coming to Banda’s country could expect a mandatory haircut at the airport if they arrived with hair outside the approved limits, and men found in public with long hair were liable to be grabbed by the police and given a haircut against their will. Films were censored by the national censorship board as a matter of course, with even the image of a couple kissing, being prohibited outright—and that’s to say nothing of the response to deeper affronts like nudity. If a person purchased a videotape, it had to be sent to the Censorship Board to be checked out and approved before being sent back; books and magazines had pages cut out of them; and televisions were tightly controlled and were extremely difficult to get unless a person was particularly rich. For a while, the Malawi Daily News was the only newspaper allowed to print in the country, and just a single radio station was able to operate.

Second to his media prohibitions, education was the other bogeyman Banda seemed to fear most. Following the example of Plato, Banda seemed to actively disapprove of the idea of educating the masses, preferring the idea that most people shouldn’t be allowed to know much at all, beyond what they needed to know. Literacy in Malawi remained low for the duration of his tenure, and creative speech produced by Malawi’s own writers and poets was combed-through to find any trace of disobedience.

Culturally, Banda instilled a sense of taboo around knowing anything about the region’s history before Banda himself became a part of it, and book-burnings were common, especially for historical volumes. Foreigners who attempted to teach anything Banda didn’t approve of, were liable to face deportation. The only exception was for Banda’s beloved classics, for which he made substantial investments into a school modeled on England’s Eton College where Malawian children were taught Greek and Latin en masse.

Many graduates of the school would go on to become leaders in academia, business, and a whole range of fields inside Malawi, and some have played key roles in dismantling Banda’s dictatorial legacy and rebuilding the country in his absence.

During his reign, Banda kept a stranglehold on any subordinates who even gave off a whiff of interest in the idea of opposition. Purges and internal explosions of violence were common, but none caught quite so much attention as the so-called Mwanza Four incident. In 1983, three of Banda’s ministers had fallen for what may, or may not, have been a rather obvious trap laid out by the president.

Banda had opened the floor for debate on multi-party democracy in Malawi, and the three ministers indicated during a cabinet meeting that they were in support of such an idea. Banda immediately dissolved his cabinet, the three were rounded up, and they, along with a parliamentarian who had stumbled upon them being tortured in a quiet area of the parliament compound, were killed and arranged in a way that suggested they’d been killed in a car accident while making a mad dash to Mozambique. We’d relate to you plainly how they actually died, but we’d rather not be demonetized today; instead, suffice it to say that they each received the tent-stake version of an icepick lobotomy.

Finally, there was the question of Malawi’s state-sponsored violence—something that was meted out by a number of brutal overseers, but none quite so often, and none quite so harshly, as the Malawi Young Pioneers. Sometimes, they were set upon religious minorities like Jehovah’s Witnesses, sometimes against minority populations like Malawi’s sizeable Indian community, but most of the time, they were simply out for blood wherever they could find it. Established in 1963 with the original intent of serving as a youth service program, the Young Pioneers spent their early days building up rural villages, teaching and rehearsing political doctrine to their pupils, and providing basic military training.

During those years, instructors would keep an eye out for pupils who showed promise, sending them to Youth Pioneers bases for more extensive instruction during the school vacation months. But before long, the organization grew into a paramilitary and secret-police force, and as its utility to the regime grew, so did its size.

In its heyday, the Young Pioneers organization framed itself within an Israeli-style kibbutz model, forming intentional communities of regime loyalists in each of Malawi’s then-24 districts. In each district, the Young Pioneers bases would train recruits in everything from agriculture and carpentry, to business, to politics, even drawing on technical instructors sent directly from the Israeli army. The organization quickly built a business apparatus, even their own airplane fleet, and ideologically, they took a sharp turn toward Kamuzuism—which was, in its proponents’ own words, quote: “The ideology that Dr.

Hastings Kamuzu Banda, as Father and Founder of the Malawi nation, was the fount of all wisdom and always knew what was best for the nation.” Once the Young Pioneers were well-established, their members spread across Malawi, building everything from physical infrastructure to commercial districts to homes and much more. The young people involved in the Pioneers were supposed to be able to return to their communities, and teach parents, older relatives, and neighbors to build stronger villages.

But with that reach, came a deep level of infiltration across Malawian society, made even deeper by a network of non-Pioneer informants. They formed a network that was part secret police, part intelligence apparatus, and part militia, and they were given some pretty major weaponry by the Banda regime. They’d even manage to secure a place as his most trusted bodyguards, and they’d embark on a long campaign of intimidation, extrajudicial reprisal, and recruitment into forced labor across the countryside.

By 1990, some three thousand youths would be trained each year at Young Pioneer bases, equipped with green-and-khaki uniforms and their own distinctive berets. It’s difficult to say just how many people were killed, tortured, or arbitrarily incarcerated during the Banda years, most at the hands of the Young Pioneers, but estimates range anywhere from six thousand, for the most common numbers, to eighteen thousand, on the high end.

But despite the blatantly totalitarian nature of Hastings Banda’s dictatorship, his reputation in the West was very slow to follow his actions at home. Banda was by no means unique in terms of how he was received internationally; in fact, he fit in quite nicely alongside Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie, the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos, Iran’s Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and a range of other global autocrats. Across the decades of the Cold War, he was just like them: a useful dictator, one who kept his population in line, didn’t stir the pot very much outside his own borders, and could be counted on to support the United States instead of going over to the Soviets.

Banda, in particular, came off as particularly harmless; he was known more for his three-piece suits, his handkerchiefs and walking sticks, and occasional reporting on his eccentricities, than for his totalitarian policies. He was even awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Massachusetts, just after being elected president in his one-candidate race, and he’d return the favor to the US in kind, becoming one of the few African heads of state to support America in Vietnam.

Meanwhile, he ensured that his disdain for the rest of the world’s nations, particularly communist countries, was obvious for all to see. With African nations, he was no more cordial, with one key exception: apartheid-era South Africa. While most nations of the region had no choice but to do limited business with the South African regime, usually quite unhappily, Malawi recognized the nation and kept up diplomatic relations, alongside a lucrative trade agreement.

Naturally, Banda caught some massive flak for this from his fellow African leaders, but he was undeterred by their opposition. Instead, he advocated his pragmatic approach all the stronger, and called on his colleagues in other countries to try to convince South Africa through diplomatic channels that apartheid was unnecessary. Said Banda of his fellow leaders, quote: “They practice disunity, not unity, while posing as the liberators of Africa.

While they play in the orchestra of Pan Africanism, their own Romes are burning.” For his defense of South Africa, he received significant financial incentives, in a clean quid-pro-quo that continued through the end of the apartheid era. It would later emerge that Banda had secretly lent his own support to the African National Congress, the anti-apartheid political party that ultimately saw Nelson Mandela’s way clear to the head of the South African government.

Closer to his own borders, Banda would also provide financial and personnel support to both sides of Mozambique’s civil war during the 1980s, with Malawi’s professional military backing up the government, but the Malawi Young Pioneers supporting the national resistance there.

But no attempt to understand Hastings Banda could possibly be successful, unless you also understand the people who surrounded him—and most importantly, a woman colloquially known as “mama”. Born Cecilia Kadzamira, “Mama”—alternately referred to as the Mother of the Nation—had first met Banda as a nurse working at one of his medical practices. She then became Banda’s secretary, then his confidante and close friend, to the point that they became inseparable.

During the later years of Banda’s life, Kadzamira would exercise direct control over who the dictator spoke to, what the dictator read, what legislation passed across his desk, and what knowledge he was able to glean, even about his own country. Her “mama” moniker was given to her when she was assigned duties as Malawi’s First Lady, although she and Banda never married. Kadzamira’s uncle was one John Tembo, who’d been an interpreter for Banda in his early days, but had then spent decades as a close confidant to the dictator.

By the late years of Banda’s dictatorship, Tembo had his own loyalists within the Malawian Secret Service, the Young Pioneers, and other armed groups, who routinely engaged in systematic incarceration and execution of anybody who stood in his way. In Banda’s later life, Kadzamira would try unsuccessfully to see Tembo named his successor, but although that was a losing effort, Kadzamira—and through her, Tembo—would exert a controlling influence in Malawi for much of the 1980s and early 1990s.

As a result of Kadzamira’s influence, it’s difficult to determine just how much Banda really knew about the problems his citizens faced, particularly in parts of the country that were further removed from Banda’s own capital city. A journalist who wrote about Banda for The Independent, one Caroline Alexander, related one experience she’d had while living in the country, to show just how skewed Banda’s picture of Malawi could sometimes be. Quote: “For example, every year Banda paid a visit to the Zomba General Hospital. Normally, the hospital was so ill-equipped and overcrowded that patients lay two to a cot, head-to-toe like sardines. I once visited a friend who was recovering from a motorcycle accident and found him sharing a pillow with the swollen, gangrenous legs of his cot-mate, who was adrift in a reverie of pain. Sticking my head around the corner of the maternity ward, I saw women lying on the floor beneath the beds, as well as in them. But when a visit from Banda was imminent, the hospital was newly whitewashed, and the wards half-emptied. What he saw was a neat line of cots each tidily occupied by a single patient, while surplus patients lay heaped together in a central courtyard out of view.” But regardless of how much Banda knew, or how upset he might have been about individual policy decisions, it appears highly unlikely that he would have taken umbrage to the overall situation in Malawi by the end of his reign. After all, he’d done all the grand architecture himself; Kadzamira, and others, were just hammering out the fine details.

By most accounts of the period, the several-decade-long rule of Hastings Banda placed him alongside the most repressive, totalitarian dictators in the world at that time. His complete control over his country’s political architecture, his systemic denial of many of even the most fundamental rights to Malawians, and his intent to cling to power until death did he and Malawi part, were certainly substantial enough evidence to support such a damning claim. But the Banda era passed without turmoil, without upheaval, without foreign intervention, and, for the most part, without ever making headlines around the world.

In a period throughout history where both global superpowers—the Americans and the Soviets—were on the hunt for what amounted to ‘good little dictators’, using tactics that the superpowers didn’t ask questions about while ensuring that their populations never made trouble…well, Malawi and Hastings Banda were among the best of the best. Banda was easy to ignore, he was easy to indulge, he was easy to chuckle about or dismiss as a harmless eccentric, and as a result, the world looked away from Malawi for decades, even as the people who lived there, were stuck with a situation that gave them very little up-side to speak of.

De-Throning a President for Life

By the early 1990s, Hastings Banda was a king among men. His authority inside Malawi was fundamentally unchallenged, and while, in private, he ruled only through the filter of Cecilia Kadzamira, the political implications of that fact tended to rhyme with Banda’s own views on his people—that is, what they didn’t know, wouldn’t hurt them. Banda exerted direct control over most of Malawi’s economy, he was estimated to have amassed a fortune of several hundred million US dollars, a fleet of limousines, a private jet, and a robust enough network of enforcers, the red-shirted Young Pioneers, that any potential dissident had long since left the country. But there was just one problem: Banda didn’t have a successor, and while he did use his political influence to nudge Malawian internal affairs one way or another, he seemed to take very little interest in what would happen after he was no longer Malawi’s sole leading voice.

Of course, that issue probably didn’t matter much to the old man; after all, he was President for Life, and whatever happened after he was gone, was going to be everybody’s problem except for his. But Banda had made one critical miscalculation—specifically, he’d failed to account for the fact that he might live long enough to see the end to the Cold War. Banda knew full well where his bread was buttered; his shrewd courtship with South Africa, the United States, and other global nations were enough to prove that. But when the Soviet Union crumbled, Banda was no longer useful to those nations. The same policymakers who’d seen Banda’s fervent anti-communism, and used it as justification to look past his many overreaches and send him buckets of money, now had very little use for third-world dictators, and certainly not when they came with as much baggage as dear old Hastings. Western governmental aid dried up, and even worse, nonprofit organizations and private donors finally had the leeway to tell Hastings Banda what they’d probably wanted to say for decades: either reform the government to be transparent and accountable to both Malawians and the world, or Banda wasn’t getting a single cent more.

With the writing on the wall that the old man’s total control had been disrupted, Malawian and international groups descended on the dictator. Malawi’s Catholic bishops released a letter that condemned the Banda government, while students across the country marched in protest of the dictator, and a labor unionist named Chakufwa Chihana, later called the father of Malawian democracy, held a rally at the capital city’s international airport to call outright for a referendum on Malawi’s future. The Young Pioneers, so recently unchallenged in their own country, now faced increasing resistance from the rest of the population, who still had reason to fear, but no longer believed that their situation was hopeless.

In the face of such fervent opposition, Banda might have considered trying the same brutal crackdowns and other repressive actions that dictators in similar spots were trying across the globe…but instead, he chose a different tack. In October of 1992, Banda agreed to a referendum on Malawi’s one-party state, and when the result was a landslide vote in favor of multi-party democracy, Banda worked with the new political parties to organize a general election. When he was stripped of his President for Life title and saw most of his executive and legislative authority undone, he seemed to treat the occasion like an academic, studying the political upheaval in his country as it played out before him.

And when it was time to choose Malawi’s next president, Banda took part in the process. By that time, the Young Pioneers had been disarmed and dismantled, the transition to democracy was well underway, and Banda had every bit of evidence at his disposal to suggest that he wasn’t about to be re-elected President…but he seemed surprised when he ended up on the wrong side of another landslide vote, this one anointing an ethnic Yao political leader to the office of the presidency. Banda would concede defeat that same day in a radio address; quoting here, “I wish to congratulate him wholeheartedly, and offer him my full support and cooperation.”

And, anticlimactic as it might have been…that was the end of Malawi’s over-three-decades straight of Hastings Banda. The dictator, strong as he might have been in his heyday, went down without a fight. Perhaps he was too old and too tired to oversee yet another round of repression; perhaps he knew that his position was no longer strong enough to keep a hold on power; or perhaps he understood that the people around him now had too much influence over him, for him to see his own situation with any real clarity.

Perhaps, as some sources on Banda have since suggested, the experience was academic for him—a real set of public-opinion data points that allowed him to see his own failed experiment in dictatorship for what it was. But no matter the truth of Banda’s own experience during his overthrow, the result was the same: Malawi’s President for Life, had managed to outlive his presidency.

That wasn’t yet the end for the old ex-dictator; a year after losing his election, Banda would be arrested and charged with murder. The incident in question, is the same one we discussed a while ago, in which four party officials were killed by government forces, and staged as if they’d all died in a car crash. As it turned out, there had been 167 witnesses who’d seen or heard enough to testify, churning out a transcript of the court inquiry that ran for well over a thousand pages.

But Malawi’s peculiar legal system, and particularly a rule that allows the admission of hearsay evidence only when it runs contrary to the interests of the person providing it, meant that much of the testimony was inadmissible. Because of that legal reality, and because the officials involved wanted to keep close fealty to the legal system as a show of proper conduct, Banda and John Tembo would not be convicted—even though inadmissible witness statements had tied them both inextricably to the crime itself.

One other factor seemed to aid Banda in his defense: his diagnosis with an acute loss of short-term memory, along with early symptoms of Parkinson’s, that a panel of doctors had assessed would prevent him from standing trial. The journalist we referenced earlier, Caroline Alexander, explained the problem succinctly while writing for The Independent; quote: “He could not, it seemed, remember the hour or the day or the year before, though he was still capable of lucid, even elegant, conversation along carefully selected lines.” By the way, Alexander’s recollections of her conversations with Banda tell of long and intricate discussions about the finer points of Roman rule, demonstrating—for whatever it’s worth—a pretty robust mental acuity.

What good it would have been to punish Banda, well over a decade after the incident in question and during the first years of a multi-party administration, is another matter entirely. While the families of the victims attested quite frankly to wanting to see Banda punished, the ex-dictator still drew strong support across Malawi, and punishing him too harshly for his crimes may have prompted major public backlash. If he’d been found guilty of murder, the mandatory punishment—by his own judicial standard—would have been execution, but to kill an old man who was widely believed by Malawians to be sick, and more misguided than despicable, was likely to make more problems than it would have alleviated.

In his final years, Banda would stay unrepentant about his role in Malawi’s history. If anything, he seemed proud of his time as dictator. He scoffed at his fellow Malawians as inexperienced, naïve, even childish when it came to politics, echoing much of the same derision he’d held for them in his days as their overlord.

He insisted, publicly and privately, that his people would eventually regret having decided to toss him out. Statements he offered toward reconciliation may have apologized for his impact, but not his actions; quoting from an apology statement given after his acquittal in court, “During my term of office, I selflessly dedicated myself to the good cause of Mother Malawi in the fight against Poverty, Ignorance and Disease among many other issues; but if within the process, those who worked in my government or through false pretence in my name or indeed unknowingly by me, pain and suffering was caused to anybody in this country in the name of nationhood, I offer my sincere apologies.” After a quiet final few months, Banda would die of respiratory failure, in an American clinic after being treated for pneumonia.

At his side, of course, was Cecilia Kadzamira. In Malawi, Banda was given a funeral with full state honors and a nineteen-gun salute, in a clean, efficient, and unmissable tribute that finally closed the book on Hastings Banda, once and for all.

A New Era for Malawi

With Banda out of office, Malawi could finally shift into a trajectory it had never known before: one of real, genuine development, and reconstruction on a nationwide scale. Now that the dictator was gone, global aid could pour in, and was it ever going to be necessary. By the time Banda’s rule had ended, Malawi was struggling with issues from stunning levels of illiteracy, to widespread malnutrition, to a high rate of child mortality. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, Doctors Without Borders, food aid organizations, legal support in drafting a new constitution, and more, were all desperately needed, if this nation was to have any future at all. Luckily, Banda’s legacy hadn’t included a late-stage civil war or any other act of national bloodletting at scale, but it was still well within the realm of possibility that Malawi might have fully collapsed, or otherwise passed directly to the control of a new dictator.

The man charged with averting Malawi’s next crisis, was one Bakili Muluzi. Born in Malawi’s days as Nyasaland in 1943, Muluzi had worked under Banda during the 1970s as a so-called “minister without portfolio”, but now, he’d been elected as the head of Malawi’s biggest opposition party. When he arrived, foreign aid immediately picked back up, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Muluzi and his deputies instituted policies of nationwide press freedom, cost-free education, and a release of political prisoners that repopulated Malawi’s intellectual and political class, to the extent that it had been able to survive at all. The country’s economy was restructured, and a new constitution took the place of the old, not eliminating Hastings Banda’s old political party, but placing it back on equal footing with all other political organizations in the nation.

But as optimistic as Malawi might have been, at least for a little while, reality very quickly began to set in that the transition to democracy would not be an easy one. Before long, the World Bank’s attempt to open the Malawian economy had backfired; inflation went through the roof, and the local currency was devalued to barely half its Banda-era worth. Political upheaval in the next country over, Mozambique, led to a flood of weapons and displaced people into Malawi. The crime rate increased dramatically, even including one instance in which armed robbers killed a high-ranking Malawian general, and for a brief moment, the army unsuccessfully attempted a mutiny. Nor did Mother Nature make things easy; a drought in the immediate post-Banda years led to widespread hunger in the countryside, well before large-scale food aid was available to offset the impact. Even the President’s own spokesman, a man named Al Osman, admitted to the Los Angeles Times in 1995 that things were looking bleak. Said Osman, quote: “A hungry person doesn’t need much encouragement to say things were better under the evil empire. People are saying, ‘What has your democracy done for me?’”

Indeed, Malawi during the Bakili Muluzi years foundered rather quickly. The bold campaigns that Malawi’s new leaders had envisioned, meant to root out corruption and bring Malawians up to a higher standard of living, were broadly unsuccessful. Malawi’s position on the world stage did improve a good bit, especially in opening relations with other African nations and the Arab world, but there was only so much tangible impact that foreign-policy changes could make on the plight of the people.

When President Muluzi ran for, and won, a second term as president in 1999, his opponent challenged the results, and the challenge set off an explosion of public discontent across the country. The election had inflamed ethnic tensions between the Muslim Yao population, of which the president was a member, and Malawi’s other, mostly Christian tribes. Looting and violence went on for weeks in the aftermath, with over two hundred mosques burned to the ground, and many instances of police either using extreme force on their detainees, or carrying out extrajudicial executions.

The riots called attention to Malawi’s ongoing problems with arbitrary arrest and detention of citizens, and the country’s difficult and often dangerous prison conditions. Not only that, but the closer that the global community began to look at Malawi, the more it found endemic issues with domestic violence, abuse of children, and child labor.

After the 1999 crisis, the world began to sour yet again on Malawi’s leader, this time condemning Muluzi for what we’d generously call democratic backsliding, if we accept the rather questionable premise that Malawi had reached a state of democracy by that time. His administration drew positive headlines in 2000, sending military forces into neighboring Mozambique and rescuing over a thousand people from a flooding crisis, but lost that street cred within two years, as a slow response to a severe food shortage eventually precipitated a state of famine. Even during the height of the crisis, officials were accused of selling off reserves of grain for a profit, and otherwise mismanaging the crisis for their own financial benefit. In 2004, Muluzi’s chosen successor waltzed his way to the presidency, in what was generally considered to be an election that was neither free nor fair.

That particular election was going to be a turning point for Malawi, no matter which way it went. It was supposed to be the country’s first-ever democratic transfer of power, and in a practical sense, it was the moment that Malawi would find out whether its future political leaders were going to keep faithful to the idea of a democracy, or start up a dictatorship of their own. When the results came in, all hope was lost; Malawi was going to return to its old ways, and the new president, Bingu wa Mutharika, was going to be the one to take it there.

Except…well, that didn’t happen. Shortly after he was elected to the presidency, Mutharika left his political party behind, eventually starting his own instead. He launched a sweeping anti-corruption campaign, one that seemed to actually work, and he streamlined both the government’s cabinet of ministers, and its spending habits, to make it into a functional system of government.

He worked to strengthen the judiciary, and quickly turned it against his own former party allies, several of whom would be arrested and prosecuted for their own corrupt acts. International aid organizations, who’d gone back to holding Malawi at arm’s length because of the last president’s actions, saw what Mutharika was doing and came back into the fold. The political reforms of the Mutharika era led to early steps in addressing Malawi’s growing HIV/AIDS crisis, finishing the educational and infrastructural reforms the last administration had started, and bringing a new generation of political leaders into the fold.

Attempts to impeach Mutharika were ultimately unsuccessful, and the last president before him was arrested multiple times, including in a plot to overthrow Mutharika in 2008, and as part of a donor-embezzlement investigation in 2009. In that year, Mutharika ran against an aging and notorious figure from the Banda days, one John Tembo, who we’ve already mentioned at length. But despite Mutharika’s unfair advantages within Malawi’s state-owned media apparatus, it was clear that the population was behind him; he coasted to a second term in an election where, even if the final vote tally might have been a bit suspect, the result certainly wasn’t.

By 2009, Malawi had come leaps and bounds from where it had been just a few years earlier. The food supply was now stable in most parts of the country, and the economy was growing consistently…but yet again, things shifted for the worse. This time, it was Mutharika who was growing more autocratic, grooming his brother to be his successor, and throwing out high-ranking officials who disagreed with him.

In 2011, amidst an economic downturn, anti-Mutharika demonstrations broke out; in response, the national army would kill nineteen people, and wound hundreds more. Aid organizations folded up their operations and pulled away from the country again, especially British groups, put off from supporting Malawi by a diplomatic screaming match between the two governments. To top it all off, Mutharika died of a heart attack, in April of 2012.

In death, just as he’d done in life, Mutharika brought Malawi to yet another turning point, yet another critical juncture in which the struggling nation had to choose between democracy or dictatorship. By law, the presidency would pass to the Vice President, a woman named Joyce Banda—no relation to Hastings. But according to Mutharika’s own inner circle, they now had a very limited time to block Joyce Banda from rising to the presidency, and a very limited set of options as to how they got that done.

The result was one of the more peculiar instances of a 21st-century succession crisis. When Mutharika collapsed during a meeting, and quite clearly died in an ambulance en route to the hospital, his cabal of supporters didn’t announce his death; instead, they gave numerous false statements to the press insisting that he was still alive, kept the body intubated and connected to medical equipment, and tried to fly him to South Africa via an air ambulance that had come from the nearby nation. At first, the helicopter refused to depart because the pilots lacked the clearance to transport what was obviously a corpse; then, that clearance was granted and the pilots explained that their flying hours for the day had expired; then, South Africa’s High Commissioner and Zimbabwe’s ambassador to Malawi descended on the airport to try and fix the situation.

Eventually, Mutharika’s body was flown to South Africa, and kept in a hospital emergency room for just a few minutes, before being taken to the morgue. Malawian ministers were still swearing to the people that Mutharika was alive a day after he died, and the deceased president’s brother even outright suggested a military coup to an Army commander, although his suggestion was politely dismissed. Eventually, it was South Africa that forced Malawi’s hand, insisting that they’d announce Mutharika’s death if the Malawian government didn’t.

Hours later, Joyce Banda was sworn into the presidency.

Malawi’s second Banda era wouldn’t last long; the country’s first woman president had been able to navigate through the coup attempt, but she wasn’t particularly well-liked at home. Abroad, she received broad acclaim for several reasons; she, herself, was seen as a personification of democracy’s triumph in the country, and she was able to tamp down on corruption, get foreign NGOs and donors back on board with the country, soften Malawi’s stance on homosexuality, and put the Malawian economy back together. She impressed the whole world at Nelson Mandela’s funeral, where her eulogy was a highlight of the event.

She’d also dismiss her entire cabinet in 2013, after a leading anti-corruption official survived an assassination attempt while investigating several of Banda’s own ministers. The outcome of the scandal was a major victory for Banda, but it wasn’t enough; in 2014, she’d come in third in a set of national elections that featured quite a few irregularities, but were generally seen as having come to a credible result. Banda attempted to annul the elections, but she was unsuccessful, and in a bit of irony that perfectly sums up the strangeness of post-dictatorship Malawi, the man who took her place was the same one who’d nearly been installed as president just two years prior.

That, of course, was now-dead president Mutharika’s brother Peter.

The new President Mutharika offered some tangible improvements on his brother’s administration. He pushed the country to diversify its agricultural crop, ran a generally technocratic government, and refrained from the sorts of brutal repression against political demonstrators that had become so common across the country. But his administration was also quite corrupt, it was a punching bag for public discontent, and it oversaw an energy shortage that further alienated the people.

During his time in office, Malawi saw slow, but positive trend-lines on just about every indicator of development, but slow and steady was not what the Malawian public was looking for. Like his brother, Peter Mutharika proved willing to hold onto power using less-than-honorable methods, and in 2019, he found his way to a second term via a highly controversial election in which Mutharika’s political party was broadly accused of having rigged the vote. This time, the issues were widespread and quite obvious across the country, including blatant reversal of people’s votes by election commissioners and using corrective fluid to erase handwritten votes on ballots, alongside a range of other, similarly cartoonish acts.

Yet again, Malawi found itself at the same crossroads it had visited time and time again, and yet again, one road led to democracy, and the other to dictatorship.

But in February of 2020, a bit over eight months after Mutharika was sworn in for a second term, the High Court of Malawi took a step that few nations in this situation would ever dare to do. Amidst widespread demonstrations and protests against the Mutharika regime, judges from Malawi’s constitutional court ruled in a 500-page decision that the 2019 election would be nullified, and fresh elections would be held five months after their nullification. The decision was historic across not just Malawi, but all of Africa, in only the second instance ever of an election being nullified on the continent. In 2020, Mutharika was trounced by his political rival, Malawi’s current president, Lazarus Chakwera. That would make this particular election the first in African history not just to benullified, but for the rerun to go to an opposition candidate, instead of resulting in crackdowns, coups, or any other sort of misbehavior by the regime to retain its power. So, that brings us to the present day in Malawi, where, we’ve got to be very clear, things are still far from perfect. Current president Chakwera has faced criticism for appointing six people to his thirty-one member cabinet who were related to other cabinet members, including a husband and wife, a brother and sister, and a pair of in-laws. Chakwera’s public service appointments have stirred up controversy because of his failure to abide by a law that demands at least forty percent of public appointees be women, and because his chosen figures largely hail from his own voter strongholds. He’s even had his own anti-corruption czar arrested, in an act that’s divided both his own country and the international community. But even still, Chakwera has continued the long, slow erosion of Malawi’s dictatorial legacy. He’s worked to trim down Malawi’s executive privileges, taken steps to curtail the wanton spending of high-ranking government officials, and eased taxes for most of the population to address a budding cost-of-living crisis. While he may or may not run for a second term in 2025, he appears, at least for now, to be on track to participate in a fair and free election—although whether he can resist Malawi’s seeming temptation toward autocracy until then, remains to be seen. Looking beyond the man in Malawi’s highest office, the country’s situation is less dire than it’s been, but it’s still not good. Life expectancy at birth still lags behind the global average, HIV/AIDS is the leading cause of death nationwide, tuberculosis and malaria are still common, and some twenty percent of children don’t complete a primary education. The nation’s population is very, very young on average, and growing at a breakneck pace, while GDP per capita in 2022 was still as low as 645 US dollars annual. Inflation rates spike and dive from year to year, sometimes cresting as high as thirty percent, and less than a fifth of the population has consistent access to electricity, while barely half have access to reliable sanitation services. In 2023, Freedom House considered the country only partly free, and the country took serious knocks from the NGO on its ongoing corruption crisis, its politicized media and hostile environment for journalists, its relative lack of due process, and its poorly supported and often brutal policing and prison systems. The country’s domestic violence, child marriage, and child labor problems have gotten slightly less abysmal, but are still a subject of serious and well-earned concern. Finally, Hastings Banda is back in vogue; now, with the dictator’s memory somewhat faded, he’s celebrated with a public holiday and a nostalgia that often earns him praise in Malawian media and politics. So, with such an exhaustive list of Malawi’s many, many enduring problems, we can finally circle back and address how we, here on Places, presented this episode at the outset. Did we lie to you, when we said that Malawi was coming back stronger than ever, or when we said that it held the secrets to not just surviving, but overcoming a dictatorship? Well…no, actually, we said it, and we meant it. Malawi today is hardly thought of in most of the world, it’s a mere bubble amidst the thrashing waves of global geopolitics, and it’s got profound issues that will haunt it for generations to come. But it’s also among the most distinctive, and, dare we say, impressive examples of a country that’s dug its way out of dictatorship—not via a foreign intervention, not via a civil war, but with its own two hands. Malawi’s path toward a better future, has been incredibly painful. At times, it’s been four steps forward, and three steps stumbling back. If we might reference the classics that Hastings Banda so coveted, Malawi’s tale is the Greek myth of Sisyphus, a former tyrant condemned by the gods to roll an immense boulder to the top of a hill, only to see it fall back to the bottom, every single time. But unlike Sisyphus, the real-life people of Malawi aren’t trapped inside a myth. They’re really doing it, administration by administration, accident after accident, power grab after power grab, sometimes getting bad results from good intentions, and sometimes getting good results, from bad intentions. If Malawi started from the bottom…then make no mistake, we do mean the very bottom. It’s been a land exploited and enslaved, a land living under totalitarian rule, and a land fought over by modern-day leaders who can’t seem to decide whether they’re dictators or not. But the people of Malawi started from the bottom; now they’re here…and with any luck, they’ll keep on climbing, building an entire nation from the ruin, and the painful legacy that was left for them.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the capital of Malawi?

The capital of Malawi is Lilongwe.

What is the largest lake in Malawi?

The largest lake in Malawi is Lake Malawi, also known as Lake Nyasa.

What is the population of Malawi?

The population of Malawi is estimated to be around 21 and a half million.

What are the major ethnic groups in Malawi?

The major ethnic groups in Malawi are the Chewa, Lomwe, Yao, and Tumbuka.

What is the nickname of Malawi?

Malawi is known as the “Warm Heart of Africa.”

What is the significance of Lake Malawi?

Lake Malawi is the fourth-largest freshwater lake by volume and the ninth-largest by area. It is also the second-deepest lake in Africa and hosts a vast number of cichlid fish species.

What is the political history of Malawi?

Malawi gained independence from British colonial rule in 1964. It was initially led by Hastings Banda, who ruled as a dictator until 1994. Since then, Malawi has transitioned to a multi-party democracy, though it has faced challenges with corruption and political instability.

What is the economic situation in Malawi?

Malawi is one of the world’s least developed countries. It struggles with issues such as high levels of illiteracy, widespread malnutrition, and a high rate of child mortality. The economy is heavily dependent on agriculture, and the country faces significant challenges in terms of poverty and economic development.

What is the role of the Malawi Young Pioneers?

The Malawi Young Pioneers were a paramilitary and secret-police force established by Hastings Banda. They were involved in state-sponsored violence, intimidation, and forced labor. They were disbanded after Banda’s rule ended.

What is the current political situation in Malawi?

Malawi is currently led by President Lazarus Chakwera. The country has faced challenges with corruption and political instability, but it has made progress in transitioning to a multi-party democracy. The political situation remains complex, with ongoing efforts to address corruption and strengthen democratic institutions.

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• Hero image source by Diego Delso / openverse, by-sa.