Goodbye Dr Banda: Lessons for the West from a Small African Country – by Alexander Chula
Polygon, an Imprint of Birlinn Ltd. 302 pages, Hardback 2023. ISBN 978 1846976278
SO MANY BOOKS about Africa invite pity, incomprehension or despair. This one is an exception. A potent combination of personal memoir, cultural and anthropological survey, absorbing travelogue and political history, its main subject is the landlocked country of Malawi and the influences that shaped it.
Malawi comes across as a distinctive place. Its slow-paced rural existence has been disturbed or re-shaped by colonisers, religious educators, a messianic and flawed leader like Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda, and self-absorbed purveyors of good works from Madonna to North American evangelists and West European NGOs. But the country has survived various intrusions and remains a temperate if often ill-used place that remains a cross-fertilisation of cultures.
The author’s own cosmopolitan ethnic and occupational background stands out and must have been instrumental in enabling him to produce what is a highly observant, thoughtful and non-judgmental account of an African country and its formative influences. Alexander Chula is half-Thai and grew up in London. He studied Latin and Greek at university but went on to train as a medical doctor.
He visited Malawi for the first time twelve years after the death, in 1997, aged almost one hundred, of Dr Banda who led it to independence in 1965, when already in his sixties and led it for another quarter-of-a-century. ‘Ngwazi’ the Conqueror’ and most of the time President-for-life, sought to reconcile the culture that he acquired from the Chewa tribe with that of the Greek and Latin world that he was introduced to initially by missionaries. He had a lifelong attachment to the classics and he set up the Kamuzu academy to inculcate the wisdom of the ancients in the youthful elite which he hoped would provide dedicated leadership.
The book’s forty chapters are replete with finely-written vignettes that bring to life aspects of Malawi. The first concerns a visit to Kamuzu academy which in its heyday was in receipt of one-third of Malawi’s educational budget. He vividly describes the rather dilapidated state of ‘the Eton of Africa’ nowadays , strikes up a friendship with one of its teachers Dr Highbrow, and inspects the library of the former President, showing what a well-thumbed copy of Caesar’s Gallic Wars might reveal about the man. Chula doesn’t think it fanciful to suggest that the Ancient Greek legends were able to chime with the rituals of the Chewa people. He later shows the extent to which traditional British education had left its mark on Malawi.
Robert Laws, the son of an Aberdeen cabinet maker, possessed a soaring educational ambition. From the town of Livingstonia which he began to construct in a mountainous fastness in the 1890s, he turned northern Malawi into the most literate and educationally developed province of any country in British Africa. Laws is forgotten in Britain but still fondly remembered in Malawi. From the brightest graduates of his schools and academies ‘came pastors, teachers, writers and thinkers – learned men and women independent in mind and spirit’. One of them, Clements Kadalie left for South Africa (a journey taken by Banda himself to seek work and sponsorship) to become a founder member of the ANC. The parents of Kenneth Kaunda, the man who led Zambia to independence, met at Livingstonia.
Laws saw education as having a catalytic role in Malawi where waves of missionaries from Britain had played a central role in vanquishing slavery in the last decades of the 19th century. His goal was nothing less than ‘the coordination of technical and literary training to fit the individual to make the most of his life for the service of God, for his own good, and for the good of his fellow men’.
Banda’s own educational odyssey was a striking one. From being a clerk in the South African mines, he acquired a degree in history in the USA before obtaining a medical qualification and moving to Edinburgh where he became an elder in the Church of Scotland in 1940. Eventually he established a medical practice in the London suburb of Harlesden where he would be ‘greeted on arrival by a waiting room of patients who honoured him by standing to their feet as he entered’.
The drawing-room of his London home became a regular meeting place for exiled African nationalists such as Nkrumah, Kenyatta, and Nyerere. Banda’s shrewd determination enabled him to take the helm in Nyasaland by the mid -1960s. He had foiled British attempts to subsume it in a vast Federation of Central Africa. He soon made it clear that ‘things have to be done according to the conditions and circumstances of Malawi’, the name chosen for his new country.
Chula does not attempt to whitewash Banda’s record. He writes: ‘The country became mired in autocracy, dysfunctionality and injustice, albeit without the degree of horror which characterised politics elsewhere on the continent’. As he drifted into senility in the 1980s, Malawi was buffeted by various misfortunes, not just corruption and repression but an Aids epidemic and a drought which led to famine in the 1990s. Stability eluded Banda’s successors but the author refuses to despair about the place or the people and admires the efforts to repeatedly overcome hardship and misfortune:
“…despite its poverty, Malawian society strikes me as fundamentally healthy. Its people are almost quintessentially rooted in time and place, bound by a rich history to the land and each other”.
Malawi confounds the stereotypes often accompanying discussion of European colonialism in Africa. Settlers were few in number as much of the land was poor. There were few major ethnic divisions and colonialists had avoided exacerbating those they had found. The role of missionaries especially in the educational field was a striking one. Chula painstakingly shows how figures armed with immense fortitude such as William Johnson, Claude Boucher and Thomas Cullen Young left immense achievements in their wake – educational centres, churches, medical facilities, the well-planned town of Livingstonia, and durable connections with Scotland in particular. Some of these figures are still admired locally and in 2020 even some of Banda’s detractors told the author that at least ‘Dr Banda cared’.
Malawi is interesting on many levels not least because its relationship with the West was not one of endless imposition. Many Europeans who made their home there brought with them curiosity and open-mindedness. Johnson once asserted: ‘We must lay aside all ideas of being mirrors of the world, and must be servants of those we are meant to serve’. Chula contrasts the high-powered foreign aid organisations with their global agendas and determination to correct things that offend their sensibilities before moving on to the next project. He writes eloquently about the monolithic atmosphere of the backpacking lodges and bars where the aid workers congregate in hubs that are as remote as the colonial clubs of the white settlers once were.
To derive benefit from reading this book, there is no need to be absorbed with Malawi or Africa in general. It is an opportunity to discover the thoughts, and admire the powers of description, of a self-aware young man who has the calm serenity and the analytical tools to turn a thoughtful personal memoir into a minor treatise on the supremely confused and disordered times that we are living through. There are some highly descriptive passages studded with fine writing on: crossing a stormy Lake Malawi on an unseaworthy craft; visiting cosmopolitan and seedy Zanzibar; observing the last days of a farming estate run by Tom and Flora, whites who had lived most of their nine decades in Malawi. They had supplied a model that was ingenious, small, personal and in harmony with its surroundings’. But their rural arcadia was slowly falling apart as they reached the end of their days.
Chula now works in the NHS in London and he seems somewhat more confident that Malawi can be the scene of attempts to build and form bonds than he is on observing the current ragged disposition of much of the West. He has an authoritative voice, an empathetic writing style and a very shrewd eye. He has written a social monograph, a national history, and philosophical treatise on our times that deserves a warm and wide reception.
Available here from Birlinn £17.99
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