No figure has shaped the political landscape and social mindset of Malawi quite like the nation's first head of state, Hastings Kamuzu Banda.
The journey began in the 1960s. Fresh out of federal prison, Hastings led his newly formed Malawi Congress Party to a sweeping victory in a 1961 election, on the back of which he told the colonialists that had been ruling his country to either accept majority rule or get out. He thus became the charismatic leader of that generation that contended for and secured Malawi's independence in 1964 and established it as a Republic two years later. In the three decades that followed, the Ngwazi, as Hastings liked to be called, ruled Malawi with a strange mixture of cruel authorianism, eccentric idiosyncrasy, and paranoid intelligence. And though the impact of his rule on Malawi is both inestimable and incomparable, a greater scrutiny of it is no doubt one of the keys for unlocking Malawi out of its perpetual gridlock and vicious cycle of failed leadership.
Politically, Kamuzu perfected the one-for-all model of leadership. In this model, the illusion was created that he was the one leader that all others could not do without. He was so successful at managing this perception of his own indispensability that when he faced a revolt from some of his own cabinet ministers in 1964, those who saw Kamuzu as first among equals found themselves ousted and labeled as traitors, leaving behind only those who fully endorsed that Kamuzu had and will never have an equal. The event was a pivotal moment in Kamuzu's efforts to transition from being Prime Minister to being President before declaring Malawi a one-party state and himself its Life President, all in the space of seven years. His success in doing this gave him tacit permission to use state resources for his and his coterie's personal enrichment for thirty years. In so doing, he firmly established the now-prevalent attitude of going into politics mainly to hold on to power at all cost, plunder state coffers for personal gain, and wield the powers of the state to muzzle opponents. It is no accident that since the dawn of multi-party politics and the end of Kamuzu's reign in 1994, Malawi has yet to have a president who does not attempt to hold on to power through bids to end the presidential term limits imposed by the constitution, or through rigged elections, or through bribed parliamentarians and electorates, or through undemocratic and nepotistic attempts to keep the presidency of a political party and the country in someone's family.
Psychologically, by referring to Malawians as "children" for thirty years, Kamuzu shaped the way we see ourselves and our leaders. He trained us to see ourselves as helpless, and in turn to see our leaders as our saviors simply because they are powerful, rich, and older. Even the confusing relationship Kamuzu had with the West has left an indelible mark on how Malawians view westerners in general and white people in particular. On the one hand, Kamuzu had received his education in the west, and held it in such high esteem that when he resolved to build an elite secondary school to surpass all others in Malawi, he made it clear that his intent was to fashion it in the likeness of Eton College, the prestigious English school. In keeping with his vision, he ordered that only white people be allowed to teach at his school, where the brightest children were chosen from villages across the country to learn such subjects as Latin and Greek. To this day, Malawians hold a foreign education in higher esteem than a local one, even where the local one may be more relevant. Similarly, Kamuzu went everywhere dressed in a three-piece suit and an English hat, and refused to address crowds or make public speeches in Chichewa, the vernacular language of Malawi. And to this day, the more frequently and better a Malawian speaks English, the more they are pleasantly admired and bitterly envied. It is not uncommon to find Malawians who speak English as a second language preferring it over their mother tongue in conducting daily conversations, business, and meetings with fellow Malawians. It is also not uncommon for Malawians to envyingly refer to wealthy Malawians as living "Moyo Wachizungu", literally meaning "a white lifestyle". In contract, Kamuzu had also been imprisoned by the colonialists for his initial calls for a revolt against their rule. And in turn, he had famously referred to the federation under which he had found the British ruling Malawi as "a stupid federation". Yet at the same time, he was the only African leader to maintain full diplomatic relations with the racist apartheid government of South Africa. In so doing, Kamuzu was truly the first to embody the now-prevalent Malawian sentiment that white people are simultaneously worthy of being feared, hated, and suspected as oppressive, and worthy of being imitated, followed, and admired as superior.
Culturally, it is common knowledge that Kamuzu spoke disparagingly of people from the north of Malawi, even introducing several government policies designed to sideline them. The rest of the country's resulting antagonism both to northerners and to their strong sense of cultural identity is still an enduring reality to this day. Even the role to which Kamuzu allocated women in the public arena, that of singing and dancing around him in uniforms bearing his face, is one that does not look set to go away any time soon. In connection to this latter practice is the impact that I also suspect he had on the moral standards in the relationships between men and women. It is rumored that when he lived in England, Kamuzu got into trouble for his indiscretions with a married woman named Mrs. French. Whether true or not, what is beyond rumor is that for the thirty years in which he was president, Kamuzu never married. Instead, he lived in co-habitation with a mistress in a strange relationship that he never accounted for. I dread at the consideration of the impact that this mysterious relationship between Kamuzu and his mistress, or between Kamuzu and fatherhood, or between Kamuzu and marriage must have had on an entire generation's view of how a man should relate to women and of whether marriage is a worthy commitment for a man to make, but wives all across the country can testify to that impact on the men they married. Even the fact that the nature of his relationships with women and whether he had children were always shrouded in mystery and secrecy has since become something of a heritage for men across the country.
But perhaps I am being too harsh on the iconic demagogue. My purpose is not to put the blame on Kamuzu for Malawi's ills. I know that Kamuzu did not rule this country without the people's consent and I know that not everything he did was bad. In many ways, he was a leader with a vision beyond his time, and I think all the leaders we've ever had since Kamuzu have failed to escape his imposing shadow. So as much as we like to blame our present calamities on leaders who have gone before, the real blame belongs to ourselves as a people, for we are the ones who choose and tolerate bad leadership. Therefore, if we are serious about changing Malawi for the better, it will not be enough to blame all our country's woes on those who have led us before or lead us now. We must also blame ourselves and take responsibility for our proclivity to settle for self-aggrandizing leaders and to defend them when the law catches up with them. There are people in this country, many people in fact, who still defend Kamuzu Banda's authoritarianism, Bakili Muluzi's corruption, Bingu Wa Mutharika's arrogance, and Joyce Banda's appeasement as being more tactical than detrimental. That is the real tragedy, for the kind of leadership we choose, follow, tolerate, and defend are a photograph of the kind of country we want to live in and the kind of people we want to become.
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