Memories of Dr Hasting Kamuzu Banda By A Close Scottish Friend

Kamuzu Banda In 1977

MEMORIES OF DR. BANDA

by Professor Emeritus George Shepperson, C.B.E.

(An address given after the annual lunch of the Friends of Malawi, East of England, at the Haycock Hotel, Wansford, U.K., on Wednesday, 27th  of May, 1998).

It seems to me that anyone who partakes of a formal lunch, especially when properly lubricated, is entitled to expect of the post-luncheon speaker a little humour from time to time. I am afraid that I am going to disappoint you. Any humour which emerges in my remarks will be quite unintentional. I have been asked to share with you some memories of Dr. Banda, most of them mine but a few from others; and the former Life President of Malawi is surely no subject for laughter?

The face of John Chilembwe has now replaced that of the Life President on some Malawi banknotes. During my three years of war service with Nyasaland battalions of the King's African Rifles in Africa and Asia, I heard of John Chilembwe but never of Dr. Banda.

I did not become aware of his existence until 1948 when, having completed my studies at Cambridge University, I was appointed to a Lectureship in Imperial and American History at Edinburgh University. Because of my interest in Nyasaland and Scottish influences upon it, I sought out anyone who could tell me more about these. I was particularly fortunate to meet, in my first year in Edinburgh, a gentleman who was ideally equipped for this purpose: the Reverend T. Cullen Young, formerly of the Livingstonia Mission and, in the 1940's, living in retirement in Scotland. Dr. Hastings K. Banda was one of the first Malawians he mentioned to me. Indeed, Cullen Young was a figure of fundamental importance in Banda's life.

The story of their association is indicated in a book, published in 1946, called Our African Way of Life. which was translated and edited by Cullen Young and Hastings Banda. I was fortunate enough to be given a copy of this now very rare volume by Dr. Banda when I visited him at his house in London on 18th. of September 1952. Let Cullen Young and Hastings Banda themselves now tell the story of their long association, quoting from the preface to their jointly edited book:-

"It is, we think," they said, "fortunate that in the translation of these Essays from the Chewa people of Nyasaland, there has been available a partnership between a European [Cullen Young] who has had the chance to know something of these people, and one who is himself a Chewa. That partnership has an interesting story behind it."¹That, indeed, was putting it mildly!

"In the year 1915," continued Young and Banda, "an examination was due for teachers in one of the districts under the Livingstonia Mission in Northern Nyasaland of the then United Free Church of Scotland. Selection of men to go to the training centre for the course leading to full certification was the purpose of the examination, and there presented himself a very youthful pupil-teacher [Hastings Banda], small also in stature. He was not more than thirteen years old" - we will not argue now about that - " but [Young and Banda continued] from the age of about ten he had passed all tests open to him. At the other end of the scale, as it were, was a European [Cullen Young] who happened to be available for the conduct of the examination, though not attached to the District and therefore not intimate with the teacher personnel. The number of examinees was large, the examination hall - actually the Station Church - was small, but the unlucky small pupil-teacher [Hastings Banda] found himself in a distant seat, too far from the blackboard easily to see the questions thereon written. At one point he stood up in order to see more clearly over the shoulder of the man in front of him. The European [Cullen Young] misconstrued the action and debarred the boy from further participation in the examination."

And so began the forty-three years odyssey away from Malawi of Hastings Kamuzu Banda. As Young and Banda, in their preface to their 1946 book put it, "Three weeks later a youthful figure [the young Kamuzu] crossed the Zambezi, heading, as he hoped, for Lovedale in South Africa... Years went by and then there arrived in Edinburgh a young African....who exhibited a full Federal Diploma of Medicine qualifying him for practice in any state of the U.S.A. But his face now being set towards the land of his mother's folk, he [Kamuzu Banda] had come to take the British degree at the Edinburgh School of Medicine in order to qualify in a British territory." But, continued Cullen Young and Banda, "By what we call 'chance' he met in Edinburgh the ex-missionary who had brought down about his ears, twenty years earlier, the house of his dreams. He recognised the European, but the latter only saw in him one of those whose land and people were well remembered... Thus again, although still in complete ignorance of the older contact, the European was in touch with the African whose career he had so profoundly but unconsciously influenced."

Indeed, Cullen Young did not become aware of his part in the expulsion of Hastings Banda from the 1915 examination and its consequences until Dr. Banda told him about it when they were working together in 1946 on their book, Our African Way of Life. What course, one wonders, would the history of Malawi have taken if Cullen Young had not exercised old-fashioned, Scottish pedagogic discipline and expelled the youthful Kamuzu from this examination?

The Reverend Cullen Young and Dr. Banda told me of this remarkable conjunction of their lives. They came together a second time in 1939 when Chief Mwase Kasungu arrived in London to help the School of Oriental and African Studies with an analysis of the Nyanja language. Cullen Young recommended that Dr. Banda, then almost a fully qualified medical general practitioner in Britain, should become Mwase Kasungu's adviser: an experience which reinforced the turning of Banda's attention towards Nyasaland and its problems on the eve of the Second World War. Even more, it must have reinforced his growing obsession with his Chewa identity.

I had an unusual experience of this when, in the summer of 1959, I visited the African American Howard University in Washington, D.C. In search of material on black American contacts with Africa, I called on Professor Mark Hanna Watkins of Howard's Anthropology Department. He had published in 1937 A Grammar of Chichewa which was based on his doctoral thesis at the University of Chicago. This Chichewa grammar, probably the first of its kind so-named, contained the statement that, "A lithe information was obtained from Kamuzu Banda, a native Chewa, while he was in attendance at the University of Chicago from 1930 to 1932."²

Because so little material on Banda's reactions to American, particularly black American society was - indeed, alas, still is available - I asked Mark Hanna Watkins what Banda was like when he knew him in Chicago in the early 1930's. Watkins' reply came immediately, in a staccato statement which I have never forgotten. Banda, Watkins said quickly, was "very tribal, very tribal." I asked Watkins what he meant by this. He gave me an anecdote to illustrate what he meant by calling Banda in Chicago "very tribal". Watkins used to visit Banda in his Chicago lodgings to get information from him on the Chewa language for his doctoral thesis. At lunch time, one day, Watkins took up a couple of what Americans call "brown-bag lunches": one for himself and one for Banda. Watkins started on his own lunch and began putting linguistic questions to Banda. Banda replied; but Watkins noted that he was not eating his lunch. Watkins asked him why not, several times; until Banda finally asserted, "The Chewa do not eat with strangers."

Further evidence from Chicago in the 1930's of Banda's consciousness of his Chewa identity is provided by four Chewa songs which were included in the massive Negro anthology made by Nancy Cunard, the Afrophile daughter of the shipping family, in 1934. Banda had recorded these four Chewa songs in Chicago in 1932, "together with others."³ Where are these recordings now, I wonder? If properly processed, they would be invaluable evidence not only for the neglected study of folklore in Malawi but also for the growth of Banda's belief in his African identity.

There is an interesting letter about this by Hastings Banda in the W. H. J. Rangeley Papers in the library of the Society of Malawi. On the 18th. of November, 1951. from his London address. discussing Chewa history, Banda wrote to Provincial Commissioner Rangeley. "I am in a position to know and remember more of my own customs and institutions than the younger men that you meet now at home. who were born in the later twenties or even the thirties.... It so happens that I was already old enough to know most of these customs before I went to school. Also, fortunately for me, before I could forget all of them. I entered the University of Chicago which cured me of my tendency to be ashamed of my past. The result is that. in many cases, really, I know more of our customs than most of our people, now at home. When it comes to the language," continued Banda to Rangely "I think this is even more true. For the average youngster [in Nyasaland] now simply uses what the European uses, without realising that the European is using the word incorrectly. Instead of correcting the European, he uses the word wrongly, himself, in order to affect civilisation, modernity or even urbanity."⁴

This seems to me to be a highly interesting miniature historical essay from Banda. I can, incidentally, certify that his grades from the History Department at the University of Chicago were very respectable ones, because I was given a list of them many years ago, by my old friend, the late Professor Walter Johnson, former Chairman of Chicago University's History Department.

On Banda's knowledge of the older forms of his language, I can supply a personal anecdote which may be relevant. In the 1970's, after a Commonwealth Prime Ministers' meeting in London, Dr. Banda and his entourage went up to Scotland, to Gleneagles Hotel, for a few days. I was then a member of the Edinburgh University Southern African Scholarship Committee. Banda had already given a few hundred pounds to its funds. But, from Gleneagles he invited the Chairman of ourthere. He presented us with a cheque for £3,000 for our Scholarship Appeal. This occasion gave me the opportunity to tell Dr. Banda that Mark Hanna Watkins had died in America. Dr. Banda was sad at this news. He asked about Watkins' wife. Was she still alive? If so, he would like to invite her to visit Malawi. I said that she was; and that I would let Dr. Banda have her address "posachedwa". "No, no," he replied, "I want it msanga, msanga'."

Banda's part in the renaming of Nyasaland as Malawi is fundamental. It appears for example, in the Cullen Young - Hastings Banda book of 1946: "It is practically certain that aMaravi [Malawi] ought to be the shared name of all these peoples: this carrying with it recognition of the Chewa motherland group as representing the parent stock of the Nyanja-speaking peoples."⁵ Was this pan-Chewa sentiment all Banda's or had he derived it largely from the influence of Cullen Young? My old friend and collaborator, the great Central African linguist Thomas Price, thought the latter. But looking to Banda's Chewa consciousness as it developed in Chicago, I am by no means sure of this.

Before Dr. Banda went back home in 1958, some of the young leaders of the Nyasaland African Congress had discussed the question of a new name for their country when it became independent. The Gold Coast had become Ghana on achieving independence. What should Nyasaland be called?

Orton Chirwa, whom I had known since the 1950's when he was studying for the Bar in London, told me that Dunduzu Chizisa, Secretary General of the Nyasaland African Congress and later of the Malawi Congress Party, who died tragically in a car accident in 1962, had suggested a new name for Nyasaland but he (Orton Chirwa) had forgotten what it was. However, when I interviewed Henry Masauko Chipembere, in exile in California, in the early 1970's, he remembered that Dunduzu Chisiza had noticed a name on old maps of Africa adjacent to Nyasaland and he thought that this would be satisfactory for the post-colonial nomenclature of their country, Chipembere spelled this name out to me as "Moene muji": "M.O.E.N.E.M.U.J.I.". I suggested that this was one of those misleading expressions, given by a hasty African informant to a European or Arab explorer, such as "Phiri Hill" or "Lake Nyasa" which are not really proper names; and that "moenemuji- probably meant something like "the owner of the village (or small town).- Chipembere agreed with me. This curious name occurs in a variety of spellings in old maps of Africa. On mine of 1782 it is "Monde mugi." But, whatever may prevailed and that the have been its origin, one must surely be glad that Dr. Banda's opinion euphonious and exact name of "Malawi" was given to the Land of the Lake and not "Moenemuji."

Let me now say a word or two about my meetings with Dr. Banda before he went home in 1958. The reasons for them were twofold: first, my interest in central African history, which was the consequence of my war-time experience with the K.A.R., notably the Chilembwe movement of 1915 and the role of emigrant Clements Kadalie in the growth of black trade unionism in South Africa; and secondly my opposition to the inclusion of Nyasaland in a political union with the two Rhodesias.

I first met Dr. Banda in 1950, I think it was, when he came to Edinburgh to speak to an anti-Central African Federation meeting. I had obtained his London address either from the Reverend Cullen Young or from Orton Chirwa. I invited Dr. Banda to tea in the staff common room of the Old College, South Bridge, Edinburgh, to which he was no stranger. When Banda was studying for his L.R.C.P. and L.R.C.S. in Edinburgh, he knew this traditional area of Edinburgh University very well. Indeed, according to the distinguished surgeon, the late Sir Hugh Robson, Principal of the University in the early 1970's, Hastings Banda was an habitué of the Students Union, where he was often to be seen playing bridge. This, I must admit, is the only piece of evidence which I have seen about Banda the bridge player; and I would be interested to learn of other testimonies about his pastimes.

When Banda and I met over tea in the Old College, he was in a jovial and lively mood. He pledged his opposition to federation, and he reinforced his points by frequently slapping his own knees - and, occasionally, mine as well. This meeting led to others with him, the most notable of which were two at his house at 8, Aylestone Avenue, London, N. W.6. I have mentioned the meeting of the 18th. of September, 1952, when Dr. Banda gave me a signed copy of Our African Way of Life. He also pushed upon me several copies of Federation in Central Africa, a blue-covered pamphlet which he had written with the Northern Rhodesian leader, Harry Nkumbula, and which Banda had published at his own expense in 1951.

My other meeting at his house was also in the summer of 1952 when I was researching into early British Central African documents in the Public Record Office.

Both these meetings were very pleasant social occasions as well as opportunities for us to tap each other's brains on the history of Nyasaland. Banda was then living in a substantial and well-kept villa in Harlesden with his friend, Mrs. French, and her young son, Peter. The atmosphere was very cosy indeed; and the four of us sat around the table to two excellent high teas prepared by Mrs. French. The sitting room was very comfortable and surrounded by a large collection, all neatly shelved, of Dr. Banda's books and literature from the local Labour Party, to which he belonged, and from the Fabian Colonial Bureau to which he subscribed.

Dr. Banda was anxious to discuss with me all aspects of the history of Nyasaland. He seemed to believe that the expression "Nyasaland Protectorate" committed the British Government specifically to protecting its African inhabitants. He was anxious to have copies of any treaties which I discovered in the Public Record Office which might endorse this view. I sent him some. But, as most of these were on the Jumbes of Kota Kota (then my current interest) 1 think he was disappointed.

We discussed John Chilembwe. But Dr. Banda knew little about his movement. What, however, became clear in these discussions, was that the year 1915 was - indeed, is - something of a turning-point in Malawi's history. Banda, as we have seen, left home in 1915 for South Africa, America and, ultimately, Britain. 1915 was also the year of Chilembwe's Rising and Clements Kadalie's move to South Africa to start the I.C.U., the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union of Africa, the first powerful black trade union in South Africa.

Dr. Banda was well aware of Clements Kadalie; and he suggested that I should visit George Padmore, the radical journalist from Trinidad, then living in London, who later became Kwame Nkrumah's adviser in Ghana. Banda gave me Padmore's address; and he did indeed prove helpful, lending me the then unpublished typescript autobiography of Clements Kadalie from Livingstonia.

Dr. Banda's association with George Padmore was typical of his knowledge of and, in many cases , friendship with African political leaders in London, to many of whom he acted as a personal physician. He was looking after the pregnant wife of one of them while I was in Dr. Banda's house. This - if my mid-septuagenarian memory does not betray me - was Kojo Botsio, the first secretary of Kwame Nkrumah's Convention People's Party in the Gold Coast: a most pleasant person who ran after me into the street to hand me some papers which I had left, by mistake, in Dr. Banda's sitting-room.

Perhaps I should add here that when, after one of my visits to his London home, Dr. Banda was driving me back to the local tube station, I sought his medical advice. I told him that I was finding pains in my shoulders most irritating. "Oh, that's all right," he said, "It's just a touch of fibrositis."

And, with that, he put me down at the tube station. I believe that was the first time that I had heard the word "fibrositis" which, according to the British Medical Association encyclopaedia, "is not a medical term, and some doctors refuse to recognise the condition."⁶

Perhaps my most significant encounters with Dr. Banda were not through meetings with him but through correspondence. A fascinating aspect of this was his habit of sending Christmas cards. I had a whole sequence of these from him, in Britain and in Malawi, which lasted until a few years ago when, presumably, I was struck off the official Christmas card list because of my support for Orton Chirwa, then under sentence of death, and for the release from prison of Jack Mapanje, the Malawi academic and poet.

Of all Dr. Banda's Christmas cards, the one which I cherish was posted on the 10th. of December, 1959, from Gwelo in Southern Rhodesia where the leaders of the Nyasaland African Congress were in prison. It was a home-made Christmas card, with the greetings "During Christmas-tide, we shall be wishing you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year." It was signed by Dr. Banda himself, by Yatuta K. Chisiza (who attempted, eight years later, a coup d' etat against Dr. Banda and was shot in the field in October 1967), by his brother Dunduzu Chisiza (who, as we have noted, was killed in a car crash in 1962) and by Henry Masauko Chipembere ( who died in exile in California in September 1975). It is very sad for me to-day to look at this Christmas card from Gwelo: sent at a time when these four men shared common hopes and were not to know that their lives were to be so disastrously and savagely torn apart.

Until the late 1980's, I received occasional letters from Dr. Banda in Malawi. Some were simple requests for service such as the showing around Edinburgh of a Malawi nursing sister, Lucie Kadzamira, who had been seconded for a short period to an Edinburgh hospital. This my wife and I did with great pleasure.

During my sixteen years as Chairman of the Commonwealth Institute in Edinburgh, we often gave hospitality to delegations from Malawi. On one such occasion, we put on an exhibition of Malawiana in Edinburgh, the star item of which was a chiefs stool that had been presented to John (Mandala) Moir of the African Lakes Company. I had been given this interesting object (sometimes claimed to be the stool of the Yao chief, Kapeni) by John Moir's Edinburgh-based daughter with whom I had maintained a close acquaintance over many years. This seemed a suitable time to send the stool back to Malawi. Therefore, the Director of the Commonwealth Institute in Scotland and I packed up Kapeni's stool and sent it back with the delegation to Dr. Banda. We included in the package a copy of a short article which Dr. Banda had written in the late 1930's in the Church of Scotland's missionary magazine, Other Lands, about the death of John Moir whose funeral he had attended.

A letter came back immediately from Dr. Banda. He was delighted with the chiefs stool. It would be put in a museum in Malawi - has it been, I wonder? Dr. Banda then said he had been operated on in Edinburgh for thrombosis by John Moir's son. I have not seen elsewhere a reference to this serious operation. Was Dr. Banda, in his old age, confusing this operation with one for an appendix which is mentioned in Philip Short's biography of him? Philip Short states that Dr. Banda stayed with John Moir's nephew in Edinburgh while convalescing after his appendix operation. It seems, however, unlikely that Dr. Banda, as a medical man with many years in practice, would confuse thrombosis with appendicitis.

The most important letter which I received from Dr. Banda came to me when I was in Uganda in the summer of 1962. Not having been able to visit Uganda, when I was with the K.A.R. in wartime East Africa, I took the opportunity that was offered to me to teach at Makerere College in Kampala. The first term of its academic year fitted very conveniently into Edinburgh University's Long Vacation. At the end of my term at Makerere, I had arranged to visit Zanzibar, calling in, en route, I hoped, to see our old student, Julius Nyerere, in Dar es Salaam. And then came the letter from Dr. Banda.

He wanted me to serve on a Commission which was to be set up to consider the establishment of a University in Malawi: and then, intriguingly, he suggested that I might like to be its first Vice-Chancellor. I cancelled my trip to Zanzibar - alas, I shall not see this beautiful island now - and went back to Scotland. Dr. Banda's academic schemes for me seem to have crashed on the Scylla and Charybdis of British and American officialdom. But I am very glad to say that a far, far better Vice-Chancellor than I would have been for the new University of Malawi was appointed: that admirable gentleman, Dr. Ian Michael, who saw the fledgling Central African University through many difficult days.

I was, however, at Dr. Banda's new University in the summer of 1965 when, as Chancellor, clad in a magnificent new academic gown, he delivered what was called his Inaugural Lecture. It was a remarkable two hours of dour deliberation, delivered in increasingly cold weather before a large, mixed audience, in uncomfortable chairs, in the grounds ofthe former Asian Girls School at Limbe which was the temporary headquarters of the University that was the fulfilment of Dr. Banda's long cherished dream. His Inaugural Lecture is the most remarkable, indeed bizarre, academic occasion that I have ever attended. It consisted of a complete outline of English grammar! Dr. Banda introduced it by saying that, since he had been back home, he had found that no one could write a decent letter in reasonable English - therefore, he would give them the basis of this language. I have some sympathy with his idiosyncratic approach because, as an academic, I have had the sad experience of witnessing the declining standards of spoken and written English in my own country. But I cannot help wishing that Dr. Banda had started by distributing free copies of the very useful pamphlet of English grammar for Malawi schools by Thomas Price's wife, Patricia, thereby giving himself time to speak of his vision for a University in an emerging Central African nation.

I visited his University several times after this, usually as an external examiner in history; and I had the opportunity to hear Dr. Banda speak at the University when it had moved to Zomba, at the Kamuzu Stadium and at Ryall's and Mount Soche Hotels. The length of his discourses grew longer and longer. I began to think that he was incapable of giving a short speech. I had had an inkling of this when I sat on the platform with him in the 1950's at an anti-Federation meeting in the Central Hall, Tollcross, Edinburgh. I could then observe him at close quarters, whipping up his energy and launching into lengthy, vociferous discourse. Yet I also witnessed that, when diplomacy required it, he could make a remarkably short speech of only a few minutes. I saw this, in particular, at an official luncheon which I attended in, I believe, Lancaster House, London, which - if my memory is not at fault - was chaired by Lord Home. And the shortness of Dr. Banda's speech was even more marked at a State Dinner in Edinburgh Castle on Saturday, the 20th. of April, 1985, at which my wife and I were guests, on the occasion of a visit to Scotland by Dr. Banda.

Long or short, Dr. Banda's speeches form the greater part of his published works. He never published a book of his own. But in the early euphoric days of African independence and the burgeoning of African studies, he was given the opportunity, by at least one distinguished press, to do this. Cambridge University Press, at that time, was publishing a series of works by African leaders; and it asked me if I would get into touch with Dr. Banda in the hope that he would write a book for it. His reply to me was a polite "no". But he added to this negative response, I think significantly, that he intended one day to write his autobiography. Alas, this never materialised.

And so we must depend upon future biographers. There have been already at least two; and, no doubt, there are more to come.

That concludes my selection of memories about this long-lived and controversial figure. I can offer no conclusion other than, perhaps, an interim one. It occurs to me that Dr. Banda, when he was asked whom he admired most in history, replied "Julius Ceasar." Two lines from Shakespeare's play of that name, spoken by Marcus Antonius over the dead body of Ceasar, may not be inapplicable to Dr. Banda's long existence:

The evil that men do lives after them:

The good is oft interred with their bones.

I pray that, in the case of Kamuzu from Kasungu, the very opposite of these sentiments will prevail.

References

1. This quotation and those in the following two paragraphs are taken from Our African Way of Life by John Kambalame, E. P.Chidzalo, J. W Chadangalara: Essays presented under the Prize Scheme of the International African Institute for the period 1943-1944, translated and edited with preface by Cullen Young and Hastings Banda (London: United Society for Christian Literature, Lutterworth Press, 1946), pp. 25,27.
2. Mark Hanna Watkins, A Grammar of Chichewa: A Bantu Language of British Central Africa. Language Dissertations Supplement to Language, Journal of the Linguistic Society of America, Number 24 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1937).
3. George Herzog (Department of Anthropology, Yale University) "African Songs of the Chewa Tribe in British East Africa-, in Nancy Cunard, Negro: an anthology made by Nancy Cunard, 1931-1933 (London: Nancy Cunard at Wishart & Co., 1934; New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969, reprint), p.413.
4. This letter of 18 November 1951 by Banda to Rangeley was in answer to a letter from Rangeley, a copy of which was not included in the Rangeley Papers file in the Society of Malawi Library when I examined it.
5. Young and Banda, op. cit., p.10.
6. Dr. Tony Smith, editor, The British Medical Association Complete Family Health Encyclopedia (London: Dorling Kindersley, 1995), p.44