Big Men Little People

by Alec Russell

  Banda's experiences on the way would have tested the most tolerant of Africans. After working on a Johannesburg mine under a bullying Afrikaner overseer, with the help of American missionaries he travelled to America to complete his studies. In Tennessee in the Twenties he witnessed a mob lynching a black man. Even after he qualified as a doctor and set up practice in Britain, the prejudices of his era stood in his way. His long standing ambition to be a medical missionary in his homeland for the Church of Scotland was thwarted in the early 1940s when a group of white nurses in Nyasaland, as Malawi was then known, wrote to their Edinburgh headquarters to say they would not serve under an African doctor. Further insults were to come when Banda applied for a post with the Nyasaland government. After a long argument over whether he should be paid as much as a European, where he should live and whether he could use the swimming pool at Zomba, the colonial capital, he was offered a job as a medical officer. But according to some accounts there was a final twist. He received a letter from the Colonial Office informing him he must not seek social contact with white doctors. Banda turned down the offer.

  Yet despite these setbacks and insults the influence of Banda's missionary upbringing endured. He remained if any thing more Presbyterian than his tutors. He is said to have been appalled by the number of pubs in Glasgow when he docked there in 1937 after twelve years in America. He was also shocked that in Edinburgh, 'the very Mecca of the Church of Scotland', couples touched each other when ballroom dancing. Years later he contrasted this unfavourably with the 'propriety' of African traditional dances where men and women danced without body contact.

  The influence lingered until his final day and, within the unstructured haze of his reminiscences, was a recurring theme in my interview. Long after the British had left he liked to see himself as the ultimate paternalist and 'civilizer of natives'. At first I thought his ramblings had a whiff of Dr Arnold's stern Victorian values. Then the voice of Banda's Scots mentors became clearer - 'Discipline. Unity. Hard work,' he insisted when I asked if he had a message to his people. 'I do not want stagnation. And of course dress is important. When I came here people were naked. I didn't like this. I told them we must be on good relations with the rest of the world. We must be presentable.'

  Banda's life was undoubtedly the most varied of the independence leaders. It spawned a range of bizarre theories about his psyche. It has also inspired endless curiosity about his career. How, it has been asked time and again, did a doctor trained in the West and seemingly comfortably settled in its society metamorphose into a ruthless dictator? And how could the man who advised Nkrumah on how to take power prove so disdainful of Africans that he employed only expatriates in his favourite hospital and school?

  For those looking for the seeds of his dictatorial future he was a slow starter. He settled down to practice as a GP in the north of England in 1938 before moving to Harlesden, and thence to Brondesbury Park, archetypal London suburbs where he led a classic British middle-class existence. It was a remarkable achievement for an African of his generation. He sported a black Homburg and a rolled-up umbrella. He had a car and a secretary. Such was his reputation that young trainee colonial officers were sent to have briefings with him before taking up their posts.

  Simultaneously he was a leading light in the liberal salons where talk of decolonization was all the rage. Drawing on his vast and varied experience he advised the fledgling independence movement in Nyasaland and leading African nationalists. He is said to have told Nkrumah that the Gold Coast was the best place to begin the drive for independence on the grounds that the mosquitoes were so virulent there that the British would be the easiest to dislodge. But Banda's was hardly a revolutionary existence. He was the height of respectability until his secretary's husband, a Major French, filed for divorce citing him as co-respondent. Shortly afterwards he closed down his practice and moved to Ghana, where he was joined a year later by Mrs French. Both almost certainly expected to retire.

  Banda was at his lowest ebb. Not only was his domestic life in tatters but his dreams for his homeland had also come to naught. He had been working with the fledgling Nyasaland African Congress, which, like other nascent African nationalist movements, was formulating its pitch for independence. But in 1953 Nyasaland was joined in a federation with north and south Rhodesia, under Sir Roy Welensky, a burly ex-train driver, a development, which Banda feared would leave them forever under the yoke of the Rhodesian colonists. As a final blow his professional life had also suffered a setback. He was suspended as a doctor in Ghana in late 1957 because, it is thought, he had offended the authorities by running an illegal abortion clinic.

  And yet this same man was hailed as a hero the following year when he returned to his homeland, aged sixty, to lead it to independence. For the Congress he was Nyasaland's most distinguished son: he had worked his way abroad and triumphed in the white man's world. For Britain, too, despite the opposition of Welensky, he was an obvious leader. When in 1964, as prime minister of one year's standing he presided over the independence ceremony, hopes were high. His rhetoric was restrained and it was assumed his advanced years had encouraged a prudence and conservatism that would spare his people the radicalism of 'firebrands' like Nkrumah.

  But in fact that was just about that for Malawi's dreams of freedom. In a sequence that was to become depressingly familiar in the rest of the continent, he rapidly began to believe his own propaganda. He was soon hailed as the country's Messiah and Moses. At the first whiff of serious criticism, political opponents were drummed out of sight. To get anywhere in life, Malawians had to carry party cards. In 1971 Banda became president for life. His 'Young Pioneers', which were founded as a boy scout movement, metamorphosed into a thuggish party youth wing, which kept the people in line. It was a blueprint for Big Man rule.

  For psychoanalysts the metamorphosis from middle-class London GP to African dictator is rich fare. Critics have had a field day trying to find a link between the two stages. A favourite theory is that he broke down and had a personality change during his three years in Ghana. There are even historians who claim that the Banda who returned to Malawi was not the man who had left all those years earlier. They attest his policy of speaking only English in public and relying on an interpreter. It was striking that he never slipped into his own tongue, not even when addressing peasantry, few of whom would have understood English. His biographer, Philip Short, however, gives the argument short shrift. He says Banda had not forgot ten his local language, but it was rusty and archaic, and it was in keeping with the persona of a supreme leader to speak through an intermediary. Far from diminishing Banda's appeal, Short concludes that speaking English would have enhanced it by placing him on a par with the Europeans. (2)

  The most authentic witnesses, the Malawians, concur that there is little to explain. He was a clever man who was in the right place at the right time. With his education and experiences he had a head start on most of his fellow countrymen. He arrived back home with three suits and little else. The temptation to improve on this wardrobe was clearly irresistible. He was over seeing an uneducated population who were hungry for a new message. In short he had a free rein for his foibles and fancies. He had his own country and he could do as he wanted.

  ‘I want to be blunt,' he told his people soon after taking office. 'As long as I am here and you say I must be your president, you have to do what I want, what I like and not what you like, what you want ... Kamuzu is in charge. That is my way.(3)

  He could hardly have been more direct - and yet there were voices, some partisan, some patronizing and others merely pragmatic, who argued his dictatorship was not all bad.

  *

  Of all the many colourful episodes in Banda's rise to power, few are more absurd than the tale of 'the bruising of Miss Phombeya's toe'. She was a young woman whose foot was stamped on in a scuffle with colonial police officers and whose case for no particular reason caused a rumpus in Westminster. It is by most reckonings a footnote in the story of d
ecolonization. It is literally little more than a footnote in Hansard. But the story helped to prime a belief in Europe, and particularly Britain, that Malawi was a comic opera society. It was a theory which was willingly bolstered by Banda to back his case that he was a benign dictator, a dangerously misleading argument.

  The bruising occurred in 1960 outside Ryall's Hotel in Blantyre where Harold Macmillan. was lunching on the home ward leg of his famous 'wind of change' tour. A crowd had gathered outside to protest at the imprisonment of Banda and other local leaders by the federation government. A cloudburst soon put a stop to trouble between the police and the crowd. It was more of a jostle than a riot, and would soon have been forgotten were it not for the prime ministerial press pack, whose prose in the next morning's newspapers in London was so purple that the affair reached the House of Commons and led to the appointment of a commission of enquiry.

  The one-man commission duly met and concluded memorably:

  It does not appear that the amount of blood that was shed would be sufficient to test the capacity of an ordinary mustard spoon. Contemplating the measure of the injuries sustained by the demonstrators one cannot avoid the reflection that when the face of Helen launched a thousand ships and brought Agamemnon and the great Achilles to the shores of Phrygia it hardly achieved as much as Miss Phombeya's toe when it brought the paladins of Fleet Street in the aerial argosies of our day across two continents to appear before your Commissioner in the remote highlands of Middle Africa.

  The simplistic portrayal of brutal colonial policemen and oppressed black protestors undoubtedly intensified pressure on London to undercut the federation and to grant full independence. Banda himself was later to remark that the over-reaction of the British press and government was the 'best turn the British ever did for me'. But by allowing her toe to be stamped on Miss Phombeya did her fellow countrymen a bad service, as the story also inadvertently fuelled the idea that Malawi was a cuddly teddy bear that played to different rules from the rest of the continent.

  I heard this point of view many times in Blantyre as I underwent a long and elaborate courtship to see the Ngwazi. First I had to submit myself to preliminary interviews with bigwigs from Banda's Malawi Congress Party. Then I had to secure the permission of a range of government officials, from the head of police and the commissioner of prisons to the director of state protocol. Finally I needed the go-ahead of Clive Stanbrook, the British QC who had been flown out to defend him. If I had stopped to think amid the form filling, I would have paid my respects to him at the outset. I should have guessed that Banda would trust only a Briton as the gate-keeper to his presence. But as it was, I played the game by the book, so I had plenty of time on my hands.

  The Mt Soche Hotel where I was staying had seen better days. The waiters sat in the shadows like museum curators. The service was as threadbare as their ancient stained tunics. Their buffet always looked as if it had been put out the previous day. Most evenings I retired across the road to a Chinese restaurant, the pride of the town with its plastic chairs and cheap Christmas lights. There, amid rows of empty tables, the years would roll back as a British couple who had 'stayed on' recalled happy memories of the days when floral print dresses were the rage and Banda kept Malawi in line.

  The couple was among the last of a breed of white settlers. Raised in Rhodesia, they had been marooned by the post colonial upheavals. Zimbabwe was out of bounds because of the husband's record in its independence war. Britain was alien and unfamiliar and anyway expensive to reach. The 'new' Malawi, too, did not feel like home, although it was at least Africa. There was plenty of time to talk, as the menu - like the Mt Soche's- was all form and no substance. Day by day their old life was crumbling. They were too honest to grumble. Instead they wistfully recalled the Banda era when Malawians knew where they stood. 'He was in many ways just the sort of leader that Malawians wanted. They are a friendly lot . . . but they need a father figure to keep them in line ...'

  As with all but the most brutal Big Men, there were arguments that could be marshalled in Banda's defence. Malawi was stable at a time when much of the continent was beset by coups and civil war. The economy grew at an average of more than 5 per cent a year in the late Sixties and Seventies. Banda was also a solitary voice at the foundation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) to dare to question its unswerving commitment to the Soviet bloc and to argue for an independent line.

  But the logic of personal rule soon took its toll. As Malawi became poorer, so Banda's bank balance grew. Tyranny is tyranny whatever its form and wherever it is. There are massive cultural and social differences between Europe and Africa, but there are also some absolutes. Africans have to - and indeed for the most part want to - be judged on the same terms as the rest of the world. Subservience and apathy should not be mistaken for consent. Witness the overwhelming vote which ousted Banda and other African dictators in first-time multi-party elections. To indulge African dictators is reverse racism. It also plays brilliantly into their hands.

  As my companions at the Chinese restaurant chattered away, I recalled a meeting the previous day with a Malawian lawyer in a crumbling villa on the outskirts of Blantyre. Dr Vera Chirwa had for many years been an outspoken critic of Banda. Her husband Orton had been one of the early activists pushing for independence. Their relationship with Banda dated back to his London days when he had paid for Orton's living expenses at a post-colonial conference. But the Chirwas had grown increasingly disillusioned after independence. They were imprisoned in 1981 after they were kidnapped from exile in neighbouring Zambia. For the first four years Vera was held in leg-irons. She was released only in January 1993 as Malawi moved towards democracy under pressure from the foreign aid donors on whom its economy relied. Her husband had died mysteriously in custody two months earlier. She had seen him once in the previous eleven years.

  'When Dr Banda first came you could not imagine he would do those bad things,' she told me. 'He was actually dedicated - unless of course he was a very good actor. But there are some people who get drunk with power. Power corrupts and it corrupted him. It's a pity, a man who started quite well and he developed into an animal, a killer.'

  By the late Eighties it was widely believed that Banda no longer had a hand in the day-to-day affairs of state. He was certainly relying heavily on John Tembo, his police minister and business associate, who was a co-accused in the murder trial and the uncle of the enigmatic 'Mama', the third member of the ruling triumvirate. When the murder trial opened, Banda was allowed to stay in Mudi House after the court was told he was too old to sit through the hearings. By the time of my interview his mind was clearly fading. It was almost as if he had reverted to being a schoolboy. He jumped to attention when asked if he would be photographed and grinned merrily when positioned in front of a giant portrait of himself. But every now and then the old wicked gleam would return.

  When I rose to go I asked whether he had any regrets and whom he most admired. He seemed puzzled at the first part of the question. Penitent he was clearly not. He saw his detention as the ultimate endorsement of his low opinion of Africa. 'Bitter? Why? I am indifferent.' He needed no prompting however for the second part. 'Julius Caesar,' he said. 'He could be tough. He could be kind. But when he was tough he was tough ... oh yes.'

  The analogy was all too apt. Caesar's assassination ushered in a period of chaos before Octavian took over as primus inter pares. Banda's fall paved the way for the long-awaited democracy. Sadly for Malawians it was confused and confusing from its earliest days.

  *

  If there was one tale in the 1990s that illustrated the fragility of African democracy, it was the story of the president who was not himself. A fortnight after my interview with Banda I went to chronicle the last political gasp of another Big Man, his erstwhile neighbour and rival, the former Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda, who was plotting a comeback. I left the capital, Lusaka, after a few days with a far more ludicrous and yet ominous story about his successor than I coul
d ever have imagined. Far from observing the last of a Big Man I wondered if I had been chronicling the birth of a new one.

  'K.K.', who led Zambia from independence in 1964, always managed to avoid the opprobrium of his peers, but this was a sentimental not an empirical judgement, as his rule was a disaster. To be fair, his government was dealt a grievous blow when the price of copper, Zambia's main source of export earnings, plummeted in a harsh echo of the collapse of cacao prices which so devastated Nkrumah's Ghana. But his Utopian policies reduced one of Africa's most promising economies to a shambles from which it may never recover. He destroyed the country's rich agricultural base by introducing price subsidies which made it uneconomic to grow crops. An extravagant social welfare programme for the towns further encouraged peasants to abandon the land. By 1990 it was estimated that half of Zambia's population lived in towns, an absurdly high figure for a country with such ideal farming land. Thousands of jobs were created in a bloated civil service and giant state monopolies. Money was printed to pay the salaries. Aid agencies then compounded the problem by saturating Lusaka with cut-price food, encouraging still more people to leave their plots and live off the state.

  Frantic for funds for his ambitious plans, K.K. could not resist taking control of Zambia’s 'golden egg', its copper industry. By nationalizing the mines he destroyed the threadbare remains of foreign investor confidence and entrenched a Western cynicism about African governments' grasp of economics, which endures to this day. When Mandela's ministers introduced a textbook free-market economic programme, which was designed to boost growth, officials angrily berated wary foreign businessmen for their 'racist' preconceptions about 'voodoo economics'. But caution was only to be expected, given that the ANC had still been talking of nationalization in 1990 when Mandela was released.