Malawi's president for life did not know which decade he was born in
Hastings Kamuzu Banda long gave his birthday as 14 May 1906. Shown evidence from tribal customs, he conceded he was probably born in 1898. The boy who walked out of his village to South African mines became a doctor abroad, led Malawi to independence and then ruled it as one of Africa's most repressive autocrats.
He was born Akim Kamnkhwala Mtunthama Banda near Kasungu, in what was then British Central Africa. Kamnkhwala, little medicine, gave way to Kamuzu, little root, because his mother had conceived after a healer gave her root herbs for infertility. Baptised into the Church of Scotland in 1910, he chose the name Hastings after John Hastings, a Scottish missionary he admired near his village.
His schooling was a marathon. Around 1915 he set off on foot with an uncle for Southern Rhodesia, and in 1917 walked on to Johannesburg, where he spent years working at the Witwatersrand Deep Mine. There a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church offered to pay his fees at an American school if he could cover the fare, and in 1925 he sailed for New York. He finished high school at the Wilberforce Institute in Ohio in 1928, paying his way partly through talks arranged by the Ghanaian educator Kwegyir Aggrey, and went on to study ethnography, linguistics, history and medicine overseas.
Returning to Nyasaland to campaign against colonial rule, he became prime minister and led the country to independence in 1964. In 1966 he declared a republic with himself as president, then made it a one-party state under the Malawi Congress Party, which named him its president for life in 1970; in 1971 he became president for life of the country. A firm anti-communist, he enjoyed Western backing in the Cold War, supported women's rights, improved infrastructure and kept schooling relatively strong.
The cost was enormous. Opponents were routinely tortured and killed; human rights groups estimate at least 6,000 people were killed, tortured or held without trial, and one estimate reaches 18,000 deaths. He also kept full diplomatic ties with apartheid South Africa. Under mounting pressure he accepted a 1993 referendum that ended one-party rule, lost his life presidency and most of his powers, and was beaten in the democratic election that followed. He died in South Africa on 25 November 1997.
Source: Hastings Banda
