Aged Banda Has Total Control : Longtime Leader Makes Indelible Mark on Malawi

The bodyguards’ eyes were riveted on the black brogues of the president of Malawi, guarding against a telltale falter as the octogenarian hobbled down a red-carpeted stairway in his immaculate gabardine suit.

At each landing, an acolyte indicated the break in the stairs with the sweep of his arm, like a servant placing an offering on the ground.

Finally His Excellency, the Life-President Ngwazi Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda reached the field of the soccer stadium, where 500 undulating dancers in red, green, and blue awaited him. Mysteriously gaining strength, he put aside his mahogany stick and, raising high his horsehair fly-whisk, broke into a dance. One after another, young girls came out of the crowd to take their turn with the Ngwazi, or “champion.”

Presently, frail again, he took back his cane. Back up the stairs the brogues went, always under the scrutiny of the guards, and Banda impassively regained his seat on the reviewing stand.

“Does he do this often?” a government official sitting nearby asked rhetorically, then answered himself: “More often than not.”

Witnessing such displays at a four-hour ceremony kicking off a nationwide child-immunization drive, the people of Malawi might be forgiven for feeling that their aging life-president might hold his job forever.

Countless times over the last 10 or 15 years, foreigners have been foolish enough to suppose that Banda was losing his grip on his tiny landlocked African country, preparing to relinquish some of his intractable authority, even appointing a successor. They underestimated him.

So had the Young Turks of British Nyasaland who invited the then 60-year-old U.S.- and Scottish-educated physician back from his exile in Ghana, judging him a pliant figurehead to place at the front of their independence movement. Five years later, Malawi was indeed independent--but under Banda’s one-person rule.

Next year, Banda will mark 25 years at the helm of a country that has known no other national leader.

Face Reprinted on Fabric

Malawi is almost defined by the reverence that its people grant Banda. His benign face peers not only from the walls of every office and shop in the country but also from the print of the colorful fabric with which Malawi’s women clothe themselves on special occasions.

A typical speech on the floor of Parliament, whether the subject is rural development, agriculture, or health care, can best be described as a paean to the life-president verging on hysterical enthusiasm. Unsurprising, for Banda not only selects the members of Parliament but holds in his hands the machinery for removing any who displease him.

In the same way, he controls the courts, frequently decreeing verdict and sentence, whatever the evidence. When a group of people charged with a series of politically inspired murders and kidnapings here were acquitted some years ago, he summoned Malawi’s attorney general with the instructions “not to release those people, no matter what the judges are saying,” and adding, “I am in charge here, not the judges.”

Lest anyone miss the point, there are the outbreaks of sheer repression. At one time in the 1970s, there were 7,000 political prisoners in detention here, according to diplomatic and academic sources.

Vicious Campaign

About the same time, Banda embarked on a vicious campaign against the country’s Jehovah’s Witnesses, openly sanctioning mob violence against them and deporting as many as he could across the Zimbabwe border. The Witnesses, who have a history of trying to remain aloof from government, apparently angered Banda by refusing to buy Malawi Congress Party cards, which were a fund-raising device. As long ago as 1967, Banda accused them of “preventing” people from paying taxes or buying the party cards.

At the University of Malawi, teachers talk of colleagues who have simply disappeared, like Jack Mapanje, the head of the English Department, who was arrested one day late last year and brought to his office in handcuffs to watch while it was ransacked by security officials.

A poet whose allusive, satirical verse was beginning to earn an international reputation, Mapanje has been neither charged nor heard from since. His friends are divided over whether it was his poetry that earned him imprisonment or simply his error in earning renown in a land where only one person is permitted to be remarkable.

Speeches Wander

Today Banda seems to observers to be progressively more frail; his clear baritone does not waver but his speeches wander, as when he addressed the audience at last month’s immunization rally with a disquisition on a famous American President--”I won’t tell you his name”--who triumphed over polio.

But while no one can tell how long the process of decline could last, there is more reason than ever for disquiet over Malawi’s future. Aged at least 86, and possibly more than 90, Banda has anointed no successor.

Mention of the very issue is illegal in the country--for all but Banda, who made the most recent public reference to the question last year. That was just after an outbreak of speculation over the political aspirations of Malawi’s “official hostess,” Mama Cecilia Kadzamira, Banda’s former medical receptionist, who accompanies him everywhere.

Opening a Malawi Congress Party conference, Banda suddenly broke off his soporific address, waved his hand and said, “I want to talk about the issue of succession.”

“We all almost fell off our chairs,” recalled one diplomat in attendance. “You never saw a more attentive audience in your life.”

As Kadzamira sat uneasily nearby, Banda asserted that she had no political ambitions. The process of succession, he added, was laid out in the constitution, a document that few of the ministers, party members and diplomats at the conference had ever seen. It was found to dictate an interregnum by a troika of the party’s secretary general and two ministers. As it happened, the last secretary general had died in a mysterious car crash in 1983.

Today, the most experienced and able heir apparent, a long-term henchman of Banda named John Tembo, who is Kadzamira’s uncle, is “also the most obviously disliked among Malawians,” says one experienced businessman here.

The reason has much to do with Tembo’s long association with Malawi’s Special Branch, the security service, and its long history of detentions and murders of Banda’s political opponents. Tembo is also thought to be the favored candidate of the South African government, which has enjoyed a close political relationship with Banda unique in southern Africa and considers Tembo the one most likely to continue the policy.

But there are also fledgling opposition groups thought to be headquartered in neighboring Zimbabwe, where Banda’s closeness to the South Africans has long grated.

Formerly head of the Reserve Bank of Malawi, Tembo today holds no public office. But he remains in the public eye as Banda’s official interpreter, standing at a microphone a few paces to the rear whenever the president gives a speech, translating Banda’s English into the native tongue of Chichewa, which Banda is said to have forgotten during his 40-year exile from the country.

Still, even Tembo’s stature is uncertain.

Said Leroy Vail, a historian of Malawi who has spent years teaching at its university: “One of the problems in closing down all thought in a country is you’re left with nothing but speculation.”

No one can gainsay that Banda is a remarkable man. At the age of 16, he marched on foot out of what was then Nyasaland to South Africa, working his way through school, college and medical school in the United States and Scotland.

By the 1950s, while he maintained a thriving medical practice in London, he was also issuing pamphlets critiquing the British administration of the Rhodesia and Nyasaland Federation. The British plan, he perceived, was to profit from the two countries’ mineral and agricultural wealth by exploiting the cheap black labor of Nyasaland.

As a well-known African nationalist who did his work at a distance, Banda seemed someone the radical nationalists inside the country could easily manipulate. This view may have prevailed even when they found Banda referring to them as “my boys.” But it was soon clear that the relationship he had in mind was less one of the affectionate grandfather than the imperious Caesar.

Since then, he has cut his own path in African politics. Banda long ago established formal diplomatic relations with South Africa. When other African leaders reproached him, he charged them with hypocrisy for not acknowledging, as he did, that they all shared an economic dependence on South Africa. When Banda decided to implement his dream of a sterile new capital at Lilongwe on Malawi’s central plains, the South Africans put up the money.

The Malawi that Banda created combined some of the most progressive policies in Africa with some of the most sinister. Sliced off from the British-ruled Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland at the time of independence in 1964, Malawi lacked the mineral resources of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), or the agricultural productivity of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

Yet in the next 15 years, the country experienced a rate of economic growth among the highest in the region. Banda had his abstemious people planting tobacco, tea and sugar for export and tilling so much land for corn that until recently Malawi had to import no food.

But economically, Malawi remains particularly vulnerable to outside forces. Its three export crops are among the most volatile in price; the country’s long record of economic advance halted abruptly in the 1980s when the price of tea collapsed, a drought cut sharply into corn yields and interest rates on its heavy foreign debt soared.

Compounding the problem was the Mozambican war, which shut down Malawi’s shipping access to the Indian Ocean. The necessity of sending its goods to market by way of South Africa has added more than $100 million a year to its transportation costs.

“Two years ago, we were hitting rock bottom and there was very little Malawi could do,” says Harry Thomson, a Malawian who heads the country’s Chamber of Commerce. International lenders helped by renegotiating the country’s debt to cut its interest and principal burden by two-thirds. Commodity prices crept up. But the country’s economy is still woefully dependent on tobacco above all else.

Moral Values

A Presbyterian, Banda imparted his own moral values to the population. To this day, women are prohibited from wearing trousers or skirts that expose the knee; tourists who step off the plane in violation of the edict are politely handed a swath of bright cloth to wrap around their legs. Men are similarly expected to keep their hair shorn above their collars.

Still, the Malawians have won a reputation for honesty and generosity, not least for their selfless assistance to the more than 600,000 refugees who have flooded their land over the last two years in flight from neighboring Mozambique’s civil war.

Yet there has long been a measure of overstatement in Malawi’s reputation for efficiency. The country’s single-minded cultivation of corn as food indeed allowed it to feed its people, but on a diet so unbalanced that malnourishment has been a chronic problem.

Headed since its birth by a highly educated physician, Malawi has Africa’s fourth-highest infant mortality rate; its life expectancy, at 45 years, is among the continent’s lowest.

Banda founded one of Africa’s most remarkable schools, Kamuzu Academy. Designed along the lines of an English private school, this so-called “Eton of Africa” may be the only place in the Third World where classical Greek and Latin are cornerstones of the curriculum.

But in truth, the country’s educational system is a shambles. It is the only country south of the Sahara where literacy rates have actually declined in the last 15 years. Of the country’s primary-school graduates, a meager 5% go on to secondary school.

“His Excellency has said that secondary education is a privilege, not a right, and only the best should be allowed to go,” says one missionary heading a church school outside Blantyre. But even the best are often left behind, for all those who pass their primary-school exams are subjected to a lottery for the scarce seats in secondary school.