The Radical and Reactionary Politics of Malawi’s Hastings Banda: Roots, Fruit and Legacy

This article reconsiders the political thought and practice of Hastings Banda, prime minister and then president of Malawi from 1963 to 1994. Often side-lined and maligned in considerations of post-colonial African leaders for being an authoritarian comprador in service to western interests, the article suggests that Banda’s life and practice illustrates a complex interplay between two types of conservatism: a more radical anti-colonial conservatism, and a more reactionary post-colonial conservatism. This approach has important implications for how we consider independence-era African political leadership more generally, and for understanding contemporary public protest in Malawi, and more broadly. Mainstream scholarly interpretations of anti-government protests in Malawi in July 2011 presented them as a response to an uninterrupted continuum of authoritarianism in the country stretching back to Banda, playing on ideas of innate African autocratic tendencies. This article, however, argues that such comparisons result in an ahistorical consideration of post-colonial Malawi, leading to analyses that mistakenly suggest that protests in Malawi, as in other African countries in recent years, are the result of liberal rights claims, as opposed to a nostalgic and markedly different reclamation of the cultural, national and economic promises of African independence.