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

Abstract

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...