Hastings Banda
Hastings Banda came home to Nyasaland in 1958 after forty-two years abroad, led it to independence as Malawi in six, and then ruled it for thirty as the last and most complete of the founding autocrats. He was born in a village near Kasungu around 1898 - he never knew the year - walked to South Africa as a teenager, worked in the Rand mines, and was put through school and medical college in the United States by American Methodists; he qualified again in Edinburgh, and practised as a doctor in the north of England and then in London through the war, a Presbyterian elder who kept a surgery in Harlesden and his country's politics in his sitting room. The Central African Federation of 1953, which yoked Nyasaland to the settler Rhodesias, was what brought him back: the young men of the Nyasaland African Congress wanted a leader with a reputation and he was the one they had. Within a year of landing he was in prison in Southern Rhodesia after the emergency of 1959, which made him, and Britain released him in 1960, gave him an election in 1961, and gave him the country in July 1964. He broke with his cabinet within weeks over his refusal to hurry Africanisation or break with Portugal and South Africa, and drove the dissidents into exile. He made himself president for life in 1971. What followed was a small, orderly, terrifying state: one party, women forbidden to wear trousers, men forbidden long hair, the press silent, the Malawi Young Pioneers as an armed youth wing. Opponents died in road accidents or, in 1983, were beaten to death in a case that was tried after his fall. He was the only African leader to keep diplomatic relations with apartheid South Africa, and was paid for it. The donors withdrew in 1992, the Catholic bishops read a pastoral letter against him from every pulpit, and a referendum in 1993 and an election in 1994 removed him at about ninety-six. He was tried for the 1983 murders and acquitted, and died in a Johannesburg clinic in 1997.
- Lived: 1898 CE – 1997 CE
- Nationality: Malawian
- Roles: head_of_state, head_of_government, physician
