The folly of romanticising despots

Ngwazi Dr H. Kamuzu Banda, as our founding president preferred to be called, was rather quite an enigmatic a figure. For someone who lorded over us for some good three decades, it is simply incredible how little Malawians ‘intimately’ knew the man. This was not an accident of course. It was all part of a carefully designed persona, steeped in mythical obscurity, meant to keep Malawians in check. So successful was this project that most Malawians at the time grew up believing that any dissident whisper would be picked up by the walls and trees around them and somehow waft in the gentle breeze into the mighty Ngwazi’s ears at the opulent Sanjika Palace. The Ngwazi literally defined life as they knew it. Heck! Dr Banda owned everything they surveyed! Including, naturally, the very piece of earth on which their tiny and sorry feet were planted. And so it was generally in this spirit of things that 14 May was plucked from thin air and declared to be a public holiday in celebration of the great leader’s birthday. No one was of course bold enough to interrogate the historical accuracy of the ‘birthday’ claim. Well, at least not openly. Only idiots tempted fate in that fashion during those days.

But like much of the Kamuzu symbology, the ‘birthday’ was done away with in the euphoria that engulfed the country at the dawn of the so called second republic in May 1994. So strong was the anti-Kamuzu sentiment at that time that anything seen as dismantling of his dark legacy was wildly cheered on regardless of its merit. So Kamuzu’s name on public infrastructure was quickly scrapped off and replaced with something else. Never mind that in the intervening years the infrastructure itself was allowed to rot away in neglect. Prisons notorious for holding the Life President’s political enemies, real or assumed, were shut down in an exuberant display of presidential populism. The fact that the prisons held other non-political prisoners who would then need to be transferred and crammed into already over-stretched correctional facilities was hardly mentioned to the new man in charge. If it was, then it must have contemptuously been waved away.

The trajectory of public benevolence was quickly reversed. The people, who for years had been forced to part with their hard earned chickens, or if they were lucky just eggs, as gifts for their Kamuzu, now found themselves at the receiving end of presidential charity. Soon they were being showered with new K50 notes at public rallies. That was, of course, if they were lucky enough to hold on to one in the mad scramble that usually followed the ‘donation’. How people never saw the debasement in money being thrown at them for it to be fought for like one would do with bananas at caged apes is beyond me. It is fair to say that with each passing year during the first decade after the reintroduction of multiparty democracy, the coldness towards Kamuzu somewhat thawed. What was to follow during the subsequent 10 years, however, would have made the Orton Chirwas, the Atati Mpakatis and the Gadamas of this world turn in their graves.

On the face of it, it is rather difficult to understand Bingu wa Mutharika’s morbidly enthusiastic embrace of Kamuzu. This is particularly so if one believes the claims that Bingu himself made that he had fled the country in the 1960s, fearing for his life, after policy disagreements with Dr Banda. One would thus think that he was just as well placed as anyone to make the correct call about Dr Banda’s legacy. The simplest explanation for Bingu’s rather strange behaviour was that it was all politics. He was in the middle of a fierce feud with his mentor and political patron Bakili Muluzi over who would be calling the shots in government post 2004 and wanted to find a political foothold to sustain himself. Since conventional wisdom had it that Muluzi’s bastion of political power was the Southern region, Bingu’s overtures to Kamuzu must have been a shrewd move to endear himself to the latter’s kinsmen in the centre.

And so began the most comprehensive project to rehabilitate Dr Banda. His name that had so unceremoniously been knocked off several public buildings and facilities was restored in the splendour of a presidential decree. The project to construct his mausoleum, in respect of which the United Democratic Front administration had shown only a modicum of cosmetic interest, took off with gusto. An imposing statute of the former head of state was unveiled. There was even talk of the former president’s official portrait hanging side by side with that of President Mutharika. Bingu even went to the ludicrous extent of prefixing the former head of state’s title before his own name. And of course, the dubious ‘birthday’ was reintroduced as a public holiday. How Bingu ended makes one wonder, of course, if the motivation for the cosying up to the Ngwazi was just a cunning political move or whether it was a result of some sincere admiration on his part of the first president’s ways. His impatient references to the need for public ‘discipline’, in response to charges of autocracy, and his authentic bemusement at our opposition to the same had an eerie sound of someone who was truly nostalgic about the darkest days of Kamuzu’s reign.

To date, the romanticism of Kamuzu has continued unabated. There are no signs that the current administration will change tack and radically depart from the course set by Mutharika. Otherwise we wouldn’t have been celebrating the Ngwazi’s ‘birthday’ this year, would we?

That Kamuzu was a pioneering nationalist cannot be disputed. His role in ‘developing’ the country certainly needs to be acknowledged. But we wrong ourselves if we merely stop there. We need to remind each other that his was a particularly repressive regime that visited some of the most colourful atrocities on the people he was supposed to be serving. The many whose promising lives were snuffed out by his pervasive security apparatus should not be forgotten. The thousands of Jehovah’s Witnesses who were exiled from their country for simply refusing to buy party cards should not be shoved aside in our rush to ‘honour’ Dr Banda. We owe it to the many nameless ones who spent uncertain and terrifying nights behind the walls of Mikuyu Prison to tell the whole story. And of course we must not forget folks from the ‘dead north’ who were victims of systemic purges from both the civil service and educational institutions every now and then. The list of the egregious human rights violations that this ‘great leader’ committed against ‘his people’ is depressingly long one must say. But it would do his admires no harm if they refreshed their memory by looking at it and the stark reality that it represents.

An obsession with the truth and nothing but the whole truth should not be mistaken for vengeance. It’s important to point this out because ever since Kamuzu’s so-called apology for his atrocities in 1996, any attempt to reopen discomforting inquiries about the old man’s time at State House is met with slanderous accusations about the inquirer’s malicious intent. Milan Kundera once wrote that ‘the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’. Celebrating Kamuzu’s ‘birthday’ the way we do now risks consigning his regime’s excesses to some amorphous bin of irrelevance. And that, countrymen, will be our ultimate tragedy because whatever constitutional edifice we sought to put in place in 1994 was supposed to ensure that our ‘difficult past’ was never repeated. If we forget this ‘difficult past’ as we are likely to if this travesty of blindly celebrating Kamuzu is not arrested, we are surely ‘condemned to repeat it’.

History, sadly, is often the product of the dominant voices in society. Of those who control the ‘narrative’. Malawians must be wary of their leaders telling it not as it was. We must wake up to the fact that the picture that our politicians try to paint of Kamuzu Banda is one borne out of political convenience. It is an imperfect caricature of the real despot that Kamuzu was and it does violence to the memory of the many victims of his authoritarianism. History, for it to be accurate and authentic, if at all it’s capable of such, must be told in its totality. We must celebrate our glorious past, whatever that means, without smoothing its coarse contours. We need to look at our yesterday in the eye—with all its attendant inconveniences, embarrassment and painful truth—and hold its gaze. We owe ourselves that at least. 14 May does not help our memory’s struggle against forgetting. It should hardly be surprising that our corporate struggle against power is similarly in a moribund state.

Khumbo Bonzoe Soko is a Malawian lawyer currently studying for a post-graduate degree at the University of Warwick, Coventry, UK, and is a regular social and political commentator on in Malawi.

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