NYASALAND: Return of the Native

• Share

As he got off the big Viscount at Blantyre-Limbe's airport, the aging, European-garbed man uttered only one word. But the word was enough to send into a frenzy the 4,000 wildly excited Negroes who had come to greet him. "Kwaca! Kwaca! Kwaca!" they roared back, screaming the African nationalist slogan that means dawn (i.e., the beginning of freedom). They draped their hero in a ceremonial leopard skin, carried him on their shoulders to a car, yelled and beat tom-toms as he drove off, escorted by red-robed young "freedom fighters" on motorcycles. Thus last week, after 40 years of self-imposed exile, Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda, 53—"savior, liberator and messiah"—came home.

Having long cultivated the air of a man of mystery, Banda has become something of a legend among African nationalists. A member of the Chewa tribe and a mission-school boy, he ran away at 13 "to acquire an education, because today one does not fight with spears: one fights with knowledge." At first his parents thought he must have been devoured by lions. Only months later did they learn that he had walked barefoot 1,000 miles to Johannesburg, where he got a job in a gold mine. While studying at night, he somehow managed to scrape together enough money to get to the U.S., where he lived for twelve years. He worked his way through college, earned an M.D., and then, being a devout member of the Scottish kirk, went on to the University of Edinburgh. By 1952 Hastings Banda, Ph.B., B.Sc., M.B., Ch.B., M.D., L.R.C.S., had a prosperous practice of 4,000 patients, mostly white, just outside London.

New Broom. Over the years he kept close tabs on the leaders and chiefs of his native land (where the blacks outnumber whites nearly 400 to 1). He constantly denounced the British plan for forming a federation of Nyasaland and the two Rhodesias (where there are more white settlers), insisted that the Colonial Office continue to rule Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland until the two countries were ready for independence. When the federation went through, Banda sold his practice, moved to the Gold Coast, to Kumasi in the land of the Ashanti. There he became a friend of Kwame Nkrumah and an admirer of Ghana's fight for independence. Finally, this year, he decided that the time had come for him to go home and become a Nkrumah to his people.

Last week at a huge Baraza given in his honor, Banda watched members of the Angoni tribe perform their Liguto war dance, for two hours accepted gifts from all over Nyasaland, including a new broom to "sweep out the federation." Then, silhouetted against the sunset, he launched into a speech. "The federation," he cried, "was imposed by European settlers who fought the Colonial Office so they could have power over us, just as Europeans in the Union of South Africa have power over our unfortunate fellow Africans there." Then he announced that he would resume the practice of medicine.