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 3
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 May 14 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 2nd 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’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 better 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 UDF 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
cozying 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 romatincism 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 so
called apology for his atrocities in 1996, any attempt to re-open 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 smoothening 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 less. May 14 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.
