I SPENT the greater part of last week on assignment in Lilongwe, Malawi.
It was a hectic week, but on the last day, I managed to squeeze a few hours for tourism rituals.
My hosts left it entirely to my discretion on where to visit.
As I only had a couple of hours I advised Francis, the driver, that we would do the Bingu International Conference Centre (BICC) and the local market, their Mbare equivalent.
The former had, together with the Bingu Stadium, stood out during my morning trips to the hosting office in Lilongwe, as beacons of resistance to the widely held view that Malawi is looking downhill under the current leadership.
The latter would provide me with opportunity to pick out a few African print fabrics for the clan back home.
As soon as we were out of my hosts’ earshot, my Francis insisted on taking me to the Kamuzu Banda mausoleum first.
He reasoned my trip to Lilongwe would be incomplete without this pilgrimage.
In a polite, but very firm voice, he did not wait for my consent to change the itinerary.
Soon I was at the monument, a half a dozen workers relaxing in the lush green lawns and not another visitor in sight.
An enthusiastic guide took me and Francis on a tour of the monument.
To my utter surprise, I learnt during the tour that this was Francis’s first visit to the monument opened a decade ago.
I found his passionate persuasiveness in getting me to visit something he had never been to very strange.
The guide explains that Hastings Kamuzu Banda was born in 1898 and died less than 12 months before becoming a centenarian.
His Kamuzu (root/kamudzi) middle name comes from the fact that he was conceived with aid of herbs, mwana wemitombo.
By the end of the tour, we had heard all his early life struggles, his foot-journey to South Africa via the then Southern Rhodesia as a labourer, medical studies in the US and UK (1930s/1940s), political activism in the 1950s including imprisonment at Gwelo (Gweru) prison, how he subsequently became independent Malawi’s first Prime Minister in 1964 and later Life President before embracing multi-party democracy, losing the subsequent 1994 elections and finally passing on in 1997 in South Africa.
Under the Bingu waMutharika Government, much was done to restore the dignity and legacy of Banda.
The Banda legacy, symbolised by the mausoleum’s four pillars, was given as; Unity, Loyalty, Obedience and Discipline.
By the end of the tour, I had not had a chance to see the mausoleum which had to be closed soon after commissioning on cultural considerations.
What visitors see though is a replica tomb on top of the now closed mausoleum.
The tour though was a story in a way at variance with the Banda legacy I had accumulated over time.
There was no mention of bees, age discrepancies (officially born in 1906 and baptised in 1905!), Cecilia Kadzamira (official hostess), children or the Shire River, the latter having been famed for hosting political opponents.
It was in the mid-1970s and later that I came to know of Malawi’s Banda.
A distant aunt of me brought her Malawian boyfriend/husband to the village for Christmas.
He had a radio and a collection of ‘records’ from which belted tunes like ‘aPhiri anabwela’.
He taught us ‘bum jive’.
He also spoke about Banda, Malawi’s black President, who owned a swarm of bees that he regularly set against his enemies.
Years after this Christmas, as we hunted for mice in Unyetu’s agricultural plains, we wondered aloud at why our liberation movement, ZANLA, could just not cut a bee deal with Banda and sort out Ian Smith.
During the tour, save for the origin of the name ‘Kamuzu’, nothing came close to resonating with my village view of magical Banda.
By the mid-1980s and at university, my positive cult image of Banda had given way to revulsion.
It was generally given in student union politics that Banda was a traitor who cut deals with the Portuguese and apartheid South Africa, thus derailing efforts to liberate southern Africa.
Matters came to a head in 1986 when Samora Machel died in a plane crash in South Africa on his way from a meeting in Malawi over the RENAMO insurgency. As students, we tried and convicted Banda and his imperialist friends for the heinous act.
We set out on a massive violent demonstration at the Malawian Embassy, South African Trade mission and American embassy.
We neither believed in, nor feared his swarm of bees.
Years later I found myself studying in the UK together with a colleague from Malawi.
He was a political/current affairs animal.
However, as soon as the subject of Malawi or Banda was thrown into a conversation, he would go dumb.
One day, as we watched television footage of Banda’s fall during the CHOGM summit in Harare, my Malawian colleague just rose and left the common room. We did not see him for days.
I found this quite intriguing.
A couple of years after Banda’s passing on, I was in Malawi and recounted to a senior civil servant there the strange behaviour of my Malawian UK colleague.
The senior civil servant perfectly understood, ascribing it to fear.
He himself confessed that even he and his wife could not trust each other to engage in a political conversation over the time.
He spoke of the Young Pioneers and crocodile feasts in Shire River.
Fear masquerading as Unity, Loyalty, Obedience and Discipline, I wondered.
As I took my last jog in down town Lilongwe in the midst of grinding poverty in sharp contrast to the impressive stadium and conference centre, I wondered whether Malawi would ever agree on the Banda legacy.