*By Jimmy Kainja* Last week we had a public holiday in Malawi. May 14 is “Kamuzu Day,” when the nation celebrates the life of its founding president, Hastings Kamuzu Banda whose autocratic rule lasted between 1964 and 1994. The day has been there since Kamuzu’s reign, during which it was celebrated as his birthday. This despite […]
The historian Margery Perham once wrote that “the basic difficulty” with the British colonial technique of indirect rule, of which she was a major architect, was “the great gap between the culture of rulers and ruled.” “People do not understand what we want them to do,” she wrote, “or, if they understand, do not want […]
We had been studiously avoiding coverage of Madonna’s latest trip to Malawi, but such is the deliciousness of the excoriating 11-point press release put out yesterday by Joyce Banda that we couldn’t resist wading in. These two had previous — Madonna’s people had scapegoated Banda’s sister over a botched school project — and the latest […]
Guest Post by Jimmy Kainja* Joyce Banda, the fourth President of Malawi, is among this year’s Foreign Policy list of 100 Global Thinkers for “stepping in – and up – to fix a broken country” after her predecessor Bingu wa Mutharika died suddenly of a heart attack in April this year. She’s in there at Number 22, […]
When Bingu wa Mutharika was hospitalised in April it was at first extremely difficult to find reliable information about either his personal condition or the high drama of political theatre that was unfolding. By far the best place to go for this turned out to be Twitter, where a number of Malawian reporters posted live […]
In her first order of business since being inaugurated as Malawi’s new president on Saturday, Joyce Banda fired the country’s top policeman. No reason was given for the firing, but the BBC reports that the police chief, Peter Mukhito, was in charge last year during anti-government protests over the worsening economy.
