Goodbye, Dr Banda

Alexander Chula

Polygon/Birlinn, £17.99, 320 pages

Reading Goodbye, Dr Banda is an initiation into an antique rite. Alexander Chula presents a highly agreeable history of Malawi, and introduces the reader to the life of Hastings Kamuzu Banda, its first president after independence from British rule in 1964. The narrative focuses upon Chula’s twin experiences as a teacher of Latin and Greek at the eponymous secondary school, Kamuzu Academy, and latterly as a medical doctor.

Kamuzu Academy was founded in 1981 in the village of Banda’s birth. Its purpose is to provide an English public school style education in the self-proclaimed “warm heart of Africa”. Until 1994 its students were the top-performing children from each local education board, regardless of financial means. This was estimated to cost a third of Malawi’s annual education budget, and with the demise of Banda came leaner times: the student bursary was largely cut and then completely withdrawn. Many of the expatriate teaching faculty withdrew and were replaced by native Malawian staff, with the exception of the Classics department, which is sustained largely by Oxford graduates.