Page 44 - 2020 SoM Journal Vol 73 No 1 FINAL_Neat

36 The Society of Malawi Journal

Fallout from the Fallacious Accusation of Hastings Kamuzu
Banda’s West African Origins, 1960

Brooks Marmon

Abstract:
In the early 1960s, it became clear that the nationalist movement in
colonial Malawi was gaining the upper hand in its political struggle to secede from
the minority dominated Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. White political
figures in Southern Rhodesia, the predominant body in that federation, began to
speculate publicly that the Malawian nationalist leader Hastings Kamuzu Banda
was actually a west African.
Active in pan-Africanist political circles for decades, Banda was the
doyen of the Federation’s nationalist movement. The allegations had no
substantive basis, and did not endure, but they prompted a brief flurry in Southern
Rhodesian political circles, with black nationalists at the highest levels vigorously
rebutting this attempt to discredit a then inspirational regional politician. This
trans-national debate transpired in various public forums, from parliament to the
media.
This paper traces the impact of this debate in the broader context of
Southern Rhodesia’s racial politics and the efforts of various political groupings
of the era to define and critique racial identities. In particular, it focuses on a
contentious exchange around this issue between a Federal Parliamentarian,
Humphrey Wightwick, and the Reverend Ndabaningi Sithole, a Zimbabwean
nationalist.

Introduction:
For several months in mid-1960, a contentious debate on the national
origins of the Malawian nationalist leader Hastings Kamuzu Banda raged in the
Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. 1 Unfounded allegations from a white
Federal MP of the right-wing opposition Dominion Party that Banda hailed from
west Africa dismayed the supporters of the future Malawian President. This
debate reached its zenith among the white settler politicians and their anti-colonial
nationalist opponents in the Federation’s capital, Salisbury (today’s Harare).
The rumour concerning Banda’s foreign origins lacked any substantive
basis and was promulgated by a politician patently eager to discredit the leader of
the Malawi Congress Party (MCP), which was at the vanguard of the regional
charge against the British Empire and the Federation. The grounds of the attacks

1 The Federation existed from 1953-63 and consisted of today’s Malawi,
Zambia, and Zimbabwe.