OPINION| Why I Don’t Celebrate Kamuzu Day
Today, the flags fly high, the politicians speak with affected reverence, and school children sing songs of national pride. It’s Kamuzu Day in Malawi—a public holiday dedicated to celebrating the life and legacy of Hastings Kamuzu Banda, the self-proclaimed Ngwazi, the ‘founding father’ of the nation.
But I do not celebrate. I cannot.
To celebrate Kamuzu Day is, for me, to participate in a national amnesia—a willful forgetting of the bloodied footprints that littered the road to this so-called independence. It is to silence the screams of those who were detained without trial, disappeared without trace, or exiled into oblivion for daring to dream of a Malawi that didn’t revolve around the whims of one man and his iron-fisted regime.
I write not from abstraction but from lived experience. I was one of the exiled. My family was one of the many who fled the tightening grip of Kamuzu’s paranoid authoritarianism. For us, Malawi was not the warm heart of Africa. It was a land lost to fear—a place where expressing a different idea could cost you your home, your freedom, even your life.
In 1996, I saw him. Old, frail, and barely conscious of his surroundings at Mudi House in Blantyre, surrounded by sycophants and a dying cult of personality. He was nearing the end of his days, propped up like a relic of a vanishing age. Still, they tried to imbue the moment with a veneer of reverence. A regal chair. A crowd of loyalists. Hollow chants of “long live Ngwazi!” (how dare they, I thought. The man was nearing 100!). A desperate attempt to restore some vestige of dignity to a man who had robbed so many of theirs.
And yet, here we are in 2025, treating this man not as a cautionary tale but as a national icon.
What madness is this?
Kamuzu Banda’s legacy is not a singular story of triumph. It is a complicated mosaic stained with blood and broken dreams. Yes, he led Malawi to formal independence from Britain. But at what cost? His Malawi Young Pioneers, the dreaded MYP, acted as his personal militia, silencing dissent through terror. His prisons bulged with political prisoners. His assassins hunted exiled voices across borders. He ruled through fear, not consent.
We have, somehow, managed to forget—or worse, forgive—this history. We have constructed statues and renamed highways. We’ve built a mausoleum on Capital Hill, right at the seat of government, as if to say: “This is the kind of leadership we revere.”
And yet, where are the monuments to the real heroes of our democratic struggle? Where are the memorials for Orton Chirwa, co-founder of the MCP and Malawi’s first black lawyer and a man who believed in justice before he was abducted from Zambia and left to die in Kamuzu’s jail? Where are the gravestones for the Chisiza brothers, Masauko Chipembere, Kanyama Chiume, Aleke Banda—all men who challenged Banda’s tyranny and paid the price?
What about the Mwanza Four—Aaron Gadama, Dick Matenje, Twaibu Sangala, and David Chiwanga—who vanished and were later found dead under mysterious circumstances in 1983? Their families continue to grieve in silence while we throw wreaths at the feet of their suspected tormentor.
And every year, we expect these families to join in our national delusion, to celebrate a man whose hands were, at the very least, symbolically soaked in the blood of their loved ones.
It is a profound betrayal.
A nation that refuses to remember all sides of its history risks losing its moral compass. Kamuzu Banda was not just a founding father. He was also a father of fear. And our reverence for him, without a full reckoning, makes mockery of the suffering of thousands.
It is not that we should erase Kamuzu from our history. We cannot—and should not. But to celebrate him without context, without acknowledging the pain, is not nation-building. It is a lie.
Perhaps one day, we will commemorate Kamuzu Day not with praise, but with introspection. We will teach our children about his achievements and his atrocities. We will build monuments for the forgotten. We will inscribe the names of the exiled, the jailed, and the murdered into our national consciousness.
Until then, I will not celebrate.
_________________________________
Jack McBrams
Journalist | Thought Leader | Strategic Communications & PR Expert | Social Justice Advocate
