The Extremest Extremist

When he finally gave up his prosperous London practice to go home to Africa, after 40 years of self-imposed exile (TIME, July 21), Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda proudly adopted the title "the extremest of the extremists." A gnomelike little man who, as a youth, "wandered from university to university like a medieval scholar," in the U.S. and Scotland, he has more than lived up to his title. Though he speaks scarcely a word of his native tongue, he has stumped the countryside using translators (which seems to increase his prestige among his fellow blacks), railing at the British-sponsored federation of Nyasaland and the two Rhodesias.

"Art thou the second coming of Christ?" he is asked, and his admirers call him their messiah. To the whites, he is either the biggest demagogue to come down the pike, or a deluded mystic, and in either case dangerous. Never has Dr. Banda appeared in better--or worse--form than last week, on his return from Nkrumah's All-African Peoples Conference in Accra. The experience had been heady.

What About Cromwell? At Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, where his plane landed for a brief stop, he was detained by immigration officials for questioning. When he emerged from the examination room, his plane had left, and there was no other due to go to Nyasaland for two more days. But Dr. Banda made the most of his stay. At an airport press conference, he bluntly declared that he had no use for moderates. "What about your Oliver Cromwell?" he shouted at British reporters. "Was he a moderate? No. He was a fanatic." Then, gesturing wildly, he exclaimed: "I'm ready for prison any time, whether it be Makarios' cell in the Seychelles or Napoleon's St. Helena. Even your Winston Churchill was an extremist at one point."

That night Banda toured the city in a friend's car, grumbling all the while that he was "followed everywhere" by cops. At a mass meeting, he exhorted 3,000 wildly cheering fans: "Go to your prisons in your millions, singing Hallelujah." "Kwaca!" he cried to indicate the "dawn" of freedom. "Ufulu!" he roared, his face twitching, and the crowd roared back, "Ufulu! Ufulu! [freedom]." "My brothers and sisters in the hell of Southern Rhodesia," he cried, "I am prepared for anything. Even my ghost, my ashes will fight federation. Are you with me?" When the cries of "yes, yes" died down, Banda continued. The British, he said, wanted federation. "Why? So we can be herded into reserves like animals in our own country. Don't trust the missionaries. We must fill the prisons. That's the only way to get freedom. To hell with federation!"

You Are All Liars. As he finally started home to Nyasaland (a poor back country inhabited by 5,730 whites and 3,000,000 blacks), Dr. Banda held another press conference, which ended, in typical style, with his yelling at reporters: "I don't fawn on you. I think you are all a pack of liars." Then he rode on the roof of a car to the airport, as crowds scrambled to kiss his hand. At home another singing, dancing mob was waiting to greet him. Adopting a Napoleonic stance, Banda declared: "In Nyasaland, we mean to be masters, and if that is treason, make the most of it."

"We mean to get out of their damned federation," he said later. "You have today all the reactionary tories buying land in Southern Rhodesia--Lord So-and-So and the Duke of This-and-That--20 to 50 servants. They cannot do that in Britain, because 1945 finished that. There are European people in this country who think they must be lords and masters, and there are Indians who think they are better than we are. Well, that type of European and that type of Indian might as well pack up and go home now. We mean to be our own lords in our own house, in our own country and on our own continent of Africa."

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