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budget, and with the demise of Banda came leaner times: the student bursary was largely cut and then completely withdrawn.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.
Chula questions why Classics is taught at the school. He highlights Dr Banda’s fixation upon the moral lessons found in Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars. Recording the first Roman invasions of Britain in the summers of 55 and 54 BC, Caesar related “facts that subverted the authority of [Malawi’s colonial] oppressors”, by showing them as a conquered territory beneath the Roman yoke. Yet at one Founder’s Day celebration the student body were lectured upon the wickedness of empire by a (soon- to-be-expelled) British High Commissioner; before he could warm to his theme the audience “had already lost interest and begun muttering impatiently”. The legacy of colonialism sometimes weighs heavier upon the coloniser than the colonised.
So Chula searches further. He argues with some justification that “the classical world and the Malawian village might be closer to each other in spirit than either was to our own modern way of life”, in particular through his exploration of Gule Wamkulu, the Great Dance of the Nyau people. When the neophytes perform their gule, they wear the masks and inhabit the personality of the village spirits. Is this not similar to the great public funerals of pagan Rome? Perhaps, but while satisfying for the (classically) initiated, it is equally likely that to the general reader, such a comparison may largely draw a blank.
Equally confused are the students themselves. In its current arrangement, the school expects that one of the classical languages should be pursued to GCSE level. Many tie themselves in knots discerning whether Latin or Greek will help them better pursue a car-eer in medicine or the law. This may constitute part of the department’s self-preserving myth. In the lower school, similar confusion exists in the Caledonian inflections found in Ecce Romani, the Latin primer produced by the Scottish Classical Group. Many are baffled just as much by the word insula and its translation as “tenement”. It is as if Caesar’s Gallic Wars have been transmitted to the African hinterland via the Edinburgh of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
In addition to the reasons presented, the reader should consider the role of Christianity, on which the author is disinclined to linger. Chula, by his own admission, is “a member of no church”. For this reason he fails to reckon with Banda’s Presbyterianism, experienced today at the Academy by the presence of a chaplain who by statute is member of “The Church of Central Africa Presbyterian”. The students are offered a rich exposure that spans a variety of Christian traditions and is bolstered through the work of the Classics department, which teaches Greek with the ambition of encouraging the students to engage with the Christian story as it was first written down, while the great hymns of the early Church can be rendered in their original Latin.
Western readers may learn much about their own preconceptions and history through the pages of this wonderfully witty book, sub- titled “Lessons for the West from a Small African Country”.
Timothy Moller is a doctoral student at Wolfson College, Oxford, and previously taught Classics at Kamuzu Academy.
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