Decision to uproot Banda prompts anger

A government decision to exhume the body of former leader Kamuzu Banda and to create a mausoleum for him has evoked anger in Malawi, the Canadian ‘Calgary Herald’ reported on Sunday.

Banda, who led Malawi for 30 years, was embalmed and buried in an airtight gold coffin on the outskirts of Lilongwe, Malawi’s capital, in 1997. However, according to the report, he is to be re-embalmed, placed in a see-through cabinet and placed before a high-tech viewing gallery in the nation’s most expensive building.

The decision, prompted by Banda’s party and family, has enraged critics, many of whom lost friends during a reign in which up to 7,000 political opponents disappeared, the report said. Banda, a diminutive medical doctor, practised in Harlesden, north London, before returning home in the the early 1960s. He quickly became an unpredictable chief, swapping his stethoscope for an ivory-handled fly whisk, and sporting a homburg and sunglasses at state occasions. Banda joked about throwing detractors to the crocodiles and once ordered the execution in a “road accident” of two governors of a school he founded for bright children. Police admitted crushing the victims’ heads with rocks before rolling their car over a precipice.