page_title: Hastings Banda
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Hastings Banda / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: Young Dr Banda
context_page_description: Hastings Kamuzu Banda was the Prime Minister and later President of Malawi from 1964–1994. In 1966, the country became a republic and he became president. His rule has been characterized as a "highly repressive autocracy."
  After receiving much of his education in ethnography, linguistics, history, and medicine overseas, Banda returned to Nyasaland to speak against colonialism and advocate independence from the United Kingdom. He was formally appointed Prime Minister of Nyasaland, and led the country to independence in 1964. Two years later, he proclaimed Malawi a republic with himself as president. He consolidated power and later declared Malawi a one-party state under the Malawi Congress Party. In 1970, the MCP made him the party's President for Life. In 1971, he became President for Life of Malawi itself.
  A renowned anti-communist leader in Africa, he received support from the Western Bloc during the Cold War. He generally supported women's rights, improved the country's infrastructure and maintained a good educational system relative to other African countries.
context_section_description: Kamuzu Banda was born Akim Kamnkhwala Mtunthama Banda near Kasungu in Malawi (then British Central Africa) to Mphonongo Banda and Akupingamnyama Phiri. His date of birth is unknown, as it took place when there was no birth registration. When presented with evidence of certain tribal customs by a friend, Dr. Donal Brody, Banda said: "No one knows the hour, the date, the month or the year in which I was born, although I now accept the evidence that you give me – March or April 1898."
  He left his village school near Mtunthama for his maternal grandparents' home and attended Chayamba Secondary School in Chikondwa. In 1908, he moved to Chilanga mission station and was baptized in 1910.
  The name Kamnkhwala, meaning "little medicine", was replaced with Kamuzu, which means "little root". The name Kamuzu was given to him because he was conceived after his mother had been given root herbs by a medicine man to cure infertility. He took the Christian name of Hastings after being baptised into the Church of Scotland by Dr. George Prentice, a Scot, in 1910, naming himself after John Hastings, a Scottish missionary working near his village whom he admired. The prefix "doctor" was earned through his education.
  Around 1915–16 Banda left home on foot with Hanock Msokera Phiri, an uncle who had been a teacher at the nearby Livingstonia mission school, for Hartley, Southern Rhodesia (now Chegutu, Zimbabwe). He apparently wanted to enrol at the famous Scottish Presbyterian Lovedale Missionary Institute in South Africa but completed his Standard 8 education without studying there. In 1917 he left on foot for Johannesburg in South Africa. He worked at the Witwatersrand Deep Mine on the Transvaal Reef for several years. During this time, he met Bishop William Tecumseh Vernon of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) who offered to pay his tuition fee at a Methodist school in the United States if he could pay his own passage. In 1925, he left for New York.
caption: A young Hastings Banda
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