Introduction—Protectorate, Dictatorship, Democracy: Reflections on Malawi’s Past and Present

Malawi is often overlooked within the southern African region, seen as politically and economically weak as compared with its neighbours, and marginal in terms of its significance to the wider region, the African continent and the world beyond. During the years of British colonial rule (1891-1964), Nyasaland (colonial Malawi) was regarded in imperial circles as a ‘Cinderella colony’, an ‘imperial slum’ or a ‘colonial backwater’. After independence, Malawi endured a thirty-year period of authoritarian rule under Hastings Kamuzu Banda and the Malawi Congress Party (MCP). The newly independent African state seemed to betray the principles of the regional liberation struggles by collaborating with the apartheid regime in South Africa and the Portuguese in Mozambique. It also broke with convention by following its own course of economic development that emphasised increased agricultural production over urban and industrial growth. Malawi and its people are often stereotyped as passive despite important episodes of resistance, protest and solidarity running through the country’s colonial and post-colonial past. This edited volume challenges these narratives of Malawi’s past by showing how events in colonial Nyasaland, and later Malawi, were far more complex and significant than previously acknowledged. Malawi underwent a peaceful transition to multiparty democracy in the mid-1990s. Yet, concerns over economic instability and a fragile democracy endured. Since 2011, Malawi has experienced successive catastrophic environmental events, the death of a president in office, the inauguration of the first female president, the annulment of an election by the Supreme Court, large-scale political demonstrations, which have led to violence and deaths at the hands of the police and state security forces on several occasions, and notorious corruption scandals involving high-level politicians. Malawi has made international headlines in relation to gay rights, so-called harmful cultural practices, and the ongoing ‘cashgate’ corruption scandal. Since 2019, Malawi’s democracy has attracted more attention globally as the country’s opposition parties successfully challenged the legitimacy of the 2019 election through the Supreme Court. Nonetheless, little considered scholarship has been produced to put these more recent events in context.