Britain's Misguided Shame

A discussion with Alexander Chula on The Rasheed Griffith Show

Shem Best

and

Rasheed Griffith

Nov 01, 2024

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Show notes

The role of the Church in dismantling the slave trade must not be understated. This is just one of many hard truths we examine in this episode featuring British writer and medical doctor, Alexander Chula. In his book "Goodbye Dr. Banda: Lessons for the West from a Small African Country", Dr. Chula guides us through harmful misconceptions about Western culture.

Western culture, the Classics and many of its trappings were not simply tools of subjugation. To frame them solely as such is to apply a reductionist view of a much broader and complex history where they were also tools of enlightenment and civilization building. In his book, Dr Chula introduces one such prolific character who recognized the utility of Western culture and used it to enrich and spotlight his own country's literary prowess. Malawi's first prime minister, Hastings Banda serves as the focal point for understanding the true role of Western influence via colonialism in Central Africa.

His own history and initiatives on return to his homeland provide insight on the contributions of the Church of England, not via force but through countless missionaries who sought to bring development to the region by appealing to humanity.

Fast forward to the present, and these contributions have been almost entirely forgotten or overlooked. In its place is a regrettable sense of guilt, guiding the narrative solely on emotion, rather than empirical evidence and manifesting via counterproductive reparations movements. How did we get here?

Alexander Chula on X

Full Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated by AI and lightly edited by our team. We don’t catch every error, so if you spot one, send us a message/email via shem@cpsi.org.

Rasheed: Thank you so much, Alexander, for coming on the podcast today.

Alexander: Thank you very much for having me, Rasheed.

Rasheed: So, I'm going to start in a very straightforward question. What did you find in Dr. Banda's abandoned castle in a derelict chest on a hill in Malawi?

Alexander: Yes, so this is the scene which opens my book. I should explain that I was, at the time, you might say I'm a medical doctor and I've worked in Malawi in that capacity, but my first acquaintance with Malawi was when I went there to teach Latin and Greek, as bizarre as that sounds.

And while I was there, I explored the ruined palace, which lay about 30 miles away from the academy where I was teaching, where I lived, which had belonged to Hastings Banda, the eccentric and notorious dictator who had founded this academy to promote the study of classics in Central Africa. And we were there to catalogue the library.

And when I went in, it gratified every hope I might have had for the experience. It was abandoned. There were baboons scuttling around on the forecourt as I arrived, there were wild bees nested in a corner of the room, bric a bracs scattered everywhere, and this extraordinary collection of classical books.

And I spent a couple of days cataloging it, but it was only on the very last, my very last sweep of the place that I was exploring this strong room attached to the library. And I had to do it by torchlight because the electricity had being cut off long ago to the palace. And amidst all of these disordered papers and boxes, I found portraits, dusty, battered oil portraits of Mugabe, of Nyerere, of Gadaffi and underneath all of them was a treasure chest, I mean a proper oak treasure chest bound in leather and brass.

And I took it out to the sunlight and opened it to find a 1584 edition of Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars printed by the Venetian Aldean Press, in other words one of the most celebrated presses of the Renaissance. And so that is the question that opens my book is how did this extraordinary talisman of Western culture come to find itself on a mountainside in the middle of Central Africa.

Rasheed: And that sets the stage quite nicely for the general meta concept of the book. And we're going to obviously dive into that. But before we do that, I'm curious, what's your explanation for why exactly did Dr. Banda have such an interest in promoting classical literature in Malawi at its extremely low stage of development?

Alexander: Before we need to delve into some of the historical context here, first of all, who is Hastings Kamuzu Banda ? He is born into the Chewa tribe in the late 1890s, when it has just become a part of the British Empire as a protectorate. And he comes from a family of peasants who are living by subsistence farming, in which, among whom literacy until maybe just a couple of years before was completely unknown.

And he receives basic education from Scottish missionaries who are in the area. And this awakens this extraordinary appetite for learning in him. And he's determined because he recognizes his own intelligence and capacity to learn to set off on foot for South Africa where he is hoping to get to a mission station called Lovedale, which at that time offered what was reputed to be the best education available to black Africans anywhere on the continent including, specifically, in Latin and Greek, and that was something it was famous for. And so Banda walks the 1, 500 miles or so to South Africa. He never makes it, though, to Lovedale. He ends up having to work in the mines on the Rand in Joburg. But when he's there, he's also taking evening classes, supplementing his education, and he gets a scholarship to go to America.

And in America, he embarks on 12 years of full time adult education sponsored by a church, church sponsors. And this begins with liberal arts, with classics, with history, with literature. He then does quite a lot of anthropology. He takes a degree in history. And only then does he switch into doing medicine.

He's really immersing himself in the richness of Western culture. He then comes to the UK, he has a full career, pretty much, as a GP, a family doctor in the UK. And it's only in his late 50s, early 60s that he becomes politically active. The winds of change bring him back to Malawi, where he's by far and away the most qualified man to run the country.

But because he's got this background in Western culture, which he's come to admire so much, he's determined that this needs to be, this should be developed in Malawi as well. And I think the motivations for this are psychologically and historically quite complicated. What then happens is he then rules Malawi for 30 years as dictator for life and begins various programs to promote classical education, including at the university, which he founds.

And then in the final decade of his rule, he sets up this wildly extravagant project called Kamuzu Academy, which is an academy modeled on Eton College in the middle of the Malawian bush at the site of the very Kachere tree under which he'd received his childhood lessons from missionaries.

And at enormous expense, this school is there to educate the country's brightest pupils, boys and girls, whoever performs best in local exams throughout from each district of the country in Latin and Greek. And this is done at a cost of some 14, 000 U. S. dollars per year. This is in the 1980s, at a time when the government allocation of spending on the education of children in ordinary state schools in Malawi is 17 dollars per year.

And at the opening ceremony, Banda stands up for this podium and addresses this enormous crowd of pupils and masters, but also dancing women assembled, Angoni warriors, Gule Wamkulu dancers, and a throng of villagers who have wandered from far and wide to observe this spectacle. And he proclaims to them, anyone who is not interested in learning Latin and Greek has no place at this school.

And he then proceeds to declaim page after page of Caesar's Gallic Wars in Latin. Now he's already got a minister who's having to translate his English into Chechewa for the local population. With the Latin, the minister just tells him in Chichewa, "you heard what Komuzu said", and leaves it at that. But you can see why this provoked such a strong reaction amongst postcolonial thinkers, because there is obviously an element of absurdity to the whole project, but worse than that it was perceived as grotesque, as wasteful, elitist, absurd.

And also you get figures like the Kenyan critic Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o denouncing this as the paradigm of the colonized mind in pretty much the first chapter of his book on that subject. There's a grain of truth in all of these accusations, but what I've tried to show in the book is, although there is a grain of truth there, what also mustn't be forgotten is that Banda is also a very intelligent, highly educated man, with experiences of both Africa and the West that are virtually unique for an African leader of that period, or indeed any leader of any period.

And dismissing it merely as the colonized minds in the manner of, say, Idi Amin fancying himself the last king of Scotland. It seems to me a rather facile and slightly high handed dismissal of his project. And the next thing that my book is really trying to convey, which is that this project of Banda's, it sounds, when you first hear about it, like this is some total aberration, a perverse obsession of his own that comes out of nowhere.

But when you delve into the historical context of Malawi, you in fact discover that this is entirely consistent with a tradition of high academic ambition, which begins with the first missionary contact with Malawi in the 1850s and 60s and remains a constant throughout that exchange between Malawi and the Westerners who engage with it.

And Banda is really trying to build on that tradition and preserve it.

Rasheed: Do you have an insight into why Banda, as a strong proponent of classical literature as cultural transmission, seems to have a passion for Western modes of education, but clearly not Western modes of government? Do you have an insight into why you think Banda was so reluctant to have a more democratic state of Malawi in the very early development period?

Alexander: Or indeed throughout his rule. There is an extraordinary arrogance to Banda. Banda is a classic African dictator. It will not surprise anyone to learn that he had grievous, grievous faults, which I certainly do not shy away from. There is brutality, there is corruption, there is mismanagement, and there is dictatorship very early on.

And that's tied in with, yes, this supreme arrogance that he and he alone is qualified to run the country. But at the same time, it is understandable because his experience of the wider world and his education did far surpass that of pretty much all of his rivals in the political scene, and not just in Malawi, but on the international African stage.

Banda was certainly initially hugely respected by other African leaders whom he has actually, in some cases, fostered when he's working in London. His suburban house in North London becomes something of a focal point with anti colonial activists dropping in and dropping out, along with members of the Labour party and the Fabian Society, all through the 1940s and 50s.

And so he befriends Nyerere, Kenyatta, but in fact he is perceived initially at least by most of them as their superior because first of all he's older which counts for a lot but because he is actually more experienced. So he's something of a sort of avuncular figure with these figures of course as his politics becomes more reactionary and conservative and in particular when he makes Malawi the only black African state to align itself with apartheid South Africa they, of course, shun him and distance themselves from him very promptly. But up until that point, he is very widely admired and I think he succumbs to the same spirit that most of those peers of his do, that they are, yes, the only people capable of directing the countries that they've come to rule.

Rasheed: Why did Banda ally with apartheid South Africa?

Alexander: So his argument was that apartheid could only be broken down in South Africa through engagement, through positive engagement. His basis for this was his own peculiar experiences in America and in Britain. In America, he found himself in a very unusual situation. In particular when he was in some of the southern states, he found that although he was black, he was mysteriously exempted from the contempt and ill treatment which he saw black Americans being subjected to by white people.

And he was adopted by a black American surgeon who became a great inspiration in his life. And this surgeon, called Walter Bailey, impressed upon him as a young man, that if you are extremely competent, educated, and you do your job extremely well, then you will have the respect of white and black alike.

Because he had a practice in which he had white and black patients. And Banda basically absorbs this as something of a personal motto. Now the problem is it may work just about for Banda, and it works for the overwhelming majority of people who have had less extraordinary opportunities to educate and advance themselves.

But that is, I think, quite deep in his mentality. He's also without, to a great extent, the feeling of acrimony towards white South Africans, white Africans, white colonialist that characterizes a lot of the rest of the politics in the post colonial period. When he goes to the UK, for example, he really contrasts his experience in Britain with his experience in the US.

Now in America, in Nashville, Tennessee, he's actually witnessed a lynching. When he goes to the UK, he can't believe how open and welcoming society is, especially when he goes to Scotland, which is the country that almost furnishes him with a surrogate identity. He goes first to Edinburgh. And not only is he not excluded from society, he becomes something of a local celebrity and he really opens up.

And he even writes to his colleagues back in Malawi saying, "You won't believe it when you come here. The way I'm treated as an equal, it's just extraordinary". And the chief that he writes to comes and visits him in the UK. And when he gets back to Malawi, he writes to Bandar i Ganon and says, I didn't believe you when you wrote those letters to me, but when I came and visited, I saw for myself that it was true.

So because he's had these sort of contrasting experience. He doesn't have the same preoccupation with Western racism that others in the same period have acquired. The result of that, though, is that he can approach South Africa with a, I suppose, a distance from the sensitivity of the alliance. There's also a way in which I suspect he feels a certain satisfaction in his aloofness from that, and that's very much tied into his high handedness and his arrogance, that he feels he's a special case that's actually above the experiences of ordinary black Africans, and that's why he can consort.

And so when he goes to South Africa. They give him a 21 gun salute. He's there pictured having tea with the President of South Africa at Groote Schuur. But from a practical point of view, what he's hoping to achieve is investment. And basically, the South Africans are delighted because it's diplomatic gold dust for them to have a black African country that aligns itself with them.

And in return, they pay for his new capital and a lot of other infrastructure besides. So that's the practical side of it.

Rasheed: You mentioned earlier in passing, you do discuss in the book, that the approach of Banda towards classical education was quite looked down upon and attacked, not only by fellow Africans, but also Westerners, even then. And ironically, that would likely still happen today. What was the arguments used by Western people, or Westerners, British, or even Americans, that this should not really be occurring?

Why waste the time and the money, in particular, trying to teach poor Africans classical literature?

Alexander: I suppose on one level, it does seem obvious. Malawi is a fantastically poor country. It usually hovers around the place of being about the fifth poorest country in the world. It's, people endure extraordinary material hardships.

It's a world of preventable disease, of illiteracy, of infant mortality, and it's, Western involvement since independence, and especially since the fall of Banda, has really been focused on how to improve the material conditions of people in Malawi. And it's notoriously the country that Rory Stewart mentioned as having received a four and a half billion pounds of UK aid money and yet somehow ended up being poorer than when it started.

It's so natural to want to focus on trying to improve the desperate material conditions there and why in contrast to that focusing on classics seems so grotesque and absurd, elitist and wasteful. And it's very difficult to counter those accusations. The one thing though that I think is noteworthy is that.

They're all exactly the same accusations that I've heard leveled against classics being taught in the West. So my suspicion, and this is based also on my own experiences of studying classics at Oxford, which I describe in the book, is there is something deeper here. It's not merely a preoccupation with how to improve conditions in Malawi.

It is also a problem that Westerners have with the study of their own culture.

Rasheed: And what is that problem, exactly do you think?

Alexander: So, Classics, in particular, in Britain, Classical education has become, say, tainted because of its association with the imperial past. The fact that Classics was seen as the educational basis which equipped young British men to go out and rule the empire.

And also because within Britain, of its elitist associations that it's especially its association with the public school system and Oxbridge. And I think there's a powerful resistance to all of those. I think that there is also something deeper. I think there's a growing embarrassment about our culture in general, which is the result of both being uninformed and misinformed about that culture.

For a long time, education has neglected the classics outside the elite sphere. It's neglected the teaching of more recent European culture as well. And also there have been, I think, active efforts to disparage that culture within the educational system. People are left feeling doubtful about the value of European, especially English culture, and its classical antecedents.

And not merely doubtful about its value, but actually inclined to wonder whether it might have been a bad culture, responsible for so much wickedness in the world, inequality, imperialism, slavery, and so on. And I suppose the reason I wanted to focus on Malawi is because it offers an extremely unusual case study in the sort of culture that Westerners have exported to the rest of the world.

Because Malawi has experienced the whole gamut of Westerners down the ages, starting with David Livingstone and the early missionaries through the colonial era when it's part of the British Empire, up to the present day when it's experienced as chiefly through tourists, international development, industry professionals. And I think the view that we flatter ourselves today that we are now respectful, passionately curious, open minded about other cultures, and we contrast this with the bad old days of the past when our forebears were bigoted Eurocentric cultural imperialists.

But what my sometimes mischievous compare and contrast of all these different approaches down the ages, I hope shows is that in the case of Malawi, it was our ancestors, even and especially in the Victorian era, who engaged far more energetically, far more respectfully, actually, and with results that were far more mutually uplifting for both sides and enriching than is almost ever exhibited by contemporary visitors to the country.

Rasheed: You speak a lot about the impact of missionaries in Malawi in particular and this is very often understated, especially now, how impactful they were. So that's the question for listeners. How impactful were missionaries in Malawi?

Alexander: Absolutely. And indeed that was very much what I was chiefly thinking of when I mentioned just then the positive and enriching ways in which Western culture has been introduced to this part of Africa.

The initial contact with Malawi, as it now is, was almost entirely a missionary endeavor. It is an important historical microcosm because it really undermines a lot of the prevailing narratives about the colonial experience and the experience of slavery in Africa. So this is the land that obsesses David Livingstone.

It's a major focus of his expeditions and missionary endeavors. And it obsesses him because once the Transatlantic Slave Trade has been suppressed, the largest in the world is the Indian Ocean Slave Trade. And at its very heart, the most populous territory supplying that slave trade is Malawi, the broad territory of what is modern day Malawi. When Livingston explores the region, what he discovers can fairly be described as Hell on Earth.

It's on that territory have converged a number of different, very malevolent forces, chiefly Omani slave traders, whose empire is reaching its pinnacle at this time and extends from Muscat, Oman to Zanzibar, where the capital is re-centered, as far north as Lamu in Northern Kenya, and down to the border with the Mozambican territories in modern day Mozambique.

And they, together with Islamised African accomplices in the hinterland are predating on that huge swathe of Central and East Africa with the peoples of Lake Malawi towards the bottom end of that. And at the same time you have also got the Portuguese slaving in the area and even more nefariously than them, a peculiar group of mixed race Portuguese African robber barons who are particularly brutal slave traders.

You've also got a tribe called the Ngoni who have themselves been displaced by the Zulus but have assimilated some of the custom of the practices in particular some of the military tactics of the Zulu peoples and they have moved north from what is now South Africa through Mozambique and into Malawi and all of these forces are predating upon the indigenous peoples of Lake Malawi to create conditions which Livingston describes as being the open sore of the world.

You have total disruption of local societies, total disruption of agriculture, associated perennial famine, and when Livingston is traveling up the Shire River, one of the expeditions is confronted by a river that has constantly got corpses floating down it just because the dead are so numerous and the people so exhausted by famine and war that they no longer bother to bury their dead and just toss them in the river. And Livingston is an example anti slavery fanatic.

This is a total obsession of his. And he realizes that to actually end the Indian Ocean Slave Trade, it's going to be much more difficult than the Transatlantic one in some ways, because it's being conducted by small boats, Arab dhows, coastal hugging, going up and down the East African coast. And the Omani Arabs are engaged in it, the Egyptians are engaged in it, the Ottomans are engaged in it.

But, for the sort of large naval vessels that could police the Transatlantic Slave Trade, of the Royal Navy, they can't get in close enough to the coast to actually stop these dhows from operating. And also, the dhows, because they've got a friendly coastline ruled by the Sultan of Zanzibar all the way, they can easily just drop off their cargo as soon as they catch sight of a British ship and deny then that they're slaving. To add to that, there's even the Portuguese and the French are also shipping. They're easier to stop because they are shipping them in larger vessels. It's quite extraordinary, the French are still being caught trading slaves in the Indian Ocean into late in the 1890s.

And the Portuguese are exporting slaves from Malawi even to Brazil in the late 19th century. But that's relatively easy to stop that. The difficult part is this vast trade being conducted. but in very small vessels. And pressure is brought to bear on the Sultan of Zanzibar, and he is eventually coerced into banning the slave trade, but it's a very ineffectual ban that he issues.

The slave market is closed down eventually in Zanzibar, and eventually he's forced to abolish slavery entirely after the Anglo-Zanzibari War, which is to a greater extent about slavery. But it's still not getting to the heart of the matter because there's still this vast trade in the inland which just cannot be controlled.

And this is why Livingston promulgates this idea of the infamous three C's of commerce, Christianity, and civilization, which causes such huge embarrassment today. But for him, he saw it as the only practical solution to suppressing slavery deep in the African interior. And you needed all three, is what he thought, because how can you have a sustainable mission that properly blocks out slavery without the commerce to fund it, the Christianity to embed an alternative moral code amongst local peoples, and the civilization so that there is an alternative vision of society that's not based around slavery.

It was very much tied up in concerns about, in a profound belief that freedom and free trade and education and civilization were all there for the betterment, could all achieve extraordinary social improvement. And I think Livingston's personal experience in this is really important because of how Livingston grows up.

His family are from the Hebridean island of Ulva where they live in conditions of poverty which really as materially awful as any you might find in Central Africa at this time. They then move to a mill town outside Glasgow where aged 10, Livingstone is put to work in the mill doing this difficult and actually quite dangerous work operating spinning jennies.

And he's doing 10 to 12 hour days of work, back breaking industrial labor. But the mill owner has got a lofty vision himself of the power of education, sets up a school for the workers children, and Livingston gets an education. And he self educates as well, teaching himself Latin and Greek. And so he's able to read Horace and Virgil in the original, which is something, by the way, that students at Oxford now struggle to do after four years at university.

But he did it by teaching himself after doing a twelve hour working day, and not just David but all of his siblings. They all improved their lot through education. So it's a very positive vision which he thinks he's bringing to an era of the world which he sees as being consumed by unnecessary human suffering and that it does just need the approach which has worked so well for him and his family and his peers in his native Scotland.

It's actually an even bigger vision that he has because he mistakenly believes that the territory around Malawi will lend itself especially to cotton cultivation, and this is just on the eve of the American Civil War. And he thinks this is great, we'll knock out two birds with one stone, because we can also completely undermine the economy of the southern states of the US by having vast cotton production here.

He's wrong about the cotton, but he's actually right about everything else. Not that he achieves it much of himself, he inspires others. But what he succeeds in doing is persuading a tranche of young, mainly English and Scotsmen, who are from themselves extraordinarily lofty educational backgrounds, to take up his cause in Central Africa and go there as missionaries to introduce Christianity and civilization. And it's really striking because, first of all, his first appeal that he makes in England.is to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. And so they form the first missionary group that goes out to Central Africa to take up this challenge. And these are men of the highest intellectual and moral caliber that this country has almost ever produced.

Theologians, they are physicians, they're classicists, they're linguists, even musicologists. They're brilliantly educated men with an incredibly lofty, both religious and educational ambition for the country. And the extraordinary thing is that over the next few decades, after initial disaster, after that they actually succeed, by and large in enacting Livingston's vision. And they do it almost entirely peacefully, basically by a heroic appeal to better nature.

There's an extraordinary thing that Samora Machel, the founding father of Mozambique, says about this. That the difference between British and Portuguese colonialism is that the Portuguese sent to Africa their worst, the British sent their best. Now, it's a little odd to find oneself challenging a militant Marxist Leninist for overstating the case in favor of the British Empire, but in the particular case of Malawi, there is, I think, a lot of validity to his claim.

Rasheed: It is quite striking the contrast of especially Church of England in the Civilizational project of the late 19th century to now in 21st century, where not to be too harsh on the church, but it feels like they're trying to dismantle civilization in many ways with a lot of their new positions on things like reparations, for example, or even things like renaming aspects of the church.

Using the Malawi case study, there are also similar ideas in the Caribbean, for example, and other parts of South Africa and Western Africa. It is very striking the turnaround of the same church as a stable institution just after two centuries. Is it striking to you how the Church of England, instead of continuing this civilizational project it has had, has now followed the political moorings of just current society?

Alexander: I think it's desperately sad. I don't know if I go so far to say they're seeking the dismantlement of civilization. I think they are well intentioned. They believe that they're doing the right thing, but I think that they are gravely mistaken and deeply uninformed, especially with their handling of the memory of the Church of England's contribution to eliminating slavery in Central Africa.

So, coming to the fore in the last year or so because of the Church Commissioner's report, which used forensic accounting to establish guilt by benefiting from the slave trade in the early 18th century. It was actually quite a short period of time when there were church investments in the South Sea Company, which participated in slave trading.

And on the basis of this quite short period, the Church has pleaded, I would argue, a wildly disproportionate degree of guilt and has proposed, I would argue, a wildly disproportionate degree of reparation is necessary in the form of a fund of a hundred million pounds, which I think is tipped to be expanded to one billion pounds for, by way of reparations, to the victims of slavery. And it struck me amidst the report that, the report's authors pride themselves on telling an untold story. Voices that are not normally heard, they are amplifying them. But this is history which is not known to most people and needs to be better known.

But it struck me in the midst of this that there are aspects of the Anglican Church's contribution to abolitionism which are reasonably well known. The role of the Clapham sect, for example. But it seems to me that the contribution of the Church of England to eliminating slavery in Central Africa is almost completely undiscussed.

And yet I think it is something that the church should be extraordinarily proud of for and for practical reasons, which I'll, I'll come to, I think should be vigorously asserting. What happened when Archbishop Welby went to Zanzibar earlier this year and gave a sermon?

In which he had, I thought, sort of failed to, honor and uphold the memory of the Anglican missionaries who'd done so much to extirpate slavery in, in Central Africa. There seems to be so much an absorption with the past.

It seems so obsessive. It seems so self obsessed. Because, there's a contemporary issue going on which he is completely ignoring in the midst of this, which is that in recent years slavery has started to recrudesce in precisely this region. So it was a very, very bitter discovery that just earlier this year that a story was broken by the BBC of Malawians who'd been tricked and trafficked to, of all places, Oman, the historical force at the, at the heart of slave trading in the region historically.

There they'd had their passports confiscated. They'd been bound into domestic servitude. They'd also been appalling sexual abuse that they alleged, including gang rape. And in the negotiations that followed, the Malawian government, which bear in mind is the government of the fifth poorest country in the world, had ended up having to pay reparations to effectively the slave owners, to the Omani businessmen who had acquired these Malawian workers in order to get them repatriated.

And it seems to me that if the Church of England actually asserted its extraordinary and heroic historical record in opposing slavery, then it could actually use that as a moral basis for challenging and opposing evils, which are reasserting themselves in the region, even as we speak, but instead it's lost in this totally introspective private narrative about its own guilt.

The arc of history is supposed to bend towards justice, but that won't happen if the actual custodians of that history completely neglect it.

Now Zanzibar is important because for a long time it was the head, it was the center of the University's mission to Central Africa, that mission set up in response to Livingston's appeal to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

And after their initial debacle in Malawi itself, they had to retreat to Zanzibar, which is where they built this magnificent cathedral on the site of the old whipping post that stood at the center of the Zanzibar slave market. And, well, he went to this cathedral. He did fleetingly, though acknowledge that there had been a university's mission to Central Africa and that they had been brave and fought against slavery. But their absolutely crucial role in properly eliminating it from Central Africa, he did not mention. And he did not mention at all the enormous sacrifice, personal sacrifice, that so many of these men made, including their lives.

And it really struck me as a betrayal of that memory. And the preoccupation all seemed to be with his own sense of guilt, the church's guilt. He even condemned those missionaries for not having been suitably repentant for the, not stated but presumably for the church's involvement in the slave trade, what 160 years before they went to Central Africa to try to oppose it.

And he then even started to dwell upon his own personal courage in taking up this cause and how he had been attacked in Britain for taking up this cause, and it all had the character of a sort of a personal obsession with guilt. It is offensive to the memory of those men and what they achieved. So, in the cathedral itself, there's an extraordinary plaque on the wall which reads, "to the memory of Livingston and other explorers, men good and brave who, to advance knowledge, set free the slave and hasten Christ's kingdom in Africa, loved not their lives even unto death."

And yet, when I was visiting the cathedral, I did so in the party of Scandinavian aid workers who just blinked at it. They'd just about heard of Livingston, had heard of absolutely none of the other missionaries who'd been involved in this, and then just muttered, "oh, they were all just colonialists." And it seems to me that level of both ignorance and feeling of moral superiority over these heroes of the past is not confined to gawping Scandinavian aid workers.

It seems to be at the very top of the Church of England as well. Shall I go on here, Rasheed, about some of the details of some of those missionaries? So take, for example, two of the Oxford missionaries, William Johnson, Chauncey Maples, and their friend, Charles Johnson, who are friends in Oxford.

These are young men with astonishingly bright careers. Johnson is, in fact, been offered a post in the Indian Civil Service, which at that period is the equivalent of being put on the J. P. Morgan graduate entry fast track program. They have careers of enormous success, potentially very lucrative careers ahead of them.

But on hearing Livingston's appeal and that of his son's successors. They decide to embrace a life of extraordinary danger and hardship by going to Central Africa to try to oppose slavery. And they've already heard of the disaster of the first expedition that goes out under a man called Charles Mackenzie, who is a Cambridge mathematician, who ends up dying with most of his party in desperate conditions in southern Malawi.

They know the risks especially due to disease, and so on their way out to Africa on board ship, they're devoting themselves to writing their own epitaphs that will rest on the graves that they expect to find in Africa. And sure enough, the third of their party, Charles Danson, is dead within a week. And having lost most of his party and their supplies in a flood, William Johnson has to basically bury him with his bare hands.

But they are totally undeterred. They're even undeterred when Johnson develops this tropical eye infection and goes completely blind in one eye and pretty blind in the other. But for the rest of his life, and this is going on for the next 40, over, almost 50 years, he devotes his life to the region.

And for much of it, he's wandering as a mendicant preacher with a single guide, a bag of books and a bag of clothes, wandering around Lake Malawi, essentially trying to convert people by setting a heroic example and to discourage slavery, again, by appeal to better nature. It sounds so improbable, but the extraordinary thing is that these men actually succeeded in this.

It really used to be a huge quandary for me how such a huge swathe of the world could have been converted so peacefully to Christianity. This is not like the conversion of Latin America by the conquistadors by any stretch. It's done by a handful of very educated, very cultivated men who enter a situation that, as I've described, resembles Hell on Earth and suggest peace on Earth and goodwill to all men as an alternative.

And their message is embraced. Just so enthusiastic by local peoples who are just desperate for some possible vision of hope out of the horror that prevails in the region. And I found it so interesting to actually drill down into what was the concrete experience of these missionaries when they actually set foot in the place.

The first thing to note is that this is a fantastically sparsely populated country, even though it's one of the more populous regions, which is why the slave traders are going there in the first place, it's still got a country the size of England with a population of less than a million when they do the first census in 1911, and that's after a generation of relative stability and peaceful agriculture and so on.

So they can travel for days or weeks without seeing anybody, and then when they do they come across an extraordinary description of Mackenzie, the first bishop encountering a slave caravan in southern Malawi for the first time. And as soon as the caravan sees him and his handful of companions, the slavers just flee in terror.

And it's that easy at first to discourage this practice. The people are just so overawed by the appearance of these strange people. And of course, they start to uncover the atrocities that are taking place. And they then realize it's more complicated and that they're in the middle of intertribal warfare and this will need to be put essentially by commitment to the place and commitment to peaceful means, especially by the time Johnson and his friend Maples get there. By building a secure stronghold on an island in Lake Malawi, they are basically able to set an example and show the fruits of civilization, show the way of peace, and it just attracts more and more people to their cause.

But it's not the educational side is the part that I suppose my book has tried to emphasize, because that for me was what impressed me, perhaps impressed me most. are in the midst of a society in which literacy is completely unknown and in order to teach anything, they have to first learn the local languages.

Several of them, including Johnson, end up then translating the Bible, the common prayer, to local languages. Others of them write dictionaries and grammars of the local languages and only then are they in a position to teach their parishioners how to read the Bible. And what they unlock is the this extraordinary appetite for the written word so that in especially another part of Malawi that I really focus on in the north, Livingstonia. This titan of Victorian missionary endeavour called Robert Law, who is almost completely consigned to oblivion in Britain today, but is still remembered very respectfully in Malawi.

And he embarks on this educational project of really towering ambition, because once he realises how much appetite there is, he realises, actually, I can teach them Latin and Greek. and Hebrew, and literature, and philosophy. And by the time he ends his career in the mid 1920s, there's this extraordinary episode where a British anthropologist is sent from SOAS to investigate levels of educational attainment in the region.

And she comes across an Ngoni warrior walking in the hills one day with a spear in one hand and a book in the other, and it's a copy of Plato's Republic. But when I related this anecdote to a British Oxford educated civil servant of my own age who'd worked for the International Development, DFID as it then was, he just grimaced and muttered something about cultural imperialism.

Now, if this was cultural imperialism, it spectacularly backfired because what emerged from these missionary institutes were educated men of properly independent mind and spirit who became themselves pastors, writers, even poets, political activists, and they go on to form the first tranche of activists who are challenging colonial rule, who set up the first political party in Malawi, and who then are the major movers in the movement towards independence, which most of them actually live to see when it happens in 1964.

But that's the tradition of high intellectual ambition and high culture, the missionaries have introduced, which Banda is then responding to in his own idiosyncratic way with the Museum Academy in his classical project.

Rasheed: So, almost in every domain of humanities, theology, philosophy, literature, sociology, currently you always hear people, especially in the UK, say, "we have not yet reckoned with the past."

That's always a refrain used. Where, in fact, in all those domains, there have been people, their entire careers have been reckoning with the past, have been explaining why these things are true. Even, for example, in literature, you say, oh, post colonial literature is not very associated with the colonial times, and yet you have V.S Naipaul, his entire career was just one topic. And in terms of the church, you have missionary after decade, after century, and yet you say that in the church we have not yet properly reckoned with this story.

And that has always been a very strange lack of historical reasoning that honestly I didn't think was possible. I didn't think it'd be possible and I see the same thing in the Caribbean where you have, in my generation, almost no one thinks about a Caribbean that would still be a British Empire type system, although of course there literally are Caribbean countries that are still part of the UK, Cayman Islands, BVI. In the independent Caribbean, those things are not even discussed in an incredible way.

In the older generation, people around the age of 75, 80 or so, they always say how weird of a mistake it was that the Caribbean became as independent as it is now in the English Caribbean sense. And I find that's a weird generational slide. I don't see any, this is in my view, the pessimistic question. I don't see any counter movement, particularly in the UK, where you're trying to actually teach younger people what happened, what they should be grateful for, what they should be prideful of in terms of the civilizational project of their own society in the Caribbean, in Africa, in India.

I don't know if you have a view on how this is going to turn out or what is currently happening to counter it.

Alexander: I think I share your analysis, Rasheed. I wish I could say something optimistic about it, but I don't particularly feel that way. I particularly deplore this constant talk of needing to reckon with the past.

I agree that we need to reckon with the past, but that is precisely what we are failing to do. We are reckoning only with a highly selective version of the past and not its totality. And so I suppose I was hoping that my book might do something to correct that. I'm not saying that it's the whole story, of course, but it's an important part of the story that gets totally neglected.

There is, in all this, a sense that there isn't actually a desire to reckon with the past. There's no real desire to inform oneself about the history. It's really about asserting one's moral superiority over the past. Because, I suspect, we feel such a moral vacuum without that. Without the comfort that, yes, there are at least our ancestors that we can feel better than.

Yes, without that feeling, our lives are otherwise unworthy. And I think it's a place like Malawi that explains why that feeling can develop. Because when you see the extraordinary material inequality between one's own life and that of people in Malawi, and indeed most people in most parts of the world, it's, I think, natural to feel an extraordinary sense of guilt about that inequality.

But nobody actually wants to reduce their own material circumstances, and the only way to comfort yourself in a situation is to assert your superiority over something. And the thing that's easy to knock is your ancestors, and so you can have all the satisfactions of feeling morally self righteous, even though you live lives of extraordinary comfort and self indulgence.

Can you remind me of the heiress of a Caribbean slave plantation, who I think is a UK journalist, and she made a rather public display of giving something like a hundred thousand.

Rasheed: Yeah, I think a hundred thousand dollars thing, Grenada, I believe.

Alexander: Yeah, that episode struck me as the example of the phenomenon I'm trying to describe.

The guilt of inherited wealth and that need to castigate the wicked ancestors that you got it from, and also make a big exhibition of giving some of it away. But at the same time, you don't give away so much that you actually make any material difference to your own life.

Rasheed: When I discuss this topic, I always remember something that was said by Richard Ely, who was a pastor and also a founder of the American Economic Association back in the 1800s. And he said that, in his view, economics should be taught in theology schools, because that was the only mechanism humans have to create heaven on Earth, to solve the problem of evil. So in his view, similar to Livingston, commerce, Christianity, civilization, you need all three at the same time. And economics gives you the tools to actually approach society in a way to solve the real deprivation, health crisis, bad education, all those kind of things. And he had this kind of applied theology view of the world where that was the thing you do.

You go and toil in civilization to approach Christianity in a more clear light. And in very many ways, I think, we don't really think about that anymore. Ironically, it's almost too inward in some ways now. But, for my last question, I actually want to ask the first question again. Why did Dr. Banda keep that particular book in the chest?

Alexander: This is the priceless antique edition of possibly the quintessential work of Western history, Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars, and There is actually something importantly symbolic in his decision to install it at that palace. So a little background, the palace is about 30 miles or so from where Banda was born and grew up, and it's an iconic, copy style, Great Rift Valley mountaintop called Mount Kasungu.

And Banda specifically built his palace there because it was the site of a battle, and it was a battle in which his grandfather had actually participated during the intertribal wars of the mid 19th century. Banda's grandfather had taken him there as a boy to show him the site where, had it not been for a very unexpected victory on their side, he and his whole family might never have come to exist.

Banda is obsessed with this site and you have to remember that he has been out of his homeland for a very long time. He's left in his late teens in 1915. He doesn't return to Malawi until 1958. And so his life is entirely in the US, Britain, and a very brief spell in Ghana in between. And, of course, his parents have passed away in this time.

He never sees them again after he leaves. And when he comes back, he is desperately trying to reconnect with the culture that he's lost. He is trying to track down relatives. He's trying to extract memories from people. If there's the slightest place that he can recall that has an important association, he memorializes it.

Like the tree under which he receives his first lessons from missionaries, that's where he builds the school. His mother's village, he sets up a new model village with modern houses. A drinking well that he remembers drawing water from as a boy, he, yes, he memorializes. But he can't even find his parents' graves because everyone's forgotten.

And he's so frustrated at how the history just slips from your grasp. And yet this mountaintop, this battlefield site was something that he could definitely concretely remember because the hill is so unmistakable in the big, vast empty plains in which it's set. And I think for Banda, Julius Caesar, the classics, literacy, these were all symbols of the power of the written word, the power of written history to preserve your heritage and to connect you with not just the heritage of a couple of generations which has already been forgotten, but with thousands of years past.

And that really, I think, is why the classics is such a major source of obsession for him. It's because the curious thing about Banda is that for all of his obsession and some would argue fetishization of Western culture, he is also deeply attached to his own in perhaps the way that only an exile who's been severed from that culture can be.

And so when he comes back to Malawi, he's simultaneously trying to promote this high version of Western culture that he's absorbed from abroad, but he's also trying to celebrate what is local. He tries to foster a literary tradition that will revitalize ancient mythology, ancient myth. He tries to, himself is very learned for his anthropological studies on the history of the region, and he tries to impress that into the educational system.

He has rather eccentric views on the major Malawian language, Chichewa, which again he's determined to return to the pure form which he thinks he's the only custodian of before he leaves Malawi, this language which he thinks has otherwise been corrupted basically by foreigners who can't speak it properly in the intervening years.

It's very much the two cultures that he has his own very idiosyncratic version of synthesizing. But what's, I suppose, for me touching about it is that it's that high vision of Western culture which actually does prove compatible with what is local. And that far from being Eurocentric and exclusive, it actually, knowledge of that is what allows him, allows the missionaries who introduced it, to engage with indigenous cultures on a far better, far deeper level than actually most of us in the West manage to engage with other cultures today.

And I think at bottom, it's because for cultural exchange to work, both sides need to have something to give. And for, I think, Westerners can only ever, will only ever struggle to engage with other cultures so long as they have a defective attitude towards their own. And oddly enough, it was summed up by Banda himself who pronounced to his people, yes, learn Latin, learn Greek, yes, of course, but learn your own ways first.

Otherwise, you will be completely lost.

Rasheed: It sounds like what Naipaul viewed as the universal civilization. Dr. Banda wasn't trying to extradite Malawian culture. He was trying to bring it into the universal civilization anchored on Western classics.

Alexander: Absolutely, yeah. And it's really remarkable about, sorry, as a final thing to add to what I said before about the fruits of this engagement with Western culture is that from very early on, from that introduction by the missionaries of literacy, and then very quickly, literature and Western high culture upon it, there emerges a literary tradition of Malawi's own, which is absolutely astonishing in size for such a tiny country.

I mean, there's a catalogue of, poetry becomes something of a national pastime for educated Malawians. And, It's something that Banda himself briefly contributed to and then tries to foster with literary competitions. He tries to produce an anthology of celebrations of Malawian culture. Ironically, it's a tradition which then develops its own life force, as literary traditions are wont to do, and it becomes politically very intractable and highly critical of Banda's rule.

And one of the major sources of opposition to his regime is the famous Malawi Writers Group, of which Jack Mapanje is probably the best known outside Malawi because he eventually escaped from prison and was released from prison in Malawi to the UK where he lives now. And so it is one of the sort of bitter ironies that this tradition that Banda tried to foster ends up actually in opposition to him and he tries to suppress it.

But the bigger concern I think of most of the Malawi writers is one that did accord with Banda's original vision and did accord with the vision of the early missionaries who were themselves truly devoted to the study and celebration of local cultures, in the best cases, in a way that's so neglected today.

The Church Commission's report again, it spoke about how missionaries have denigrated local cultures. And that did happen, but it's not the whole story. You also get a very large number of very learned missionaries whose bias, when you read them, is not talking, writing about Malawian culture. Their bias is so obviously towards the local culture, not against it.

But of course, these are writers that get totally neglected today because they are inconvenient for the Malawian narrative. So the larger point I was to make there was this literary tradition, what it comes to really focus on is how to celebrate Malawian culture, a culture that they know is vanishing with the intrusion of modernity.

There's an inevitability to this, and they know that ancient ways are being forgotten, but that literature offers them this tool for revitalizing that tradition. And it's curious that it's something that's echoed elsewhere on the continent and most famously from Chinua Achebe, who talks about harnessing Western means for African ends and using literature to preserve and reinvigorate culture that's otherwise going to disappear from your grasp.

But actually it's there in the Malawian literary tradition even before Achebe, and it's very much something that emerges from that tradition of high ambition in the humanities, which the earliest missionaries to Malawi fostered.

Rasheed: Alexander, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. This has been a truly amazing conversation.

Alexander: Thank you so much for having me, Rasheed.