Hastings Kamuzu Banda

Hastings Kamuzu Banda was born around 1896 near Kasungu and left Nyasaland on foot as a boy, walking to South Africa to find work in the mines. What followed is one of the more extraordinary educations of the century: he was helped to the United States, took a degree at the University of Chicago and a medical qualification in Tennessee, then qualified again in Edinburgh because colonial rules would not let him practise in Africa on an American degree. He spent years in general practice in England and in Ghana.

He was in his late fifties and had not lived in the country for forty years when the Nyasaland African Congress asked him to come home and lead it. He arrived in 1958 to enormous crowds, and the campaign he led against the Central African Federation — the arrangement tying Nyasaland to white-ruled Southern Rhodesia — brought a state of emergency, mass arrests and his own imprisonment at Gwelo in 1959.

The Federation was dissolved, and he took Nyasaland to independence as Malawi on 6 July 1964, becoming president when it became a republic in 1966. He built the country's institutions from a standing start: the Kamuzu Academy, roads, the new capital at Lilongwe, and an agricultural policy that kept Malawi self-sufficient in food for most of his rule. Malawi's existence as a nation is inseparable from him, and the men and women who built the independence movement — Chipembere, Chiume, the Chirwas, Rose Chibambo — came home at his call.

He was removed by referendum and multiparty elections in 1994, accepted the result, and died in 1997.