Hastings Banda and his English Mistress

This is the little-known story about the controversial president of Malawi and his time in Kilburn when he lived with his mistress and her husband.

Hastings Kamuzu Banda was born about 1898 in a small village in Nyasaland to a poor family. After his initial education from African teachers of the Livingstonia Mission of the Free Church of Scotland, he went to Rhodesia and then South Africa. He worked as a miner and then a clerk at the Witwatersrand deep mine. There he met black American members of the African Methodist Episcopal church, which he joined in 1922. The leader of the church, Bishop Vernon, was so impressed by the young man that he agreed to sponsor his education in America. In 1925 Banda travelled to Ohio where he completed his high school education. Then he went to the universities of Indiana and Chicago and obtained a degree in history and political science in 1931. He graduated as doctor of medicine in 1937 in Nashville, Tennessee.

Banda came to Britain, but his American qualifications did not allow him to practise here, so in 1938 he went to Edinburgh, where he obtained a medical degree in 1941. His intention was to return to Nyasaland as a government or mission doctor. When the British colonial government refused to employ him on the same terms as European doctors, he abandoned his plan and instead set up a practice in the poorest part of Liverpool, and soon gained a reputation for free care for the poor, even paying the rent of those facing eviction. He refused military service as a conscientious objector, but was drafted to North Shields, where people flocked to his surgery because of his abilities and charm.

Merene Margaret Ellen Robbins was born in 1911 to a large farming family in Barnstable Devon. She came to London to work as a nurse and met William Henry French, who she married in Hackney in 1934. He was born in Northumberland in 1910 and was working as a teacher in London. Their son Peter was born in 1940. They lived in Stamford Hill until WWII, when William was called up, and using his foreign languages, became a major in British Intelligence.

In 1944 when William’s mother became ill, Merene went to look after her in North Shields and met Dr Hastings Banda who was the local GP. They began an affair, and after the War Banda followed Merene to London, where he worked as a GP. At first he lodged with Merene, William and son Peter, at No.18 Ridley Road in Willesden. Then Banda bought No.8 Aylestone Avenue, a large semi-detached property off Brondesbury Park where they all lived from 1947. Initially, William French accepted the relationship between Hastings and Merene, but then left in 1949. He finally sued for divorce in 1955 citing Banda as correspondent. Banda and Merene stayed together and she became his receptionist and housekeeper. Banda was a very popular doctor at a time when racism was quite blatant. Always impeccably dressed in a dark three-piece suit and a Homburg hat, he won the trust and respect of his patients.

Banda was deeply involved in the politics of Nyasaland and visiting African politicians regularly came to the house. With the founding in 1944 of the Nyasaland African Congress, Banda became the London representative, and he took up its concerns with the Colonial Office, and with various members of parliament. The 1949 plan for the federation of Nyasaland with Northern and Southern Rhodesia brought Banda into conflict with the British government as he saw it as a scheme designed to maintain white supremacy. He denounced the proposals and threw himself into the anti-federation campaign. Banda masterminded the Congress’s policy of bringing together chiefs and commoners in an alliance, only to be defeated in 1953 when the Central African Federation was finally imposed. In the same year, disillusioned with British democracy, he went to live with Merene French in the Gold Coast, now moving towards independence as Ghana under his friend Kwame Nkrumah, where he set up his medical practice in Kumasi. 

Thirteen year old Peter French was sent to a merchant navy college and spent the holidays with his father William in a cramped East London flat where he slept on a camp bed. Banda remained in the Gold Coast until July 1958 when he returned home as leader of the Nyasaland African Congress. It was impossible for Merene to accompany him and she returned to England. (It has not been possible to find a picture of Merene).

With exceptional energy and skill, Banda created a nationalist party with himself as its undisputed leader. As the campaign gained in popularity, disturbances broke out in May 1959 and Banda was arrested along with over 1,000 Congress leaders and taken to Gwelo gaol in Southern Rhodesia. He remained in prison for over a year, until the new colonial secretary, Iain Macleod, was convinced that without Banda no settlement in Nyasaland would be possible and he was released on 1 April 1960.

Hastings Banda, 1968

Once freed from prison, Banda asserted his control over the Nyasaland African Congress’s successor, the Malawi Congress Party (MCP), becoming life president of the party in 1960 and the centre of an extravagant personality cult. After the MCP won the elections, Banda was appointed prime minister in February 1963 by the last British governor Sir Glyn Jones. A year later, in July 1964, he led the country to independence as Malawi (a name chosen by Banda to commemorate the pre-colonial Maravi state). Elected president under the new republican constitution in 1966, and life president in 1971, Banda introduced a personal style of government where he ruled through a small group of shifting confidants. The most important of these were his new companion, the oddly titled ‘Official Hostess’ ‘Mama’ Cecilia Tamanda Kadzamira, who had replaced Merene French on his return to Nyasaland, and Cecilia’s uncle, John Tembo. For almost thirty years no criticism of Banda or the MCP was tolerated, and his opponents were gaoled or killed; ‘food for the crocs’ as he coldly put it.

Harold Wilson and Hastings Banda with trademark fly whisk

Pressurized by a growing popular movement inside the country as well as from outside, Banda was forced to hold a referendum in June 1993, in which Malawians voted decisively for multi-party democracy. In the following May, he and the MCP were defeated in Malawi’s first democratic election. He was placed under house arrest in 1995 for the murder of the four politicians twelve years earlier but acquitted for lack of evidence directly linking him with the killings. He died of pneumonia in a Johannesburg clinic aged 99 on 25 November 1997 and was given a state funeral.

During his presidency he tried to hide his relationship with Merene. Philip Short, a journalist who had worked in Malawi wrote a biography of Banda for Longmans. Banda sent two lawyers and asked his now retired friend Sir Glyn Jones to meet representatives of Longmans in London. They persuaded the publishers to drop the book because of the suggested reduction of their large educational sales in Africa. However, Longmans sold the typescript to Routledge & Kegan Paul. At a meeting between Routledge, Jones and Banda’s lawyers, they looked at the points which Banda most objected to, including his relationship with Merene and being cited as correspondent in her 1955 divorce case. This was not well known in Malawi, and those who knew did not talk openly about it. In fact, there were only two short passages about Merene; Routledge decided these were true and published the book in 1974.

When Merene returned to London she first worked in a public heath laboratory. She rarely spoke about Hastings Banda even when he appeared on TV in the newly formed Malawi. Nor do we know what she thought about his despotic rule, so different from the ideals formed over the kitchen table in Brondesbury Park when she helped him draft the Malawi constitution. Merene died in poverty in Greenock Scotland in 1976.