Chichewa as a dialect had to be one of such primitive languages of the backward and the uncivilized. Probably inconsequential until one realizes that Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda, the individual who led the country to independence and became its first president, is a Chewa and a very nationalistic one at that. During the period when publications focused on Chinyanja, there was one notable exception. In 1937, Mark Hanna Watkins, an African American anthropologist who had worked with Edward Sapir, had a language dissertation published by the Linguistic Society of America as a supplement to the journal Language. The language dissertation had the title A Grammar of Chichewa. A Bantu Language of British Central Africa. While Mark Hanna Watkins notes that "the Achewa ...are a division of the Nyanja group" (p.5) and that Chichewa is "only a variant" of the Nyanja language, the fact that it had to be Chichewa rather than Chinyanja that he described was significant for a reason later to become relevant. This was that "all the information was obtained from Kamuzu Banda, a native Chewa, while he was in attendance at the University of Chicago, from 1930 to 1932" (ibid. 7). This is the same "native Chewa" who, later, became the first president of Malawi. With that, Chichewa effectively became the Tdialect with an army and a navyU giving it the political clout for ascendancy to the status of language, relegating Chinyanja to obscurity. In fact, President Banda who, on many occasions, lectured to the staff of the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation about the promotion and use of Chichewa remarked more than once that Chichewa is not a dialect but a language with grammatical rules.