I believe that Muluzi (early survivor) and Chihana (late) are important
personalities to Malawi’s current political pluralism. However, I don’t
think that they are a big AGENT of that change in the 90s. In fact, I
think they are being unnecessarily praised and glorified to have been
able to play a role in bringing about change only because the real agents
of change were doing a lot of work. And the real agents of change were
the people working at the grassroots level, like the Catholic Bishops
for example and those who were dehumanised by questioning the integrity
of MCPs governance and its authority such as the Lecturers and the
revolutionary students from the University of Malawi. There’s no question
about that. Anyone with no single trace of a grey cell in their heads
would laugh and collapse in ridicule at that.
  
  Look, part of the whole technique of disempowering people is to make
sure that the real agents of change fall out of history, and are never
recognised in the culture for what they are. So its necessary to
distort history and make it look as if Great Men did everything- that’s part
of how you teach people they cant do anything , they are helpless, they
just have to wait for some great man to come along and do it for them.
What’s all the fuss about Kamuzu Banda? Here is country in miserable
conditions , worse than anything we can imagine ,naked with vane
imagination , but with a population that was able on their own effort to
construct a lively, vibrant , functioning civil society with political
parties  and grassroots organisations and without any resources , to sweep
their own black president into power and create an actual democratic
society. Well, they say Kamuzu was a hero. My balls.
  Okay that’s all about history. Historians, of course. The educated
classes in general. Part of their task is to shape our picture of the
past in a way which is supportive of power interests in the present.
What’s in history is, one person had the courage to do something, which he
did. Chihana the late,  coming through KIA and being arrested to
announce the hope for change and charged for treason. But not on his own.
Nobody does anything on their own. Chihana came out of an organised
community of committed Malawian people who had been working together for
change  for a very long time. And that’s how it always works.
   The same is true of Muluzi . He was able to appear and give public
speeches because the Catholic Bishops and University of Malawi
revolutionary students had prepared the ground and taken a brutal beating for
it. The point is , it is always the people on the ground who do the work
that prepare the basis for these bastards to become prominent and sort
of articulate things. They only rode on peoples shoulders. Lazy bones.