Malawi: The Politics of Despair

This lucid history of Malawi is notable for a thorough analysis of the effect of Hastings Banda's one-man rule on the country's economic development. Although 15 years of dictatorship have kept everybody down on the farm, in the view of the author the "orderliness" of Malawi's development is the result not only of repression but of the country's extreme backwardness-which has not changed much since independence.