Author of ‘Goodbye, Dr Banda’ Alexander Chula at Chambo Market, 14 December 2023
Chambo Market Bookshop and Gallery is gearing up for its final event of 2023, a conversation between authors Muti Michael Phoya (Madonna is our Mother: Notes from Malawi, 2023) and Alexander Chula (Goodbye, Dr Banda: Lessons for the West from a Small African Country, 2023).
Join us at 6pm, Thursday 14 December, at Chambo Market Bookshop and Gallery, Old Town Mall, Lilongwe, to hear more from Chula and his highly acclaimed book. RSVP to reserve your seat muti@logosmw.org or +265 996376788. Limited copies of the books will be available for purchase.
About the book
“In a ruined dictator’s palace, Alexander Chula – a classicist-turned-doctor, fresh out of Oxford – stumbles upon an oak treasure chest. Inside is a priceless, antique edition of Julius Caesar’s Gallic War. This unexpected talisman of Western high culture belongs to the mercurial Dr Banda, a man of many parts: scholarly physician, anti-colonial hero, brutal tyrant, and fallen philosopher-king.
“Banda leads the author deep into the heart of this mysterious country, there to uncover a bizarre meeting of worlds: between one of Africa’s most fascinating indigenous cultures and the best and worst of our own. Here tribal ritual collides with Greek theatre; masked dancers with roving classicists; poets and pop stars with missionary-explorers; hippies and kleptocrats with long-suffering peasants.
“The story is enigmatic but exhilarating, by turns edifying and deeply uncomfortable. But we would do well to examine it: Malawi presents urgent lessons which resonate piercingly in our vexed age of culture wars and identity crisis.”
Felix Mnthali, playwright, poet and novelist, said of the book,
This is an impressively researched, beautifully written book. I loved the empathy Chula brings to Malawi’s myths, our past and our present. The history of missionaries like Robert Laws and Chauncy Maples showed his thoroughness in research. This is a book to read and enjoy.
About Alexander Chula
Alexander Chula is a medical doctor and writer. Chula was born and raised in London and is of mixed Thai and British ancestry. He read Classics at Worcester College, Oxford, then medicine at the University of London. He has worked in Malawi both as a teacher of Latin and Greek and as a doctor.
