GOODBYE, DR. BANDA, lessons for the west from a small African country

i307pp., hardback, d.w., Edinburgh, 2023

Memoir by Alexander Chula, a writer and NHS junior doctor. He 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 worked in Malawi as a teacher of Latin and Greek at Kamuzu Academy and as a doctor in Malawi's hospitals

While working in Malawi he found a priceless, antique edition of Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars in one of the abandoned palaces of the late Dr Banda, which clearly belonged to the former president.

 "Goodbye, Dr Banda is one of those rare books that are hard to classify, but are all the more delightful for that very reason. It is a highly unusual personal memoir, but it is also a sympathetic and perceptive portrait of a country and its past. It is a quite superb book that will linger with the reader for a long time after it is read." Alexander McCall Smith, author of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series

"A rewarding, delightful and personal examination of Dr Banda’s struggle to reconcile his indigenous Chewa culture with the culture of the Greek and Latin Classics ... Radical, deep and surprising, with gentle but trenchant observations on African versus Western cultural dynamics." John Lwanda, Medical doctor, Malawi