DR. BANDA: Menace or Martyr?

In a pleasant-looking jail of whitewashed brick at Gwelo last week sat Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda, 54, who, though a Negro, got a white man's cell to himself. His crime: advocating secession. He wants to take his native Nyasaland out of the Central African Federation with the two Rhodesias. Question: Is Britain once again conferring the martyrdom of prison on a man destined to be the leader of a new nation? The man:

Early Life. Originally named Kamuzu (the little root) because a medicine man had cured his mother's barrenness with a root herb, he later took the name of Hastings from a missionary he admired. When only 13 he ran away from home. At first his parents thought he had been eaten by a lion, learned only months later that he had walked barefoot 1,000 miles to the gold mines of South Africa. There, working by day and studying by night, he accumulated a little learning and a little money, with the help of a Methodist bishop made his way to the U.S. Comparing himself to the wandering scholars of the Middle Ages, he went from the Wilberforce University high school in Ohio to the University of Chicago, to Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tenn., and then on to complete his studies for a British medical license at Edinburgh (his church: the Church of Scotland).

Career. Settling down in the lower-class Kilburn district of London, he gradually built up a thriving practice of 4,000 patients, most of them white. His modest home became a favorite meeting place for such future African leaders as Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah, who called him affectionately "G.P." or "the Doc." Intense and impassioned about his native Nyasaland, he became increasingly bitter after the Federation was formed in 1953. "The Nyasas," he insisted, "have been deceived by a people whom they had grown to regard as Christian and honest, and betrayed by a government which for 60 years they had relied upon as trustee and protector." Last July he returned home, after 40 years of self-imposed exile, to give battle.

Personality. From the moment he arrived amid frenetic cheers at the air, he was taken up by Nyasaland's 3,000,000 blacks. A gnomelike, soberly dressed man who neither drinks nor smokes, he could speak calmly of the necessity of proving "that we are responsible people." but, in a sudden shift of mood, he might then begin banging the table in his surgery or shrieking to a mob from a platform: "To hell with federation!"

"We don't want any of this India Bwana stuff," he would cry, and he denounced the moderate Africans in the government as "quislings" who had sold out their country for "a cup of tea in a white man's house." Though always arguing against violence, he called himself "the extremist of extremists," and had a way of stirring up his people as no man had before. He boasts: "To the majority of Africans in Nyasaland, I am the Lord Mayor's Show in London."

Goals. "I've lived in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Tennessee and also Britain," says Banda. "I have nothing against those Europeans who think of Africans as human beings. I'm against those who think they're the chosen ones of God and that Africans are their 'boys.' " Banda's immediate goal: to get Nyasaland out of the Central African Federation.

But he insists that he wants to stay in the Commonwealth; he believes his people will fare better at London's hands than at those of the white settlers of Rhodesia. When Nyasaland is on its own, he says, he would keep a number of European Cabinet Ministers (even the most sympathetic Europeans are appalled by his lack of economic realism about a poor country that must be heavily subsidized to stay alive). An emotional, erratic man, he warned just before being carted off to jail: "They will stop nothing by my arrest. Nyasaland is awake!"

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