Zoë Groves is Lecturer in Modern Global, Colonial and Postcolonial History at the University of Leicester, UK, and Research Associate at Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), Johannesburg, South Africa. Her research focuses on migration, urban history and popular culture in Southern Africa. She is author of Malawian Migration to Zimbabwe, 1900-1965: Tracing Machona (2020).Jessica Johnson is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK. She is the author of In Search of Gender Justice: Rights and Relationships in Matrilineal Malawi (2018) and co-editor of Pursuing Justice in Africa: Competing imaginaries and Contested Practices (2018).

• Introduction— Protectorate, Dictatorship, Democracy: Reflections on Malawi’s Past and Present 1. Birthing a Nation: Political Legitimacy and Health Policy in Hastings Kamuzu Banda’s Malawi, 1962-1980 2. The Radical and Reactionary Politics of Malawi’s Hastings Banda: Roots, Fruit and Legacy 3. Remembering Kamuzu: The Ambiguity of the Past in Malawi’s Central Region 4. Yielding Trouble: Development Dilemmas and the Political Uses of Bad Data in Malawi, 1964-1978 5. ‘The Native is the Producer of the Future’: Improving Peasants’ Food Production in Southern Malawi, 1859-1939 6. The Green Belt Initiative, Politics and Sugar Production in Malawi 7. Chieftaincy in Malawi: Reinvention, Re-emergence or Resilience? A Kasungu Case Study 8. Petitioning the State: Group Councils and the Development of Political Consciousness in Malawi, 1940s-1950s 9. ‘The General from Fort Hill’: Katoba Flax Musopole’s Role as an Anti-Colonial Activist and Politician in Malawi 10. Central African Immigrants, Imperial Citizenship and the Politics of Free Movement in Interwar South Africa 11. ‘Totemless Aliens’: The Historical Antecedents of the Anti-Malawian Discourse in Zimbabwe, 1920s–1979 12. Malawi in Verse: Authenticity, African Literature, and Indigenous Aesthetic Forms 13. The Madando Rhetoric: Musical Critiques of Electoral Management Leadership in Malawi 14. The Invention of ‘Harmful Cultural Practices’ in the Era of AIDS in Malawi Afterword