Kanyama Chiume - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Chiume described his given name, Kanyama, as meaning “another piece of meat for you,” a wry joke by parents who had grown wearily accustomed to death in their family. Chiume’s younger brother died at two months, and Chiume’s own mother died the following day, aged 37. After the funeral, Chiume went with his uncle to his native Tanganyika (now Tanzania). He attended schools in Dar es Salaam in the mid-1940s, at a time when this coastal city was a hotbed of African nationalist political activity. In his last year at Tabora Upper School he became Secretary of the Debating Society, polishing rhetorical skills which would later be much admired when he entered politics in Nyasaland (now Malawi). At Tabora Upper School he reportedly invited an alumnus, Julius Nyerere, to join him in debating against white colonial teachers and administrators on political subjects. According to Chiume in his autobiography (the strict veracity of which has sometimes been questioned), they were so successful in this debate that the school threatened him with expulsion. Nyerere later became the first leader of independent Tanzania.

In 1949, Chiume went to Makerere College in Kampala, Uganda, the premier university in East Africa, and in 1951 he was admitted into Makerere College’s Medicine School. He later changed his major to Education, after discovering that he “could not stand human dissection”, specializing in Physics, Chemistry and Biology. Among his contemporaries at Makerere were people who would in later life become some of Africa’s most accomplished scholars and public officials, including B. Ogot, Kenya’s celebrated historian and Chancellor of Moi University in Eldoret, and the current Kenyan president Mwai Kibaki. He was president of the Makerere College Political Society, while Mwai Kibaki was a committee member. Later he was joined at Makerere by other Nyasas, Vincent Gondwe, David Rubadiri (former Vice Chancellor of the University of Malawi), and Augustine Bwanausi (former Malawi cabinet minister). Chiume was also chairperson of the Makerere College Education Society. Chiume and other students formed a Nyasaland Students Association at Makerere, an association that helped the Nyasaland African Congress by doing research, and by also linking up with fellow Nyasas at Fort Hare College, where Henry Masauko Chipembere, a lifelong friend and political colleague of Chiume’s, went for his own university education. Another future leader of Nyasa nationalism, Dunduzu Chisiza, was also active in the Nyasaland Students Association at this time.

After graduating from college Chiume taught at Alliance Secondary School in Dodoma, Tanganyika. He resigned after the white headmaster insinuated that the presence of a pre-adolescent girl in Chiume’s house might create immoral temptations. Chiume was extremely offended by the remark, which further gave him resolve to fight for the dignity of Africans. “I had made up my mind there and then to plunge myself into politics and to help remove the obstacles that lay before Africans who wished to have human dignity. I was determined to try and play my part, however small, to free Mother Africa” (from his autobiography). He then went to study law, on a scholarship, at Ramjas College in Delhi, India. Upon being approached by the Nyasaland African Congress to stand in the country’s first general election in 1956, Chiume accepted, and decided not to further pursue his interest in law.