Dr. Banda's thirty-year rule was the subject of Lwanda's earlier book Kamuzu Banda of Malawi: a Study in Promise, Power and Paralysis, the first edition of which was in 1993. Now the small Southern African nation of Malawi has been a multiparty democracy since the first multiparty elections on 17 May 1994. The first multiparty dispensation, under the United Democratic Front's President Bakili Muluzi, experienced both startling successes and fantastic failures. Since then, the paralysing poverty has persisted, yet the once silent land is resonating with freedom of speech, free universal primary school education, an independent judiciary...