Thamar Dillon Thomas Banda

Thamar Dillon Thomas Banda ("TDT") was a politician in Nyasaland in the years prior to independence. He was President-General of the Nyasaland African Congress (NAC) from 1957 to 1958, and founded the Congress Liberation Party in 1959.

Background

TDT Banda was a Tonga born in Nkhata Bay on the shores of Lake Nyasa in around 1910. He had spent most if not all of the 1940s abroad in Southern Rhodesia before returning to Nyasaland, when he joined the Nkhata Bay branch of NAC.

The Nyasaland African Congress was organized by James Frederick Sangala and Levi Zililo Mumba, and inaugurated in October 1944 with Mumba as President. Sangala, Mumba and their associates had a vision of the NAC becoming "the mouthpiece of the Africans", cooperating with the government and other colonial bodies "in any matters necessary to speed up the progress of Nyasaland". By the mid-1950s, African leaders in European colonies throughout Africa were encouraged by the example of Ghana's independence to take a more aggressive stand in seeking independence.