‘‘TO ME, EDUCATION BASED ON no Latin is a house built on stilts.” This admirable statement, drawn from early in this new book, was made not by some moth-eaten Classics master desperate for custom. Instead, it is a quotation from Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda, the first President of Malawi, who led the country to independence in 1964 after British colonial rule.
Why an anti-colonial African leader should be so obsessed with the Classics that he established an English-style public school in the middle of the African bush to teach Latin and Greek up to A-level, often to local tribal children on scholarships, is the question that opens this remarkable