This is the script for my video posted on July 6, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.
Malawi is one of the world’s poorest countries. It depends heavily on foreign aid and a colonial-era economy anchored on declining tobacco exports, and it’s wedged between Tanzania, Zambia, and Mozambique, making it completely dependent on ports in other countries for trade with the rest of the world to occur at all. This also means that it is extremely vulnerable to those countries’ political volatility. So why is Malawi a country at all, and how has it managed to survive?
Before the colonial era, the land that’s now Malawi mostly belonged to the Maravi Empire, a Bantu kingdom united under a single ruler. In the 17th century, the Portuguese began exploring and trading in the region, and after the empire broke apart into areas controlled by distinct ethnic groups in the 18th century, the area became a focal point for the Indian Ocean slave trade.
In the mid-19th century, British explorers and missionaries reached Lake Malawi and sought to establish settlements there. Blantyre had been founded as a Scottish mission in 1876, and in 1878 the African Lakes Company was set up there to support trade and missionary work. When it became clear that the Portuguese were also trying to stake a claim in the area, the British worked to set treaties with local rulers. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, they proclaimed the British Central Africa Protectorate covering the same area as present-day Malawi. In 1907, they renamed it Nyasaland, and that’s the name it kept for the remainder of British rule.
In 1912, an organization called the North Nyasa Native Association was formed by a group of natives who had been educated in missions, with the goal of promoting the social, political, and economic interests of Africans under British rule. Then during WWII, this evolved into the Nyasaland African Congress, or NAC, which began to work at a national level to promote native interests. At first the British cooperated with them, but in 1953 the Colonial Office established the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland with Europeans enshrined in leadership positions, abandoning their earlier principles of partnership between races.
In the 1950s, the NAC began to advocate for civil disobedience, and it evolved into a political party. They met with the colonial government to discuss potential changes to the constitution, and shortly thereafter the British withdrew their recognition of the NAC as official native representatives. A famous native anti-colonial politician named Hastings Banda gave provocative talks around the country, and the resulting unrest got bad enough that Rhodesian troops had to be flown in to maintain order, the British declared a state of emergency, and the NAC was ultimately banned. Hastings Banda and hundreds of others were arrested as threats to law and order.
In 1959, the banned NAC was succeeded by a new organization called the Malawi Congress Party, or MCP, founded while Banda was still in prison. When Banda was released in 1960, he took over as its leader. In a matter of months, Britain began to realize that independence was inevitable. Banda was released from prison, and in 1961 the MCP swept the country's first multi-party elections. Two years later, the country became self-governing before gaining full independence under a new name: Malawi.
Hastings Banda led the country for over 30 years. Malawi was a republic, but until 1993 the MCP was its only legal political party. In 1971, Banda was declared president for life, and though his regime was totalitarian, it also prevented the country from falling into armed conflict. In the early 1990s, pressure for political freedom increased and Banda agreed to run a referendum in which the population ultimately voted for a multi-party system. Banda was defeated in the first free election in 1994 by one of his former cabinet ministers, and ever since, the country has held regular multiparty elections, though they've faced corruption scandals and contested results. In 2020, the opposition won a court-ordered rerun after the courts annulled the previous year's vote, and in 2025 power changed hands again peacefully when Peter Mutharika beat the sitting president, Lazarus Chakwera, taking about 57% of the vote.
Today, decades of political volatility and structural problems have made Malawi one of the world’s poorest countries, with a GDP per capita of only around 500 USD. Around 76% of people live on less than 3 dollars per day, and close to 80% work in agriculture. Most of these are subsistence farmers growing maize, but tobacco is the country's main cash crop and export earner. Tobacco’s long-term outlook is shaky as the world smokes less, but recent harvests have actually earned record sums, over half a billion dollars in both 2024 and 2025. Still, the country relies heavily on foreign aid, with donor grants historically funding up to 40% of the national budget. Aid from the US alone was more than 13% of the 2024-2025 budget, and this dependency gives donors substantial leverage that has repeatedly reshaped Malawian politics.
In 2008, Malawi stopped recognizing Taiwan as legitimate and recognized the People’s Republic of China instead. In return, China has built the country’s parliament building at a cost of 50m USD, as well as the Bingu National Stadium at 70m dollars, an international convention center and hotel, a massive road improvement project, and Malawi’s new University of Science and Technology. Malawi signed a memorandum of understanding in 2022 to join the Belt and Road Initiative, but China is only Malawi’s largest bilateral creditor, and bilateral debt, or debt between governments, is small next to the rest. Multilaterals like the World Bank and the IMF dominate.
Of course, in 2025, Malawi’s four-year Extended Credit Facility with the IMF, valued at 175m dollars, automatically terminated after going 18 months without a completed review. Malawi only received 35m dollars, and the cancellation happened shortly after the country’s public debt hit 88% of GDP. Then most US aid collapsed too when the current administration took office and dismantled USAID. One estimate had US support to Malawi falling by nearly 60% in a single year. Some health funding has kept flowing through a temporary bilateral arrangement and limited waivers, but it's only a partial, stopgap replacement. The country’s debt is now assessed to be in distress or unsustainable, and some think an expansion of Chinese support is the likely result.
Meanwhile, the country has a long-running border dispute with Tanzania over Lake Malawi, where there may be large supplies of oil and gas, though nothing has actually been proven. In 2012, Malawi awarded exploration licenses to a British firm on the lake's eastern side, and Tanzania responded by pressing its own claim to the water. A panel of former African heads of state tried to mediate, but the dispute was never actually settled, it's just gone quiet, and Malawi’s 2026 fiscal policy statement reaffirms the government’s intent to promote oil and gas exploration, which would alleviate some of the economic pressure they’re under.
Malawi is surrounded by other countries on all sides, and in cases like Mozambique this creates yet another liability in the form of refugees and trade route instability. The country is hugely susceptible to climate change as well, because they are so reliant on agriculture and hydropower from the Shire River, Lake Malawi’s outflow to the Zambezi. Realistically, if any kind of crisis were to strike, Malawi would not be positioned to navigate it effectively without substantial external support.
Keep reading
- How does South Africa’s history feed into its geopolitical dynamics?
- Why can’t Ghana afford its own democracy?
- Why is Madagascar so unstable?
I’m writing a book called Groundwork about the buried history beneath geopolitics. Join the waitlist to hear when it has a publisher, a cover, and a release date.