Abstract: A critical reconsideration of black nationalist origins in Malawian political assertiveness, focusing on the movement created by Jamaican populist Marcus Garvey. Though familiar with Garvey’s ideas, the nation’s first President—Hastings Kamuzu Banda—was not responsible for carrying them to Malawi. That distinction belongs to an earlier group of activists who—during the decades of Banda’s absence from his homeland—stoked the fires of “Africa for the Africans” which Joseph Booth and John Chilembwe had first sparked a half-century before independence. Key among them was Isa Macdonald Lawrence who championed Garveyism, at first directly and later indirectly, planting black nationalist roots in Malawi’s mid-twentieth century politics. Despite efforts to repress those Garveyist influences and replace them with a veneration of Banda’s legacy, the echoes of Marcus Garvey and his vision of Africa for the Africans have reverberated through more than a century of Malawian history revealing the black nationalist influences embedded in its past.