Brown Chimphamba is a

Malawi Malawi (; or aláwi Tumbuka: ''Malaŵi''), officially the Republic of Malawi, is a landlocked country in Southeastern Africa that was formerly known as Nyasaland. It is bordered by Zambia to the west, Tanzania to the north and northeas ...

an academic, civil servant and diplomat. He is the former

Permanent Representative A permanent representative is a diplomat who is the head of a country’s diplomatic mission to an international organisation. Organizations that receive permanent representatives from their member states include the United Nations, the World Tr ...

to the

United Nations The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be a centre for harmoniz ...

. He was also the chairman of the commission which ran the 1993 referendum which ended the rule of

Hastings Banda Hastings Kamuzu Banda (1898 – 25 November 1997) was the prime minister and later president of Malawi from 1964 to 1994 (from 1964 to 1966, Malawi was an independent Dominion / Commonwealth realm). In 1966, the country became a republic and ...

Malawi Congress Party The Malawi Congress Party (MCP) is a political party in Malawi. It was formed as a successor party to the banned Nyasaland African Congress when the country, then known as Nyasaland, was under British rule. The MCP, under Hastings Banda, pres ...

. He was also the Vice Chancellor of the

University of Malawi The University of Malawi (UNIMA) is a public university established in 1965 and until 4 May 2021, when the university underwent a delinking, was composed of four constituent colleges located in Zomba, Blantyre, and Lilongwe. Of the four colleges, ...

Academic Freedom 2011

He was head of the Academic Freedom Commission in 2011, where democratically elected President Bingu Mutharika had a standoff with the lecturers at

UNIMA UNIMA (''Union Internationale de la Marionnette'' - ''International Puppetry Association'') was founded in Prague in 1929 (the then Czechoslovak magazine Loutkář was UNIMA's first official journal in years 1929–1930). In 1981, the French pup ...

. This was the result of a lecturer, Dr Blessings Chinsinga being summoned by the police Inspector General Peter Mukhito for comparisons Chinsinga drew in a political science class with regards to the Tunisian uprisings in 2011 that resulted in the overthrow of President

Hosni Mubarak Muhammad Hosni El Sayed Mubarak, (; 4 May 1928 – 25 February 2020) was an Egyptian politician and military officer who served as the fourth president of Egypt from 1981 to 2011. Before he entered politics, Mubarak was a career officer in ...

. It led to the firing of Dr Blessings Chinsinga, Jessie Kabwila-Kapasula, Gaston Kanchedzera, Edge Kanyongoro and Franz Amin. It also led to student protests at the

. The six-man Commission of Inquiry, headed by Prof. Brown Chimphamba, was convened by Mutharika 'to define academic freedom, investigate the cause of the stand-off and propose measures to avoid future ones'.

Sources

Opposition in Malawi Demands Ruler Yield Power
''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

'', 17 June 1993

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Chimphamba, Brown Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Malawian civil servants Malawian diplomats Permanent Representatives of Malawi to the United Nations Academic staff of the University of Malawi Vice-chancellors of universities in Malawi