Professor Paul Kishindo has died. He was one of the pillars of the University of Malawi.
Kishindo was a professor of Rural Sociology and former Dean of Social Science at Chancellor College, the main constituent college of the University of Malawi.
In 2012, he retired from the University of Malawi after 35 years of teaching Sociology at Chancellor College – an institution which Kishindo first joined as a student in 1971.
A year after retiring, he expressed concern that the university was descending into mediocrity due to issues such as under-funding.
“So much mediocrity happening. There is complete shortage of discipline, values of education and funding in the college. Surely, at the rate it is degrading, Chancellor College will cease to be a university. It will be just one of those glorified high schools.
Last year, Kishindo trended on social media after authoring a letter reprimanding Anglican Bishop Brighton Malasa for excommunicating him (Kishindo) from the church.
“As a matter of principle, I refrain from engaging in arguments with intellectual midgets; but your most recent pranks in which you purport to have excommunicated me and more than twenty others from the Anglican church is so blatantly stupid that it cannot go without comment,” said Kishindo in the letter to Bishop Malasa.
Meanwhile, tributes have started pouring in for Kishindo.
“Prof Paul Kishindo. An elephant has fallen. Rest in Power sir,” wrote Dr. Pearson Nkhoma in a Facebook post.
While poet Robert Chiwamba said: “I understand Prof. Kishindo is no more. What a loss. An institutional memory for Chancellor College, Sociology Department and the Anglican Church. The legendary tree has shed another leaf. All we are left with are memories. May the legendary Prof. Paul Kishindo rest in peace.”
