In 1949, at the age of 17, Mwaungulu entered primary school for the first time in Nyasaland (present-day Malawi) in Karonga, his home district located on the northwestern shore of Lake Nyasa, near the Tanganyikan border.

Four years earlier, around the age of twelve, he transferred to the Overtoun Institution, a prestigious boarding school in Livingstonia founded by Scottish missionaries in the late nineteenth century.

According to Mwaungulu, the missionaries sought to restrict his political development by steering him toward theological studies, with the aim of preparing him for a career as a primary school teacher.

[3] He attended the Aggrey Memorial School, located in Bunnamwaya, north of Lake Victoria near Kampala, the capital of Uganda, and over 1,500 kilometers from his home district of Karonga.

However, the school's location was afflicted by tropical diseases, and Mwaungulu contracted malaria and dysentery from contaminated water, necessitating his return to Nyasaland in 1951.

Supported by the Convention People's Party, Mwaungulu attended Accra Academy, a boys' boarding school providing secondary education and assistance to financially needy students.

As a result of the Malawian cabinet crisis which turned Malawi into a dictatorship,[7] he was later placed under house arrest and the Banda regime planned his murder, but he was able to escape to Tanzania with the aid of friends, and later returned to the East Germany where he settled in 1967.

Mwaungulu returned to the GDR as a member of the steering committee of the Socialist League of Malawi (LESOMA), the most important oppositional Malawian party led by Attati Mkapati.

"[11] In 1997, he co-founded the Pan-African Forum e.V with Wilfred Imoudu, another Pan African intellectual and activist who had studied in the GDR in the 1960s, and was the son of an important Nigerian trade unionist.