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5— Tribalism in the Political History of Malawi1
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Tribalism from Above: the Strengthening of the Yao Chiefs

Yet in 1915 an event occurred that was instrumental in imposing a clear, specifically ethnic interpretation upon the south's heterogeneous population, at least in the perceptions of its British rulers. This was the Chilembwe Rising, an upsurgence of popular discontent on certain plantations of the Chiradzulu district under the leadership of the Rev. John Chilembwe, head of the Providence Industrial Mission.[105] Chilembwe had been influenced by the non-particularist message of such missionaries as Booth and Cheek and then educated in America. He had adopted, as others of the Southern Province's educated petty bourgeoisie had, a universalistic Christian message as the ideological base for his opposition to colonialism.

The Chilembwe Rising was crucial in shaping later British attitudes towards Africans in two ways. First, it reinforced an already well developed colonial distrust of educated Africans in particular and of Protestant mission education in general.[106] Planters and administrators alike henceforth did all they could to


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separate members of the anti-colonial petty bourgeoisie from possible popular village support against the planters' control over the local economy so as to avoid a repetition of the Chilembwe phenomenon.

Second, and related directly to this distrust, the Rising encouraged the British to impose Indirect Rule on the confusing tangle of African people in southern Nyasaland in an effort to check any possible disturbances by dissatisfied Africans through bolstering chiefly control. Indirect Rule was essentially conservative, employing its own concept of tradition and drawing its personnel from chiefs and headmen. For the British the more 'traditional' Africans were, the better, and they warmly embraced the most obviously conservative Africans in the area, Muslim Yao chiefs. In the Southern Province, then, a 'tribal order' was to be largely imposed from above rather than being shaped from below, as occurred in the Northern Province.[107]

As one reads official documents after 1915, it is difficult to avoid concluding that British officials who were pursuing control through divide-and-rule policies invoked ethnic categories that existed only in their own minds. The contrasts for them seemed to be between law and disorder, between the trustworthy Yao and the untrustworthy Nguru.[108] The insecure British administration's differentiation of Africans into 'good' Yao and 'bad' Nguru began in the immediate response to the Rising itself. The vast majority of those found guilty and sentenced to death or to long terms of imprisonment were members of Chilembwe's church, and the vast majority of these were Nguru. No declared Muslim was found guilty, although several Christian Yao were sentenced.[109] Because of the clear Nguru support of Chilembwe, it was obviously dangerous to be labelled an 'Nguru', and many immigrants therefore claimed that they were 'Yao'. It was also dangerous to be a Christian. 'We were arrested in our village by Yaos because we were Christians,' was a frequent remark in the testimony of those brought to interrogation.[110]

With this opportunity presented to them, the Yao chiefs and headmen speedily acted to protect and, if possible, improve their positions. In the week after the rising, the Yao chiefs and headmen of Chiradzulu presented themselves at the British administrator's office, assuring him that they did not support Chilembwe. They ingratiated themselves with him through gifts of flour and eggs and chickens, and he responded, finding that he enjoyed talking to them. He liked their Islamic robes, so different from the disturbing mimicry of the European suits worn by Chilembwe and many of his followers. Reassured and grateful, he wrote categorically that the Yao chiefs were all completely loyal. Two months later, his successor in Chiradzulu reported that the chiefs were being cooperative in providing road repair labour.

The British decided to seize the opportunity of the Yao chiefs' goodwill and to proceed, years in advance of anywhere else in the Southern Province, with the implementation of the DANO (1912) and with the appointment of Principal Headmen and village headmen to assume the duties laid down by the ordinance.[111] In their embrace of the Yao chiefs what the British were searching for some analogue to the English class system. The Principal Headmen were, after all, being incorporated into the colonial bureaucracy, some way down the ladder from the district commissioners, but nonetheless needing to display some of the same natural ability to govern.

The problem, given the masses of Africans all remarkably alike in their material poverty, was how to distinguish which ones were the natural gentlemen. With Christianity and mission education threatening to produce an African bourgeoisie hostile to colonialism, and yet with an official embrace of Islam a political


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impossibility, the British were forced instead to formulate ethnic theories of African differentiation. Given the mixture of 'tribes' within a single area and the impossibility of finding distinctions between them, they postulated for the south a labour-specific hierarchy of 'tribes' that occupied the same land.

An official publication illustrative of the thought processes of British officials as they defined ethnic labels is S.S. Murray's A Handbook of Nyasaland (1922). Murray correctly comments on the vagueness of such terms as 'Nguru'. The Nguru are, he explains, a number of different peoples loosely allied in the Makua-Lomwe group but bearing separate designations (Atakwani, Akokola, etc.) that refer to different districts of origin in Mozambique. Similarly, with respect to the Yao, Murray comments that because of intermarriage which has robbed them of their 'finer features', the 'majority of the so-called Yaos' in the Shire Highlands 'have little claim to the name'. Yet this recognition of the obvious cultural heterogeneity of southern Nyasaland does not prevent him from detecting quite specific 'Nguru' and 'Yao' traits. The Nguru, he claims, 'are represented among the idle and criminal classes to a disproportionate extent'. The Yao, on the other hand, are 'intelligent and quick', making 'excellent servants' while 'as soldiers they have proved of inestimable value'. They also speak 'perhaps the finest of all Central African languages'. The Yao are seen as being more like Europeans than any other people of the Southern Province. They live in 'square houses' and cultivate habits of 'personal cleanliness'. It was felt that they understood a certain man-to-man equality of address. Unfortunately, and as if it were a by-product of their intelligence and fine features, the Yao are 'poor cultivators of the soil'.[112]

Before DANO could be implemented, however, 'villages' for Yao headmen to head had to be created from the ethnic soup. Complaints had noted that houses were 'scattered in twos and threes all about the place', making it difficult to collect taxes and to keep good order generally. The British ordered that houses be 'concentrated' into groups of no fewer than twenty. Many thousands of people had to be relocated, and it was impossible to join four adjacent settlements and appoint a headman without political trouble. Yet, despite such problems, this plan to form new villages was implemented.

The majority of those most directly affected by hut concentration were Nguru, for the power of the newly appointed Yao village headmen to allocate land put all immigrants firmly in their power. As Nguru immigrants continued to pour into the area during the 1920s and 1930s, they needed to secure a tax certificate, a document carrying a chief's name, as evidence of their legal residence in the country. This ensured continued advantages to the Yao chiefs and headmen from whom they had to request permission to settle. Chiefly control over land effectively made Nguru labour available to the Yao chiefs and headmen on akapolo ('slave') terms, just as it had been made available to the European planters through the thangata system. When, therefore. World War I created a demand for porters for the Carrier Corps, the newly installed Yao chiefs, in marked contrast to the Ngoni Paramount in the north, Chimtunga, responded with alacrity. From Chiradzulu district alone, 2300 porters had been despatched by the end of 1915, and, the chiefs being 'cooperative', 800 more were provided in January 1916.[113] Virtually all the 6000 porters supplied from the district during the war were Nguru.

This government-sponsored political differentiation between Yao chiefs and Nguru commoners also had a clear economic parallel. By April 1916, exactly one year after village consolidation had begun, tobacco was being cultivated as a cash crop. The new crop was fire-cured dark leaf tobacco. No reliable production


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figures are available until the mid-1920s, but descriptions of the crop make it clear that this was a development of great importance to the country's economy. By 1930 tobacco grown and cured by Africans represented almost 75 per cent of Nyasaland's tobacco exports. It was the ethnically specified redistribution of power on the Shire Highlands which provided much of the opportunity for this expansion in production as chiefs could use Nguru labour to produce the crop in exchange for permission to settle.[114]

The fallout from the Chilembwe Rising, the demands of the war, and the desire for bureaucratic convenience had all made the Yao chiefs seem indispensable to the British. DANO proved its worth during World War I in suppressing opposition to colonialism, in keeping the supplies of labour flowing, in getting cash crops grown and taxes collected, and in reducing officialdom's bureaucratic burden. In the years after the war, therefore, official support for the political and economic authority of the Yao ruling elite continued to grow. And, as the alliance between the British administrators and the Yao elite deepened, the British came to see the Yao, their chosen instruments in Indirect Rule, as a people with a real history, in marked contrast to other local Africans, who had only customs and folklore. In 1919 Yohanna B. Abdallah's The Yaos was published in Zomba by the Government Printing Office in both Yao and English versions. Abdallah's aim was to 'write a book all about the customs of we Yaos, so that we remind ourselves whence we sprang and of our beginnings as a nation'.[115] It is significant that Abdallah was a priest of the Anglican Universities Mission to Central Africa, the first African to be so ordained in Nyasaland. Thus his book effectively made the point that some Yao were not Muslims: they were loyal members of the Church of England.

During the 1930s the contrasts between the Yao and Nguru 'tribes' were made in ever starker terms. In 1936, for example, a district officer produced an evolutionary account of Yao history that was even more useful to the British administration than Abdallah's had been. According to him, the Yao had their origins in Mozambique as family units, small matrilineal communities often living many miles apart. Because of threats from the Portuguese and Arabs of the East Coast, they coalesced into larger communities, living under chiefs who were responsible for organizing their security. The chief who led in war came from the largest of the various units that had amalgamated. Then there were coalitions of the larger groupings, the family units having thus evolved into the 'tribe' or the sub-sections of the 'tribe' under powerful chiefs. At this stage of development, which coincided with the migrations into Nyasaland, there were thus three levels of power among the Yao: the paramount chiefs, the subordinate chiefs, and the village lineage head. Although the paramount was basically a military figure, his position 'rested largely on his reputation for fairness'. No Yao paramount had the power of a Zulu or Ngoni chief: if the Zulu chief was like Caesar, the Yao paramount was more like an English prime minister! The Yao, then, were a tribe with a true history: they had evolved through the proper stages into something like a nation.

The Nguru, according to the official's investigations, had evolved in just the opposite direction. Originally united under the chieftaincy of Mwatunga, the tribe had disintegrated into family groups taking their names from their relationship to Mwatunga's respective wives. Thus the Nguru were no longer a 'tribal unit'. Even the name 'Anguru' as a term of unification was only a fiction, this discovery by a twist of colonial thinking being adduced as fresh proof of their intrinsic inferiority.[116]

This vision of the Nguru as inherently inferior beings was both a reflection of,


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and rationalization for, their subordinate social position in the area's political economy. As such, it was reinforced as a result of changes in Nyasaland's economy in the Depression years. European planters and Yao chiefs alike had encouraged Nguru settlement for decades, and as a result of these policies there was a severe overpopulation of the Shire Highlands and a serious threat of soil erosion. In response to this situation, then, certain planters tried to evict what they now viewed as 'surplus' Nguru. While concerned about the ecological problem, the government opposed this plan because of the congestion that existed already on Crown Land and because the Nguru were living in such abiding poverty and insecurity that there was a likelihood that they might stage a bloody revolt if subjected to any further pressures.[117]

To many it was already clear that the only solution lay in the purchase by the government of the largely unused European-held estates, the abolition of the thangata system, and the general relief of congestion in the Shire Highlands by land settlement schemes. The public debate about the role of the Nguru became extraordinarily virulent. Spokesmen for planters who had begun to fear that they might be displaced by the very Nguru whom they had themselves settled on their land lashed out in letters to the Nyasaland Times . Why should Britons die, raged one, 'to make Nyasaland a safe boozing den for alien Nguru?' There was insufficient space in the newspaper, clamoured another, to show 'from the history of these people the steps by which they became in turn slave-trading gangsters, irregular soldiers, cringing-starving-unclothed refugees, and finally under a safe benign government: drunken, slothful and vicious'. The older colonial historiography had been turned on its head: all along it had been the Nguru who were the slave traders; they were 'candid bandits, their prey human flesh and blood, and having gorged like hyenas, they then returned to Manguru for the most part replete'.[118] The wheel of European opinion had come full circle: the former 'raw Anguru' who had been welcomed for decades as cheap workers were now cannibals!

While the government considered the question of post-war land reforms, a new ethnic initiative made its appearance. The reasoned African reply to the letters to the Nyasaland Times was coordinated by Charles W. Mlanga. Within two years Mlanga had become the first secretary general of the new Nyasaland African Congress, the first specifically nationalist movement in the country. One of its committee members was an educated Nguru, Lewis Bandawe. Bandawe, who was to serve the Lomwe in much the same way that Edward Manda had served the Tumbuka, had been born in Mozambique in 1887.[119] He was educated in the schools of the Blantyre Mission and in 1913 he returned to Mozambique to teach, remaining there until 1928. He worked as a teacher, acted as head of the local mission for long periods of time, and translated the New Testament into 'Lomwe'. On his return to Blantyre, he broke with the Blantyre Mission and became a clerk in the Judicial Department, eventually rising to the rank of deputy registrar.

With his long experience of both Nyasaland and Mozambique, Bandawe was ideally placed to become a spokesman for the despised Nguru peoples. He understood the goals of Indirect Rule and the room for manoeuvre they offered. He began to speak of 'a vast country' east of Lake Chirwa, extending from Yao country to the north to Sena territory to the south, from the Nyasaland border east to the Indian Ocean. It was a country populated by 'the mighty Lomwe tribe' and its 'sub-tribes', all of whom looked to the Namuli hills, the heartland of the Lomwe people, as their ancestral home. These were arguments the administration understood.

In 1943 Bandawe founded the Alomwe Tribal Representative Association, a


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group which successfully petitioned the British administration to have the word 'Anguru' banned from all official government documents and replaced with the term 'Lomwe'. One of the tactics used in Bandawe's campaign for the rehabilitation of the image of the immigrants from Mozambique was, as elsewhere in Nyasaland, an appeal to History. Not all the 'Yao' chiefs who had invaded the Shire Highlands in the 1860s, it was claimed, were actually Yao—some, like Kawinga, had been Lomwe![120] In this way, then, the various disparate groups of refugees and immigrants from Mozambique had come to join the ranks of those of Nyasaland's peoples—like the Tumbuka, the Ngoni and the Yao—who were to be considered a 'tribe' in their own right, even though earlier stereotypes of their alleged inferiority were to remain powerful at least into the early 1980s.

In the Southern Province, then, the elaboration of ethnicity was underscored with appeals and justifications drawn from what, largely at European prompting, was said to be history. The British sought to develop and impose a tribal system useful to them within the structures of Indirect Rule, with loyal Yao chiefs ruling over docile Nguru workers to further the successes of the European plantation economy and to maintain order. The Yao chiefs collaborated with the British, but, in so doing, they were promoting their own personal and economic power rather than any broadly conceptualized notion of Yao unity or identity. The great majority of Yao-speakers remained Muslim and hence were hostile to the establishment of the sort of Christian schools which propagated the notions of Ngoni and Tumbuka identity in the north. Similarly, Bandawe's ideas failed to gain popular acceptance because of the lack of schools under Lomwe control.

Without schools to propagate notions of ethnic identity among the young at the village level, ethnic ideologies remained weak, largely restricted to the chiefly elite and their supporters and possessing little popular force. What existed in the south, then, was a highly stratified African society, with Yao chiefs and headmen ruling over a large population of unhappy Nguru—or 'Lomwe'—whom they held in thrall by control over the land. In this situation, those who had mission education and who sought an end to colonialism were unable—and perhaps unwilling—to mobilize any popular support for their movement among Mang'anja, Yao or Nguru/Lomwe peoples by evoking ethnic symbols.


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5— Tribalism in the Political History of Malawi1
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