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5— Tribalism in the Political History of Malawi1
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The Focusing of African Discontent

During the 1940s and 1950s, African discontent in the Northern Province over labour migrancy, in the Southern Province over the thangata system and Yao chiefly dominance, and in the Central Province over economic policies all came to be subsumed in a country-wide hostility to the state's agricultural policies. By the end of the 1930s, Nyasaland's agricultural experts had become convinced that there was an ecological crisis in the making. Problems of deforestation, soil erosion, and soil exhaustion loomed ever more prominent in official reports, holding out the prospect that Nyasaland might soon be unable to feed itself. There were various reasons for this problem, some national and some regional. The first was simply that population had increased to a point where in many parts of the country the carrying capacity of the soil had been exceeded.[136] The country was, in the context of east central Africa, a relatively hospitable territory, and at the beginning of the British occupation the population was already fairly dense. With increased security and improved medical facilities, especially in the form of anti-smallpox vaccine, the population grew. To it were added tens of thousands of immigrants from Mozambique. In 1945, the census reported an average population density of 56 persons per square mile, with as many as 310 persons in the most densely populated areas.[137]

The second reason was linked to the first and lay in the nature of the country's agricultural systems. Throughout the country, but especially in its northern half, with its dry Brachystegia woodland and relatively lower rainfall, successful subsistence cultivation depended on giving the land long periods of rest, often extending to twenty or thirty years. Without such respite, the humus quickly vanished under strong sun and leaching rains. Such systems were appropriate to the country's ecological demands, but they depended on the abundance of two things: land and labour. In the overpopulated areas, in particular in the Shire Highlands and the lower Shire Valley, there was no longer land available for such fallowing. As a consequence, the soils of most of the heavily populated districts began to decline in fertility. By contrast, in the north of the country, where land remained relatively plentiful, it was labour that was lacking. Labour migrancy had drained the region of its men since the 1890s, and the labour necessary to open fallow land for cultivation, thus ensuring that the land already under cultivation could return to fallow, was simply not available. Again, the soils of the region suffered from excessive use.[138]

A third reason for the crisis lay in the effects of the tobacco boom itself. Soil erosion and soil exhaustion were occurring both on African land and on the European estates, where, for example, tobacco was planted on ridges descending


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hillsides so that unwanted rainwater could be quickly carried away![139] Tobacco also required wood for curing, and deforestation had become a serious problem over wide tobacco-growing areas. Districts like Chiradzulu, for example, which older settlers could remember as having been thick with trees, were beginning to look like semi-desert. Streams that had once been perennial now flowed only in the wet season. This deforestation, together with the opening up of tobacco nursery gardens on the banks of streams, furthered soil erosion.[140]

Finally, as causes had effects, so effects produced further causes. Land shortages and soil exhaustion, reinforced by the hostile pricing policies of the Native Tobacco Board, led to increased labour migrancy and a shift in its sources. Before World War II the Northern Province, with but 14 per cent of the country's population, contributed over 50 per cent of the total number of migrants.[141] On the other hand, only eight per cent of adult male migrants came from the four districts where Africans produced tobacco or cotton and the two districts where European plantations held the local population through ties of thangata or where they could produce maize or tobacco for sale on Crown Land.[142] By 1945 the situation was quite different, with only 28 per cent of total migrants now coming from the north. Thus the problems inherent in large scale migrancy came to new areas of the country.[143]

The significance of this shift lay not merely in the fact that more labour was being removed from the villages, however. Not all the migrants left the country. Some became visiting tenants on estates in the Central Province, while others took jobs on nearby tea plantations. These workers, together with the immigrants from Mozambique who continued to supply the bulk of the workforce, had to be fed. Buyers toured the villages to purchase maize, groundnuts, and cassava. There were also substantial populations in the towns who purchased their food, most of which was supplied by peasant growers. Thus, at a time of growing labour migrancy, land shortage, soil erosion and exhaustion, the people remaining in the villages were required not only to feed themselves but also to feed an increasing proportion of the local population which did not produce its own food.[144]

To the aggregation of these problems the government offered one major and several minor solutions. The minor solutions included the gradual purchase of unused estate land for resettlement and a legal requirement that the big tea and tobacco estates grow their own food for their workers. A 'yeoman farmers' programme was also created that involved special allocation of land, distribution of free seed, fertilizer and advice, and the payment of cash bonuses for work well done to a select few, a plan that was generally unpopular because of its perceived unfairness. And in the Central Province, where policies of the Native Tobacco Board had already alienated thousands, the government took yet another step against African producers. By the late 1940s many producers had begun to produce large quantities of maize for the market to earn the money they needed. The state reacted to this initiative as it had towards tobacco growing in the 1930s, especially after a severe famine in 1949 had underscored the fragility of the country's agricultural systems.[145] Because agricultural experts asserted that mono-cropping maize was injurious both to soil fertility and soil structure, the state intervened in the 1950s, reducing prices paid for maize, abolishing many marketing facilities for it, and even uprooting growing maize, all in the hope of forcing a reduction in maize production.[146] This further fuelled African discontent.

The government's major solution to the perceived ecological threat, energetically pursued throughout the country from the mid-1940s onwards, was that the villagers themselves should bring soil erosion under control by


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constructing thousands of miles of contour ridges in their fields. Three facts about this decision are plain. First, it was clearly illogical to impose highly labour-intensive contour ridging in those parts of the country where the land's declining quality was caused by labour shortages. Second, it was equally misguided to expect peasant producers to take measures to increase their yields without a pricing policy to make the extra work worthwhile. Villagers well understood that land shortages were caused partially by land alienation, and they could see that the European estates were underutilized. They also were aware that the state's marketing regulations were requiring them to feed the towns and the labour compounds at prices lower than a free market would have secured.[147]

Third, and most important of all, it was over the issue of contour ridging that truly national politics finally came to Nyasaland. To the Africans, the fact that ridging was compulsory was another example of colonial brutality. To the administrators and agricultural experts, African resistance to ridging was another example of peasant conservatism and irrationality which had to be overcome with force if necessary. No other issue—not even the political question of the creation of the Federation of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland itself—generated such united mass protest at the village level as it became mixed with the political turmoil that surrounded the creation of the new Federation. This protest provided ample grounds for the Malawi Congress Party to mobilize an anti-colonial nationalism throughout the entire country, regardless of the presence or absence of local ethnic ideologies.[148]


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5— Tribalism in the Political History of Malawi1
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