In 1950, when I arrived in Nyasaland, it was trying to live down its unhappy nickname
of the period - the Cinderella of Central Africa. At this time it was undoubtedly
rather down at heel, for during the war districts had been amalgamated as the younger
and fitter officers left to serve in the armed forces, the professional services suffered
similarly and the general infrastructure was pared to the bone. The first sign of returning
life was the result of the burgeoning Colonial Development and Welfare grants that an
optimistic British government had started in a modest way in the depths of the war, and
now, in the late forties and early fifties, the previously all but moribund administration
was slowly moving to a more productive existence.
From the start there was a major problem in the lack of experience of the officers
available to do the work. By 1950 the Department of Agriculture was reasonably well
staffed. Excluding specialist and support staff there were about sixty professional
officers, but only the three top men (who were inevitably office bound) and three others
had been in the country long - all the rest were quite new. In the Provincial and District
Administration the same pattern pertained; of about 85 officers, only twenty had been in
the country for five years or more, and a number of these were in Secretariat or other
posts outside district work. While we all did our best, there was a general dearth of
relevant experience.
However, with a forceful governor and a persuasive and energetic Director of
Agriculture, the economy of the country was to be galvanised into action and expansion.
Unhappily the country was not endowed with much in the way of mineral wealth - no
gold, no diamonds, no coal, no iron; there was plenty of bauxite at Mlanje, but one of
the hard rules of economics was that a base mineral more than three hundred miles from
the sea was just not a viable prospect for exploitation. All Nyasaland had to offer the
world was great beauty, plenty of water and a large, friendly and hard-working
population. The technical advance on which all development had to be based was the
humble khasu - the hoe. Wielded by the African farmer, this simple tool was an efficient
cultivator; it consisted of a sharp spade-shaped blade (about 12 in by 10 in - though
there were different sizes) with a long spike, which latter appendage fitted through a hole
in a three-foot long club-like handle, and with it the whole country's gardens were dug
over, stones prised out and the whole kept clear of weeds. Swung towards the user, it
was necessary to avoid chopping off one's toes, but during a sojourn of a dozen years in
the country I do not remember any such accident. Hoes wore out fairly regularly, but
even the remains had their value as boot scrapers and other exotic uses; to this day I
have on my wall two pairs of wicked looking weapons, a pair of battle axes and a pair of
stabbing spears, which had started their existence as common or garden hoes.
Early in 1950 the close collaboration of Governor and Director of Agriculture was
marked by the issue of a personal and signed directive from His Excellency to all officers
concerned with the field. This letter was a four page document in exceedingly small print and was most comprehensive in its direction; it was a remarkable summation of
Government agricultural policy, and I have kept my "Dear Smith" copy to this day.
Much of it was sensible, even if it still held traces of ancient prejudices - "I am told
that the Nyasaland African is lazy ... (but) the low output cannot be entirely attributed to
laziness...". He contrasted this poor production with the high reputation for industry
enjoyed by Nyasa workers outside the country, and attributed this largely to a deficient
diet. He was rather closer to the mark when he commented on the fact that in earlier
days the African could feed himself adequately on about thee months' work a year; well,
what man of any sense in the tropics would want to work harder than he must - the
Protestant work ethic has seldom held any charms for the inhabitants of a hot and humid
country, be it Africa or Burma. Having said that compulsion would not work, he then
went on to detail the agricultural planning involved - with compulsion - for all types of
farming, starting with soil conservation - which section ended with the minatory words
"Destructive methods of cultivation must be proscribed and offenders punished" - and
in this phrase lurked the early success and ultimate utter failure of the scheme of action.
Each district had to plan for increased production along the lines set out, and submit
these plans to the Provincial Commissioner, who in consultation with the provincial
departmental officers and the Natural Resources Board, would approve or amend. Guidelines for each province were then set out.
The Governor, Sir Geoffrey Colby, had come to Nyasaland in that office after 23 years
in Nigeria, so at the date of this letter had had not quite two years in the country. The
Director of Agriculture, Dick Kettlewell, however, had been in Nyasaland since 1934 and
knew it intimately in all seasons and conditions. The Governor's letter bore all the hall
marks of having been composed as a policy paper by a senior and deeply experienced
agricultural field officer, and it was indeed the brain child of this highly able officer that
went out over His Excellency's signature.
So the future of the country had to lie in agriculture in all its manifestations. The early
mainstay of tea was not susceptible of much government influence, as it was entirely
privately owned. The only temporary exception had been the wide Conforzi estates,
sequestered to Government during its owner's internment as an enemy alien, but returned
to him with the reappearance of Italy in the allied fold. Tobacco was both plantation
(European) and African produced, and was overseen and largely operated by a Tobacco
Board (a quasi-Government affair), though the tobacco auctions were entirely
commercial. There was considerable opportunity for expansion and assistance, while in
those primitive days tobacco was considered a social boon and not a menace. With
China being thoroughly inscrutable at this time, there was a fair opportunity for the
cultivation of tung nuts, but this was firmly in the hands of the East Asiatic Company -
in spite of its name a Danish concern. However tung required a major capital input and a
long lead time before the nuts could be harvested. The first crop ever tried in Nyasaland
was coffee, and by 1900 two million pounds were exported, but crop failures and a poor
price had led to its abandonment. Rice was a possibility, but did not come into its own
until many years later, under a Malawi Congress government.
Another promising prospect, not yet fully tapped, was cotton, which grew well in the
hotter and lower districts of the country, i.e. the Lake Shore and Shire Valley. Historically,
this had been an early considerable success, production in 1916/17 reaching 3.5 million
pounds, but this had been in decline for many years. There was a body already in
existence, the British Cotton Growers' Association, with a large plant near Balaka, but it
was moribund; Government proposed to move in with all the forces at its command, and
vastly increase the production of cotton.
But by far the most widespread agriculture was on a subsistence level. With some
minor exceptions the population was rural, each villager producing what he and his
family needed, and, in good times, some over for sale and barter. I have said "he", but in
fact while gardens tended to be opened and broken in by male labour, much of the actual
grind of cultivation was done by the women. The need for money and adventure and a
natural dislike for the dullness of manual toil in the gardens induced many young men to
travel abroad to seek work. Many were recruited on contract by the two labour
organisations - the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (Winela) and the
Rhodesian ditto - (Mtandizi = "assistance"). Neither of these bodies was a slaver
recruiter, and both were strictly regulated by law. They had to ascertain a man's physical
fitness to work, see that he went to an approved employer, and that he sent regular
remittances home to his family, and that he returned at the end of his contract. This was
fine as far as it went, but neither recruiting body could know whether or not the man's
family at home would suffer without his labour, while many Africans went off on their
own initiative. At the time of which I speak there were scores of thousands of Nyasaland
men abroad, and many were known as machona - the lost ones - for they never came
home, nor sent money. There was another social factor that may have encouraged this
movement of men, that I have never seen taken into account in learned treatises - the
practise of uxorilocal settlement. Put simply, the custom demanded that a man go and
live in his wife's village - and what man of any colour or creed would really relish living
away from his own home and surrounded by all his wife's female relations?
Now the Government, through the Department of Agriculture, set about improving the
general standard of agricultural practices. Unlike that pertaining among the more
sophisticated peasantry of Asia, African "garden" agriculture was fairly simple. You
cleared the bush, burned off the resultant rubbish, and there was your garden. The
growing pressure of population increase meant that the gardens could no longer be
rotated, and were used for ever and a day. Since no regard was paid to the contour, the
annual heavy rains sent vast amounts of topsoil coursing down the Shire River; it was
said that Nyasaland was rapidly becoming a mudbank at the mouth of Zambesi, of which
the Shire was a tributary.
To eradicate this abuse of the land, agricultural rules almost draconian in their severity
were brought it, and the peasantry forced to follow them. The technique behind the rules
was sensible enough, and was based on "ridging and boxing". First of all an Agriculture
Department capitao (foreman, from the Portuguese for "captain") would come along, and mark the contour lines in the gardens. The owner then had to hoe up ridges a foot or
more high, and three feet apart from each other, along the contour and over the full
extent of his garden. As if that was not hard enough, he or she had to put in transverse
closure ridges every six feet, so that from above the garden would resemble a brick wall
in pattern. The outcome would be that the regular rains would be retained in the hollows
thus created and preserve both moisture and soil.
Now these rules, if accompanied and introduced by a persuasive propaganda
campaign, might have been acceptable. However, there were three problems; the first
was that the contours depended on the skill and accuracy of the capitaos who marked
them, and the care with which they were followed - otherwise they were worse than
useless, merely creating more runnels for rainwater run-off. The second was the limited
amount of physical endurance available to the garden owners, who were only too often
women or old men. The final problem was much worse. We did not attempt much in the
way of persuasion - it was all done by compulsion and punishment. Still worse was the
fact that the District Officers, to whom the people looked for (and usually got) fair and
sympathetic treatment, were themselves among the persecutors. As I have said, we had a
forceful Governor and an enthusiastic and driving Director of Agriculture, and the result
of their otherwise praiseworthy close co-operation was to turn the District
Administration into the handmaid of the Agricultural Department. We were obliged to
travel round and round the district, harassing the unfortunate peasantry into these
exhausting labours. The African farmer is no more appreciative of being bullied into
virtue than any other farmer - or for that matter any other human being - and from the
outset the ridging and boxing rules were hated; the first major act of the Malawi
Congress Government on assuming power was to abolish these laws - and the unhappy
country is still being washed down to the sea. We, the district staff, were allowed no
discretion in the enforcement of the laws, and on one occasion I found myself preaching
the virtues and detailing the penalties of the agricultural rules to a village in the heart of
the Elephant Marsh near Chiromo - a spot completely on the flat, in a swamp, and liable
to be under water anyway in the rains. The inspection of gardens, by the way, meant just
that; it was not a matter of airily casting an eye over the landscape, but a careful and
detailed inspection of each garden sod by crumbling sod - I must have stumbled over
many miles of furrows on these visitations.
Having thus ground the faces of the poor we then set about improving their lot by
encouraging the planting and propagation of cotton. Even then we did not seem to be
able to do it without coercion. The gardens had to be cleared and ready to be planted
by a certain date, thorough weeding carried out, the cotton picked by another fixed
date, and the old bushes uprooted and burned to eliminate the risk of the spread of the
cotton boll weevil by yet another deadline. It was all well meant and the correct
practice needed to be followed carefully, but bullying, however genteel or gentle, was
not the way to do it.
Once the cotton was growing well, the gardens had to be kept weeded and here again
the capitaos. District Officers, Agricultural Officers and Assistants spent much effort in chivvying the garden owners. I earlier mentioned our inexperience; to illustrate this I
must cite a certain large and genial Agricultural Officer, once a bomber pilot and still in
possession of a fine RAF moustache. He was a man of great energy and devotion to duty
and later of considerable distinction, but in his early stint in the Lower River District he
was still thinking in terms of the UK working day. He would rise about seven, have a
leisurely breakfast and at about 9 am set out on his bicycle for the gardens, returning
exhausted and covered in sweat several hours later, complaining loudly that the locals
were a lazy lot - they were all lying about in their villages and there were none working
in the gardens. It took him a little time to realise that the Lower River African was a
sensible man (and woman), and, living in a climate of blighting midday heat, would
leave home well before dawn, and finish by nine, returning for a well earned rest, after
completing a hard day's work.
I do not wish to give the impression that all of this was an unrewarded burden on the
grower, for at the height of the cotton buying season large amounts of money were
disbursed by Government's Agricultural Production and Marketing Board, and the
various cotton markets, sited at convenient centres, presented a lively sight as cheerful
men and women queued up with their produce tightly packed in wicker bales,
contentedly anticipating being paid. The amount of cash held by these centres was
startling; the "strong room" at Chiromo had wooden shelves round its walls with bundles
of bank notes and bags of silver stacked high. I sometimes wondered at the sanctity of
the place from robbery, for the only "strong" part of the strong room was its door - the
walls were brick, but the mortar mere mud, while the nearest police were at Port Herald,
thirty miles away on the wrong side of the Shire. In about half an hour's easy work any
Johannesburg trained thug could have coshed the night watchman, smashed his way
through the wall and be over the shallow Ruo river into Mozambique, many thousands of
pounds richer.
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