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Peasant Cotton Agriculture, Gender and Inter-Generational Relationships: The Lower Tchiri (Shire) Valley Of Malawi, 1906-1940

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

Elias Mandala
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Extract

During the colonial era, pre-capitalist social and economic institutions in Nyasaland (now Malawi) underwent profound change as the result of the incorporation of the country's societies into the world capitalist economy. This essay explores the change in the day-to-day relationships between men and women and between the elders and the youth in the Tchiri valley of colonial Nyasaland from 1906 to 1940. The development of cotton as a cash crop was the focus of these changing relationships. This study locates the principal dynamics of the cotton economy in local adaptation to the ecosystem, a process which accounts for the success of cotton agriculture before the mid-1930s and its subsequent decline. The peasantry which developed before the mid-1930s was later reincorporated into the world system mainly as wage earners. This altered all earlier gender and intergenerational relationships.

The history of peasant (or Crown Land) cotton production in the Tchiri valley falls into three distinct periods. The first phase lasted from 1906 to 1923, when it struggled for survival vis-a-vis the state sponsored plantations. The second extended from 1924 to 1935 and represents the prosperous period when peasants triumphed and the plantations failed. The third phase, 1936-1940, was the collapse of peasant production in large parts of the Lower Tchiri valley.

The principal dynamics of the peasant cotton economy were ecological. The Tchiri valley is bounded by a range of hills on the north, west and north-east and cut in a north-south direction by the Tchiri River which has its source in Lake Malawi. It is divided into two broad ecological zones: the rain-fed or mphala and the river-fed or dimba subsystems.

Type
Research Article
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 25 , Issue 2-3 , September 1982 , pp. 27 - 44
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1982

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