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Food Production and Family Labour in Southern Malawi: the Shire Highlands and Upper Shire Valley in the Early Colonial Period*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Megan Vaughan
Megan Vaughan
Affiliation:
University of Malawi
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The mechanics of food production by peasant cultivators have received relatively little attention from historians of colonial Africa, and yet a knowledge of food production systems and the labour they require is crucial to any understanding of rural change and stratification in the colonial period. On the Shire Highlands of Southern Malawi, ecological disturbance and the alienation of land in the early years of the twentieth century meant that an intensification of labour on food production was needed if hunger was to be avoided. The differential success of various groups in holding on to their family labour was a major factor making for economic differentiation in this period. Full-scale famine was avoided by the ability of some groups to adopt new cropping patterns, intensify labour, and thus continue to produce a food surplus. A degree of land shortage could be accommodated as long as labour could be intensified on the available land. In the Upper Shire valley at the same time, there was little shortage of land, but the concern for food security there was important in determining the outcome of the introduction of cotton as a cash-crop. The attainment of food security in this area, which was prone to drought, involved the deployment of family labour on food production over much of the year, including the planting of second crops and back-up crops in the dry season. The introduction of cotton was largely a failure because the returns did not compensate for the loss of labour on food production.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 23 , Issue 3 , July 1982 , pp. 351 - 364
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

References

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5 There is a problem here in discerning how far the matrilineage, or the sorority group (mbumba) within it, were units of production. This is almost impossible to determine historically. Oral testimony tends to emphasize the importance of the ‘household’ as a unit of production, whilst the ‘ideology of kinship’ centres on the unit of the territorial clan. The matrilineage and sorority group are almost invisible in oral testimony.

6 As evidenced in the case of an intra-Nyanja dispute over land bordering Lake Chilwa in the late eighteenth century.

7 Eleusine coracana.

8 Sorghum vulgare.

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16 Vaughan, Megan, ‘Social and economic change in Southern Malawi: a study of rural communities in the Shire Highlands and Upper Shire valley from the mid-nineteenth century to 1915’, Ph.D. thesis, London, 1981, 71–81.Google Scholar

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23 There were frequent outbreaks of measles in this period, as well as epidemics of a virulent strain of smallpox which was new to the area.

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25 Serious food shortages occurred in 1900, 1902, 1905, 1911 and 1912. Vaughan, , ‘Social and economic change’, 181–4.Google Scholar

26 The adoption of tobacco and cotton as the main crops grown on the estates was highly significant. Tobacco, in particular, is a land-extensive crop, requiring a long soil rotation. The early estate owners cleared new land for planting every year, and were anxious to keep their tenants off the fallow land.

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30 The Natives Foodstuffs Ordinance was passed in 1912 with a view to preventing exploitation of the food shortage by European and Indian traders. The overall effect of this measure, however, was to make food even more expensive in areas where the crop had failed.

31 ‘Famine is a characteristic of some people not having food; it is not a characteristic of there not being enough food. While the latter can be a cause of the former, it is one of many possible causes, and indeed may or may not be associated with famines’ (italics in original). Sen, Amartya, ‘Famines’, World Development, VIII, ix (09 1980), 614.Google Scholar

32 Very little is known about the ways in which peasant farmers respond to changing conditions by breeding certain characteristics into their crops, though it is clear that such selection does take place.

33 The British Central Africa Company held over 200,000 acres of land in this area, most of it taken over from Eugene Sharrer who had ‘claimed’ it in the 1880s.

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38 The price paid to the farmer was between three-quarters of a penny and one penny per pound depending on the distance that the cotton had to be transported for ginning, and also on the quality of the cotton. In 1910 some of the Nyasaland African-grown crop obtained the record price of one shilling and one penny per pound on the world market. Nyasaland Protectorate, Annual Report of the Department of Agriculture and Forestry, 31 Mar. 1910, 5.

39 In 1914 the Assistant Agriculturalist of South Nyasa district reported that up to eighty per cent of the crop in his area had been destroyed by field mice. Nyasaland Protectorate, Annual Report of the Department of Agriculture and Forestry, 31 Mar. 1915, 23.

40 Cotton was planted in November or December, at the same time as labour was required to plant millet, sorghum and maize. It required a great deal of weeding during its growth, as well as a heavy labour input when it was picked and sorted in April or May.

41 Oral Testimony no. 53, Village Headman Hindahinda, Hindahinda village, T.A. Kalembo, Machinga District, 5 Jan. 1979.