Introduction

In his political history of Southern Rhodesia, Lord Blake describes the inter-war years as a ‘not very interesting’ period in the colony's history, when little of significance took place. In Nyasaland, by contrast, the interwar years were marked by profound although unspectacular changes, resulting in the creation of economic structures that continued virtually unaltered into the 1960s. Estate agriculture, once seen as the leading sector in the territory's economy, went into steep decline, while peasant communities emerged into more active participation in the cash economy, only to run headlong into the Great Depression. On a political level, the fierce dramas of 1915 and, again, of the 1950s were conspicuous by their absence. But Nyasas were involved in the forging of new forms of identity, forms that were to remain of considerable importance well into the post-war era.

Peasant & planter

In Southern Rhodesia the 1920s were marked by the consolidation of the white farming sector and the decline of the African peasantry; in Nyasaland this pattern was reversed. Following the declaration of peace, ‘there was an influx of new settlers’, most of them ex-servicemen, ‘with some, if not too abundant a supply of capital’ bringing the number of white farmers in the territory from 154 in 1916 to 399 in 1921. No soldier settlement schemes of the type employed in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia were sponsored by the Nyasaland Government. But land was made available in the hitherto unexploited Cholo district by the British Central Africa Company which brought out 5 ex-officers, paid them salaries of £12–15 a month for three years and then sold them 1,000–acre farms at inflated prices.