This chapter begins with a brief description of Blantyre District and surrounding areas of the Southern Province of colonial Malawi in the late 1940s. It then goes on to detail the events of the famine of 1949–50. This description focuses on Blantyre District where the famine was most severe, but it also draws on material covering a wider geographical area, in an attempt to relate government policy to local experience. As the famine progressed, so the linkages between local communities and wider economic structures became more crucial. The narrative traces these linkages, moving backwards and forwards between the local setting and a larger world.

The town of Blantyre was prosperous in the late 1940s. Blantyre had never been the administrative capital of colonial Malawi, but along with its ‘twin’ town, Limbe, it formed the commercial centre of the country. It was a town dominated by Europeans and tied closely to the settler economy. With high tobacco prices, an expansion of construction, and an influx of demo bed African soldiers flush with money, the immediate post-war period was a good time for commerce. Blantyre had grown, somewhat raggedly, from its foundation as a ‘township’ in 1895, when it had been literally built around the twin pillars of Commerce and Christianity, in the form of the Church of Scotland mission on one ridge and a handful of trading companies on another.