Introduction

During the 1940s and 1950s, the colonial government of Malawi was faced by mounting opposition larger in scale and more intense in type than anything it had previously experienced. The nature of the opposition varied considerably from place to place. In the Shire Highlands, long-term resentment among tenants over the exaction of thangata on European-owned estates deepened from the early 1940s, leading in 1953 to an outbreak of peasant-based violence, the nearest that Central Africa experienced at this period to the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya. Independent peasants in the Central Province were aggrieved by the policies pursued by the Native Tobacco Board. Peasants more widely resented the imposition of malimidwe, the new intrusive conservation rules imposed by the Department of Agriculture. Fear of the likely impact of federation added to discontent. This was combined in a number of districts with the appearance of subordinate groups seeking to challenge the system of collaborative alliances with chosen chiefs that had been carefully constructed by the government over the previous half century. Meanwhile, the emergence of a nationalist movement, given organisational form through the creation in 19 by a group of Blantyre-based intellectuals and businessmen of the Nyasaland African Congress, added an important new centralising element to Malawian politics. Ostentatiously modern in its emphasis on the importance of Western education, Congress in its early years was something of an elitist organisation, with little room for women, the uneducated or the poor.