Colonial rule in Africa has been aptly characterized as a “working misunderstanding.” On both sides of the divide, Europeans and Africans hammered out relationships that permitted them to live together in the colonial world. John Iliffe argued that the notion of “tribe” was essential to many of these relationships. Vail and White convincingly demonstrated how true this was for colonial Malawi, and Chirwa argues for its continuing relevance today. And yet we still do not know much about the process by which colonial understandings of “tribe” shaped those of nation or nationalism. The tenacity of political ethnicity and regional or parochial politics makes it even more important to examine the link between these categories; to understand the complex relationship between “political language” and “political organization.”

Regional and ethnic identities continue to be central markers of politics in Malawi, but they are not entirely straightforward mechanisms for political mobilization. This can be traced to the colonial experience. While Africans were governed as they were because Europeans saw them as “Africans” (or perhaps “natives”), not all Africans experienced colonialism in the same way, nor did they define and experience political culture uniformly. Age, gender, class, and ethnicity all shaped experience, but the latter is most explicitly represented in the written and oral evidence produced by colonizers and colonized alike. It is inscribed in their diaries, memoirs, official documents, biographies, histories, and personal testimonies.

Elizabeth Schmidt recently wrote that the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain in Guinea was able to lead that colony to independence because, even though its leadership was drawn from the western educated elite, the “non-literate masses” drove “the nationalist agenda.” This would eventually be true for the NAC in colonial Malawi, but it did not start out as a mass party. Rather it was transformed into one through struggle. Those who formed the Nyasaland African Congress in 1944 were drawn from the ranks of relative privilege derived from hereditary status, access to mission education, or, like Charles Chinula, Chief Mwase Kasungu, and Levi Mumba, both. They were the “new men,” members of a growing “accumulating class” born of the colonial economy, and Congress's early agenda emphasized and reflected their aims and aspirations. It would take an internal scandal and a territorial crisis born of white settler nationalism to push Congress's focus away from a narrow elitism toward a more populist, mass-based agenda. The story of how and why this occurred begins with the formation of Congress in 1944.

Much has been made of the role of Livingstonia Mission graduates such as Levi Mumba and Charles Chinula in the beginnings of “modern” politics in colonial Malawi, but the Congress of 1944 to 1950 was as much a product of the commercial south as of the “enlightened” north of missions and labor migrants.

Wracked by the ravages of the slave trade and Ngoni incursions from the south, Malawi's precolonial political and economic systems were, to put it mildly, in a state of flux at the close of the nineteenth century. European colonization coincided with this period of local political instability. Europeans entered the region as traders, missionaries, and adventurers who, wittingly or not, found themselves caught up in webs of local intrigue and the shifting political and economic alliances born of them. As McCracken observed: “Malawi by the 1870s was less a land of chaos than of fluidity, with confusion resulting not from the absence of political systems but from the presence of too many clashing and competing ones.” In addition to the plethora of competing political actors with whom they had to contend, Europeans encountered political systems marked by a clear tension between centralizing political forces and those bent on retaining local autonomy based on village or clan governance. These competing claims for political legitimacy informed the way politics played out in the early colonial period.

Present day Malawi's geographic boundaries were fixed in 1897 when it came under British Foreign Office control as the British Central Africa Protectorate. It was renamed Nyasaland (land of the lake) in 1907, after its control was transferred to the Colonial Office. District boundaries changed over the course of the colonial period but the territory's boundaries did not (see map 1.1).

At the end of 1962, Dr. Banda announced that secession was imminent, and on Saturday, December 29, a procession of LMY members carried a coffin labeled “Federation” around Blantyre to celebrate its demise. Chipembere was freed on the “spur of the moment” on January 15 after two years in Zomba Prison, in time for Banda to be sworn in as prime minister on Friday, February 1. Dr. Banda held a cocktail party for Chipembere the next evening. On this occasion, Chipembere, now minister of local government, spoke at length of how the press had tried to drive a wedge between him and Dr. Banda by hinting at Chipembere's ambitions.

The Malawi Congress Party was a necessity born out of the State of Emergency that proscribed the Nyasaland African Congress. Between August 1959 and April 1960, the MCP grew into a mass party fueled by youthful enthusiasm and the vindication provided by the Devlin Report. With the release of Dr. Banda in April, the party and the nationalist movement took a critical turn. Kanyama Chiume, Dr. Banda, and others transformed the MCP into a political machine directly linked to the personality and authority of its leader. By 1962, Banda's MCP had seized control of the Legislative Council and secured Nyasaland's right to secede from the federation. Banda's methods, on the other hand, had come to be questioned by some of his closest associates. According to Henry Phillips, the European finance secretary under Armitage (and, for a time, finance minister under Banda), Banda had secured the promise of secession in November of 1962 but delayed the announcement until just before Christmas. “He had accomplished this,” recalled Phillips, “in quiet negotiation and not across a conference table.” He went on to recall Banda saying that while the fact that this was not decided at the formal November talks with Butler might have worried “my boys … it did not worry me. Fortunately for me, people in this country take the attitude that the doctor knows best.”

This book has explored the development of political culture and nationalism in Malawi during the colonial and early postcolonial period. While it would be a gross oversimplification to attribute all elements of Malawi's politics today to these developments, there are some undeniable connections. First, the development of anticolonial politics involved people in an engagement between the local and the national to produce a particular type of populism rooted in the championing of local causes and linking these (sometimes erroneously) to a larger political project, specifically the end of federation and the attainment of self-government and independence. Once these things were achieved, once the political kingdom was assured, all else would follow. One of the conditionalities for decolonization was the holding of elections, but this really happened only once, in 1961, given the overwhelming monopoly of political power by the MCP. The government it formed inherited all the problems of the colonial state and its structure, which was anything but democratic.

On the other hand, the MCP government's legitimacy cannot be questioned, even if it increasingly turned to violence and intimidation to quell opposition. Its success lay in its historical development. The NAC and then the MCP had been able to forge alliances between traditional and modern elites and the masses, first by squaring “tradition” with indirect rule and later through a formal alliance of Congress and chiefs in the Supreme Council.

Outside the urban areas, politicians built networks and coalitions around rural discontent with state attempts to interfere in people's daily lives, particularly government efforts to conserve natural resources and increase agricultural output. The “second colonial occupation” of Nyasaland (by agricultural experts and conservationists) was marked by “an energy and conviction surpassed only in Kenya.” Government had hoped to undertake agrarian reform in the 1930s, but economic recession made that impossible. This changed in the postwar period when a global oil and fat shortage, combined with Britain's dollar gap and rising primary product prices, provided the incentive and the wherewithal to intervene in agricultural production. Up to that point, state intervention in the economy had been most commonly at the level of distribution (for example, through licensing rules, indirect taxation, and market regulation) rather than production. When the state extended its interventions to the production level after the war, it challenged peasant autonomy not just in the realm of cash crop production but also in food security. It was by addressing these grievances and linking them to the fight against federation that Congress fostered the kind of grassroots populism that became the hallmark of nationalism in Malawi.

The success of the populist strategy is evidenced by the dramatic rise in Congress membership. By 1956, official Congress subscribing members numbered around six thousand (two thousand of whom were anonymous), but government estimated an additional sixty thousand “sympathisers” spread over twenty-four internal and eighteen external branches.

When Governor Armitage declared a State of Emergency, to begin on March 3, 1959, he did so ostensibly to forestall a “massacre plot” hatched by the Nyasaland African Congress, in which Europeans (mostly officials) and their African “stooges” would be killed in order to wipe out colonial authority in Nyasaland. Of the ten people I interviewed who attended the fateful “Bush Meeting” of January 24–25, 1959, at which the plan was said to have been devised, not one spoke of an organized plan to murder, although many admitted to much fiery talk and discussion as to whether or not violence was a legitimate tool with which to fight federation. Delegates felt a real sense of urgency and the need for new tactics and strategies. And there were good reasons for this heightened tension. First, it was becoming ever more difficult for Congress to get police permits for public meetings. Second, rumors abounded that Congress would soon be banned in Southern Rhodesia. Banda had already been declared a prohibited immigrant there and in Northern Rhodesia. Banning Congress in the Rhodesias would be serious, not just for purposes of mobilization but financially, since these branches had long been important sources of party funds.