Child and youth labour on the Nyasaland plantations, 1890–1953

Wiseman Chijere Chirwa

18 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Southern African Studies

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African history and culture studies Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies African studies and sociopolitical issues

Abstract

Evidence from labour censuses and from the reports of the Labour Branch of the Native Administration Department suggest that ‘young persons’ constituted a large section of the plantation labour force in Nyasaland from the mid‐1920s. This paper argues that the employment of children, youth and women in casual wage labour stemmed from the wider problem of labour mobilisation and was compounded by seasonal variability in the flow of adult male labour and the volatile environment in which the country's agricultural economy operated. From the 1930s, right up to the early 1950s, the Nyasaland planters could not afford a large and regular wage‐labour force. The tendency was therefore to rely on cheap categories of casual labour, predominantly that of children, women and immigrants from Mozambique. What was particular about child labour during the colonial period is that it was easily accessible. The majority of the children who worked on the European plantations in the Shire Highlands were drawn from the tenant families already resident on the plantations, and from the villages surrounding them. Those from the tenant families were born, brought up and cultured into plantation life and constituted a reserve from which future adult workers could be drawn. To day, child wage labour is still prevalent on most tea estates in the Shire Highlands.

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References

1987The Story of an African Famine 1989The Story of an African Famine: Gender and Famine in Twentieth-Century Malawi 1890British Central Africa 1983Which Family?: Problems in the Reconstruction of the History of the Family as an Economic and Cultural Unit 1983Planters, peasants and the colonial state: the impact of the Native Tobacco Board in the central province of Malawi 1982Food Production and Family Labour in Southern Malawi: the Shire Highlands and Upper Shire Valley in the Early Colonial Period 1985FAMINE ANALYSIS AND FAMILY RELATIONS: 1949 IN NYASALAND 1986Working Conditions and Worker Responses on Nyasaland Tea Estates, 1930–1953

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