Coercion and Control in Nyasaland: Aspects of the History of a Colonial Police Force

Abstract

This article examines the changing function of the Nyasaland police force between the 1890s and 1962. Initially, the police consisted of small groups of armed ex-soldiers, totally untrained in conventional police duties and employed by district officers in pressing labour and enforcing the payment of hut tax. In 1920, however, the authorities responded to the threat seemingly posed by the emergence of ‘dangerous classes’ – particularly labour migrants returned from the south – by forming a trained, centralized force, commanded in the Shire Highlands, though not elsewhere, by European police-officers. In the reorganized districts the police succeeded in protecting urban property. But so limited was the size of the force that the prevention and detection of crime was hardly attempted over the greater part of the country, while campaigns such as that against the Mchape witchcraft eradication movement foundered in the face of popular opposition. Substantial changes began in the mid-1940s in response to urbanization and the increasing complexity of police duties, coming to a climax in the 1950s as the colonial government struggled to maintain authority. At first the emphasis was on raising educational standards and improving conditions of service. But following the crisis of 1953, it switched to expanding police numbers and increasing the coercive power of the force; this process was accelerated in the aftermath of the 1959 emergency. Recruitment policies were influenced by the technical requirements of the authorities and by the ethnic stereotypes they evolved – a combination which resulted in the recruitment of a disproportionate number of Yao policemen in the first few decades and of more Lomwe and Chewa later. Policemen were attracted less by the rates of pay than by the privileges on offer. An inner corps of policemen spent their lives upholding colonial authority, but most could not be placed in a distinctive category of ‘collaborator’.

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