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Working Conditions and Worker Responses on Nyasaland Tea Estates, 1930–1953

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Robin Palmer
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The tea industry of southern Nyasaland employed intermittently a heterogeneous labour force of some twenty to thirty thousand and paid workers minimum wages of 7s. in 1930, rising to between 17s. 6d. and 20s. in 1953. A complex wage structure offered different rates to hoers, pluckers, factory workers and clerks. Thousands of children, butvirtually no women, were employed. Wages and working conditions were acknowledged to be unattractive, even by the industry itself, and compared favourably only with those offered in Portuguese East Africa. The initial viability of the plantation sector in the Shire Highlands was made possible by the immigration of hundreds of thousands of Lomwe from Portuguese East Africa. Lomwe workers, who sought assimilation and upward mobility, have been depicted as virtual slaves of the planters, but there is evidence of effective local, day-to-day and passive resistance on their part which left planters feeling impotent, unable to turn labour out on Sundays or in the rains or enforce unpopular thangata (labour rent) agreements, and obliged to reduce the daily tasks demanded of the worker. Confronted with an increasingly severe shortage of labour, which caused millions of pounds of tea to remain unpicked, planters began to improve working conditions on their estates, but this failed to resolve their labour problem or to dampen post-war militancy. Irresponsible actions by the British Central Africa Company increased tensions in Cholo which culminated in the serious riots of 1953 in which eleven people were killed. Government responded to this growing rural radicalism by repurchasing half of the million acres of freehold estate land which had initially been ‘bought’ from chiefs prior to the colonial occupation.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , March 1986 , pp. 105 - 126
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

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References

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35 The Acting Governor told the Colonial Office that ‘both the Governor and myself have seen the children at work and they appear to like it. The work is simple, consisting principally of picking out defective leaves and stalks from partially manufactured tea. Were they not so employed they would doubtless be less wholesomely occupied in their insanitary villages, and the money they receive from the estates is a help to their parents’. C.O. 525/137/33418/30, Davidson-Houston to Passfield, 15 March 1930.

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43 ‘It was foreign to me’, wrote ‘An Itinerant Engineer’, ‘to see the local labour force, termed “boys” and consisting chiefly of hefty coloured gentlemen all plucking leaf, instead of women and children being employed for this work as is customary in other tea growing countries’: An Itinerant Engineer, ‘ Notes upon a visit paid to tea estates in the Nyasaland Protectorate’, Nyasaland Tea Association Quarterly Journal, III, I (1938), 6.Google Scholar

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49 Ibid., MMBD, NTA, 5 Nov. 1948; ibid., MMBD, NTA, 7 Jan. 1957.

50 On hearing of this increase, the Edinburgh Board of Blantyre and East Africa Ltd. observed: ‘We would welcome this legislation if it meant additional work from the natives but each successive increase has not brought any additional effort on the worker's part and the whole policy of wage increases without further efforts stands condemned. We shall have to get good prices to offset the rise in costs’: BEA Archives, General letters from Edinburgh 1949–52, Stark to General Manager, Blantyre, 2 Aug. 1950.

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74 As early as 1904 there were 11,470 people working on the six estates then established in Mlanje: Mlanje District Book, 1904–7.

75 NSE 5/1/5, Report of the D.C, Cholo, for 1938. The D.C. conceded that some of the planters might be described as ‘irritable’, adding that all planters were short of labour, ‘the irritable ones more so’.

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77 They had tried earlier, in 1934, but the results had proved ‘most disappointing’. Only 100 of 201 recruited in South Nyasa actually started work, ‘the remainder either deserted or failed to reach their destination. No volunteers were forthcoming from the Upper Shire District and very few from Chiradzulu’: Annual Reports of the Provincial Commissioners for the Year Ended 31st December, 1934 (Zomba, 1935), 15.Google Scholar

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89 BEA Archives, Estate Reports, Acting General Manager, Blantyre, General Report No. 5, June-July 1954.

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102 A hundred workers at the Lauderdale tea factory refused to work overtime on Sundays unless the rate of is. per 8½ hours was doubled. The management refused this demand, preferring not to work the factory on Sundays. NS 3/1/17, Report of the D.C., Mlanje, for 1948; Labour Department Annual Report 1948, 16.Google Scholar

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112 The population of Cholo (624 square miles) rose from 59,154 in 1931 to 119,746 in 1945, the population density thus rising from 94.8 to 191.9 per square mile. The comparable figures for Mlanje (1,511 square miles) were: population rising from 134,431 to 209,522 and density from 87.8 to 138.7 per square mile. In 1945 there were 74,465 Africans (38,066 men and 36,399 women) living on private estates in Cholo, compared to only 16,207 (8,717 men and 7,490 women) in Mlanje. The total number living on private estates in the whole country was 211,394. Land Commission Report, 4; Central African Statistical Office, Statistical Handbook of Nyasaland, 1952 (Salisbury, 1952), 14.Google Scholar

113 In 1948 the British Central Africa Company owned 329,353 acres in Nyasaland, 103,957 of them in Cholo. In 1949 it agreed to sell 182,493 acres to the government at 12s. 6d. per acre. C.O. 525/208/44332/3, ‘History of the British Central Africa Company’, 15; C.O. 1015/773, Minute by Nield, 20 July 1953.

114 C.O. 525/208/44332/3, ‘History of the British Central Africa Company’, 19.

115 There were also earlier incidents on the Blantyre and East Africa's Limbuli Estate, Mlanje in 1942, in which the estate's General Manager was severely censured for his behaviour towards tenants, and in 1943 in Blantyre, when ‘several hundreds’ refused to obey eviction orders. BE A Archives, Labour disputes Limbuli file 1942–3, Tait Bowie to Dunn, 17 Jan. 1942; ibid., Tait Bowie to Stark, 7 Feb. 1942; Land Commission Report, 14.Google Scholar

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121 Ibid., Colby to Lyttelton, 9 July 1953.

122 Ibid., Minute by Nield, 26 March 1953.

123 Ibid., ‘Report on unrest on Cholo estates’.

124 Ibid., Minute by Reed, 15 June 1953.

125 Ibid., Minute by Marnham, 17 June 1953.

126 Ibid., ‘Report on unrest on Cholo estates’.

127 Ibid., Colby to Lyttelton, 10 Aug. 1953.

128 Protectorate, Nyasaland, Report of a Commission of Inquiry Appointedby the Governor on the 20th August, 1953, under the Commissions of Inquiry Ordinance (Zomba, 1953), 3.Google Scholar

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133 The main file on the Cholo riots has been retained by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office though the subsidiary files, C.O. 1015/458–462 and 470–474, are all available at the Public Record Office.

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135 C.O. 1015/470, Minute by Marnham, 23 Oct. 1953.

136 C.O. 1015/473, Minute by Marnham, 28 Nov. 1953.

137 C.O. 1015/470, Colby to Gorell Barnes, 22 Sept. 1953. For the various demands to send out a British commission, see the files C.O. 1015/458, 459, 470–474.

138 C.O. 1015/470, Colby to Lyttelton, 19 Oct. 1953.

139 C.O. 1015/470, Colby to Lyttelton, 19 Oct. 1953; C.O. 1015/773, ‘Report on unrest on Cholo estates’.

140 C.O. 1015/773, Colby to Lyttelton, 2 Sept. 1953.

141 Ibid., ‘Report on unrest on Cholo estates’.

142 C.O. 1015/707, Minute by Marnham, 14 Oct. 1953. This involved the imposition of soil conservation and other measures which had the effect of making the Native Authorities extremely unpopular. As McCracken has recently written, ‘government intervention into peasant production took place in Nyasaland with an energy and conviction surpassed only in Kenya among British African colonies’: John McCracken, ‘Introduction’, in Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, Malawi: An Alternative Pattern of Development (Edinburgh, 1985), xiii.Google Scholar

143 ‘Unfortunately, it is a problem as intractable as it is of long standing. It has baffled generations of Governors and Secretaries of State since the beginning of the century’: C.O. 1015/707, Minute by Marnham, 14 Oct. 1953.

144 Ibid., Colby to Lyttelton, 23 Nov. 1953. This left some 887,000 acres remaining in private ownership, of which 100,000 acres were under cultivation and a further 200,000 acres were either forest land or incapable of economic development. Of the remaining 587,000 acres it was deemed practicable to acquire only about 300,000 acres in large blocks.

145 C.O. 1015/707, Colby to Gorell Barnes, 20 Nov. 1953.

146 Ibid., Colby to Gorell Barnes, 2 Oct. 1953.

147 Ibid., Gorell Barnes to Colby, 24 Oct. 1953.

148 Ibid., Minute by Williams, 27 Nov. 1953.

149 Ibid., Minute by Marnham, 27 Nov. 1953.

150 Ibid., Minute by Marnham, 12 Dec. 1953.

151 Ibid., Colby to Gorell Barnes, 2 Oct. and 20 Nov. 1953.

152 Ibid., Colby to Gorell Barnes, 22 Dec. 1953.

153 By May 1956 the amount of land bought by the government since 1946 had risen to 461,474 acres, and by the end of 1958 to 526,000 acres. Pachai, , Land and politics, 144Google Scholar; Report of an Economic Survey of Nyasaland, 40.Google Scholar