School of History

University of New South Wales

Equivocal Empire: British Community Development

in Central Africa, 1945-55

Daniel Kark

A thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

The University of New South Wales,

2008

ORIGINALITY STATEMENT

‘I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project's design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.’

Signed ……………………………………………......

Date ……………………………………………......

For my parents, Vanessa and Adrian. For what you forfeited.

Abstract

This thesis resituates the Community Development programme as the key social intervention attempted by the British Colonial Office in Africa in the late 1940s and early 1950s. A preference for planning, growing confidence in metropolitan intervention, and the gradualist determination of Fabian socialist politicians and experts resulted in a programme that stressed modernity, progressive individualism, initiative, cooperative communities and a new type of responsible citizenship. Eventual self-rule would be well-served by this new contract between colonial administrations and African citizens.

The thesis focuses on the implementation of the Mass Education programme in , and, more specifically, on a small but significant Mass Education scheme at Domasi, that operated between 1949 and 1954 in Nyasaland’s south. The political and social context in which the Mass Education scheme was implemented in Nyasaland is important. The approach taken by the government of the before the mid-1940s is discussed, and previous welfare interventions described and critically assessed. The initial approach to Mass Education in Nyasaland is also dwelt upon in some detail. The narrative concentrates upon the scheme itself. Three themes emerge and are discussed successively – the provision of social services adapted to the perceived needs of Africans, the enforcement of environmental restrictions and inappropriate social and agricultural models, and the attempted introduction of representative local government. All three interventions were intended to promote the precepts of Mass Education, but instead resulted in the extension of state administrative power. The manner in which this occurred is explored throughout the thesis.

Mass Education at Domasi did not result in the creation of a new form of citizenship in Nyasaland. It contributed instead to a breakdown in the narrative of social development and eventual self-rule that had legitimised British rule. The riots that occurred in 1953 tore at the precepts that underpinned the Mass Education programme. The immediacy of self-rule

and independence resulted in a shift in emphasis within the Colonial Office and the colonial government in Nyasaland from social intervention and to constitutional reform and political development. There simultaneously emerged a new rural transcript, one that privileged open opposition to the colonial social prescription over subtle and hidden rural resistance. At a time when nationalist politics was in disarray in Nyasaland, rural Africans spoke back to colonial power.

Acknowledgements

This thesis is a collaborative effort. Thanks are due to a large number of people who have contributed selflessly in many different ways. The thesis is dedicated to my parents, but friends and other members of my family have given of their time and themselves. Emma and Tamer provided a colourful distraction from thesis work, but they also enriched the experience. Emma also drew beautiful maps and provided a professional finish for my photographs. Lauren provided great moral support when it was most needed. Jane reappeared, turning bleak into bright. My family in also took me in on short notice – thank you Barbara, Murray, Craig, Luke and Hazel. I cannot understand those with a bent for masochism. Thanks are nonetheless due to Charles, Jane and Lauren for proof- reading.

My academic life was enriched by association with undergraduates at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Macquarie University and my own UNSW. More particularly, thanks are due to Mr. Paul Andon and the students of Goldstein College, who provided me with a very hospitable and thoroughly enjoyable residence. The postgraduates in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences lab provided the academic and social interaction that staved off postgraduate jitters – Moya, Gen, Nathan, Larissa and Jen were particularly important.

Research in was a great joy for me. That it was so is due to: the personal hospitality of Pauline Ramsay, Jane Thorneycroft, Alick Bwanale, Helen Jones, and the staff of the National Fisheries; the academic supervision provided by Mustafa Hussein; the field assistance provided by Derrick Yekha and Mr. Mudu; and, most of all, by the tremendous help extended by the dreadfully underpaid and sadly under-resourced staff of the Malawi National Archives. Great gratitude is due the Director Mr. Paul Lihoma, Deputy Director Joel Thaul, Mr. Oswin Ambali, Mr. Innocent Mtakulamusi and Mr. Stanley Gondwe.

Thanks to Chancellor College in Zomba, the Public Record Office in London, Rhodes House in Oxford and to the School of History at UNSW for providing the financial assistance for fieldwork and a Dean’s Award to supplement my income. The Australian government also awarded me – a recent immigrant – an Australian Postgraduate Award that supported me and kept me in clover during my candidacy. It is a tribute to the current approach to postgraduate research within Australian universities that I was awarded funding for a project of little immediate relevance to Australia.

I have benefited, finally, from the advice and friendship of my supervisor, Prof. Roger Bell. He has patiently shepherded me through the production of this thesis, despite suffering nineteenth century prose and being driven to distraction by occasional incoherence. Thank you Roger.

Many others have contributed to this thesis – if your name does not appear here this is due only to my thoughtlessness. Any errors are of course the sole responsibility of the author.

Naming Conventions Used in This Thesis: Some given names, European and African, could not be found in the documents used. Where these names could not be found the surname alone is used. No disrespect is intended. Where group interview subjects did not want their names used they were excluded from the bibliography.

Table of Contents

Maps ...... 13 List of Illustrations...... 16 List of Illustrations...... 17 Introduction...... 19 Colonial Welfare and Development: The Domasi Community Development Scheme in Context ...... 19 1. The Empire: Perspectives on Metropolitan Decline, Decolonisation and Development ...... 24 2. The Colony: Perspectives on the Late-Colonial African State...... 35 3. The District, The Project and The Scheme: Perspectives on Local Resistance and Development ...... 47 4. The Individual: Perspectives on the ‘In-between’ and the Integrated ...... 62 Section One -The Creation of Mass Education – Metropolitan and State Welfare Policies, 1925-1948...... 71 Chapter One - ‘As Wide As the Needs of Society’ – The Origins and Development of Metropolitan Mass Education Policy 1925-48 ...... 73 1. The Roots of Mass Education: Economic Development Versus Welfare, 1929- 1945 ...... 77 2. The Roots of Mass Education: Moral Fragility and International and Colonial Critics of the Post-War Empire, 1944-48...... 85 3. The Roots of Mass Education: Fabians, Liberals and Metropolitan Assertion to 1945 ...... 91 4. The Roots of Mass Education: Metropolitan Colonial Education Policy, 1925- 1935 ...... 101 5. The Mass Education Report, 1943 ...... 106 6. ‘A Rendezvous with Destiny’: The Creation of Initiative in African Society, 1948 ...... 111 7. Ambiguity: Individualism, Nationalism and Citizenship...... 114 8. Ambivalence: Mass Education and UNESCO...... 129 9. Ambivalence: Mass Education and the Colonies ...... 132 Chapter Two - ‘The Imperial Slum’: Welfare and Improvement in Nyasaland, c.1920-1945...... 139 1. Administration and Government in Nyasaland ...... 143 2. Indirect Persuasion: Welfare Experiments in Nyasaland c.1930-1945 ...... 150 a. Welfare Evangelisation – The Jeanes Training Centre, Domasi, 1928-49...... 155 b. Colonial Preoccupations: Nutrition and Soil Erosion in Nyasaland, 1936-45 ...... 168 i. ‘Casting Pearls Before Swine’ – African Nutrition and the Kota Kota Scheme ...... 169 ii. ‘European Madness’: Soil Erosion and the Misuku Agricultural Project 1938-43 ...... 177

3. The Road to Domasi – Mass Education Arrives in Nyasaland ...... 182 Section Two - The Domasi Community Development Scheme: Education, Environment and Government in Nyasaland, 1949- 55 ...... 185 Chapter Three - Adaptation – Education, Hygiene and Nationalism in Domasi, 1949-52 ...... 189 1. Adaptation: Education in the British , 1925-50...... 193 2. ‘Urgent and Intractable’: Education in Nyasaland, 1891-1950 ...... 198 3. ‘A Heaven-Sent Opportunity: Mass Education comes to Nyasaland, 1945-47 203 4. A False Start: Mponela, 1947-8 ...... 206 5. A False Start: Domasi, 1949 ...... 210 6. Famine as Education – The 1949 Nyasaland Famine...... 223 7. ‘Kwaca!’ – Mass Literacy Takes Off in Domasi ...... 227 8. ‘A Promising Plank’: Nationalist Demands for Education in Domasi and Nyasaland ...... 237 9. “Bunds are Bad”: The Masses Turn Against Education ...... 242 Chapter Four - ‘A New Grammar of Agriculture’ – Coercion and Resistance in Domasi 1949-55 ...... 245 1. Sighing Dictators: Approaches to Coercion and Production in the Colonial Office and Nyasaland, 1945-50...... 249 2. Regularity, Rationality and Reform: Tax and Agriculture at Domasi, 1949- 1955 ...... 260 3. ‘Desirables’ – Creating a Progressive African Agriculture ...... 266 4. ‘Just another form of cruelty’? – Resettlement in Domasi...... 277 5. ‘Essentials’ – State Coercion and Hidden Resistance...... 290 Chapter Five - ‘Is this what you wanted when you came here?’: Local Government and Rebellion in Domasi, 1949-1955 ...... 307 1. ‘Giving the people what they want’ – Local Government in British Africa, 1947-50...... 311 2. ‘We had our eyes opened’ – The Federal Moment, 1953...... 321 3. Matrousers and Autocrats: Recreating Local Government in Domasi, 1949-53 327 4. ‘It was hot here at Malemia’ – Rebellion at Domasi, 1953 ...... 344 Conclusions - The Failure of Liberal Imperialism and How Britain Imagined the Modern World ...... 371 Bibliography...... 381

13

Maps

14

15

16

17

List of Illustrations

Figure 1 Chief Katyetye attends class. Nigel Parry, H., African Advance, Government Printer, , 1945...... 159 Figure 2 Alice’ at work in her backyard. Nigel Parry, H., African Advance, Government Printer, Lusaka, 1945...... 160 Figure 3 ‘Chiefs attending a Jeanes Centre Course and the Principal, the Rev. E.D. Bowman. Photo taken by Lord Bledisloe during his visit in 1938’. Bowman, E.D., Jeanes Training in Nyasaland: The Story of its Development, Oversea Education, vol. XVI, no. 3, 1945...... 162 Figure 4 ‘A house in Matula Village exemplifying Jeanes Centre influence’. Bowman, E.D., Jeanes Training in Nyasaland: The Story of its Development, Oversea Education, vol. XVI, no. 3, 1945...... 165 Figure 5 Riverbank erosion in South Africa. It was the South African preoccupation with this kind of erosion that influenced agricultural officers in Nyasaland. Bennett, H.H., Soil Erosion and Land Use in the , Department of Agriculture, Pretoria, 1945...... 179 Figure 6 Governor Colby opens the Domasi Scheme, 14th of January, 1950. Debenham, F., Nyasaland: The Land of the Lake, HMSO, London, 1955...... 218 Figure 7 ‘Master Farmer’s poultry house in District, Central Province’. Department of Agriculture, 1956 Annual Report of the Department of Agriculture, Zomba, 1957...... 271 Figure 8: The Jeanes Centre housing at Domasi – straight roads and social order. Bowman, E.D., Jeanes Training in Nyasaland: The Story of its Development, Oversea Education, vol. XVI, no. 3, 1945...... 281 Figure 9 Illustration from Community Development training booklet. Nigel Parry, H., African Advance, Government Printer, Lusaka, 1945...... 282 Figure 10: Part of map of Chitenjere village before redistribution. File 18658, African Local Government Domasi papers (16/5/9F, 4979, MNA)...... 284

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Figure 11: Chitenjere Village after the redistribution. File 18658, African Local Government Domasi papers (16/5/9F, 4979, MNA)...... 285 Figure 12 Villagers filling an eroded gully in Domasi. Debenham, F., Nyasaland: The Land of the Lake, HMSO, London, 1955...... 297 Figure 13 ‘A Village Meeting’. Nyasaland Protectorate, Notes on the Duties of Administrative Officers, Zomba, 1955...... 301 Figure 14 ‘Discussions with a village headman’...... 302 Figure 15 ‘At work in the office’. Africanisation comes to Nyasaland. Nyasaland Protectorate, Notes on the Duties of Administrative Officers, Zomba, 1955...... 340 Figure 16 Gomani and Colby. Debenham, F., Nyasaland: The Land of the Lake, HMSO, London, 1955...... 348

Introduction

Colonial Welfare and Development: The Domasi Community Development Scheme in Context

Between 1949 and 1954 Nyasaland’s colonial government conducted a social experiment.1 Over the five-year period agricultural, administrative and educational methods were tested in a specially created development district in the southern region of the Protectorate. The Domasi Community Development Scheme was a colonial laboratory, integrating democratic local government, rationalised farming methods, effective social services and an efficient census and revenue service. The results were disseminated in a number of papers and articles – discussing everything from soil protection to education of over-age children – in the hope that they would have some salutary effect on development policy in Nyasaland and on British colonial policy more generally. There is little evidence that they did. There was also some optimism among Colonial Office policy makers and advisors that the scheme would provide a model, not only for the rest of Nyasaland, but the rest of British tropical Africa. In this sense, it was tied very closely to broader colonial policy and motivated (depending on the view taken) by everything from hopes for British economic solvency to liberal Metropolitan altruism. The optimism invested in the scheme turned out to be misplaced. Local and territorial trends and emergencies intruded – increasing nationalist militancy and peasant intransigence not only forestalled, but drew strength from mandatory environmental conservation measures, stuttering political reforms and deeply unpopular federal integration in Central Africa. External conditions further contaminated the pristine laboratory conditions. Changing Metropolitan priorities, concentration on constitutional change rather than socio-economic transformation and an accelerated time- table for political independence all impinged. The scheme became more exemplar and

1 The pre-independence name for Malawi, Nyasaland, is used in this thesis.

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victim of the political failures and expediency involved in decolonisation than the flagship of a revivified post-war colonial partnership. The project was initiated at the end of a period of remarkable administrative momentum at the imperial centre. The stasis of the pre-war period and hiatus forced by the War were followed closely by the frugal and considered optimism of the post-War Atlee government. Far from resuming pre-war parsimony and , the Colonial Office – led by the Fabian Secretary of State Creech-Jones, and Secretary for African Affairs Andrew Cohen – began to push for the introduction of democratic local government structures, the steady widening of territorial political responsibility, and an extension of welfare and community development structures. The metropolitan and colonial were linked. Just as the Labour government intended social planning to transform metropolitan Britain, so the Colonial Office invested a good deal of hope in a carefully planned colonial counterpart – Mass Education and Community Development.2 Conscious prescription and careful planning replaced the pre-war agnosticism blamed for retarding development in the British colonies. The Colonial Office and territorial governments readied themselves to gradually remake their bits of the continent, not only in preparation for a distant yet foreseeable political separation from Britain (a novel idea in itself), but in pursuit of ideas of development current in a post-War climate that demanded some sort of legitimation for continued colonial rule. Increasingly the empire had to burnish its ruling credentials with claims that it was improving African lives through economic development and by instilling universal values of modernity, progress and citizenship through Community Development. Economic development did, of course, have a self-interested corollary – increased Imperial Sterling production could only benefit an insolvent Britain, beggared by the war. But it was no longer acceptable for a colonial state to remain openly self-interested, hegemonic and unaccountable for the welfare of its subjects without a cohesive and beneficent ruling narrative, plausible to both an international audience and African subjects.

2 Community Development was Mass Education. The latter was the first name for the programme. It was abandoned as a programme title in favour of Community Development after 1948. The Colonial Office felt that Community Development was a less ambiguous title, avoiding possible confusion with formal education. The two titles are used interchangeably in this thesis, and mean the same thing.

INTRODUCTION 21

Britain and France were in the vanguard of an apparent liberalisation of colonial rule common to most of the major European colonial empires after 1945. The French and British were particular and vocal advocates of notions of ‘colonial development and welfare’ and a ‘mise en valeur’. A changed international climate made these legitimations of colonial domination necessary, but external pressure was not the only motivation for reform. Domestic metropolitan commitments to institutional change, and territorial nationalist initiatives and responses to colonial reform and repression influenced and were influenced by external conditions. While external pressure was damaging to Imperial reputations and interests – not least when running an empire in conjunction with a bankrupt and overcommitted welfare state – internal institutional change made its own contribution, with ideological antecedents relating to colonial development and self-government predating popular ideals of self-determination. Reformist, Fabian and Labour ideologies were current in the Colonial Office (if not in Colonial Service circles) well before external pressure was brought to bear – the simultaneous pursuit of self-determination in the long- term and the justification of colonial rule through development were not novel concepts.

Decolonisation was not solely a metropolitan issue. Nascent territorial political transformations and the beginnings of social upheaval were apparent in Nyasaland in the period after the war and before 1955. The period is of particular interest, being the interregnum between a relatively stable pre-war colonial relationship based on indirect rule (and not inconsiderable administrative independence for individual colonial governments), and a period of rising instability leading, in an increasingly immediate sense, to self-rule and political decolonisation. Whereas, in the years immediately following the War, it was conceivable that some sort of direct colonial relationship could be maintained with the African territories and , by the late nineteen fifties it was increasingly obvious that this was unlikely, at best. The rise of African nationalism and an educated African elite, increasing awareness of principles of self-determination and consistent internal and external pressure to relinquish a larger share of political control, made independence not just conceivable, but imminent.

22 DANIEL KARK

Stepping outside elite-nationalist perspectives muddies the picture further. Quotidian subversion of colonial regulations by peasants, and inversion of local governing structures by the traditional leadership, added further ambiguity to the local-colonial relationship. Colonial authority and development policies were not hegemonic. The public transcript governing colonial relationships between rulers and the ruled was no longer so clear. A new and independent sense of local citizenship challenged the ruling narrative, providing an alternative to the ideals cultivated by both the Domasi scheme and African nationalists. It was an independent conceptualisation that would shortly involve a substantive and violent challenge to the rural writ of the colonial state. That the most benign form of liberal community development could not prevent – and in certain respects encouraged – widespread revolt against the state and colonial rule is the fundamental issue addressed by this thesis.

These were the parameters that defined the period inhabited by the Domasi Scheme. The scheme itself was emblematic of the transformations implicit in Late , and the indeterminacy of this change. We need to heed Frederick Cooper’s warning, not to read colonial history backwards, and not ‘to privilege the process of ending colonial rule over anything else that was happening in those years’. Complexity requires a sharp focus – ‘to see the divisions among colonizers, the deflection of colonial projects against the complexity of the societies they intended to transform, and the insecurity of colonial officials about their own social coherence and power’.3 There was no guarantee that the complex web formed by the relationships between colonial officers, metropolitan policy- makers, nationalists, the traditional leadership and the broader population, would result in the chummy constitutional change and territorial independence that eventually occurred. There was, similarly, no guarantee that the colonial officers administering Nyasaland would favour a political transfer over gradualist repression that stressed social development and the production of a local political agenda on their own terms. Without the advantages of retrospection it was never a clearly specified transition. The Domasi Scheme was at the

3 Cooper, F. and African Society: The Labour Question in French and British Africa, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, pgs. 6-9.

INTRODUCTION 23

interstices of this transformation and is a plain example of this indeterminacy. The scheme represented a confusing crossroads, between the confidence of post-war development imperialism, and the pragmatic dissolution of Imperial territories. While the scheme claimed African initiative, modernity, progressive individualism, and inclusive citizenship as operating principles, coercion, suppression of dissent, forceful prescription and racism remained just off-stage, the worn tools of an administration well-versed in their use. Domasi operated in a fuzzy imperial penumbra in which political decolonisation was shortly, but not inevitably, to eclipse the promise of a new colonial partnership. The chapters that follow explore the shadows cast by this problematic and equivocal colonial relationship.

24 DANIEL KARK

1. The Empire: Perspectives on Metropolitan Decline, Decolonisation and Development

The Domasi Scheme was a project initiated by Nyasaland’s administration, and the Nyasaland Protectorate was part of Britain’s African empire – it was linked, administratively and ideologically, to Britain’s Imperial project on the continent. The dictates of colonial development, political reform and ‘welfare imperialism’4 tied territorial policy to metropolitan requirements. Britain and the colonies were all to benefit from the economic development of African assets and a focus on both the political development and welfare of its inhabitants. Economic development and the pursuit of technical solutions to thorny problems were the focus of the Colonial Development Corporation (CDC, set up in 1948) and part of the focus of the Colonial Development and Welfare Act (CDWA, passed in 1945). The Domasi Scheme in Nyasaland represented a different kind of colonial concern, focused on the perceived degradation of African societies. The Colonial Office hoped that the proposed solution – Mass Education – would revive the empire.

After the war the Colonial Office encouraged administrations to submit plans for territorial development. Mass Education, later relabelled Community Development – the main concern of this thesis – was supported by CDWA funding, and was, again, dependent on territorial initiative. While economic development would transform African livelihoods in more obvious ways, Mass Education would remould more intimate aspects of African mentalities and communities. Individualism, citizenship, initiative and modernity were key concepts in the reconstruction of education, agriculture and domestic life in the British territories. Concern for welfare was to be accompanied by a corresponding concentration on local political reform, as a form of political education and in preparation for ultimate self-government. The whole was a radical change of course. Pre-war imperatives of minimal intervention, territorial solvency and the intensely personal administration provided by the ‘man on the spot’, were to be replaced by close metropolitan supervision,

4 Phrase borrowed from Lewis, J.E.,, The Ruling Compassions of the Late Colonial State: Welfare Versus Force, , 1945-52, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, vol. 2, no. 21, 2001.

INTRODUCTION 25

central funding for recurrent expenditure and the reformation of local administration by a ‘second colonial occupation’5 of technical ‘experts’. Just why this metropolitan change of heart occurred is the tricky question, and it is closely linked to the debate on the paths taken to ultimate political disengagement.

The Labour government, elected overwhelmingly in 1945, was given a comprehensive mandate for substantial domestic change. This agenda was stretched to include political and economic reform abroad, under Secretary of State Arthur Creech Jones and Assistant Under-Secretary of State for Africa Andrew Cohen. Creech Jones, previously involved in the liberal-socialist Fabian Colonial Bureau, and Cohen, with substantial experience of African administration, set about reforming relations with Britain’s African colonies. Issuing a reforming journal African Administration, instituting regular reforming administrative conferences, and focusing on African social welfare and the devolution of authority in preparation for self-government, were all elements of a transformative Colonial Office agenda undertaken with longer-term goals in mind. Preparing the African colonies for self-government would take generations. Gradual liberalisation and education would lead to eventual self-rule.

This attractive liberal interpretation is exemplified by R. D. Pearce in his work on the Labour Party and decolonisation, and Ronald Robinson6, in his biographical work on Andrew Cohen. Planning was ‘logical and consistent, balancing opposing concepts in high strategy’ and ‘the whole of the post-war policy was built on the belief in the inevitability of African self-government’7. This is not to imply that the authors deny the inconsistencies and complexities involved in applying policy in diverse African circumstances. But the liberal approach does focus on the gradualist certainties and liberalism of Metropolitan intent:

5 Phrase from Low, D.A., Lonsdale, J.M., Towards the , 1945-63, in: Low, A., Smith, A. (eds.), The Oxford History of , vol. 3, Oxford, 1976. 6 Robinson, R., Sir Andrew Cohen: Proconsul of African Nationalism, in: Gann, L.H.,(ed.) African Proconsuls: European Governors in Africa, Free Press, London, 1978. 7 Pearce, R.D., The Turning Point in Africa: British Colonial Policy 1938-48, Frank Cass, London, 1982, pg. 202.

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policy had truly been revolutionised: the straight-jacket of indirect rule was to be sloughed off, and Britain was now prepared to concede responsible self-government within a generation. The debate between the notion that the colonies were ‘decolonized’ by an enlightened Britain and the alternative that they were ‘liberated’ by African freedom-fighters can now seem to be unreal … Britain had worked out the stages on the road to self-government and was prepared for rapid progress, but nationalists would have to demand and secure the actual transfer of power. Meanwhile Britain would use the time at her disposal to foster, in alliance with the educated elite, those social and economic developments desirable for the healthy birth of a nation.8

Pearce’s narrative privileges the internally determined programme of a determined liberal metropolitan elite.9 Unlike some general surveys of British imperial history, accounts such as these do not extrapolate beyond the specificities of time and place to stake a claim for a universally liberal late-colonial British imperialism.10 They are narratives of a specific moment, in which reforming social liberalism found a temporary and tenuous foothold. Although Cooper does not adopt this liberal tone himself, he captures the spirit of the age in the very first line of his comparative study of late-colonial attitudes to African workers in

8Ibid, pg. 174. 9 Flint places the conception of a liberal development policy earlier than this. He emphasises the role of Malcolm MacDonald in the late ‘30s and early ‘40s in the instigation of an idealised colonial role. Constantine provides the background to the 1945 CDWA, connecting it to the more limited 1940 CDWA, and 1929 Colonial Development Act. In: Flint, J., Planned Decolonisation and its Failure in British Africa, African Affairs, vol. 82, no. 328, 1983. And: Constantine, S., The Making of British Colonial Development Policy, 1914-1940, Frank Cass, London, 1984. 10 According to Furedi there has recently been a ‘moral rehabilitation of imperialism’. Economic and political failure in the developing world, and particularly in Africa, have legitimised an atmosphere in which Western intervention, past and present, is acceptable. Niall Ferguson is the most celebrated and influential case, with his proposition that the was instrumental in globalizing the world and was by far the least worst tool available to do so. From: Ferguson, N., Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, Penguin, London, 2004. For further discussion of this type of position see: Bush, B., Imperialism, Race and Resistance: Africa and Britain, 1919-1945, Routledge, London, 1999; Furedi, F., The New Ideology of Imperialism: Renewing the Moral Imperative, Pluto, London, 1995.

INTRODUCTION 27

the British and French empires: ‘the era of decolonization was a time when the range of political possibilities seemed to open up, only to close down again’.11

Related, if focused a little more sharply on pragmatism rather than a liberal social programme, is a body of work similarly concerned with the domestic parameters of metropolitan colonial policy. Three inconsistent themes emerge. The fundamental irrelevance of colonial affairs in domestic politics, a post-war faith in planning and transformation governed from the centre and, occasionally, a glimpse of the very ad hoc nature of colonial administration. P.S. Gupta describes the rise and decline of Labour Party concern with colonial development issues. Despite a preoccupation with the primacy of colonial social and economic development in any prospective move to self-government (occasionally tinged with residual racism regarding the viability of African self- government) Labour prioritised the creation of a ‘little England’ welfare state – as Gupta argued, ‘in the final analysis reformist social democracy neither needed nor could afford an imperialist policy’12. After 1951, the Conservatives were able to pursue a colonial line characterised by Murphy as one of pragmatic national self-interest, influenced by economic trends, shifting international conditions and complex interactions with business interests and settler lobby groups. Commitment to a development policy conceived under conditions governed by the wartime political consensus could not last in face of – occasionally contradictory – currents pushing constitutional concessions and imperial divestiture. 13 That they could do this was partially because the Imperial mission no longer had any direct relevance within British domestic politics. The lack of any colonial parliamentary representation in the metropole, the extreme reticence of metropolitan politicians to engage with risky colonial issues, and a public credulity that allowed decolonisation to shade into

11 Op. Cit. Cooper, pg. 1. 12 Gupta, P.S., Imperialism and the British Labour Movement, 1914-1964, MacMillan, London, 1975, pg. 391. 13 Murphy deals at length with the relations between business interests and the settler lobby. He provides a detailed comparison between settler interests in East and Central Africa and the influence these interests had on Metropolitan policy. Murphy, P. Party Politics and Decolonization: The Conservative Party and British Colonial Policy in Tropical Africa, 1951-1964, Clarendon, Oxford, 1995.

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what Darwin called ‘the positive and deliberate creation of daughter nations’, effectively neutered public reaction.14

Paradoxically, the period was also characterised by the growing centralisation of policy- making – the colonial future was no longer conceived in or implemented from the Governor’s residence, but by diktat from the Colonial Office (CO) and, to a lesser extent, the Foreign Office (FO) and Treasury. The War, according to J.M. Lee and Martin Petter, put a spring in the metropolitan colonial step, demonstrating the potential of transformation governed from the centre. The huge expansion and coordination of communications and controls required by war-planning initiated this change – ‘the process was less like the conscious formulation and application of lessons and more a matter of continuous cross- fertilisation between administering controls, defining war aims, and planning for reconstruction.’15 Post-war planning drew territorial administration closer to metropolitan policy makers, and initiated the ‘second colonial occupation’ – a huge expansion in colonial technical services and staff. Labour liberalism was an essential catalyst for change in colonial policy, but it was government faith in comprehensive social planning that led a revolution in administrative thinking and thereby engendered colonial development and reform.

Metropolitan administrative assertion ultimately turned on the dissolution of the African empire. The application of central control to the late colonial state and the disengagement from empire in Africa was, with hindsight, effective. But it was also ad hoc and inconsistent, with occasional false starts and dead-ends. There was no rational weighing of options. Metropolitan policy makers were not able to rationally balance the cost of forfeiting control against the benefits of gradual development and transition. For reasons

14 According to Darwin. He goes on: ‘by assimilating the whole process of colonial withdrawal to the model devised for the settler colonies, it was possible with shrewd management and plenty of luck to present withdrawal as the positive and deliberate creation of daughter nations, worthy chips off the old block, impregnated with British culture, values and institutions. Decolonisation was the continuation of empire by other means’. In: Darwin, J., The Fear of Falling: British Politics and Imperial Decline Since 1900, Proceedings of the Royal Historical Society, vol. 36, 1986, pg. 42. 15 Lee, J.M., Petter, M., The Colonial Office, War, and Development Policy: Organisation and the Planning of A Metropolitan Initiative, 1939-45, Maurice Temple Smith, London, 1982, pg. 246.

INTRODUCTION 29

dealt with immediately below, the Colonial Office was forced to cobble together a coherent policy as best it could. Frank Heinlein does not doubt the good intentions of many of those within the Colonial Office (and contrasts Colonial Office views with their occasionally rapacious colleagues in the Foreign Office or Treasury). But he does stress a more urgent imperative – the desire to appear both in control despite an increasingly untenable position, and simultaneously benevolent towards colonial charges. Darwin agrees, arguing that there was no clear, deliberate pattern to British decolonisation, despite the tendency among liberal historians and retired Colonial Office mandarins to ‘embalm the whole in a paste of consistency with a dash of altruism’.16 The Colonial Office and British government desired above all else to ensure adequate preparation for independence and to avoid being seen to lose control. But the choice between the two was clear: ‘bad self-government, most British officials reasoned, was better than good colonial government’.17 Piecemeal and expedient solutions to colonial demands that could be passed off as controlled benevolence trumped a gradualist and developmental approach.

Just why such piecemeal solutions had to be adopted is dealt with, in part, by a group of historians with a different focus. They see domestic Metropolitan politics as a function of broader, international change. Ronald Hyam believes this international aspect is by far the most influential determinant of British colonial policy. Events in the colonies, including local and nationalist politics ‘occupies the background rather than the foreground, appearing mainly as it was perceived and assessed by British decision-makers, with whom the final word lay’.18 The international dimension forced Britain – along with other colonial empires – into a position where Imperial links had either to be dissolved or, at the very least, legitimised. A bipolar world emerged, where US assistance was required not only to

16 Darwin, J., British Decolonization since 1945: A Pattern or a Puzzle?, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 12, 1984, pg. 188. 17 Heinlein, F., British Government Policy and Decolonisation, 1945-1963: Scrutinising the Official Mind, Frank Cass, London, 2002, pg. 302. 18 Hyam, R., Britain’s Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation, 1918-1968, CUP, Cambridge, 2006, xiv. As Hyam does. He asserts the primacy of geopolitical factors and Metropolitan decision-making. Peripheral economic interests could influence the centre, mediated by colonial administrations, but central decision-making and consideration of Metropolitan prestige were the real determinants. In: Hyam, R., The Primacy of Geopolitics: The Dynamics of British Imperial Policy, 1763-1963, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 27, no. 2, 1999.

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provide military defence, but to maintain economic solvency. This was not a position many in government were willing to concede, at least initially. Labour, and Bevan in particular, were concerned to develop Britain and the empire as a third force politically, and the Sterling zone as an independent financial pole. Neither project ultimately turned out to be viable, effectively aborting long-term plans for colonial development as both a legitimising exercise and as an attempt to create a thriving imperial estate.

Before the in 1956, it was difficult for Metropolitan policy-makers to make out the precise lines determining the African empire’s place in the world. Nascent anti- imperialism was, nonetheless, apparent. David Goldsworthy describes official sensitivities to UN and American criticism of empire. The desire to avoid alienating American opinion was already strongly developed – the relationship hinged on British attempts to ‘educate’ American opinion, and American internationalism (qualified, as it was, by cold-war considerations). Relationships within the UN were also fraught.19 Internal consensus on the maintenance of a strong imperial line (in concert with other, more reactionary, European powers) was coloured by internal conflict between the FO and CO regarding whether or not to offer a defence of the colonial relationship to the UN – the CO saw it as a possible concession of authority to external opinion.20 Gestures still mattered, and conciliation was mooted from time to time. Mass Education was a conciliatory tool, designed to stabilise the fraught relationship with the UN. It was the direct colonial equivalent of UNESCO’s Fundamental Education programme, and conceded a small advisory role to UN observers.

Depending on the time and place, colonial solidarity could still trump this occasional cooperative mood. John Kent emphasises a highly developed sensitivity among the European imperial powers to external interference in their empires. He describes the often combative and ambivalent alliance between the French and British imperial administrations. Occasionally divergent imperial goals were papered over in order to

19 Domasi was, in part, a response to this fractious relationship. It was initially conceived as a collaborative effort between the CO and UNESCO, and was intended to build goodwill. 20 Goldsworthy, D., Britain and the International Critics of British Colonialism, 1951-56, The Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, vol. 39, 1991.

INTRODUCTION 31

present a picture of responsible trusteeship.21 But this was, to a great extent, imperial posturing and a wilful distortion of Britain’s place in the world. Conservative attempts to go it alone in the period to 1956 were not realistic. According to William Roger Louis and Ronald Robinson the British were caught ‘by their own reckoning … between their vision of the Britishness of the Third British Empire and their actual dependence on the Americans’. Britain relied on American military guarantees and financial support to a far greater extent than they would have cared to admit, and, in return, the US received a viable ally, and an empire guaranteed against communism. American anti-imperialism ‘dissented in faith and conformed in works’.22 Despite the posturing there was an underlying and growing realisation by the mid-1950s that both Britain and France were politically ‘under- engined’ for the task of maintaining formal or informal influence over empire.23 Mass Education and Community Development were partially pragmatic concessions to allies and a broader critical audience. Collaboration with the UN and involvement in the development of African communities bought international credit in a hostile political market. The British government bought legitimacy with a commitment – part real and part imagined – to colonial economic and community development.

There were diminishing opportunities for Britain to take an independent economic line. Weighed down by the demands of a welfare state, massive debt and remilitarisation, Britain was insolvent. Slowing exports, price controls, rationing, and successive economic crises (Sterling’s convertibility in 1947 and devaluation in 1949) curtailed British economic independence. Paradoxically, this was also – as detailed above – a period of increasing funding for, and intervention in colonial economic development and welfare. This

21 Kent, J., The Internationalisation of Colonialism: Britain, France and Black Africa, 1939-56, Oxford, 1992. Tony Smith argues that Britain and France were, in fact, very different decolonising powers. Britain’s history of granting steadily greater political reforms in its colonies, the special relationship with the US and the two- party parliamentary system allowed the British government to decolonise in ways not open to the French. While the former enjoyed more Ghanas, the latter suffered Algerias and Indochinas. See: Smith, T., A Comparative Study of French and British Decolonization, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 20, 1978. 22 Roger Louis, W., Robinson, R., The Imperialism of Decolonization, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 22, no. 3, 1994, pgs. 477 and 493. 23 Darwin’s phrase. From: Darwin, J., Diplomacy and Decolonization, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 28, no. 3, 2000, pg. 18.

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intervention has been dealt with at length in work by Michael Havinden and David Meredith24, and, less accessibly, by D.J. Morgan.25 Planning was in vogue, with the Metropolitan government contributing £120 million under the 1945 CDWA, and setting up the Overseas Food Corporation and the Commonwealth Development Corporation26. Declining economic independence and a growing propensity to intervene in colonial economies and societies were not necessarily contradictory concepts. They were both partially rooted in a desire to simultaneously alleviate British and colonial woes by stimulating colonial commodity production for British and overseas markets (limiting Sterling outflows and producing Dollar earnings). The development of modern, productive Africans through Mass Education was a necessary precondition for the construction of modern, productive economies. Were a dim or cynical view to be taken, British purchases of crops at less than profitable prices, the controls maintained over colonial export surpluses, and the resulting suppression of colonial demand for goods Britain could not provide within the Sterling zone, could also be related as less than constructive exercises. The effectiveness of the development programme was questionable, at least during the period dealt with within this thesis. Under-spent development funds, the ineffectual Colonial Economic Development Council, and the high-profile failures of several large colonial development ventures27 suggest either a lack of planning, or a failure of will, or both. Failure did not really matter by the end of the period covered in this thesis, however. British economic recovery hastened moves away from colonial development, and towards a concentration on constitutional reform, self-government and development within the Commonwealth. The African colonial empire ceased to provide either economic utility or international legitimacy. Ironically, development may even have been counterproductive.

24 Havinden, M., Meredith, D., Colonialism and Development: Britain and its Tropical Colonies, 1850-1960, Routledge, 1993. 25 Morgan, D.J., The Official History of Colonial Development, MacMillan, London, 1980, five volumes. 26 The confusion involved in the aims and operations of the CDC – whether it was intended to promote welfare or turn a profit – are described by Mike Cowen in: Cowen, M., Early Years of the Colonial Development Corporation: British State Enterprise Overseas During Late Colonialism, African Affairs, vol. 83, no. 330, 1984. 27 The best-known being Gambian eggs and the East African Ground-Nuts Scheme. The latter is dealt with at length by Morgan (Op. Cit.) and Hogendorn, J.S., Scott, K.M., Very Large-Scale Agricultural Projects: The Lessons of the East African Groundnut Scheme, in: Rotberg, R.I. (ed.), Imperialism, Colonialism and Hunger: East and Central Africa, Lexington Books, Lexington, 1983.

INTRODUCTION 33

According to Frederick Cooper, the cultural and political hegemony assumed by the colonial development project ‘opened numerous points for contestation within the colonial powers’ own discourse, and the claims were measurable in a way that assertions about ‘civilisation’ were not. Trade unions could point to inequality in wage rates, while colonial governments’ own accountants could tell whether the development drive was paying off’.28

A partial blindness afflicts many of these narratives of late colonial metropolitan policy. They barely touch upon the official desire to transform minds, bodies and communities. Their focus is firmly upon the development of colonial governments and economies. Maintaining this focus neglects the most intrusive, insidious and inconspicuous metropolitan interventions. Historians of Colonial Office policy quite understandably deal briskly with British attempts to bend Africans away from what they considered corrosive social traits. Ronald Hyam describes Community Development as ‘the spiritual equivalent of the groundnuts scheme’.29 His approach is understandable given that both these imperial daydreams were very short-lived and quickly proved themselves badly out of step with political decolonisation. This thesis, nonetheless, takes a different approach. As recommended by Cooper, it explores, as fully as possible, ‘the paths not taken, the dead ends of historical processes, the alternatives that appeared to people in their time’.30 Temporarily blinkered, it explores a particular dead-end as if it was the broad avenue its conceivers intended it to be.

This account attempts to take seriously Cooper’s advice not to do history backwards. Privileging only those avenues that led to a decolonising transition can only result in a narrative that neglects the essentially equivocal and always conflicting approaches underpinning all of British late colonial policy. The thesis reflects the liberal intent behind Mass Education interventions, but also their fundamentally nebulous nature and their

28 Cooper, F., Modernizing Bureaucrats, Backward Africans, and the Development Concept, in: Cooper, F., Packard, R. (eds.), International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997, pg. 76. 29 Op. Cit. Hyam, 2006, pg. 143. 30 My italics. Cooper, F., Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, UC Press, Berkeley, 2005, pg. 18.

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susceptibility to shifting priorities at all levels. Varying between counterpart and counterpoint to the better-known economic and political development plans, Community Development was a product of the same metropolitan assertion and post-war planning. Mass Education and Community Development are illustrative not just of a liberal urge set deeply within imperial policy, but the existence of optimistic and varied modernising and prescriptive tendencies within the Colonial Office and metropolitan government. Cooper states it more elegantly – ‘one needs to appreciate the sense of possibility of these years and to understand what ensued not as an imminent logic of colonial history but as a dynamic process with a tragic end’.31

Mass Education, retrospectively obscure and neither celebrated nor deplored, is nonetheless worthy of a lingering glance. This it receives in the pages that follow. Chapter one provides a description of the formulation of British Mass Education policy during the period before, during and immediately after the war. It discusses the antecedents of Mass Education policy, including the Fabian ideals of the post-war Labour government and the wartime pragmatism that encouraged the adoption of a programme that promised economical results. The ideals that made Mass Education a project acceptable to a critical international audience are also discussed in the final sections of chapter one. Progressive individualism, modern personalities, initiative, self-help, and a sense of citizenship were metropolitan neologisms for an African population gradually assuming the responsibilities of self-rule.

31 Ibid. pg. 26.

INTRODUCTION 35

2. The Colony: Perspectives on the Late-Colonial African State

The conception, brief gestation and abortion of mass education by the Colonial Office cannot be dealt with in isolation. The brief vogue that it enjoyed within metropolitan policy circles must be tied closely to changes in the functioning and legitimation of the colonial state in Nyasaland. Problematic and ambiguous metropolitan definitions of individualism, citizenship and progress were parachuted with minimal consultation into the laps of colonial governments. Ambiguous definitions mixed into a swirling broth of state imperatives, sometimes reinforcing, and sometimes contradicting current welfare and political policies. A clear idea of why Mass Education failed requires an understanding of how these normative conceptualisations of African mentalities and communities mixed with the interests of the late colonial state in Nyasaland. The state was the essential and ambivalent mediator between policy and people.

The African ‘colonial state’ – a contested concept – requires definition. Most, but not all, of the literature on late-colonial African states erects the territorial administrative apparatus as the essential filter between the specific and the general, the centre and the periphery, and the local and metropolitan. The state was the conduit for metropolitan ideology and funding, and the focus of local protest and alliance formation. The form taken by the colonial state is problematic, particularly during the ten or so years after 1945. The changing nature of the state – the extent and dissemination of its power and its relationship with development – is central to an understanding of how metropolitan planning and ideology were translated into local results. Metropolitan ideals and requirements were adapted and perverted by a colonial administration with diverse interests, imperatives and alliances. But the state was simultaneously faced with an increasingly assertive Colonial Office, dissatisfied subjects and organised nationalist associations. The final shape taken by the colonial development project was thus dependent on the waxing and waning of the power of the late colonial state, and its ability to mediate the colonial development discourse.

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John Darwin argues that the late colonial state was a distinct historical formation. His work links the early top-down administrative histories with more recent bottom-up ‘subaltern’ accounts of decolonisation. The state, he argues, should not be seen as analogous to the colonial government or administration, but should rather be demarcated as the locus of interactions between diverse interests – ‘an arena in which a medley of interests (and their attendant ideologies) competed for control of public goods and the regulatory power the state possessed over land, labour, transport and communal rights’32. These interests included the metropole and local officialdom, both internally divided and dependent on different alliances. This defines the boundaries of the state, but not the internal logic and the dynamics of change within these boundaries. Darwin sees the novelty of the late colonial state in its dependence on, and inability to command support from the metropole, and its loss of freedom in the negotiation of a viable position with local opponents. Thus emasculated, the state had the shutters pulled down on it, rather than closing up shop itself. The late colonial state was, in the final account, ‘a rickety, under-engined vehicle staggering under its burden of local and imperial aspirations’.33 But Darwin neglects the manner in which state agents – including officers within the Colonial Service and African Native Authorities – contested this apparently premeditated betrayal of the colonial governments. Mass Education was an illustrative aspect of this contestation. The programme was never accepted wholesale as a metropolitan imposition that privileged African communities at the expense of their government. It was bent into a shape that reshaped central authority, reinforced the administrative authority of specific state agents, and rejuvenated rural relationships between the administrative services. A medley of interests the state may well have been, but local colonial agents still had self-preserving interests of their own.

Darwin does not pencil in the finer detail, particularly with regard to the colonial state’s mediation of the attempt to salvage legitimacy by balancing coercion and legitimation (read development). Bruce Berman does just this, with a detailed description of the decline of

32 Darwin, J., What Was the Late Colonial State?, Itinerario, 23, 2-4, 1999, pg. 75. 33 Darwin, J., Decolonization and the End of Empire, in: Winks, R.W. (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. V, Historiography, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999, pg. 555.

INTRODUCTION 37

particular administrative elements within the late Kenyan state (although he does make clear that this description could apply, in its general form, to the generic colonial state). He provides dense analytical narration detailing the internal workings of the administration and government of the colony, with particular focus maintained on the colonial development project. The state administrative apparatus – part of a semiautonomous state – itself became the site of conflict, as it struggled to resolve the contradictions involved in alleviating recurrent crises of accumulation and the articulation of capitalist and pre- capitalist forms. The colonial state faced simultaneous and interlinked crises – evictions of the African labour force from white settler areas, penetration of capitalist relations into reserves, increasing degradation of reserve land, and the rise of nationalist politics – but was increasingly incapable of meeting the challenge. It could not resolve the contradiction inherent in desiring the creation of a stable African farming class and the preservation of pre-capitalist forms:

unwilling and unable to confront the structural contradictions underlying the crisis in the reserves directly, the Provincial Administration instead unwittingly reproduced the contradictions in its own practice. Uncomfortable with the complexities of land tenure and agriculture, field officers also tended to take refuge in social welfare programmes that were more ideologically rationalized. Welfare permitted full scope for the exercise of authoritarian paternalism, without requiring any rethinking of established administrative methods.34

This was not the only problem faced by the state. A contemporary reallocation of administrative power and emphasis within the state forestalled any adequate resolution. There was a shift in emphasis from the local administrative officers to technical staff. The central administration increasingly privileged technical solutions over the old, ad hoc methods. But technical methods could only achieve so much in degraded reserves and

34 Berman, B., Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya: The Dialectic of Domination, James Currey, London, 1990, pg. 280.

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stunted economies. Funding could not keep pace, and the personal, local relations that were previously the focus of the local administration were now no longer sufficient to maintain order. While it also sought out potential African allies to maintain legitimacy, the state was increasingly focused on coercion rather than legitimation, as it became the focus of claims from various emerging and discontented African class-interests. Just how vicious this coercion could become was recently documented in two histories of the Mau Mau crisis in Kenya. Caroline Elkins and David Anderson present a grim picture of the paroxysmic consequences of demonisation and brutality.35 This coercion was not limited to the naked use of military force. In a far more prosaic sense subtle and quotidian forms of authoritarian administration reinforced the racist and sexist reality that Africans inhabited.36 Repression was counterproductive for the Kenyan state. The administration in Kenya became ‘an obstacle rather than an agent of the restructuring of metropolitan capital and the global economy’, motivating the metropole to seek an alternative alliance, with African claimants, aimed at the maintenance of the British economic position and resulting in the evisceration and emasculation of the administrative services of the colonial state.37 Berman’s account (admittedly oversimplified here) describes the ultimate decay of the colonial state and development project, and its transformation into a redundant and repressive entity, useful to nobody, and a liability to all.38

In Berman’s conception, there is a refocusing of power, from the colonial state to emergent African interests on one side and metropolitan expedience on the other. The colonial state was withdrawing from its previous instrumental role, as mediator of the interests of metropolitan capital and policy. Its power varied, sometimes strong (forcing capitalist

35 Anderson, D., Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s dirty war in Kenya and the end of the Empire, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 2005; Elkins, C., Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, Pimlico, London, 2005. 36 See: Lewis, J., Empire State-Building: War and Welfare in Kenya 1925-52, James Currey, Oxford, 2000. 37 Ibid, pg. 440. 38 Crawford Young comes to the same conclusion by a different path. He sees the decline of the late colonial state as a temporary reduction in the power of Bula Mutari – the hegemonic bureaucratic power of the African state. Colonial hegemony, both before this period and after independence, was complete. The late colonial period was perhaps the one time that this hold was released – the state’s autonomy was severely curtailed by the emergence of nationalism (civil society) and metropolitan intervention. In: Young, C., The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1994.

INTRODUCTION 39

relations on a pre-capitalist African peasantry), sometimes weak (suffering a lack of resources and coercive power), but always instrumental. Cooper takes a different tack and looks at the dispersion and purpose of state power in its own terms. He criticises attempts to characterise state power as hegemonic and capillary. Foucault conceives of power and resistance as mutually constitutive, and the dispersion of power as capillary, with a broad and diffuse reach. Cooper argues that this is a conception more suitable for European state development. State power in colonial Africa was more likely ‘arterial’ – ‘concentrated spatially and socially, not very nourishing beyond such domains and in need of a pump to push it from moment to moment and place to place.’39 Colonial authority was able to concentrate authority at certain times in certain places, but was never able to establish a uniform hegemonic state.

In the years following the War the unassertive administrative values inherent in the practice of indirect rule were replaced by a renewed hegemonic effort. The colonial development project was an attempt to project uniform values of modernity into a far from uniform African population. Mass Education was a particularly value-laden aspect of this project, with the universal application of progressive individualism and mature citizenship. Limitations of funding and coercive force aside (and these were major concerns in themselves), colonial authorities could not tie African identities and roles down in a manner that allowed a deeper and wider projection of state power. The uneven effects of both capitalist penetration and the colonial intrusion created an uneven landscape and allowed neither consistent application of development policy nor a consistent result from development efforts:

The inability of colonial regimes to establish and maintain “dominance” amid the uneven effects of capitalism led them to deploy the “universalistic” conceptions of social engineering developed in Europe, only to find that

39 Cooper, F., Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History, The American Historical Review, vol. 99, no. 5, 1994, pg. 1533.

40 DANIEL KARK

their own hopes for the success of such technologies required giving up the beliefs about Africa on which a sense of “dominance” depended.40

State power was neither broad, nor consistently deep. The community development experiment aimed to be both, but succeeded only in highlighting a debilitating feebleness.

Mahmood Mamdani diverges from both Cooper and Berman. The dynamic governing decolonisation, according to Mamdani, was politically motivated – indigenous elites had to be integrated into state structures, by the state, for the maintenance of the state’s integrity and with the process governed by the state. It was not a metropolitan alliance attempting to salvage the position for capital. Mamdani ‘shifted perspective from the mode of livelihood to the mode of rule and argued that there is a historical specificity to the mode of rule on the African continent.’41 This ‘mode of rule’ entailed the creation of a hegemonic ‘decentralised despotism’. Power was not arterial, as maintained by Cooper. Mamdani’s analysis of the governing forms imposed upon the African colonies during the colonial period describes a ‘bifurcated state’ – the late colonial state adapted ‘indirect rule’ so that the system gradually integrated urban and educated Africans into the previously ‘racialised’ governing system as ‘citizens’, while at the same time continuing to govern ‘tribalised’ rural subjects through appointed chiefs and imposed ‘traditions’. Nationalism and elite interests were absorbed by this de-racialisation of the state. The rural population remained under a ‘decentralised despotism’. The despotism fused local power, created administrative-judicial nodes, and relied on extra-economic coercion. The result was a hegemonic state dependent on localized nodes of despotic power:

What we have before us is a bifurcated world, no longer simply racially organised, but a world in which the dividing line between those human and the rest less human is a line between those who labour on the land and those who do not. This divided world is inhabited by subjects on one side and

40 Ibid, pg. 1532. 41 Mamdani, M., Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1996, pg. 294.

INTRODUCTION 41

citizens on the other; their life is regulated by customary law on the one side and modern law on the other; their beliefs are dismissed as pagan on this side but bear the status of religion on the other; the stylised moments in their day-to-day lives are considered ritual on this side and culture on the other; their creative activity is considered crafts on this side and glorified as the arts on the other; their verbal communication is demeaned as vernacular chatter on this side but elevated as linguistic discourse on the other; in sum, the world of the “savages” barricaded, in deed as in word, from the world of the “civilised.”42

African rural populations were separate and subordinate. Their labour and agricultural choices were determined for them. They were excluded from accountable government, and derived their rights from the ‘tribe’ rather than the state. The only recourse they had was to unaccountable local structures. This hegemonic state was dependent on the political exclusion and administrative control of the greater part of the population. The weakness of this argument, for the purposes of this thesis, is in Mamdani’s failure to provide an adequate explanation of the dynamic of decolonisation and the period preceding it. The crisis of the late colonial state – as it fumbled coercion and attempted legitimation – does not concern him. He makes mention of the integration of the threatening educated class into local government structures, but not of the broader effort to transform societies, dictate terms, and finally determine the shape of the post-colonial state. But the model has strengths too, and is very useful in providing both a picture of the historically specific forms taken by state and local power under colonial rule and a starting point for the analysis of where the development project was situated with respect to these forms. Any genuine reform of local structures, according to Mamdani, depended on more than the inclusion and accommodation of nationalism. By implication, the success of an inclusive colonial development project required breaking down civilized-savage, citizen-subject dichotomies. It required the dismantling of an entire system that reinforced despotic mentalities, local

42 Ibid, pg. 61. My emphasis.

42 DANIEL KARK

government and administration. Mass Education promised to do just this, and it is largely with the substance of this promise that this thesis concerns itself.

The development project is seen above as the object of administrative power, the instrument of a prescriptive colonial state. Whether characterised as the last gasp of a withering state, a vessel for the arterial distribution of power or an element within a bifurcated and decentralised despotism, development is seen as the conduit through which the normative social goals of the state are directed. James Ferguson argues that this is a superficial and partial reading. Development also had deeper instrumental consequences regardless of the success or failure of the project or whether state imperatives were met. Development was the means rather than the end, the end being the introduction of bureaucratic power where it was not previously apparent, and the redirection of relationships into bureaucratic channels. It has, moreover, the effect of introducing these bureaucratic ‘knots’ in a manner that avoids upsetting local sensibilities. Generalised and standardised development solutions are introduced as ‘technical’, and therefore apolitical. The introduction of state power is thereby depoliticised. The state slips in through the back- door, irrespective of the failure or success of the technical solution. This, in Ferguson’s phraseology, is the ‘anti-politics machine’:

a “development” project can end up performing extremely sensitive political operations involving the entrenchment and expansion of institutional state power almost invisibly, under cover of a neutral, technical mission to which no one can object. The “instrument-effect”, then, is two-fold: alongside the institutional effect of expanding bureaucratic state power is the conceptual or ideological effect of depoliticising both and the state.43

Those implementing a development project do not necessarily intend, at least openly, that this depoliticisation should occur. But it occurs nonetheless, entrenching new forms and

43 Ferguson, J., The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development”, Depoliticisation, and Bureaucratic Power in , University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1997, pg. 256.

INTRODUCTION 43

new avenues for the exercise of state power. And not state power owned and operated by particular actors or institutions, but as a particular means of organizing and channelling power relations, ‘a kind of knotting or congealing of power’. It is bureaucratic state power, ‘not an entity possessed of power, but a characteristic mode of exercise of power, a mode of power that relies on state institutions, but exceeds them.’44

This thesis concerns itself with the manner in which the government and administration of Nyasaland – in other words, the state – used Community Development to reinforce its authority during the 1940s and 1950s. The full spectrum – Berman’s emasculation, Cooper’s arterial weakness, Mamdani’s despotism and Ferguson’s covert insertion – is echoed in one way or another in the community development exercise undertaken by the Colonial Office and the government of Nyasaland. The state in Nyasaland was trapped by its domestic and external relationships as well as its internal contradictions (which are dealt with in chapter two). Forced to mediate between assertive metropolitan policies and dissatisfied African subjects the state struck back by using bureaucratic power to diffuse the dual threat. By co-opting and bending metropolitan policy and language to its own ends, and by reforming its relationship with the African population of Nyasaland, the state managed to reshape itself into a form that mimicked the language of development imperialism. The words were the same and the motions were similar, but the local results were different. Improved African education, production, and hygiene, in government hands, reinforced state power and were never the technical and apolitical development interventions the administration claimed them to be.

The manner in which the state in Nyasaland reshaped itself and redefined metropolitan policy has previously been dealt with by others in different ways and with vastly different outcomes. 45 Andrew Fairweather-Tall conceived of a state ready to shake off alliances with missions and labour recruiters and forge independent education and labour policies. According to Fairweather-Tall, ‘the colonial state became more involved in the lives of its

44 Ibid, pg. 273. 45 Fairweather-Tall, A., From Colonial Administration to Colonial State: The Transition of government, education and labour in Nyasaland, c. 1930-1950, PhD Thesis, Oxford, 2002.

44 DANIEL KARK

subjects, taking back authority it had sub-contracted and spreading its institutional ambit to claim new areas of competence’.46 Colin Baker, similarly, saw the state in Nyasaland reborn under the rule of ‘Development Governor’ Geoffrey Colby – from 1948 to 1956 the governor expanded the public service and pushed productive agriculture.47 In both cases the government of Nyasaland is portrayed as an assertive, independent and coherent actor. Megan Vaughan and Elias Mandala describe a very different state. Mandala, in a narrative that stretches from 1859 to 1960, describes the manner in which local environmental conditions and African social action in the Tchiri valley altered the status quo upon which the colonial economy depended. Desperate to retain control in the face of environmental and social change in the 1930s and 1940s colonial planners ‘entered a world of visions and utopias that had no foundation in the economic and social realities of the valley’.48 Inappropriate solutions were offered in circumstances threatening to the state. The state – or more precisely, the Department of Agriculture – also desired to transform Africans into the modern and progressive citizens of European dreams in Vaughan’s account of responses to the 1949 famine in Southern Nyasaland. The DoA became convinced of the need for a class of productive and specialised yeoman farmers to replace traditional methods and mixed incomes. That the Department did not have the funding to engage in anything more than experimental schemes was irrelevant – lack of funding was ‘perhaps less important than the fact that these ideas remained very influential in the formulation of wider government policy’.49 In both Mandala’s and Vaughan’s estimations, the state impressed itself upon African lives in an aggressive and alienating manner.

Two different pictures of the colonial state in Nyasaland emerge – one coherent, benevolent and assertive, the other reactive and inappropriately prescriptive. Both characterisations present a colonial state attempting to deal with African rural poverty in an international and

46 Ibid, pg. 34. 47 Baker, C., Development Governor: A Biography of Sir Geoffrey Colby, British Academic Press, London, 1994. 48 Mandala, E., Work and Control in a Peasant Economy: A History of the Lower Tchiri Valley in Malawi, 1859-1960, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1990, pg. 203. 49 Vaughan, M., The Story of an African Famine: Gender and Famine in Twentieth Century Malawi, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987, pg. 68.

INTRODUCTION 45

imperial context that made it increasingly difficult to ignore. Both also present a state that, while benefiting from increasing post-war revenues, was still trapped within the constraints of its own poverty. But it is in the intent the state brought to African welfare that the two characterisations differ. African welfare was far too large a remit, and the colonial state in Nyasaland had far too small a capacity to allow change in any deeper sense. Nonetheless, the state established priorities within these limited horizons.

The chapters that follow adopt a sharp local focus, and trace the paths taken by the administration in Nyasaland as it conceived and implemented the small but comprehensive development project in Domasi. The Domasi Scheme is an excellent illustration of the manner in which power was directed and redirected through and around a state as post-war colonial development policy was instrumentalised, co-opted and circumvented. The universal language of individualism, citizenship, initiative and modernity was adopted as an ‘idea of state’. Indeed, such concepts fulfilled an important function, as a demonstration to African Nyasalanders and to sceptical international observers that the state was a legitimate upholder of a new moral dispensation. A new and inclusive definition would therefore meet all of Christopher Clapham’s definitions of state – control over physical space, the creation of a moral ‘idea of state’, and recognition by other states and international organisations – creating a comprehensive nationhood.50

The actual form these ideas took was different. They were cast in forms that buttressed and distributed state administrative power, tightening the state’s grip on the African and rural population of Nyasaland. In the name of educating African opinion and improving African domestic life the state offered an apolitical and diluted pedagogy and invasive surveillance (discussed at length in chapter three). Individualising African agricultural production and encouraging sustainable use of the land took the form of ineffective redistributions and highly unpopular environmental restriction (chapter four). And the encouragement of efficient and democratic local government turned into a reproduction of existing relationships within innocuous advisory bodies (detailed in chapter five). Joanna Lewis,

50 Clapham, C., Africa and the International System: The Politics of State Survival, CUP, Cambridge, 1996.

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writing about Community Development in Kenya, described a broadly similar situation. Her discussion emphasises the descent of Kenyan Community Development from high- minded mantras into racial repression – whilst the government ‘used the language of the African, implying a citizenry with a claim on government, it settled for a solution that was total and a racial one …’ Forceful too – for the Kenyan government ‘the use of force was always a tacit, and often dreamed of sanction’.51 Mass Education in Nyasaland suffered a similar fate. Far from redefining African communities and individual sensibilities, the Domasi Scheme became little more than an experiment in the capillary distribution of state power and authority. The effects of this experiment were ultimately corrosive of this type of distribution, but this was not yet an outcome that was conceivable in any immediate sense.

51 Op. Cit. Lewis, 2000, pgs. 363, 374.

INTRODUCTION 47

3. The District, The Project and The Scheme: Perspectives on Local Resistance and Development

Africans spoke back to state power. The rise of coherent African nationalism after 1945 is the clearest manifestation of this reply. Once popular, territorial nationalism and elite nationalist histories have fallen out of favour as decolonising narratives. These unfashionable accounts stressed the rise and development of coherent protest and political movements, from early protest at the initial colonial intrusion, through the formation of political associations, to territorial domination by well-organised mass movements. Historiographically groundbreaking work by and Thomas Price in 1958 dealt comprehensively with the Chilembwe rising in Nyasaland’s south in 1915, and with broader stirrings of dissent and rebellion against early colonial rule.52 In 1968 Terrence Ranger described the progressive development of nationalism in Nyasaland.53 Around the same time Van Velsen identified the sources of protest that gave rise to the first secular Native Associations in Nyasaland in the first half of the twentieth century – concerns over treatment by the local administration, the provision of education, and general complaints regarding African welfare were the major bugbears. Reasonably civil rebellion rather than revolution was the goal of many of the early associations.54

Robert Rotberg provided central African nationalism with its most comprehensive treatment.55 He detailed the rise of nationalism in Nyasaland and Northern , emphasising the personal and group politics of the period. Rotberg dealt thoroughly with

52 The work was published in 1958, just prior to the violent and tumultuous events that were to lead to Malawian independence in 1964. Shepperson, G., Price, T., Independent African: John Chilembwe and the Origins, Setting and Significance of the Nyasaland Rising of 1915, Edinburgh, 1958. Shepperson’s work may be compared with the biographical transcript on Chilembwe’s life written by George Mwase and edited by Robert Rotberg. Mwase, G., Strike a Blow and Die: A Narrative of Race Relations in Colonial Africa, Press, Cambridge, 1967. 53 Ranger, T.O., Connexions between ‘Primary Resistance’ Movements and Modern Mass Nationalism in East and Central Africa, The Journal of African History, vol. 9, nos. 3 and 4, 1968. 54 Van Velsen, J., Some Early Pressure Groups in Malawi, in: Stokes, E., Brown, R. (eds.), The Zambesian Past: Studies in Central African History, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1966. 55 Rotberg, R.I., The Rise of Nationalism in Central Africa: The Making of Malawi and , 1873-1964, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1965.

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the formation of the Nyasaland African Congress in 1944, the party’s initial conciliatory attempts to force African welfare onto the territorial agenda, the radicalisation born of disappointment, and visceral reaction against the unilateral introduction of the Central African Federation in 1953. His work provides a valuable introduction to the personalities and politics of the founding stars of African nationalism in Nyasaland in the 1940s and 1950s – men such as Henry Chipembere and James Sangala, both national figures of note and both connected intimately to events in southern Nyasaland and Domasi. Rotberg’s work is best appreciated in its broader historical situation – the nationalist politics of Central Africa operated within a complex regional context. in Nyasaland and Harry Nkumbula in operated in a world in which they were simultaneously vilified and engaged by the colonial power. Recent histories – of the liberal- imperialist ilk described in the first section of this introduction – neglect the extent to which nationalist movements forced the pace and form of change. Nationalist action exercised a considerable amount of influence on the manner in which the Colonial Office conceived its imperial mission. The CO was forced into an uneasy relationship with nationalist movements, barely drawing breath between describing nationalist movements as illegitimate and irresponsible and drawing them into negotiation. Frank Furedi argues that this curious response was not piecemeal and regional, but was part of a common and interlinked relationship with colonial nationalist movements. Subtle engagement with Gold Coast politicians in the late 1940s and early 1950s unfolded at the same time as military emergencies tore Guiana, Malaya and Kenya. They were part of the same process, threatening British colonial power with a loss of control and legitimacy.56 The rising in Nyasaland in 1953 (encountered in chapter five) was a curious mix of both engagement and violent suppression. Nationalism in Nyasaland and beyond needs to be repositioned in order to challenge the idea that metropolitan and territorial colonial policy were in any sense autonomous of nationalist politics and organisation.

Histories of nationalist politics and narratives describing the road to self-rule and political independence map the active roles played by the small educated elite involved in national

56 Furedi, F., Colonial Wars and the Politics of Nationalism, I.B. Tauris, London, 1994.

INTRODUCTION 49

politics. They deal extensively with the constitutional negotiations and political machinations that reached their terminus in national sovereignty. But they share with liberal interpretations of Metropolitan policy-making a tendency to privilege a linear and determined path to national independence. Confused aims, fuzzy alliances and an ambiguous relationship with territorial authorities do not conform to the monolithic nationalist type.57 The sheer variety of local relations is similarly neglected. Abortive local protest and regional digression from the nationalist line are not dwelt upon. Numerous small and often inchoate acts of protest and dissent are overlooked. As is the source of rural protest – dissent and rebellion was focused as often as not on the transformative social agenda of the late colonial state, rather than on the struggle for self-determination. The fight for self-government and against Federation vented deep-seated resentment against technical and administrative intrusions in the Nyasaland countryside. What the territorial administration in Nyasaland saw as the result of agitation by educated nationalists was, in fact, a much more deeply felt, localised and ambivalent relationship with state power. It is to the considerable literature on the terms of this relationship that this thesis now turns.

Late colonial interventions were models of ambivalence and ambiguity. There is little doubt that, on the Metropolitan level, the desire for democratic and efficient local government was deeply felt (at least in Fabian-Labour circles). African local structures were to be modelled on English local government, and Africans were to gain a valuable political education in preparation for eventual self-government. There was, similarly, a commitment to the welfare and improvement of Africans and African communities. This commitment took shape in the form of Mass Education, which articulated the social principles the Colonial Office wished to implant in African minds and communities – initiative, self-help, a progressive individualism and a sense of constructive citizenship. Beyond the inherently desirable nature of these mental transformations these principles would have more practically beneficial consequences, ranging from the prevention of environmental degradation and the disintegration of the African family, to the promotion of improved

57 Cooper sees the development of nationalist politics as a conjuncture of various forces, and the result of coalition building and clientage networks. It was not a linear progression. In: op. Cit. Cooper, 1994, pg. 1539.

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agricultural techniques and efficient local governments. But what was stated as desirable at the Metropolitan level was frequently thought better of later on, or dismissed as undesirable at the territorial or local level. Metropolitan policy and territorial planning and implementation did not always mix well – different administrative levels were frequently at cross-purposes. Poor planning and half-hearted execution were frequent drawbacks.

Common to all levels was a curiously ambivalent relationship with the very people marked for collaboration and integration into the colonial development project. The colonial administration, at all levels, never managed to overcome a visceral distrust of educated Africans, despite the fact that they embodied all the personal qualities the administration claimed to be seeking through Mass Education. Their subversive (read critical) influence on local government and the possibility that they might monopolise and manipulate political power without any ‘genuine’ support gave the colonial authorities pause for thought, and influenced a change of aim, from the creation of ‘democratic and efficient’ to ‘representative and efficient’ local governments. What resulted was in many respects little different from the period of ‘indirect rule’ immediately preceding the War. Traditional leadership was co-opted and opposed to educated elements. Efficiency was a problem in itself. African local government was too good a thing to be left to Africans. District Commissioners maintained administrative control, and a new wave of technical experts introduced mandated social change – there was nothing democratic about the social change intended under the rubric of colonial development.

This social transformation was itself a source of ambivalence. There was never a consistent line regarding colonial goals for rural communities. The authorities simultaneously proclaimed a desire for the creation of a progressive, capitalist class of African farmers, but feared the individualism and selfishness blamed for the disintegration of traditional African values, families and societies. The successful African commercial farmer was simultaneously model and bête noire. ‘Traditional’ African leadership was in a similarly untenable position – in the frontline when it came to enforcing deeply unpopular colonial environmental regulations, they found the ground cut from underneath them. Enforcing the

INTRODUCTION 51

dictates of colonial authority diminished colonial authority. More than this, coercion diminished state authority more generally. The profound hatred reserved for environmental restrictions among rural Nyasalanders (discussed in chapter four) negated the relatively popular educational and hygiene elements of the Mass Education scheme (looked at in chapter three). The intensely coercive nature of government responses to intransigence sat uneasily with ideals of persuasion and African initiative. The local social contradictions and administrative schisms revealed by metropolitan and territorial policy in Nyasaland and Domasi are explored in this introduction and in chapters three to five, integrating the extensive existing literature on colonial environments and development, and the smaller body of work on local government and administration. This exploration reveals the fundamental flaw in a type of progressive and liberal colonialism that wanted desperately to inscribe itself upon African society and individual life, but ended up relying on the well- worn tools of colonial repression. Jean and John Comaroff describe it best – ‘the European colonisation of Africa was often less a directly coercive conquest than a persuasive attempt to colonise consciousness, to remake people by redefining the taken-for-granted surfaces of their everyday worlds. In some places it was a combination of the two, effected by different agents at once; and even where it proceeded in an entirely non-coercive manner, the threat of violence was always imminent in it’.58

William Beinart, David Anderson and John McCracken cast light on unexplored historiographical terrain with their work on the enforcement of social and environmental change in the late colonial state. Beinart’s work was brilliant and seminal. He traced the development of concern regarding soil conservation in Southern Africa. An American and South African preoccupation with soil erosion was adopted and adapted by the late colonial state in Nyasaland. The focus of state concern shifted from settler agriculture to peasant farming, and from limited interventions to prevent erosion to large-scale planning and intervention to transform the social bases underlying African agricultural systems. Punitive sanctions were introduced in Nyasaland for failing to implement the conservation measures

58 Comaroff J., Comaroff, J., Of Revalation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa, vol. 1, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1991, pg. 313.

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mandated by the state – labour intensive bunding and ridging were made compulsory.59 Attempts were made to create a class of ‘Master Farmers’ both as a solution in itself and as a salutary exercise.60 Technical solutions to social problems were adopted alongside social solutions to technical problems. But the technical aspect dominated – the desire to meet ‘conservationist imperatives … began to win out against administrative concern to maintain social order’. The threat (actual and aesthetic) posed by peasant techniques was to be planned and legislated away – ‘it is difficult to escape the conclusion that officials were looking at the African areas with new eyes and that their response was moulded by a set of ideas which constructed the problem of erosion in a specific way and generalised it … general preventative measures were thus justified.’61

Anderson charts the emergence of environmental degradation as an area of concern in the 1930s in East Africa. While his period and regional focus are not of direct relevance, his conclusions do have a bearing on the major structural concerns discussed in this thesis rather than on soil conservation in isolation. He explores the interactive and permeable links between the metropole and the colonies. He emphasises the movement of ideas ‘that went from colony to London and back again, that were modified both within and outside the empire, and that often resulted in reforms that went far beyond what was initially intended’.62 Less permeable was the barrier that divided the post-War wave of colonial technical experts from the people they intended to help.

McCracken traces the birth and rise and apogee of the colonial ‘expert’ in Nyasaland. The expert was prescriptive, and not receptive. McCracken does not doubt their potential as innovators and improvers. But he does question their hubris – ‘their faults lay less in their

59 Ridging required the creation of a raised line of earth along natural contours. Bunding required the creation of a substantial dam of earth, similarly along contours. Both were intended to prevent soil run-off. 60 Kalinga deals with this at length. He looks at efforts to develop a class of dependable (politically and productively) yeoman farmers. The thesis will deal with these Master Farmers as an element of the Domasi scheme. Kalinga, O., The Master Farmers’ Scheme in Nyasaland, 1950-1962: A Study of a Failed Attempt to Create a ‘Yeoman’ Class, African Affairs, vol. 92, no. 368, 1993. 61 Beinart, W., Soil Erosion, Conservationism and Ideas about Development: A Southern African Exploration, 1900-1960, Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, 1984, pgs.75 and 67. 62 Anderson, D., Depression, Dust Bowl and Drought: The Colonial State and Soil Conservation in East Africa during the 1930s, African Affairs, vol. 83, no. 332, 1984, pg. 343.

INTRODUCTION 53

belief that some skills and techniques could be transmitted effectively to Africa than in their assumption that Africa had nothing to offer them’.63 Colonial agricultural development was a European show, with only the smallest cameos open to African initiative.

The colonial approach to environmental regulation – coercive and generalised technical prescription – provides a generic template for colonial approaches to the development project as a whole. Mass Education had occasional recourse to coercion rather than persuasion. Colonial community development blurred into an exercise in colonial authority.64 Most frequently this authority relied, not upon the naked display of force, but upon the ‘gentle violence’ of intrusive incursions into the village and the home – ‘the day to day reproduction of life under colonial rule in the name of civilisation and reason’.65 This represented nothing less than the attempted implantation within African minds of colonial authority. It is not surprising therefore, that the prescription was not always accepted without a modicum of resistance.

The disregard for local social forms shown by European officers caused social strife. Generalised solutions for regionally or culturally specific problems (as identified by colonial authorities) were, predictably, inadequate and unpopular. The measures introduced a novel, potentially divisive social and physical geography. Feierman documents the trouble caused by an attempt to enforce environmental rules and to create a class of commercially viable farmers in Shambaai in . Peasants revolted against the project. The objection was not so much to the creation of a class of capitalist farmers, but to the chance that they might renege on their social responsibilities to poorer members of the community, to the commoditisation of land traditionally used as a source of social security, and to the disregard shown for traditional land use practices.66 Moore and Vaughan discuss British

63 McCracken, J., Experts and Expertise in Colonial Malawi, African Affairs, vol. 81, no. 322, 1982, pg. 116. 64 Elkins deals with Community Development efforts as part of the state response to Mau Mau in Kenya. Whatever vision its coordinator Askwith might have had was neutered by the ready association of development with repression. In: Op. Cit. Elkins. 65 Bush quoting Shula Marks and Engels in: Op. Cit. Bush, pg. 9. 66 Feierman, S., Peasant Intellectuals: Anthropology and History in , University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1990.

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attempts to introduce a similar scheme in the Northern Province of Northern Rhodesia as part of a broader analysis of interactions between Bemba identities and colonial and national rule.67 Attempts to create a commercial farming class and agricultural resettlement schemes ran into a number of unforeseen problems. The schemes attracted educated and older men with the capital or ideology necessary to command the agricultural labour required. The former were predisposed to ‘progressive’ farming, and the latter regarded such effort a symbol of affluence rather than an improved method of production. Many of the farms lacked the financial depth to sustain themselves. Much more worrying for colonial authorities, however, was success, raising both the ugly issue of ‘individualism’, and the local resentment of those reneging on social obligations in favour of individual gain. Those implementing the project had themselves in a double bind. They encouraged the development of a politically stable class of progressive farmers as bulwark against agitation, and thereby gave nationalists a target for agitation.68 They desired the emergence of a class of farmers able to buy in the labour required for the maintenance of a purely commercial agricultural livelihood, and discovered most were unable to survive, cut off from diversified incomes and the social networks required to command labour. The colonial development project, where locally unadaptable, was unsustainable.

The lack of adaptability was deeply set. It was not just wilful and intransigent local administration that hobbled local implementation. Metropolitan ideals and contradictions were transmitted without the critical adaptation necessary for application to colonial issues. Lewis argues – along similar lines to Lee and Petter – that the War was instrumental in transforming attitudes to the relationship between centre and periphery. But she also argues that, more than just strengthening a commitment to central control, it bolstered a belief in the ability of the centre to apply metropolitan goals and methods to colonial problems. This resulted in an ‘incomplete and incoherent’ colonial development programme. The welfare

67 Moore, H., Vaughan, M., Cutting Down Trees: Gender, Nutrition, and Agricultural Change in the Northern Province of Zambia,, 1890-1990, James Currey, London, 1994. 68 Moore and Vaughan note that many of the earliest applicants for inclusion in these agricultural schemes were also those in the vanguard of nationalist rebellion.

INTRODUCTION 55

state, as conceived in post-War Britain, was perceived to be wholly relevant to the colonial situation:

Urban problems and solutions were reflected back onto rural Africa. For their plans to work and their hopes to be realized, the late colonial state would need to conjure up metropolitan circumstances: finance; cooperation between administration and departments; target groups in civil society to work through; and a single moral community. Had officials read the lessons of their own bureaucratic history more carefully without the distraction of war, they might have understood better that these simply did not exist.69

Even worse, according to Lewis, was the fact that the Colonial Office did in fact adapt central policy in one important respect – whereas women were seen as the agents through which metropolitan conditions would be ameliorated, in the colonies it would be men who were the vectors. The War retarded earlier moves towards privileging female welfare and temporarily refocused colonial attention on male migration, recidivism and delinquency.70 Female-headed households – not uncommon in central Africa, where male migratory labour was a major source of rural incomes – could, at best, expect no particular attention.

James Scott has a knack for incisive induction. In his work on the nexus between states and high modernist interventions he draws together and generalises the particular threads described by Beinart, Lewis, Vaughan and others. Scott labels the interventionist moment in Western history High Modernism, ‘a strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and, above, all the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific

69 Lewis, J.E., ‘Tropical East Ends’ and the War: Some Contradictions in Colonial Office Welfare Initiatives, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 28, no. 2, 2000, pg. 62. 70 Lewis, J.E., The Ruling Compassions of the Late Colonial State: Welfare Versus Force, Kenya, 1945-1952, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, vol. 2, no. 21, 2001.

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understanding of natural laws’.71 Colonial interventions to make African society legible and logical to progressive British minds were manifestations of this modernist agenda.72 African knowledge was assumed by high modernist policymakers to be illegitimate and regressive. The values transferred through Mass Education were allegedly legitimate and progressive.

Domasi itself is well described by Scott’s characterisation. The scheme was to instil values of initiative, individualism and citizenship, but in an apolitical environment – that is, an environment free of allegedly backward-looking African ideas and institutions. African contestation was an intolerable nuisance. Indeed while individual high modernists ‘might well hold democratic views about popular sovereignty or classical liberal views about the inviolability of a private sphere that restrained them … such convictions are external to, and often at war with, their private convictions’.73 Modernist projects, including Domasi, were nothing if not centralising and authoritarian schemes. That these schemes failed to project power over the vast spaces and widely dispersed populations of British Africa led to another phenomenon, of which Domasi is once again an example. The pilot project, the development district and the model village are all examples of what Scott calls miniaturisation. What the state is unable to achieve on a large scale, can nonetheless be demonstrated to scale. An intense administrative focus banished those variables that are beyond state control and forced supposedly regressive African traits into the desired mould – Foucault’s ‘capillaries’ conveyed state power, reaching into Domasi’s homes, fields and councils. Scott puts it more elegantly – ‘the constriction of focus makes possible a far

71 Scott, J., Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1998, pg. 4. 72 Scott states that progressives were the most common proponents of high modernist intervention – ‘it is typically progressives who have come to power with a comprehensive critique of existing society and a popular mandate (at least initially) to transform it. These progressives have wanted to use that power to bring about enormous changes in people’s habits, work, living patterns, moral conduct, and worldview’. Ibid., pg. 89. Cooper is critical of Scott’s attempt to condemn ‘high modernism’ and promote the use of local knowledge. He argues that ‘modernism’ is not a uniform concept. Scott neglects the very particular and occasionally irrational circumstances that gave rise to each of his case-studies, concluding that modernist solutions may not always be appropriate, but local knowledge is not always adequate. ‘We need to make distinctions, and condemning the systematic and celebrating the messy will not help us make them’. Op. Cit. Cooper, 2005, pg. 142. 73 Op. Cit. Scott, 1998, pg. 94

INTRODUCTION 57

higher degree of social control and discipline. By concentrating the material and personnel resources of the state at a single point, miniaturisation can approximate the architecture, layout, mechanisation, social services, and cropping patterns that its vision calls for. Small islands of order and modernity, as Potemkin well understood, are politically useful to officials who want to please their superiors with an example of what they can accomplish’.74

The assumption in all of this is, of course, that there existed a defined set of African and colonial structures, institutions and norms – sometimes reinforcing, sometimes conflicting – that could be rationally opposed or combined to produce some sort of conclusive outcome. The possibility that incoherence, social ‘straddling’ and diverse interests might instead result in inconclusive encounters between state, group and individual requires exploration. Sara Berry did just that, in ‘No Condition is Permanent’. She emphasises the fluidity, dynamism and ambiguity of African cultures and institutions.75 Cultural lines and identities blurred. ‘Negotiability’ was, and is a key factor in all economic and social interaction. There was no regulated implementation of legal or social norms. African agrarian change therefore needs to be seen through lenses that represent ‘law as social process, transactions as subject to multiple meanings, and exchange as open-ended and multidimensional rather than single-stranded and definitive’.76 The best strategy was to keep options open, to dissemble, occasionally to make indecision a virtue, and, above all, to invest in the ‘means of negotiation’ as well as the means of production.77 Avenues through which to gain access to land, labour and other resources had to be kept open through almost constant negotiation. And this meant negotiation through and around the colonial state. This in itself was problematic – the colonial state was, according to Berry, intrusive rather than hegemonic, and lacked the resources necessary to enforce a rigid set of legal, social and economic norms. Before the War the system depended on Indirect Rule through ‘traditional’

74 Ibid. pg. 258. 75 Berry, S., No Condition is Permanent: The Social Dynamics of Agrarian Change in Sub-Saharan Africa, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1993, pg. 6. 76 Ibid, pg. 13. 77 Ibid, pg. 15

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leadership and allocation of land rights to communities, institutionalising a shifting constellation of identities.78 After the War, individuals and communities had the added ambiguity involved in an encounter with colonial development. Far from being objects of development, they became active claimants upon colonial resources, collaborating with the state where it suited, and remaining defiant where it did not.79 Rather than seeing development as an avenue to long-term development, they cooperated when it promised short-term gain and circumvented it when it impinged. The colonial encounter and colonial development are not, therefore, assessable in any real sense – they were, rather, ‘a series of inconclusive encounters among farmers, government officials, project staff and local authorities, in which the objectives of a project or program are neither achieved nor resisted in a consistent fashion, and its effects on rural economic performance are often contradictory or unclear’.80

This thesis does not accept a deterministic liberal or nationalist perspective, nor does it identify all colonial encounters on the local level, in a specific local context, as inconclusive. It argues that colonial development policy was not accepted whole and unmediated. It was changed, corrupted and co-opted as it was implemented – by the technical and administrative staff, by African agents, and by those it was intended to change. But some of these encounters were conclusive in the local context. Relationships and options were opened up as never before during the late colonial period, but this opening did not always last nor was it always there to begin with. Relationships rigidified and options were closed off in the years immediately preceding independence. Scott’s work on rural resistance demonstrates the conclusive force of subversion and resistance. Certain types of change are irredeemable, and some kinds of power, once lost, are irrecoverable.

78 Berry situates herself in a position contrary to Chanock. Whereas she sees colonialism as a factor in the institutionalisation of conflict and change, Chanock, in his work on colonialism and the articulation of a legal tradition in Central Africa, describes the suspension of change caused by the codification of ‘traditional’ law during a period of rapid transformation. See: Chanock, M., Law, Custom and Social Order: The Colonial Experience in Malawi and Zambia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985. 79 Hyden presents only one side of this strategy. He describes an ‘uncaptured peasantry’ voluntarily isolated in an ‘economy of affection’ and beyond the purview of the state. In: Hyden, G., Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania: Underdevelopment and an Uncaptured Peasantry, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1980. 80 Op. Cit. Berry, pg. 45.

INTRODUCTION 59

Scott once again develops a powerful generalised model. He postulates the emergence of a different kind of gradualism, which this thesis uses as a counterpart to the gradualist mentality of the post-war Colonial Office. He plots, in generic terms, the manner in which the powerless speak back to power. The almost hegemonic power of a public transcript determines social opportunities and holds all – the powerful and the powerless – in its thrall. The public transcript dictates who holds power and legitimates exclusivity. But it is not impermeable. The powerless have opportunity to reply. This they do initially through small acts of defiance and by developing a hidden transcript of passive resistance and hidden meaning.

In rural Nyasaland in the 1940s defiance took the form of inefficient labour, apparent indolence, tax evasion and defiance of very unpopular environmental restrictions (detailed in chapter four). The public transcript dictated by post-war development imperialism and Mass Education was disputed by peasants and semi-educated peri-urbanites through countless small and uncoordinated acts. Even in Domasi, where administrative power was overwhelmingly apparent, these inchoate responses were increasingly apparent. As Cooper demonstrates these responses included claims framed in the progressive language used by the colonisers themselves to articulate Mass Education. Modernity and citizenship were adapted to submit subversive claims that were nonetheless stated in a manner that upheld the public transcript.81 From small things, big things come. In certain situations the public transcript becomes insupportable. The first open and public acts of defiance and declared refusals to comply take on a symbolic value far beyond their immediate effects. They are the first sign that a governing ideology is unsustainable, foreshadowing conclusive change – ‘the open declaration of the hidden transcript in the teeth of power is typically

81 Cooper demonstrates clearly the manner in which Africans used the colonial language of modernity as a ‘claim-making device’ in order to frame demands upon the colonial state and the imperial polity. He calls, in a revealing chapter, for an understanding of European and African modernities that takes historical specificities into account. In a section specifically on African claims on the French empire Cooper argues that ‘such claims were powerful because they linked well-organised social movements to colonial official’s eagerness to find a basis of legitimacy for an inclusive and unified imperial polity and their hope that Africans could, in fact, become productive and orderly participants in such a polity. Such claims would soon challenge the French government’s illusions that it could direct – and pay for – a modernised imperialism’. From Op. Cit. Cooper, 2005, pg. 147.

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experienced, both by the speaker and by those who share his or her condition, as a moment in which truth is finally spoken in the place of equivocation and lies’.82

For the colonial government and people of Nyasaland the riots and disturbances of 1953 were just such acts. The hidden transcript formed by decades of steady frustration and a more recent moment of intense coercive intervention, emerged publicly with symbolic force both in Domasi and across Nyasaland’s south. This transgression surprised both district officers and African nationalists – both groups that prided themselves on knowing ‘their’ people. The open voice suddenly replaced the covert gesture. This was not merely a local reaction to colonial authority, but was also an engagement with the concepts prescribed by nationalist and administrator.83 As Beinart and Colin Bundy have previously pointed out, peasant revolt may react against local events in a manner that harks back to a better time, but it may simultaneously engage with colonial ideas of ‘progress’ in ways that are forward-looking and critically challenging for the state – ‘they framed telling critiques of the racial and social structures determining their subordination. The peasant schema had far-reaching implications for any future division of power and wealth within the society as a whole’.84

82 Scott, J., Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1990, pg. 208. 83 Cooper is, once again, critical of Scott’s generalised approach. He sees the interaction between ruler and ruled as one of constant, critical and complex engagement, rather than a hidden transcript that only bursts forth ‘into a “public transcript” in moments of confrontation’. Indeed, ‘some of the best recent work in African history discards the categories of resistors and collaborators and starts with the question of how “rural people saw their circumstances, made their choices, and constructed their ideas about the larger society’. From: Op. Cit. Cooper, 1994, pg. 1534. This author sees no particular reason not to integrate the work by Scott and Cooper – is it not possible for moments of direct confrontation to simultaneously represent moments of profound engagement? 84 Beinart, W., Bundy, C., Hidden Struggle in Rural South Africa: Politics and Popular Movements in the Transkei and Eastern Cape 1890-1930, James Currey, London, 1987, pg. 39. The passage in its entirety is pertinent: ‘There was a consistent thread of opposition to control from the outside, a resistance to various forms of state intervention and also to the aspirations of local collaborating elites. In their hostility to the impositions of both state and capital, and in their search for a degree of autonomy for rural communities, the popular movements that we describe contained important impulses for change. They absorbed ideas about African independence and liberation, even if these were then translated into more localized versions. Their spokesmen identified the ways in which people were exploited as workers, as producers and as consumers …’

INTRODUCTION 61

While it has not previously been documented, Domasi was, in fact, a site of this type of engagement with colonial and nationalist concepts. It is a critical moment discussed at length in chapter five. The Domasi episode reveals much about the benevolence of British colonial development. The district was intended as a showcase of the best that colonial rule had to offer Africans in the British territories. Instead, the riots in Nyasaland struck at the heart of a transcript that preached the language of reform but delivered coercive force. The community development transcript was conclusively breached. The ambiguous concepts formulated within the Colonial Office, and instrumentalised by the state in Nyasaland, were rearticulated by the intended recipients in antipathetic ways not predicted by their conceivers.

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4. The Individual: Perspectives on the ‘In-between’ and the Integrated

The creation of a comprehensive picture of the crises faced and solutions offered by the late colonial state requires not only the opposition of the interests of the metropole, the state and the local, but an analysis of the internal crystallisation, opposition and articulation of policies and ideologies. Concentrated study of one particular aspect of the late colonial programme – Mass Education and Community Development – and of the translation of metropolitan policy into practical form – Domasi – allows such an analysis. Rather than a top-heavy description of metropolitan policy in its broadest sense with occasional reference to a local ‘case-study’, or an analytical bulge around the colonial state, or a thick description of local relations with passing glances at an ‘intrusive’ state or centre, this thesis aims to provide an evenly weighted (if not always direct) route from specific policy to specific result. Hargreaves85, Holland86 and Darwin87 provide integrated treatment of the twilight of formal colonial rule in British Africa and the British empire more generally, but they do not have the luxury of dwelling in any one place for any great length of time and lose in depth what they so admirably gain in breadth. This thesis allows a slow and lingering glance, and the development of a detailed picture of policy and relationships during a period when social options and opportunities for change seemed to open up. It does not seek to establish the primacy of any particular group or strata in the determination of development policy (although this may be an incidental consequence of the study). It is intended primarily as a case-study of the ebb and flow of alliances and ideologies, a history of the dynamics determining the mood, policy and outputs of the late colonial period.

Recent contributions to the decolonisation and development literature demonstrate the potential of this method. A recent special edition of the Journal of African History on the relationship between the Late Colonial State and development included four papers that

85 Hargreaves, Decolonisation in Africa, Longmann, London, 1988. 86 Holland, R.F., European Decolonisation, 1918-1981, An Introductory Survey, MacMillan, Basingstoke, 1985. 87 Darwin, J., Britain and Decolonisation: The Retreat from Empire in the Post-War World, MacMillan, Basingstoke, 1988.

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provide descriptions of the dialogue between the centre and state and the adaptation of policy by those on the ground. James Fairhead and Melissa Leach discuss the effects of a shifting relationship between scientific policy and state power in addressing desiccation in Guinea, and the manner in which it affected local relationships and alliances.88 Dennis Hodgson describes the ‘contested visions’ regarding the future of Maasai livelihoods in Tanganyika, where generalised development policies, rigid definitions of Maasai identities and selective cooperation by the Maasai themselves forestalled the success of the project.89 Eric Worby discusses the gap between ‘rational’ development objectives and the political motives behind rural relocations in Rhodesia, and the developing distinctions within the African community as determined by Africans themselves.90 And Monica van Beusekom looks at the mediation of colonial development as determined at the centre by interactions between field staff and local participants.91 These contributions demonstrate the importance of integrating all levels in any study of colonial development policy.

While this thesis maintains a clear chapter division between events at metropolitan, state and local levels it does so merely for the sake of a clear narrative. But it need not be so, and this divisive description is necessarily interrupted from time to time by intrusions from other levels. Integrated analysis need not be done methodically and explicitly – the messiness of policy-making and contested interpretations of policy may force similarly ‘messy’ narration. The centre intrudes on the local and vice versa. Causation is not uni- linear and top-down. Relationships are not clear. Alliances are fuzzy. Individual identities multiply. Cooper consequently emphasises the need to maintain a focus on the ‘in-between’ when dealing with the late colonial period. A similar approach is required when

88 Fairhead, J., Leach, M., Desiccation and Domination: Science and Struggles over Environment and Development in Colonial Guinea, The Journal of African History, vol. 41, no. 1, 2000. 89 Hodgson, D.L., Taking Stock: State Control, Ethnic Identity and Pastoralist Development in Tanganyika, 1948-1958, The Journal of African History, vol. 41, no. 1, 2000. 90 Worby, E., ‘Discipline without Oppression’: Sequence, Timing and Marginality in ’s Post-War Development Regime, The Journal of African History, vol. 41, no. 1, 2000. 91 Van Beusekom, M., Disjunctures in Theory and Practice: Making Sense of Change in Agricultural Development at the Office du Niger, 1920-60, The Journal of African History, vol. 41, 2000.

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approaching the numerous apparent dichotomies facing the historian or social scientist.92 Individuals may divide their lives between the state and broader networks, nationalist movements may define themselves against and through state structures, families may link themselves to ‘pre-capitalist’ networks and desire selective aspects of the development project. It is not a Manichean world. It is worth quoting Cooper at length: ‘in between is as much a place to be at home as any other. The implications for the historian are crucial: we must analyse the culture of politics and the politics of culture by constantly shifting the scale of analysis from the most spatially specific (the politics of the clan or the village) to the most spatially diffuse (transatlantic racial politics) and examine the originality and power of political thought by what is appropriated and transformed from its entire range of influences’.93

Cooper is, admittedly, referring specifically to the formation of nationalist ideologies, but the method is equally applicable to ideology more generally, as well as social formations and individual transformation. The individual is, of course, the most difficult category to dissect. Apart from the problematic aspects of prying open private recesses in order to satisfy academic curiosity, the usual impracticalities of conducting broad and deep oral investigations preclude the comprehensive investigation so desirable for a study of this type. Limited funding and frustrated enquiries tempered the initial urge to know all. There is no African Mass Observation to fill in the gaps thus left. The individual and collective recollection of lives lived under colonial rule is an aspect of the African past difficult to recover and fast disappearing.

Some studies have recorded aspects of this past. They contribute substantive analysis and elegant narrative writing to existing documentary studies. Elias Mandala wrote a highly regarded study of Mang’anja relations and forces of production in the Tchiri (Shire) Valley from the second half of nineteenth century to 1960. Mandala used extensive interviews to

92 Mamdani makes a similar point when pleading that African history should be neither exoticised nor banalised – it should be seen as neither so specific as to bear no relation to similar experiences elsewhere, nor should it be seen as sui generis. Mamdani also seeks the ‘in-between’. In Op. Cit. Mamdani, pgs. 9-13. 93 Op. Cit, Cooper, 1994, pg. 1539.

INTRODUCTION 65

reconstruct the social, political and productive relations that characterised African farming in Nyasaland’s southern region during these years. Recognising the absence of a changing physical environment from accounts of African farming, he included it as a key historical parameter, writing an intimate local agricultural history, and sensitively detailing the changing lives of African individuals and communities.94 Megan Vaughan is similarly sensitive and focused on a single historical incident. She looked at the revelatory function of the 1949 famine in Nyasaland’s southern region, highlighting the very complex social distinctions thrown up by the crisis. Like Mandala, she conducted local interviews and interpretively picked apart memories of the event, including the pounding songs women composed commemorating the dearth and marital strife of the period.95 The southern region of Malawi received further narrative treatment in Landeg White’s history of Magomero, a small village in Chiradzulu. He described the very different and often mixed political and agrarian relationships maintained over an extended period within a small area of southern Malawi, from the very earliest local recollections, through the colonial period, and up to Hastings Banda’s MCP government. White relied on interviews with local villagers and on a common pool of songs and communal memories.96 All three of the accounts above provide an intimate and detailed approach to the colonial period that complements metropolitan and elite state perspectives. They fill the ‘in-between’ fissures that split individual identities and made rural African communities so difficult for colonial administrative officers to categorise.

An approach that privileges the mundane and common experiences of less influential actors should not necessarily be restricted to narratives of the lives of the dominated. The dominators distinguished themselves by their varied experience. Kirk-Greene and Cannadine shift the gaze to the colonisers, with descriptions, respectively, of the ambiguous position of District Commissioners and Colonial Service Officers – men ‘in the middle’ –

94 Murray, C., Black Mountain: Land Class and Power in the Eastern Orange Free State, 1880s-1980s, Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg, 1992. 95 Vaughan, M., The Story of an African Famine: Gender and Famine in Twentieth Century Malawi, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987. 96 White, L., Magomero: Portrait of an African Village, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987.

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and the enormous complexity of the class systems propagated by the empire.97 The district officer in particular was the object of opprobrium and defensive praise, simultaneously protector and oppressor, and was placed in positions infinitely more complex than any faced by Sanders of the River. This body of work is representative of the very best sort of narrative history – complex, catholic and cognisant of diversity. After a long period in which historians damned the individual colonial dominator as the racist product of an exploitative system, more recent narratives of late-colonialism take a more circumspect perspective, one in which account is also taken of the individual propensities and characters of the officer ‘on the spot’. Eugenia Herbert notes that, as ‘schoolmasters in modernity’, late-colonial officers exercised an authority and influence beyond their small numbers – ‘few in number and distant from the centers of power and policy-making, individual officers could in fact have considerable impact on local affairs in their districts’.98 The confusion instilled by colonisation was not the monopoly of the colonised. In the Comaroffs’ finely worded assessment colonialism was ‘a drawn out struggle between ordinary people, human beings endowed with few resources and only partially coherent motives’.99 Colonial administrators were trapped within the gradualist and liberal mental constraints of the period, but were nonetheless ordinary people of diverse character, varying local legitimacy and capable of widely divergent action.

Less easily constructed are the lives of rural African individuals, unmentioned in memos, letters and circulars. Charles Van Onselen, in his brilliant account of the life of Kas Maine,

97 Kirk-Greene, A.H.M., The Transfer of Power: The Colonial Administrator in the Age of Decolonisation, University of Oxford, 1979; Kirk-Greene, A.H.M., Symbol of Authority: The British District Officer in Africa, I.B. Tauris, London, 2006; Cannadine, D., Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire, Penguin, London, 2001. The attitudes of individual metropolitan citizens towards their empire may also be included here – how the empire was received in Britain defined how concepts such as metropolitan and colonial citizenship were framed. The electoral choices made by Britons could also fundamentally alter colonial futures. Aspects of metropolitan life are also crucial for a fuller understanding of African colonial history. For attitudes to citizenship see: McClelland, K., Rose, S., Citizenship and Empire, 1867-1928, Hall, C., Rose, S. (eds.), At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, CUP, Cambridge, 2006. For an excellent understanding of the metropolitan conditions which led to the Labour victory in 1945 see: Kynaston, D., Austerity Britain 1945-51, Bloomsbury, London, 2007. 98 The first phrase is Lonsdale’s. The quotation is from: Herbert, E., Twilight on the : Late Colonialism in Central Africa, Palgrave, Houndsmills, 2002, pg. xxi. 99 Op. Cit. Comaroff J., Comaroff, J., pg. 313.

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a South African share-cropper, pieces together the very complex facets of a single and previously mute life. It is perhaps the single greatest account of South African agrarian and race history, sometimes explicating and sometimes only hinting at events in the background and offstage, but always eschewing flat generalisation in favour of the representative in the specific. At different times and in different places, sometimes simultaneously, Maine was artisan and farmer, his family both social unit and unit of production, and his identity divided between patriarch and peon:

A bifurcated existence in a colonial order calls for great social dexterity, formidable inter-personal skills and a positive mastery of the codes and practices of patriarchy and paternalism … Kas Maine oscillated between two fields of gravity that were constantly shifting, now closer, then farther apart, now attracting, then repelling, at one moment overlapping to produce a challenging new cultural synthesis, at another separating out so as to be light years apart.100

Van Onselen’s account is the beautiful product of a steady accumulation of detail through many patient interviews and over many years. Only fictional narratives more closely approximate the inner lives of individuals faced by the invasive potential of colonial power. In far humbler fashion, this thesis attempts to do for the late colonial development project what Van Onselen did for South African social and agrarian history. It seeks, not always to approach the broader history directly, nor to write history by analogy alone, using ‘case- studies’, but to read a very specific history as a prism through which to draw and interweave metropolitan ideology, the constitution of the state power, and local conflict.

A final, brief word is required on the sources on which this thesis draws and on the broad structure of the argument. The thesis draws on the usual colonial memoranda, despatches, reports and marginalia – at least for the description of metropolitan and state policy. It is a

100 Van Onselen, C., The Seed is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, A South African Sharecropper, 1894-1985, Hill and Wang, New York, 1997, pg. 10.

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traditional account in this sense. While this reconstruction draws on very limited access to ex-colonial officers and the unpublished memoirs stored in Rhodes House and elsewhere, it leans more heavily on the official sources stored in the National Archives in Kew. The picture produced is distorted by various imbalances, among them the disparity in the depth and breadth of resources between Kew and the Malawi National Archives in Zomba. The disgraceful state of archival facilities and records in Malawi is certainly not that country’s most pressing problem. The surrounding and immediate human poverty dominate state discourses, but the poor conditions suffered by the staff and documents of the Malawi National Archives are nonetheless significant for the long-term development of a complete and usable Malawian past. Rising damp and white ants gradually render Malawians historically mute. For the limited purposes of this thesis, these imbalances are partially compensated for by the unusual candour and comprehensiveness of the reports on the Domasi project itself. The project was rationalised as a testing ground for the integrated deployment of development methods, and was therefore expected to produce potentially unconventional results. The documents provide some substance for the development of a picture of the modus operandi of the colonial state, and are supplemented by recourse to the usual district and provincial reports.

More importantly, the overall picture is also balanced by the use of oral data collected in Zomba, and Balamanja Districts over a period of two years. The data is far from comprehensive. It is subject to all the usual sorts of imbalance and subjectivity typically expected from oral histories. And it neglects Moore and Vaughan’s call to focus as much on transformations in local practice as on ‘local voices’. These fascinating personal insights nonetheless provide a counter to the official and elite perspectives of colonial and nationalist sources.101 These oral accounts of the colonial period hint at the opinions and responses of those at the local level, those being transformed by – and transforming in turn – the environmental and social measures forced on them under the rubric of colonial community development. The accounts are not always factually correct, and do not always correspond with one another, but, in the words of Luise White, a particularly good oral

101 In Op. Cit. Moore, Vaughan, 1994, pgs. xxii-xxiv.

INTRODUCTION 69

historian and Africanist, ‘they construct and repeat stories that carry the values and meanings that most forcibly get their points across’.102 White goes on to claim her use of oral history does not merely emend documentary sources, but defends oral sources as superior in many ways, providing valuable evidence in and of themselves, creating a ‘vivid picture of social life and the imagination that springs from it’.103

The last three chapters in particular draw on oral histories to record local approaches to, respectively, education and hygiene, environmental restrictions and local government. Linking each of the last three chapters is a steadily intensifying local dissatisfaction with the limitations imposed by a system that preached citizenship and initiative, but demanded conformity and unquestioning compliance. Chapter three looks at the manner in which community development was actually practised by the district team in Domasi. The provision of hygiene advice and education was conducted in innovative ways. The introduction of a very basic education for adults, overage children and young children was a popular notion and responded to the first demands for universal education made by the Nyasaland African Congress. But intervention occurred in such a manner that its positive aspects were partially nullified by the roughly interventionist and prescriptive methods used to implement changes. There was no similar positive aspect colouring the implementation of environmental restriction and agricultural reform. The state imperatives that guided the forceful transformation of African attitudes towards their land are described in chapter four. So too are the passionate but muted responses of landholders to the coercive measures that forced them to obey environmental measures for reasons that were seldom explained in any coherent manner. How deeply the local resentment ran was indicated by the passive and uncoordinated defiance campaigns conducted by some chiefs and some of their people – non-cooperation, non-compliance, and non-payment were all levers with which rural Nyasalanders attempted to manipulate their political environment. The conflation of these local disputes with contentious colonial and regional issues integrated Domasi and other regions into a rudimentary national politics and further emphasised the disjuncture between

102 White, L., Speaking with Vampires: Rumour and History in Colonial Africa, UC Press, Berkeley, 2000, pg. 30. 103 Ibid., pg. 53.

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the fine words of Mass Education and the foul deeds of Central African Federation and state repression. Chapter five details the peak of this rising tide of disappointed hopes and quiet resentment. Open rebellion revealed a different type of African initiative. The violent 1953 disturbances at Domasi and elsewhere in the southern region of Nyasaland were the first open and clear indication to the government that a mutually beneficial understanding based on social change now and a political transfer later was no longer a realistic prospect. The selective provision of progress and modernity was no substitute for self-rule. Domasi was the imperfect and inadequate product of an equivocating empire.

Section One

The Creation of Mass Education – Metropolitan and State Welfare Policies, 1925-1948

Chapter One

‘As Wide As the Needs of Society’ – The Origins and Development of Metropolitan Mass Education Policy 1925-48

Emma was very compassionate; and the distresses of the poor were as sure of relief from her personal attention and kindness, her counsel and her patience, as from her purse. She understood their ways, could allow for their ignorance and their temptations, had no romantic expectations of extraordinary virtue from those, for whom education had done so little; entered into their troubles with ready sympathy, and always gave her assistance with as much intelligence as good-will.

Emma visiting a poor family on Vicarage-lane.1

1 Austen, J., Emma, OUP, London, 1966, pg. 76.

Mass Education was a key element of an established transformation in Colonial Office thought. Its formulation and introduction represented the highpoint of official concern for the social well-being and welfare of colonial subjects. During the fifteen or so years after 1938 community welfare achieved a prominence it had not enjoyed previously and would not enjoy again. Until the late 1930s colonial minds were focused on the economic development of the imperial estate. After the mid-1950s policy-makers were preoccupied with the immediate threat posed by nationalism and the necessity of an orderly political transition. It was only during the brief intervening period that hopes of a deeper social transformation were projected upon the colonies by the Colonial Office with anything like an altruistic spirit. African society was to be remoulded in the interests of its inhabitants, and Africans prepared for eventual self-government. The best features of British political and cultural life were to be conferred upon the African colonies – individualism within a sophisticated and cooperative society, democracy within a representative political system.

Transformation was not to be imposed. Indeed, this was the central premise of Britain’s Mass Education policy – rural Africans would transform themselves. Initiative, modernity and citizenship were now touchstones of benign British suasion. Through the steady inculcation of values considered central to the development of a sophisticated society and mature individuals, Britain was to ensure the gradual creation of viable and democratic successor states. Mass Education was the vehicle for this creative social project and the projection of British ‘soft power’.

This does not mean that the recreation of rural individuals and communities was the only priority for policy makers in the Colonial Office – while social change certainly had a profile it never had before, it was not in any sense a competitor with colonial economic development. Nor should this chapter imply that Mass Education stood apart from such concerns. The programme was, ultimately, a roughly defined mix of window-dressing, cost-cutting and post-war altruism. Concern for the image of British colonialism abroad, the absence of a substantial class of Africans suitable for the type of development Britain had in mind, and Fabian liberal-humanitarianism provided the impetus behind the creation of the programme. Mass Education was the inconsistent instrument of all of these metropolitan concerns.

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This chapter resituates Mass Education as a central instrument in the gradual British recreation of African society. The programme is an aspect of late colonial metropolitan policy frequently neglected in histories of the period. Considered an historical dead-end it receives far less attention than the political transitions that terminated in the decolonisation of British Africa. The chapter seeks to reconstruct the evolution of official Colonial Office Community Development policy.1 It provides a brief narrative introduction to the formulation of the policy, and a lengthier assessment of the occasionally contrary economic and political influences that produced the ideals included in Mass Education and Community Development. These influences resulted in a well-meant, but flawed product. The influences and rationale behind Mass Education are crucial. This is the central concern of the chapter – it dwells at length on the intent behind a scheme apparently aimed at undermining the bases of colonial rule. That Mass Education was not actually intended to do any such thing is the subject of much of the second half of the chapter. The manner in which metropolitan ambiguity and misspecification, and territorial misinterpretation undermined the stated aims of the programme provides the necessary context for a discussion of the manner in which Mass Education was ultimately implemented in Nyasaland.

1 Better and more detailed assessments of British economic development policy are found elsewhere. By far the handiest single volume on colonial economic development is: Havinden, M., Meredith, D., Colonialism and Development: Britain and its Tropical Colonies, 1850-1960, Routledge, London, 1993.

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1. The Roots of Mass Education: Economic Development Versus Welfare, 1929-1945

The penultimate act of the formal British Empire in Africa was defined by colonial development. An unfortunate mix of high-blown expectations and limited political and financial means, metropolitan development plans never really provided a return on the hopes invested in them. This was at least partly due to the inconsistency of development policy. It never really found a secure place in British political minds, nor a place in Treasury hearts. The colonies were unrepresented politically, and easily neglected financially. Development policy was therefore inconsistent and was subject to multiple metropolitan political priorities. Colonial policy was based on both concern for the welfare of the inhabitants of the empire, and a longing to make the empire pay its way. Lugard’s Dual Mandate lived on. These differing priorities were not polar opposites, although each had particular advocates within the Colonial Office. Both the proponents of economic development and those advocating a focus on African welfare designed their arguments in order to build political consensus regarding the British presence in Africa.2 While it was largely a concern within the Colonial Office for the welfare of colonial subjects that led to the creation of the Mass Education programme, economic pragmatism also informed the creation of the programme, as a social buttress for broader colonial development plans.

The 1929 Colonial Development Act was the unambiguously self-interested work of a floundering British government. It was a product of its time. While Depression, the introduction of Indirect Rule and a desire that colonies be financially self-sufficient did not encourage metropolitan spending in the colonies, Britain’s straightened circumstances could also encourage a broader view. The colonies could conceivably provide not only a market for British goods and employment for British workers, but long term financial security within the imperial zone. This was the manner in which the Colonial Office justified the Development Act to both Parliament and Treasury. The act was unprecedentedly generous – it made relatively large amounts available to the empire, and was directed towards the development of viable colonial markets. It was also entirely a response to British economic need. It was not directed at any particular colonial

2 Butler, L.J., The Ambiguities of British Colonial Development Policy, in: Gorst, A. (ed.), Contemporary British History: Politics and Limits of Policy, 1931-61, Pinter, London, 1993.

78 DANIEL KARK circumstance, and explicitly avoided certain development requirements.3 While funds could be directed towards , they could not be used for education, and were not intended to support any recurrent expenditure.4 The implementation of the Act was not quite so stringent, and funds were not always directed towards metropolitan interests. The Colonial Development Advisory Committee, that met for the first time in August 1929, was charged with the evaluation of projects for approval under the Act. The Committee interpreted its role broadly and did allow schemes that focused on public health and malnutrition, including 78,284 for public health in Nyasaland. But there was growing feeling within the Colonial Office that the CDA was not broad enough, and did not focus on recurrent social expenditure – and education in particular – as it should.5 Colonial welfare was not, until this point, an official metropolitan concern.

This approach changed during the 1930s. The metropolitan reasons for this change are dealt with below. But by far the most compelling propellant was a combination of colonial unrest, and a growing domestic and international awareness of the desperate poverty of the empire. The League of Nations was delving into both conditions in the colonies and colonial trusteeship. This inspired the Colonial Office to begin enquiries into nutrition in the colonial empire, a decision that ultimately painted a very unfavourable picture of welfare in the colonies. The empire’s unofficial trouble-shooter, Lord Hailey, was commissioned to produce a massive African Survey, that, when published in 1938, came out in favour of greater research into and funding for the improvement of social conditions in the empire – shortly after his survey was released Hailey said at Chatham House that ‘I sometimes wish that we could place our hands on our hearts a little less, and set them to

3 That the Act was entirely self-interested and not aimed at any particular colonial circumstance was well demonstrated by the construction of the trans-Zambezi railway bridge. This was mooted as a method of increasing British exports of construction materials. The construction of the trans-Zambezi railway bankrupted the Nyasaland government. Vail claims that the decision to build the bridge ‘was as much a cure for Nyasaland’s economic problems as a month in a tropical swamp would be a cure for malaria’. From: Vail, L., The Making of an Imperial Slum: Nyasaland and its Railways, 1895-1935, The Journal of African History, vol. 16, no. 1, 1975, pg. 109. 4 Constantine maintains that the guarantee that funds would not be used for educational development was the only explicit limitation on spending under the Act. The guarantee was given by Sir Oswald Mosley during debate on the bill. Constantine, S. The Making of Colonial Development Policy, 1914-1940, Frank Cass, London, 1984, pg. 188. 5 Constantine quotes Lord De La Warr, Undersecretary of State – ‘the real “development” needed in Africa today is not the investment of large sums of capital but the improvement of the human capital’. In Ibid, pg. 221.

METROPOLITAN MASS EDUCATION POLICY 79 explore our pockets a little more’.6 The product of this research, and of other contemporary portrayals of imperial social conditions, was a tarnished image of the colonial trust. This sense of bad faith was, according to Havinden and Meredith, ‘the real legacy of the colonial question in the 1930s, and … provided the context in which wartime aspirations for post- war colonial reconstruction and rehabilitation were made.’7 The outbreak of serious unrest in several African territories and the West Indies gave practical demonstration of the consequences of neglect. It was the West Indian disturbances that provided the immediate catalyst for a sea change in colonial development policy. William Macmillan wrote a critical and influential survey of the West Indian situation in 1936 in which he called for planned development to prevent the West Indian trouble occurring in the African colonies.8 In response to vocal criticism the unusually committed Secretary of State for the Colonies, Malcolm MacDonald, appointed Lord Moyne to report on the disturbances in 1938.9 MacDonald made sure enquiries were not limited to the West Indies. They were extended, within a specially established departmental committee, to include the effectiveness of the CDA and British colonial development policy.

The outbreak of hostilities in 1939, far from discouraging MacDonald’s push for a much broader scope for development activities, provided the Colonial Office with a convincing context in which to set the reforms. It was accepted by Parliament as a useful counter to any argument by the Axis, or any perception in the , that Britain was morally

6 Cell, J., Hailey: A Study in British Imperialism, 1872-1969, CUP, Cambridge, 1992, pg. 236. Hailey produced the key surveys of late-colonial British rule in Africa. He was originally appointed by Secretary of State Malcolm MacDonald to produce a survey of British Africa, and this became the authoritative guide shortly after its publication. More on the production of the Survey may be found in the above biography and: Cell, J., Lord Hailey and the Making of the African Survey, African Affairs, vol. 88, no. 353, 1989. After another trip to Africa in 1940 Hailey submitted a report on Native Administration and Political Development. This study was revised and expanded to a four-volume survey of administration after another trip to Africa in 1947. Hailey, W.M., An African Survey: A Study of Problems Arising in Africa South of the Sahara, OUP, London, 1938; Hailey, W.M. (Kirk-Greene ed.), Native Administration and Political Development in British Tropical Africa, Liechtenstein, 1979; Hailey, W.M., Native Administration in the British African Territories, HMSO, London, 1951. 7 Havinden, M., Meredith, D., Colonialism and Development, Britain and its Tropical Colonies, 1850-1960, Routledge, London, 1993, pg. 205. Constantine agrees with this assessment. 8 W.M. Macmillan returned to Britain in 1934 after years spent lecturing in history at the University of the Witwatersrand. He proved to be a persistent but constructive critic of empire. While he was ultimately left behind by the rapid decolonisation of the 1960s, he made a substantial contribution to the critique of British empire in: Macmillan, W.M., Warning From the West Indies: A Tract for Africa and the Empire, Faber, London, 1936; Macmillan, W.M., Africa Emergent, Faber, London, 1938. The latter was intended to form part of the African Survey for which Macmillan hoped to win the commission. Hailey received it instead. 9 The report was not ultimately published, despite MacDonald’s insistence. The recommendations were the only section released.

80 DANIEL KARK compromised by imperial neglect – even in mortal peril Britain looked after her empire. A bill on colonial development passed parliament, despite Treasury hesitance10, and was, according to MacDonald, an indication of Britain’s ‘constant care to promote the well- being of our fellow subjects in the Empire overseas’. But if it was primarily demonstrative, it was not solely for show. The new Colonial Development and Welfare Act (CDWA) broke new ideological ground, even if wartime stringency was to limit its practical significance. It established ‘the duty of taxpayers in this country to contribute directly and for its own sake towards the development in the widest sense of the word of the colonial peoples for whose good government the taxpayers of this country are ultimately responsible’. After years of benign neglect Britain was to be responsible for economic development, and was also to fund recurrent expenditure on ‘everything which ministers to the physical, mental or moral development of the colonial peoples of whom we are the trustees’11 – funding welfare and education in all forms was now a loudly proclaimed metropolitan concern.

The implementation of the 1940 CDWA was hampered by the War. Spending under the Act increased after early inertia, but results were disappointing due to the lack of planning staff in the colonies caused by wartime personnel shortages. Spending was focused on welfare, but was concentrated in areas of strategic significance. In order that the start made in 1940 not be seen as an empty gesture, planning for a more effective post-war commitment to colonial development and welfare began in earnest in the Colonial Office after 1943. The Secretary of State, Colonel Oliver Stanley, made a statement in July that year laying out the future of colonial policy in very general terms. It was the first statement that colonial relationships were to be based on ‘partnership’ and ‘eventual, internal self- government’. This commitment, while refreshingly explicit, was as vague as it sounded, and was more a righteous, nervous nod towards Article Three of the Atlantic Charter and a sop to American sensibilities than a vision of an immediate future. But it was important in its restatement of the conditions attached to this eventual self-government – the necessity of ‘educational advance and economic development’. By economic development Stanley

10 Treasury did not want colonies ‘on the dole from henceforth and forever’. There was serious concern regarding the inclusion of welfare and recurrent expenditure in the Bill. From Op. Cit. Constantine, pg. 253. 11 Colonial Development and Welfare Bill: Speech in the House of Commons by Malcolm MacDonald, 21 May 1940, Hansard Parliamentary Debates (1939-40), vol. 361, cols 41-8, 50-1, From: Porter, A.N., Stockwell, A.J., British Imperial Policy and Decolonisation 1938-64, Vol. 1 1938-51, MacMillan, London, 1987, pgs. 94-100.

METROPOLITAN MASS EDUCATION POLICY 81 meant that territories should develop economies able to support broader social opportunities and more effective systems of social support – that through external development assistance they should ultimately be self-reliant.

The right conditions had to be created in order that development assistance did not fall on stony ground. An educated population had to be created and readied for these social services and opportunities. The ideal African population would be educated in much more than the formal sense. Stanley commended this expanded conception of education to parliament, stating that ‘the education I have in mind goes far beyond the classroom walls, far beyond the teacher’s voice … the sort of education that we want as a basis for political development is education by life for life … education through local government, education through community effort, such as trade unions and co-operatives, and education through actual practice in administration.’12 Economic development remained the base on which a viable colonial future was to be built, but the empire as an educational apprenticeship necessary in order to ensure the viability of any transfer of power was now more firmly established in official thought. Hailey’s justification of empire as a ‘partnership’ rather than ‘trusteeship’ was leant some substance by this social concern. And critical American allies could rest assured that British intent was benign, and talk of ‘partnership’ sincere. Indeed, there was a tendency ‘to portray the colonial Empire increasingly as a network for the transmission of knowledge rather than as a structure for the maintenance of sound administration’.13

The fall of Singapore in 1942 was taken by some commentators as a signal that the British Empire had either to redefine itself or resign its right to rule.14 Britain’s improving fortunes after 1943 encouraged this redefinition. After 1943 the Colonial Office was increasingly involved in the preparation of a post-war development programme to replace the 1940 Act. Stanley argued for a renewed commitment to development in order to counter the impression that the 1940 Act was the empty gesture of a beleaguered and waning power.

12 Colonial Affairs: Extracts from a Speech by the Secretary of State for the Colonies (Oliver Stanley) in the House of Commons, 13 July 1943. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, vol. 391, cols 48-52, 55, 57-9, 62-4, 66-9, From: Op. Cit. Porter, pgs. 156-67. 13 Lee, J.M., Petter, M., The Colonial Office, War, and Development Policy: Organisation and the Planning of a Metropolitan Initiative, 1939-1945, Maurice Temple Smith, London, 1982, pg. 155. 14 Pearce quotes Margery Perham as writing that, after Singapore, it was necessary ‘to achieve a new and more intimate and generous relationship’ with the colonial population. From: Pearce, R., The Turning Point in Africa: British Colonial Policy 1938-48, Frank Cass, London, 1982, pg. 23.

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He did so in face of Treasury opposition, and a growing awareness of the likely state of post-war British finances. That he was able to convince the War-Cabinet was due to his use of established arguments regarding Britain’s influence in the world, and concerns for the welfare of colonial subjects. Fair treatment of the colonies would not only reward them for their contribution to the war effort, but would be an indication of Britain’s continuing international relevance, and could conceivably pay future economic dividends (although this was incidental, according to Stanley). Not to do so would be a ‘confession of our national impotence in the future.’15

While the Bill was sold as a boon for those in the colonies, it was a growing appreciation within government of the parlous state of Britain’s finances that created an atmosphere different from that into which the 1940 Act was born. The abrupt withdrawal of American aid in 1945, the convertibility and devaluation crises in 1947 and 1949 respectively, and the demands of defence and domestic welfare spending left Britain in a tight spot financially throughout the late 1940s. The growing threat posed by the Soviet Union was a particular preoccupation for the British government. Preventing Soviet subversion of British rule in the colonies and meeting the costs of defending British assets required the development of African resources. The response was increased pressure from Treasury, and others, to increase colonial production in order to supply Britain with cheap commodities and dollar earnings. In 1947 the Colonial Office issued two memoranda focused on the production of food and raw materials in the colonies. Five visits by Colonial Office ministers and four by Secretaries of State during this period were indicative of the perceived importance of African resources and development. A superficial assessment of the economic opportunities on offer in Africa was also produced, by none other than Viscount Montgomery. Despite the clear oversimplifications included in the war-hero’s report, Montgomery represented a resurgence of hopes within the British government that a profitable imperial estate would fuel Britain’s recovery.16 Once again, metropolitan economic recovery justified colonial development assistance.

15 Colonial Development and Welfare: Cabinet Memorandum by the Secretary of State for the Colonies, 15 November 1944, CO852/588/11, From: Op. Cit. Porter, pgs. 208-11. 16 Field-Marshall Lord Montgomery, Memo, ‘Tour in Africa, Nov-Dec 1947, in: Hyam, R. (ed.), The Labour Government and the End of Empire 1945-1951, Part II Economic and International Relations, HMSO, London, 1992, pg. 188. Creech Jones quickly produced a memorandum replying to Montgomery’s proposals. The Secretary of State responded that Africa could not be subjected to a centralized plan for economic development which emphasised military planning and chains of command.

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The feelings of Colonial Office officials were mixed. Labour Secretary of State for the Colonies, Arthur Creech Jones, in his despatch on the 1945 CDW Act, emphasised economic development, but always with social and political ends in mind – ‘without economic development it will be impossible for the Dependencies to maintain from their own resources the improved standards which are desired for them; but in the meantime the social services must be improved and in many cases this improvement in the social services will contribute indirectly to economic development and general advancement’.17 But this desire for social improvement was mixed with a more self-interested streak, both within the Colonial Office and within government more generally. Colonial sterling balances earned during the war and held in London were not returned in any great haste.18 Projects pursued under the auspices of the Colonial Development Corporation and Overseas Food Corporation met with limited success and made little reference to colonial needs.19 Colonial economic policy turned away from industrial diversification in the colonies towards increased commodity production.20 And there was a consistent emphasis placed on the need for economy – the effective use of the very scarce resources available for colonial social development (which were under-spent anyway – just over one fifth of the 120 million promised over ten years under the Act had been used by mid-194921). None of this suggested a commitment within the Colonial Office to the construction of a sound economic foundation for the erection of social and political structures, or a commitment to social and political reform as a goal in itself. The welfarist implications of ‘development’, as conferred by the 1940 CDA and its antecedents, were subject to what Cooper calls ‘slippage’. ‘Development’ developed ‘a new emphasis without its old one ever being discarded. The ambiguity of the word – expressing simultaneously the notion of increasing

17 Circular dispatch from the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Allocation of Funds Provided Under the Colonial Development and Welfare Act, 12th November 1945, S11/1/13/1, MNA. 18 This is dealt with in much greater detail by Hinds, A., Imperial Policy and Sterling Balances 1943-56, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 19, no. 1, 1991, and Sterling and Imperial Policy, 1945- 1951, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 15, 1987. 19 Both corporations were set up after the 1948 Overseas Resources Development Act was passed. The conflict between welfare requirements and returns on colonial investments is described by Cowen, M., Early Years of the Colonial Development Corporation: British State Enterprise Overseas During Late Colonialism, African Affairs, vol. 83, no. 330, 1983. 20 See Butler, L., Industrialisation in Late Colonial Africa: A British Perspective, Itinerario, vol. 23, no. 3-4, 1999. 21 Op. Cit. Porter, pg. 49.

84 DANIEL KARK production and increasing welfare – made it particularly useful in serving multiple political purposes’22. Colonial development was an adjunct to metropolitan economic need.

Mass Education suited these purposes well. It had the benefit of being cheap and balancing local expectations with local resources and effort rather than with the very limited pool of development funding.23 Local initiative would substitute for capital inputs. This, too, commended Mass Education to Creech Jones and the Colonial Office. Rather than draw resources away from administration and the provision of basic services, it would supplement them – ‘present scarcities of skilled manpower, equipment and raw materials are hindering the development of these central services and it is therefore all the more necessary to press forward with mass education which makes less demands on these scarce commodities if development is to proceed now’.24 What little funding there was would be spent on the economic development projects beloved of Colonial Office planners. The grass-roots development of African communities would not draw from this effort. It would, instead, rely on the untapped labour and enthusiasm of groups of motivated rural Africans. It was, all in all, an attractive metropolitan solvent for obstructive economic blockages.

22 Cooper, F., Decolonisation and African Society – The Labour Question in French and British Africa, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, pg. 206. 23 Funding under CDWA amounted to little more than 0.1% of Britain’s GDP. From: Op. Cit. Havinden and Meredith, pg. 275. 24 CO1045/418, Report of Sub-Committee on Mass Education and Development Planning, 1948.

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2. The Roots of Mass Education: Moral Fragility and International and Colonial Critics of the Post-War Empire, 1944-48

The Atlee government was sensitive to allegations that Britain was exploiting its charges. A failure to address these allegations made Britain vulnerable to two potential threats to its imperial legitimacy and sovereignty: foreign intervention in colonial affairs, and the development of a nationalist threat to colonial legitimacy. Creech Jones lamented the first, an international environment that encouraged the ‘play of a fierce searchlight’ upon British rule in Africa.25 International intervention in colonial affairs was a problematic issue for the Labour Party. While Creech Jones decried the fierce searchlight, there was a strong vein of internationalism which ran through the movement, encouraging the subordination of British colonialism to supervision by external, international bodies. In 1943 Leonard Woolf and the Advisory Committee on Imperial Questions drafted the Party’s definitive statement of post- war colonial policy. The policy foresaw an international inspectorate able to monitor colonial conditions. The new body would treat all colonies as mandates. The Party accepted the proposals at the 1943 Labour conference, accepting ‘the principle of inter-national supervision and accountability in Colonial policy and administration’.26 Labour was backed by the Fabian Colonial Bureau, an influential left-wing policy group with which it was affiliated. The FCB felt that the system of mandates supervised by the League of Nations was ‘merely annexation seeking the cloak of fine phrases’.27 During the war the group proposed a system of independent regional bodies permitted to inspect conditions in the colonies. During the 1945 election the Labour Party Research Department prepared a speaker’s guide in which candidates were advised to propose a colonial commission that would be attached to the new international authority – that is, the United Nations.

Article 73 of the UN Charter required the imperial powers to gather and transmit to the UN statistical information on social and economic conditions in their colonies. The Charter described colonialism as a ‘sacred trust’ that required nations with colonies to ensure the

25 Quotation taken from: Hyam, R., Africa and the Labour Government 1945-1951, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 16, 1988, pg. 150. 26 Labour Party Conference Report, 1943, quoted in: Douglas, R.M., The Labour Party, Nationalism and Internationalism, 1939-1951, Routledge, London, 2004, pg. 186. 27 Fabian Society, International Action and the Colonies: Report of a Committee of the Fabian Colonial Bureau, quoted in: Ibid, pg. 191.

86 DANIEL KARK comprehensive development of the territories under their care. The UN comprised an increasingly diverse assortment of critics of empire – apart from the predictably hostile Soviet Union and intermittently anti-colonial United States, there was a growing company of newly independent and vocal Asian states, including , the Philippines, Burma and . The latter group – consisting of ‘non-administering’ powers – was by far the most critical. The Labour government considered them far more of a threat than the Soviet Union. The Soviets were, anyway, absent, boycotting the UN’s Trusteeship Council for most of the period between its establishment in December 1946 and 1950. During this period the Council was divided more between ‘administering’ and ‘non-administering’ powers than by cold-war ideology.28 Even without the Soviets present, the British delegation felt themselves besieged by a ‘Slav-bloc’, India and ‘the coloured nations’. Creech Jones bemoaned the ‘prejudice’ which resulted in attacks on British colonialism. The Council had become ‘a forum for largely ignorant and often malicious criticism of the administering authorities’. The supposed naïveté of critics at the UN irked the Colonial Office. Britain had, after all, stood alone in defence of democracy and self-determination during the war. The Colonial Office was also convinced of its vastly superior experience of colonial conditions. It was, accordingly, uniquely qualified to define how Africans should develop. The Colonial Office attempted to clear its name by having the black president of the Barbados Labour Party, Grantley Adams, speak favourably of British rule at a 1948 Council meeting. Even this ended with derision. The incident was interpreted for what it was – ‘rather too obvious window-dressing’.29

For their part the Americans wavered between pragmatic alliances and an anti-imperialist tradition. The Atlantic Charter was the first salvo of an American assault on colonial exclusivity.30 Criticism was tempered by pragmatism. The Colonial and Foreign Offices made play upon American fear of the threat posed by communist exploitation of colonial dissatisfaction. Time and attention were diverted to the portrayal of a benign imperial

28 Douglas writes that, due to the absence of the Soviet Union on the Trusteeship Council, ‘the trusteeship system was impeded less by obstructionism than any [of the other UN organs]’. Ibid. pg. 201. 29 Creech Jones quoted in Ibid. pg. 200. 30 Not technically true. It was the first open, official and direct assault on colonial legitimacy, even though Churchill failed to see it as such. Unofficial American criticism and intervention started much earlier than this. Among these interventions was funding from American corporations, including Carnegie and Rockefeller, into conditions in British Africa. Rockefeller funded the establishment of the International African Institute in 1926. Carnegie funded research into conditions on the Copperbelt in 1932. The American inspired Jeanes Schools are discussed in chapter two.

METROPOLITAN MASS EDUCATION POLICY 87 image, qualified by selective international accountability. Simultaneously, the British government felt obliged to stress the autonomy of colonial policy-making. Churchill stated emphatically at Yalta that Britain would never allow its empire to be ‘put in the dock’. Secretary of State Oliver Stanley in 1945 stated his refusal to allow a ‘motley international assembly’ to cast judgement upon the empire.31 But it was not just Conservative politicians predictably leaping to a visceral defence of empire. The Labour Party did not live up to their previous commitments to internationalism in the colonies. In San Francisco in 1945 the Labour government was committed to creating a powerful and interventionist international body. It very quickly veered away from this policy, seeing in the Security Council and the British veto a potent defence against critics of British colonial policy.32 Pragmatism and the paternal racism which characterised elements of the British socialist movement meant that the Labour Party ultimately failed to differentiate itself to any great extent from the previous exclusionary Tory line. British colonialism was a British affair, and did not concern any international supervisory body. Creech Jones, the primary Fabian critic of empire before 1945, felt obliged to defend it at the 1942 Mont Tremblant Conference, providing ‘loud and living proof that Britain was not effete or spiritually bankrupt’.33 The Labour Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, was similarly defensive. He saw the empire as a strategic asset that should be beyond the purview of critical outside powers. The prevailing sentiment of the Labour government was summarised in ‘The Colonial Empire Today’, a document written in 1950 and designed to influence US and UN opinion. It stated that ‘at this stage more than any other in the history of the Colonial Empire ignorant or prejudiced outside interference would do incalculable harm’.34

The Labour government and Colonial Office did not completely rule out cooperation in the British colonies. Technical cooperation with specialist agencies within the UN was quite acceptable as a sign of good faith (and Mass Education was to fall within these bounds). So too, in Andrew Cohen’s opinion, was the possibility that the US might agree to underwrite

31 From: Roger Louis, Wm., Imperialism at Bay 1941-1945: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire, Clarendon, Oxford, 1977, pg. 99. Roger Louis deals with the American relationship with the British empire during the war. 32 Douglas describes this transition in detail in Op. Cit. Douglas, pgs. 141-66. 33 Op. Cit. Roger Louis, pg. 15. 34 CO537/5698, no. 69, [May 1950], ‘The Colonial Empire Today: summary of our main problems and policies’: CO International Relations Dept paper. Annex: some facts illustrating progress to date, From: Hyam, R. (ed.), The Labour Government and the End of Empire 1945-1951, Part I, High Policy and Administration, HMSO, London, 1992, pgs. 334-366.

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British colonial development. The CO nonetheless continued to maintain that allowing the UN or US to interfere politically as a superior court of appeal for colonial grievances would only delay the creation of autonomous states able to stand on their own feet. According to James Griffiths, Creech Jones’ successor as Secretary, allowing an external arbitrator would weaken colonial authority and inflame nationalists, making administration impossible. Indeed, the British government found certain UN resolutions – including that passed by the General Assembly in October 1947 stating that colonies be put under trusteeship – unacceptable intrusions into British domestic policy.

This was the line the government pedalled to critics of empire in the US, alongside commitments to a constructive and positive role in debate within the UN (which was a line also pushed by the Foreign Office, hoping to influence ‘principled’ Colonial Office intransigence). If the US could be made amenable with promises of gradual reform and self-government within the empire – and Mass Education was part of this – and if their fears of communist intervention in the colonies could be played upon, Britain would stand a better chance of being able to fend off outside intervention by ‘irreconcilables’. Charles Jeffries, Deputy Under Secretary of State for the Colonies from 1947-1956, felt that gradually granting self-government and ensuring colonial development ‘should be a sufficient answer to those who carp and sneer at ‘Imperialism’ and ‘Colonialism’, for reasons often quite unconnected with the welfare or interests of the peoples of the territories concerned’.35

The Colonial Office also considered collaboration with other colonial powers, although there was a wariness of association with those seen as more reactionary than Britain. Occasionally frigid cooperation with France was most effective where it presented a united front on principles of exclusive colonial control and the use of technical development and social transformation as justifications for ongoing colonial rule.36 Bevin, wrote in October 1947 that Britain and its colonial allies should ensure that colonial policy could not ‘in any way be represented as springing solely from our own selfish interests. It is above all important that … there is no possible suggestion of exploitation of the colonial populations.

35 Jeffries, C., The Colonial Office, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1956, pg. 38. 36 Kent, J., The Internationalisation of Colonialism: Britain, France and Black Africa, 1939-56, Oxford, 1992.

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In either case we may find ourselves exposed to bitter criticism in the United Nations and be obliged to defend ourselves against quite baseless charges.’37

Bevin’s sensitivity to criticism was partly a product of an awareness of growing and internationally audible dissent in the African colonies. In Nyasaland this took form with the creation of the Nyasaland African Congress in 1944 – the organisation began to orchestrate the first national and coherent campaign to improve the standing of Nyasaland’s African population. In Nyasaland this did not initially take the form of militant action. The first engagements between the government and the relatively educated members of the NAC were conciliatory and were directed at the form of colonial rule rather than the legitimacy of the colonial government itself (a relationship discussed in later chapters). Nationalist ‘agitation’ nonetheless began to loom large in the minds of Foreign and Colonial Office ministers, and with it the threat of communist subversion. The Colonial Office did not have to look too far to find examples of colonial dissatisfaction – African critiques of empire emanated from émigrés resident within metropolitan Britain itself. The high hopes that African critics invested in the post-war Labour government were invariably disappointed. The optimism expressed at the fifth Pan African Conference in Manchester in October 1945 turned to bitter regret.38 Jomo Kenyatta wrote that ‘while certain British people are willing to learn from colonials privately – over a cup of tea – they are unwilling to admit publicly that these people are ready for self-government’. was disappointed that Secretary of State Creech Jones ‘changed quite a lot since he came into office … he was an old Fabian. But more gratitude will be shown the Fabians when they do more, when they put into practice their high-sounding principles’.39 African political organization, demands for racial equity and alienation necessitated a public metropolitan response. Or, as Ronald Robinson put it, ‘no policy of letting sleeping dogs lie is likely to succeed where the dogs are already barking’.40 It was important, therefore, that critics, both internal and external,

37 FO800/444, ff34-36, ‘Definitions of functions of Colonial Development Corporation and Overseas Food Corporation’: minute by Mr Bevin to Mr Attlee (PM/47/139), From: Op. Cit. Hyam, vol. II, pgs. 52-53. 38 Hastings Banda attended this Conference. He struck up a friendship with one of the key players in Manchester – Kwame Nkrumah. The two maintained contact and Banda came to regard Nkrumah a protégé. 39 Meredith, M., The First Dance of Freedom: Black Africa in the Postwar Era, Harper and Row, New York, 1984, pg. 16. 40 CO847/38/3, no 1, ‘Some recent trends in native administration policy in the British African territories’: memorandum by R E Robinson, From: Op. Cit. Hyam, vol. 1, pgs. 153-7. Robinson served under Andrew Cohen as a research officer in the African Studies Branch of the Colonial Office from 1947-50 and was later, as a colonial historian, to write the favourable accounts of Cohen’s work discussed in the introduction and later in this chapter.

90 DANIEL KARK see colonial rule conferring demonstrable benefits upon those in the colonies. The Colonial Office had to balance metropolitan interests with the fulfilment of growing local and international pressure for change.

It was therefore of some importance to the CO that the British economic self-interest inherent in colonial development be tempered by a commitment to presentable social goals and gradual political change. The 1945 CDWA and the introduction of democratic local government were central to this commitment, despite their imperfect and inconsistent implementation. So too was Mass Education, the British attempt to transform rural Africa. The Secretary of State for the Colonies, Arthur Creech Jones, stated at the 1948 Cambridge Summer Conference that Mass Education was the child of a desire ‘to stand well in the eyes of the world without betrayal of our trust and to deserve well of the colonial peoples in their advance’.41 The Secretary of State felt that Mass Education would demonstrate to the UN that ‘we have a policy which is coherent and are carrying it into execution to the limit of our resources’.42 It was the presentable face of development imperialism. As will be seen below, it shared and extended the basic tenets of both colonial local government and the Fundamental Education projects beloved of the UN, producing a useful coincidence of interests. Were it to be convincing, the policy would alleviate the pressure building upon Britain on the Trusteeship Council and through the ambivalent American alliance.

41 CO852/1053/1, Opening Address to the Summer Conference – Cambridge, 1948, by the Right Honourable Arthur Creech Jones. 42 CO1045/418, Despatch from Creech Jones to Governors on Mass Education, 25/4/47.

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3. The Roots of Mass Education: Fabians, Liberals and Metropolitan Assertion to 1945

Britain could, to some extent, dictate terms. Transformation emanated from the centre, and more specifically from the Colonial Office, after 1947 housed in temporary quarters in the cluttered and overcrowded Church House, just behind Westminster Abbey. The civil servants of the Colonial Office – mainly men with good Oxbridge degrees – were increasingly confident in their ability to govern well over seventy million subjects and determine the content of the colonial future in over forty different territories.

The structure of the Colonial Office in the 1940s and 1950s was conducive to the increasing pace of change. Colonial administration no longer consisted of the administration of territorial governments by geographical departments within the Colonial Office. By 1939 the regional concentration of geographical departments was supplemented by the thematic specialisations of newly created subject departments and advisory committees, including those dealing with colonial welfare and Mass Education. The number of specialist subject departments rose from five in 1938 to twenty in 1947. In 1938, in response to the West Indian riots, the Colonial Office established a Social Services Department. In 1939 a Development Department was created in order to deal with draft legislation on colonial development and welfare. A Public Relations Department was formed in the same year to deal with increasingly vocal criticism from the US and Nazi Germany. By 1947 there were over twenty subject departments. They were supplemented by an expanded structure of expert advisers and advisory committees, providing counsel on everything from education to agriculture.43 The trend towards subject departments was not universally popular – Sir , former Permanent Under Secretary of State, reckoned it a ‘sad day if these upstarts get out of control and bring about the elimination of the geographical departments’.44 Parkinson retired in 1942, and change continued. Colonial Office staff numbers and correspondence expanded rapidly.45 As Lee and Petter have

43 The advisors had no executive responsibilities and the committees were composed of experts from outside the CO. See fn. 56. 44 Parkinson, C., The Colonial Office from Within 1909-1945, Faber and Faber, London, 1947, pg. 55. 45 Telegrams in a calendar year rose from 7,000 each way in 1937 to 40,000 in 1944. Staff rose from 400 in 1938 to 1,168 in 1947. Pearce also notes a different kind of expansion. The Colonial Office appointed its first coloured civil servant, Ivor Cummings, in 1941. In: Op. Cit. Pearce 1982, pg. 66.

92 DANIEL KARK noted, the War hastened the steady transformation of the Colonial Office from a supervising ministry into an interventionist body. The CO was no longer concerned with supervision on a regional basis. It was, from now on, preoccupied with direct, generalised and planned interventions.46

It was not a transformation easily managed. There was an irresolvable tension between the desire to extend control and planning from the centre while simultaneously advocating greater local initiative and authority – this was a tension exposed by the local government and Mass Education efforts, both aimed at the extension of local accountability, and both initiated by the centre. Regardless of the difficulties involved in this transition, the balance of power within the CO had plainly shifted in favour of general and centralised interventions. No longer would territorial governments be relied upon to provide the initiative for political reform or social and economic development. The Colonial Office was invigorated. The mobilisation of colonial resources for the war effort and planning for a post-war future both required – and resulted in – a new assertiveness. The 1940 CDWA was an early indication of this growing spirit. Sydney Caine, the Assistant Secretary of the Economic Division, wrote the definitive articulation in his 1943 memorandum. Careful social planning and a belief in the transformative power of a committed Colonial Office were now the key to a progressive colonial policy – it required, above all, ‘a strong central organization for general supervision and assistance … with a much greater development of initiatory power at the centre’.47

The route taken by this initiatory power was novel, and was determined by a period of political cooperation under the stewardship of a series of unusually committed reforming Colonial Secretaries.48 The concern the Colonial Office showed for the welfare of colonial subjects between the late 1930s and the end of the war has been noted above, but has not been put in any ideological context. As already noted, external factors forced a change in mentalities, and focused official minds upon general problems of imperial social

46 Charles Jeffries described the transition more passionately – the Colonial Office was transformed ‘from an institution confined to general supervision into the busy headquarters of an all-out drive against the disabilities which were holding back economic and social progress of the Colonial peoples’. From: Op. Cit. Jeffries, pg. 45. 47 Caine in: Op. Cit. Lee, Petter, pg. 174. 48 The Colonial Secretary sat on the Cabinet and on the Colonial Affairs Committee. He was assisted by a Minister of State and a Parliamentary Under-Secretary, usually members of different Houses of Parliament. They were all assisted by career civil servants in the CO. See fn. 61 for the civil service structure.

METROPOLITAN MASS EDUCATION POLICY 93 development – the expansion of subject departments was both cause and consequence of this broad horizontal perspective. This institutionalised concern, combined with growing academic interest in anthropological study of ‘native peoples’ and official reports critical of poor conditions in the colonies, created an administrative milieu conducive to the efforts of those with some vision of reform. Growing confidence in the potential of centralised initiative, noted above, gave further impetus to reformers. This was a period open to those with a ‘good idea’, with the acceptance of novel approaches to colonial affairs dependent less on sound articulation than a sense of fairness and liberal-humanitarianism.49 This should not imply that colonial reform was ever a pressing British political priority. Conservative members tended to concentrate on Imperial Preferences and links with ‘Kith and Kin’, while Labour parliamentarians, outside a small core of committed liberal humanitarians, did not consider colonial issues as pressing as ensuring social justice at home.50 The 1945 Labour election manifesto ‘Let Us Face the Future’ mentioned the colonies in only the briefest terms, promising ‘planned progress’ in the British dependencies.51

The Labour Party was elected in 1945 with an overwhelming mandate for substantial domestic reform. The inclusive spirit that demanded a peacetime dividend for all Britons was exemplified by the sale of over 630,000 copies of the 1942 Beveridge Report which so clearly described the coming assault on the ‘five giant evils’ – want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. Labour’s electoral success in 1945 was guaranteed by a groundswell of popular support for a platform that promised a new contract between citizen and state. Cradle to grave care, comprehensive schooling, a national health service, comprehensive welfare protection and modern housing were elements of an electoral platform that appealed to a war-weary public. A large part of the British public was also drawn by a desire to ensure that wartime solidarity and sacrifice translated into a new form of inclusive British citizenship. The creation of the welfare state was not just a matter of developing physical infrastructure and state capacity, but the creation of a new mental landscape. The

49 The rise of the ‘good idea’ among the ‘official classes’ is discussed by Lee, J.M., Colonial Development and Good Government: A Study of the Ideas Expressed by the British Official Classes in Planning Decolonisation 1939-1964, Clarendon, Oxford, 1967. 50 Although the Labour Party was also the first to publicly recognize the need for an active metropolitan development policy. Leonard Woolf was responsible for drafting ‘The Colonies’, a pamphlet which was ultimately published, under Creech Jones’ direction, in March, 1943. 51 Morrison, H. (Labour Party), Let Us Face the Future: A Declaration of Labour Policy for the Consideration of the Nation (A World of Progress and Peace), 1945, pg. 11.

94 DANIEL KARK post-war welfare state would breathe new life into towns and communities suffering years of neglect and poverty. The antidote to neglect was comprehensive state planning. What detailed and coordinated national planning had done for Britain during the war, it would do to create a prosperous peace.

David Kynaston, in his excellent history of British society and politics during the Atlee premiership, describes the approach taken by the British government after 1945. He records the enthusiasm expressed by Herbert Morrison, Deputy Prime Minister, Leader of the Commons and author of ‘Let us Face the Future’ – ‘planning as it is taking shape in this country under our eyes is something new and constructively revolutionary which will be regarded in times to come as a contribution to civilisation as vital and distinctly British as parliamentary democracy under the rule of law’.52 Morrison was not alone among Labour ministers in his enthusiasm. But it was a muddled and compromised kind of planning. The plans did not always have the full political commitment of a government attempting to forge problematic alliances domestically and abroad. Goals and targets were obstructed by Realpolitik.

This was not the only problem. Planning also neglected to maintain the democratic spirit of the original socialist project. Town planning, with its dreams of modern communities and clean and adequate housing, was an example of the limitations of ‘consultation’ and propaganda – ‘planners and others associated with the matter talked as if they were winning over the general public when really they were only winning over each other … The planning conferences were only for those who knew about the subject; the talks on the wireless probably did not reach the people for whom they would be most use; the majority of the planning exhibitions seemed to mean little to any of the general public who saw them. The people needing planning propaganda are those who are used to thinking in concrete terms – who could talk for ages about things connected with their own house, but could not frame a single sentence about planning’.53 In the absence of an informed and willing public planning demanded severe coercive measures in order to ensure public compliance with government dictates. These compulsive measures ‘democratic socialism’ and ‘democratic planning’ were unable and unwilling to utilise. According to Sir Stafford

52 Kynaston, D., Austerity Britain 1945-1951, Bloomsbury, London, 2007, pg. 136. 53 Ibid, pg. 47.

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Cripps and the Board of Trade plans were likely to remain partially unfulfilled ‘without compulsions of the most extreme kind, compulsions which democracy rightly refuses to accept’.54

The metropolitan preference for planning spilled over into colonial administration. Whereas pre-war colonial policy left the management of the colonies to the colonial governments, intimate planning and centralised management would now transform Britain’s ‘Tropical East Ends’.55 Creech Jones was an enthusiastic practitioner, demanding comprehensive plans for social reform from his Colonial Office mandarins and colonial governors. British Africa, in particular, was to be recreated in an egalitarian manner paralleling the transformation of poor metropolitan towns and districts. The difference, of course, was that, whereas poor British citizens could give and withdraw a mandate for change, African subjects could not. They were un-enfranchised and of little electoral concern to the Labour government. Trapped in colonial polities with histories of compulsion Africans were subject to a type of planning that superficially resembled metropolitan policy, but differed fundamentally in its implementation. While similarly uninformed about their choices, African individuals and communities could be compelled to do the government’s bidding in ways poor Britons could not. The conflicted approach to coercion within the Colonial Office is described at greater length in chapter four – suffice it to say that African individuals and communities suffered the effects of inflexible solutions being applied to extraordinarily diverse circumstances. It was fortunate for the British government that colonial issues were of little political consequence. Colonial issues seldom made profound inroads into the British public psyche.56 Outside the bounds of the Colonial Office, and

54 Ibid, pg. 138. 55 The analogy is Margery Perham’s. She developed this comparative description after visiting the East End of London during the war in order to organize evacuations. She was as deeply shocked by the poverty in Britain itself as she was of poverty she observed in Africa during her extensive travels there. Perham was an influential colonial commentator and advisor to the Colonial Office. She established an extensive network of official and territorial contacts through which she made a substantial contribution to colonial policy. An academic anthropologist who studied under Malinowski, Perham served on the Advisory Committee for Education, developed close relationships with many of the British officers serving in Africa and enjoyed a very close friendship with Creech Jones. She was a Reader in Colonial Administration at Oxford and was Director of the Institute of Colonial Administration from 1943 to 1947. She was an advocate of a thoroughgoing reform of Africa’s political systems. An extended description of Perham’s views and substantial influence is found in: Lewis, J., Empire State Building: War and Welfare in Kenya 1925-52, James Currey, Oxford, 2000, pgs. 89-101. 56 Goldsworthy includes survey data collected by the British government’s Social Survey Unit in his appendices. The information suggests that the British public were profoundly ignorant regarding conditions in their colonies. In 1948 75% of respondents did not know the difference between a and a colony and

96 DANIEL KARK beyond a small group of committed enthusiasts around Creech Jones, colonial matters were peripheral to more pressing domestic concerns.

If the British government never felt particularly strongly about colonial issues, colonial reform planning did benefit from the personal commitment of Secretary of State Creech Jones throughout his term at the Colonial Office (1946-50). Creech Jones was preceded in office by two Secretaries of State with a particular focus on the well-being of those in the colonies, within hesitant parameters. Malcolm MacDonald (1938-40) and Oliver Stanley (1942-5), were both sympathetic proponents of gradual political and social reform. But it was Creech Jones who had opportunity to make good on promises inspired by the wartime spirit of community within Empire. Creech Jones was a very vocal advocate of ‘constructive imperialism’.57 As a backbencher he had already been involved in the formulation of colonial development policy – he collaborated extensively with Stanley, sympathising with his Tory liberalism, and bolstering the spirit of cooperation and inter- party consensus that pervaded colonial policy until the early 1950s.58 But with Labour victory in 1945 and his appointment as Secretary in 1946 Creech Jones was able to push his own reforming agenda further, with a resourceful optimism provoked and necessitated by the political and economic limitations faced by the post-war government. He did so in spite of the quiet hostility of a Prime Minister who did not see eye to eye with his Colonial Secretary.59 Preparation for self-government through democratic and efficient local government and the reinvigoration of African society through Mass Education were the central planks of the political and social transformation for which Creech Jones judged Africa ready. This agenda, in light of what has already been stated above, was partially self- serving, justifying the necessity of ongoing colonial rule. It was also not entirely novel. Both MacDonald and Stanley made statements to similar effect, that eventual self-

51% could not name a single British colony. 86% could not name a colony recently moving closer to self- government. But ignorance does not necessarily mean indifference. It merely suggests it. 57 Joanna Lewis describes Creech Jones’ desire to fulfil Britain’s ‘sacred trust’ to improve African welfare ‘so that colonial peoples may as early as possible take their place as free peoples in the commonwealth of free nations’. ‘Peace Aims Pamphlet no. 11, Freedom for Colonial Peoples, quoted in Ibid, pg. 100. 58 This spirit of consensus is discussed by David Goldsworthy in: Colonial Issues in British Politics, 1945-61, Clarendon, Oxford, 1971. 59 Atlee was far closer to Creech Jones’ predecessor in the position, George Hall. Hall resigned in October 1946 due to ill health. Atlee did not know how to spell Creech Jones’ name correctly and did not find Creech Jones a safe seat when the former lost the election in 1950. In Creech Jones’ place Atlee appointed James Griffiths (1950-1), a man who knew little about colonial affairs, but who dutifully pursued Creech Jones’ policies. For more on the relationship between Atlee and Creech Jones see: Beckett, F., Clem Atlee, Richard Cohen, London, 1997.

METROPOLITAN MASS EDUCATION POLICY 97 government hinged on African social development. But Creech Jones and the liberal humanitarians associated with him injected into British colonial policy an energetic impatience and an unprecedented emphasis on planned social transformations.

Creech Jones was no neophyte. He was probably the most informed and personally committed Secretary of State for the Colonies ever to serve in the role. He had long been an active social reformer and campaigner. A conscientious objector during the War he was imprisoned from 1916-19. He was active within the Transport and General Workers Union during the 1920s and was deeply involved in the Workers’ Educational Association.60 His time in the TGWU solidified his relationship with the future Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, a man who shared many of Creech Jones’ reforming instincts. Creech Jones also spent nine years as a member of the CO Educational Advisory Committee. But it was Creech Jones’ passionate interest in African and colonial issues along with his years as co-founder (in 1940 with Dr. Rita Hinden) and chairman of the liberal socialist Fabian Colonial Bureau (FCB) that ensured he maintained fruitful relationships with a group of similarly minded colonial social reformers. FCB ideology was particularly important, aimed more at ensuring social justice in the colonies than the promotion of African independence.61 Eventual independence could only be made safe for Africans through the gradual creation of a more just social dispensation in the colonies. Such views were both integral and to a large extent coincidental with that of the CO under Creech Jones, despite the occasional compromises demanded by the Secretary’s new official responsibilities.62 The Bureau exercised a large degree of influence over specific policy issues, and was instrumental in pushing the CO towards greater publicity for its

60 Creech Jones organized the escape of a large number of Czechoslovakian Jews after Germany annexed the country. He sponsored a private bill that opened British moors and mountains to walkers. He also had a link with Nyasaland long before his term as Secretary – he advised Clements Kadalie, a Nyasalander and founder of the South African Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union on unionist activity. The ICU was a highly successful advocate of African rights in South Africa during the 1920s. Over a period of ten years as a backbencher he was long known as the ‘unofficial member for the Kikuyu’. 61 Rita Hinden wrote bluntly that ‘it seems to me that colonial peoples today want self-government and independence. British socialists are not so concerned with ideas like independence and self-government, but with the ideal of social justice’. From Op. Cit. Pearce 1982, pg. 110. For a better appreciation of FCB ideology see: Hinden, R. (ed.), Fabian Colonial Essays, George Allen and Unwin, Woking, 1945; Creech Jones, A. (ed.), New Fabian Colonial Essays, Butler and Tanner, London, 1959. Rita Hinden was a South African born economist and was described by David Goldsworthy as a ‘person of rare energy and organizing skill’. She set the FCB up with Creech Jones in 1940. See: Op. Cit. Goldsworthy, 1971, pg. 123. 62 There was an equivalent fear among some in the Colonial Office that Creech Jones’ reforming zeal would be overwhelming. Lord Campbell said that Creech Jones’ appointment was rather like ‘making a theoretical prison reformer a prison governor’. From Op. Cit. Goldsworthy, 1971, pg. 50.

98 DANIEL KARK reforming efforts. It was an alliance based on personal relationships and a mutually accepted vision of the colonial future – stated in the most general terms, it was for both parties based on the promotion of a ‘fair standard of living and freedom from oppression from any quarter’.63

This was not Creech Jones’ only source of willing collaborators – the CO was remarkably open to influence both from within and from without. Academic support was influential and occasionally pivotal. The Colonial Office increasingly engaged the services of expert advisers to guide the formation of policy.64 C.H. Philips, an academic at SOAS, and Margaret Read, from 1940 the head of the Colonial Department of the University of London’s Institute of Education were an elemental part of the Mass Education effort. Read is perhaps the most attractive of the personalities peopling this thesis. Her academic career was dedicated to liberal educational reform in Africa. A great deal of her academic work dealt with Central Africa – as a research fellow at the International African Institute she conducted fieldwork in Nyasaland from 1935-9, culminating in the publication of an anthropological study of the Ngoni.65 Read returned to the country in the 1940s with Freda Gwilliam to study the position of African women in the Protectorate. In her role as policy adviser to the Colonial Office Read served on the Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies after 1943, having served as a key member of the Mass Education Sub-Committee formed in 1941.66 She was instrumental in forging official links with American critics of British colonial education and with UNESCO. By 1949 she was widely acknowledged the pre-eminent expert on Mass Education (also called Fundamental Education by the UN, and later called Community Development more generally), and was serving on the Colonial Office’s Standing Committee on Mass Education. She, more than anyone else, was responsible for a Mass Education programme intended to bridge the mental divisions between Britain and its African subjects. While Read exercised a considerable influence over Colonial Office educational policy, she was certainly not alone. Christopher Cox, one of Read’s close friends and colleagues, was Chief Educational Adviser to the Colonial

63 Colonial Office, The Colonial Empire, Annual Report 1947, Cmd. 7433, HMSO, London, 1948, pg.1, PRO. 64 Advisory Committees were a longstanding Colonial Office tool. The Advisory Medical and Sanitary Committee for Tropical Africa was the first in 1909. Individual advisers were appointed after 1926, when a Chief Medical Adviser was appointed to the Colonial Office. Advisers were experts and were not representatives of the Colonial Office. They were accessible to all departments in the CO as well as to the Secretary of State himself. There were 26 Advisory Committees by 1956. 65 Read, M., The Ngoni of Nyasaland, Frank Cass, London, 1970. 66 Read died in 1991 in London at the age of 102.

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Office for the thirty years after 1940, and was also a driving force behind the ‘disorderly dynamism’ of post-war colonial education.67 In a broader sense these post-war colonial experts also had ample opportunity to influence policy through the regular thematic summer conferences organised by the CO. The conferences were opportunities for advisers and Colonial Office civil servants to influence and be influenced by the Colonial Service officers involved in the actual administration of the empire overseas. These opportunities were reinforced by the increasingly common flying visits made by metropolitan civil servants and advisers to the African colonies.

Fellow believers within the Colonial Office were instrumental in the development of policy. Collaboration between Creech Jones and Colonial Office officials proved to be fruitful – ‘this union between Labour thinking and that of the most progressive section of officialdom … produced sweeping changes in African policy’.68 Andrew Cohen, Head of the African division in the Colonial Office from 1946 to 1951, is perhaps the example of the potential of institutional change wrought from within.69 A man of great intellectual capacity, Cohen began his career in the Internal Revenue, was sometime Lieutenant- Governor of Malta during the war, and served as Governor of Uganda after serving in the Colonial Office. During his time with the Colonial Office Cohen became known as the ‘King of Africa’ and provided the liberal motivation behind the eager pursuit of democratic local government and Community Development. In the most optimistic assessments Cohen was ‘the executive – as alter ego of his minister, Arthur Creech Jones, perhaps the moving spirit – behind a palace revolution in the African empire, which in democratising its administration prepared the colonies for independence within the Commonwealth’.70 Even

67 Brief personal biographies of Cox, Read and others involved in colonial education are provided in: Whitehead, C., Colonial Educators: The British Indian and Colonial Education Service, 1858-1983, I.B. Tauris, London, 2003. 68 Pearce, R.D., The Turning Point in Africa: British Colonial Policy 1938-48, Frank Cass, London, 1982, pg. 118. 69 Andrew Cohen was, of course, a Colonial Office civil servant. The Secretary of State was supported within the Colonial Office by Permanent Under Secretaries of State (who acted as heads of staff and principal policy adviser – from 1942-47 and Thomas Lloyd from 1947-56), under whom served two Deputy Under Secretaries of State (including Sydney Caine 1947-48 and Charles Jeffries 1947-56), and between seven and nine Assistant Under Secretaries of State (who oversaw departmental groups – including Jeffries 1939-47, Caine 1944-47, Cohen 1947-51 and Gorell Barnes 1948-59). Assistant Secretaries oversaw single departments. All civil servants were selected by examination. 70 Cohen’s approach has been described well by Robinson: ‘As the realist in him discerned that the imperial era was closing, the moralist hurried to end it constructively’. In advocating the development of representative local government in the African colonies Cohen arguably achieved this. He was behind the drafting of the Caine-Cohen report which mapped out a four-stage transfer of power resulting in full self-government for the

100 DANIEL KARK if this description is not accepted at face value Cohen remained an influential proponent of colonial planning and social and political reform. His aim – and the aim of those around him – was the steady broadening of power to include Africans, most particularly those educated Africans ready and eager to govern themselves. Cohen’s reasons for doing so included not only his belief that political reform and Africanisation of power were necessary in order to guarantee economic development, but his determination to prevent bloodshed of the sort that was blighting Indian independence and partition at the very same moment he was developing his programme of reform. In implementing reform Cohen was reliant on the African governors he had helped to select. Cohen ensured that these men were fellow liberals and gradualists. The governor of Nyasaland after 1948, Geoffrey Colby, was one of these men. This group of colonial administrators ensured that Creech Jones was at the centre of a small core of sympathetic officials within an influential advisory periphery, all of whom were apparently committed to the gradual transformation of Africa and Africans in preparation for eventual constitutional reform and self- government. The Colonial Office’s self-image was one of reforming benevolence and initiative. This required that change not be forced upon the metropole by a hostile international and nationalist mob – it was to be managed in the long-term interests of Africans. The future was a liberal blueprint.

African territories. He was also instrumental in drafting the seminal local government despatch sent by Creech Jones to all African Governors in 1947. But Cohen’s efforts are not regarded universally as progressive. In advocating the Federation of Nyasaland and the and convincing the British government to accept the proposal, he was instrumental in alienating African opinion in Central Africa. Description and quotation taken from: Robinson, R., Sir Andrew Cohen: Proconsul of African Nationalism, Gann, L.H., Duignan, P. (eds.), African Proconsuls: European Governors in Africa The Free Press, New York, 1978, pg. 353. See also: Robinson, R., Andrew Cohen and the Transfer of Power in Tropical Africa, 1940-1951, Morris-Jones, W.H., Fischer, G. (eds.), Decolonisation and After: The British and French Experience, Frank Cass, London, 1980. Apart from his notes and memoranda, Cohen’s own words and ideas may be found in: Cohen, A., British Policy in Changing Africa, Routledge, London, 1959.

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4. The Roots of Mass Education: Metropolitan Colonial Education Policy, 1925-1935

Mass Education was the product of these influences. The Colonial Office promoted it as a universal social salve. Where Britain faced straightened circumstances, it allowed a cheap method of addressing social deprivation without jeopardising the economic development required for British recovery. It would recreate Africans, producing mature individuals, who combined within themselves initiative and the best aspects of traditional society, able to take their place within a productive economy. Where Britain faced the obloquy of the non-Imperial world, Mass Education allowed the retort that everything was being done to produce mature, well-informed communities and individuals capable of taking control of self-governing nations. It was the liberal product of a novel concern within the Colonial Office for the welfare of colonial subjects, and a belief that undesirable aspects of African society could and should be transformed in the image of the coloniser. Metropolitan planning would resolve allegedly unhelpful social tendencies, remoulding Africans and creating within them ideals of citizenship and initiative. Above all, metropolitan control would be maintained – liberal ideals of the gradual preparation of Africans for their eventual national independence would be predicated on the development of Africans as independent individuals within independent communities. Reputedly immature nationalist agitation and ill-informed international criticism would thus be forestalled. Methodical liberal planning would transform Africa in a manner which years of benign neglect had failed to do. Mass Education, in Andrew Cohen’s assessment, was ‘of vital importance to all our plans for development in Africa’.71

Mass Education was ultimately only partially related to formal schooling, but had its roots in colonial education policy. The publication in March 1925 of ‘Education Policy in British Tropical Africa’ was the first clear statement of British pedagogical intent. Whereas, before, missionaries provided a patchy education for Africans, the Colonial Office and the colonial state were now to supplement this inchoate system with consistent educational aims of their own. The memorandum was a product of the Advisory Committee on Education in British Tropical Africa (formed in 1923) and was a response to growing

71 CO1045/418, Note from Cohen to Jeffries, Relations of the Mass Education Sub-Committee of the Advisory Committee on Education and the Social Welfare Advisory Committee, 22/10/48.

102 DANIEL KARK concerns for the social well-being of Africans. Colonial education policy was increasingly the subject of a critical focus by both J.H. Oldham of the International Missionary Council and the American Phelps-Stokes Commissions.72 While the report focused on formal education it did not limit education to formal schooling. It proposed a joint concentration on both the individual and the community, with an appropriate admixture of agricultural, health and social advice. Education should involve the ‘training of the people in the management of their affairs and the inculcation of the ideals of citizenship and service. It must include the raising up of capable, trustworthy, public-spirited leaders of the people belonging to their own race’. It should therefore be the purview of all colonial departments with some knowledge to impart – it was not solely the concern of education departments, and should rather be coordinated by advisory boards. The Committee’s work and the memorandum laid out the philosophy around which later policy was built. Education, broadly defined, was not optional. It was tied into every other aspect of development – material well-being could not safely exist without the inclusion of some moral compass. But some caution had to be exercised. In the spirit of the Dual Mandate and the contemporary introduction of Indirect Rule, it was vitally important that any knowledge imparted not have a ‘disintegrating and unsettling effect upon the people of the country’.73 The curriculum was adapted to the perceived needs and mentalities of African populations supposedly delicately poised between tradition and modernity. This was the ambiguous cornerstone of British colonial education policy in the years that followed.

The years after 1929 provided stony-ground for any effective concentration upon education. Depression and the excision of education as a colonial concern under the 1929 CDA reduced official concern for issues covered within the 1925 memorandum. There was, nonetheless, a residual interest maintained under the auspices of the Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies (ACEC, as the Education Committee was called after 1929). The ACEC – under the stewardship of Joint Secretaries Hanns Vischer and Arthur

72 The first Phelps-Stokes Commission visited west Africa and South Africa in 1920-1. The second visited east Africa in 1924 and reported the lack of effective education in village schools. The commission emphasized the need for education to be treated as a community project and criticized the lack of cooperation between governments, missions and communities. The commissions were the product of an American missionary concern for poor social conditions in Africa. 73 CO1045/1376, United Nations Series on Community Organization and Development – A Study, Methods and Techniques of Community Development in the Dependent and Trust Territories, UN, New York, 1954.

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Mayhew74 – dispatched Julian Huxley to study African education in East Africa.75 ACEC subsequently issued a ‘Memorandum on the Education of African Communities’, largely the work of J.H. Oldham, in 1935.76 It was the result of a recognised need to encourage coordination of territorial educational policy, and was in line with the nascent interest, noted above, in social conditions in the colonies. Much like the 1925 memorandum, it saw education as much more than formal education, for children, in schools. Adult education through the use of innovative broadcasting techniques, and the dissemination of agricultural and social knowledge through those territorial departments concerned with African welfare was vital, part of the comprehensive education of entire communities. The main push was, nonetheless, to be made through the school. The school and the school-teacher were to be the vectors through which knowledge was to be imparted. Rural areas were the sole concern of the memorandum, with the focus on the creation of prosperous African communities ‘securely established on the land, progressing economically and socially’, rather than on elite education. Girls and women were also placed in the foreground. The governors of village pride and domestic progress, African girls needed the encouragement provided by larger numbers of female teachers.

Change would not be too rapid. Importantly, emphasis was placed on the provision of an education appropriate to local conditions. The purpose of education was not to create ‘an unregulated individualism, which is destructive of the best elements of communal life … it is the primary concern of the educator that established institutions, loyalties and values should not be destroyed before new bonds have had time to grow and new loyalties have taken root to replace those which changed conditions have dissolved’. The system also had to be appropriate to the conditions in which it took root, being within the means of the state

74 Mayhew spent almost twenty years in India (until 1922) serving in various educational posts. Upon his return to Britain he taught at Eton. In 1929 he was appointed Joint Secretary of ACEC and served until 1939. He edited Oversea Education, a journal dedicated to colonial education, until 1946. Sir Hanns Vischer had been missionary, administrative officer and Director of Education in Northern . He was appointed Secretary of the original committee in 1923 and accompanied the Phelps-Stokes Commission to Africa. Vischer also retired in 1939. See: Op. Cit. Whitehead 2003 for more biographical material. 75 Huxley produced a book at the end of his sixteen week tour of East Africa (during which he also visited the Belgian Congo). He saw education and the foment within African students as a transformation which ‘more thoroughly than any mere political or economic changes, is destined to transform the continent’. In: Huxley, J., Africa View, Chatto and Windus, London, 1931. Huxley was a celebrated biologist and was brother of Aldous Huxley and Nobel laureate Andrew Huxley. He was later to win the Darwin Award of the Royal Society and co-found WWF. 76 CO323/1354, Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies, Memorandum on the Education of African Communities, London, 1935, colonial no. 103.

104 DANIEL KARK supporting it. But economy would not necessarily infer inferiority – cultural advance and the propagation of methods appropriate to local conditions was ‘not wholly dependent on material resources; the right kind of organization and the right methods of propaganda may achieve much with comparatively small expenditure’. It was recognised that it may be necessary to test the techniques used in order to determine whether they were, in fact, appropriate. The recommended testing method was to become a common feature of all later Mass Education efforts – the coordination of the efforts of all relevant departments and the use of an experimental district in which an intensive effort could be maintained. The most novel feature of the memorandum however, was in its relatively brief mention of the manner in which Africans were to be involved in its implementation. It was stated as desirable that Native Authorities be involved, although it was recognised that they lacked the skill or ability to make comprehensive plans – an early realisation of the inadequacies of indirect rule and the necessity of a reformed system of local government. More important was the need for the ‘consent and whole-hearted support of the African people. Africans will be the main agents in its execution. In their enthusiasm and devotion to the improvement and enrichment of the community will be found the driving forces of any movement of social advance.’ Committees through which locals could influence their own progress would allow the development of initiative within African communities. Education owed as much to African conditions and initiative as it did to European prescription.

That the 1935 memorandum failed to have much of an effect was due to the unfortunate coincidence of events that prevented fuller consideration of its general recommendations. There was still little focus within the Colonial Office on education in its more general sense, and little interest in running the risks involved in transforming African communities. The memorandum was, at any rate, only aimed at a ‘ventilation’ of the issues involved and was limited to a very small group of interested observers – ‘something far more dynamic than a closely reasoned pamphlet on how to educate a community was needed to bring about the changes which the Advisory Committee saw to be necessary’.77

The practical consequences of the ventilation were limited by the moral damage caused by pre-war rioting and disturbances in the West Indies and on the Copperbelt and by the

77 Op. Cit. CO1045/1376.

METROPOLITAN MASS EDUCATION POLICY 105 supervention of war. The disturbances and widespread poverty and unemployment of the late 1930s forced a shift in the focus of colonial welfare and education interventions. Work by Lucy Mair and Hailey’s African Survey highlighted the lack of a definite and effective education policy for the African colonies.78 The conditions and changed mentalities caused by the war and discussed above necessitated a methodical and transformative approach not really attempted in the 1935 document. The focus shifted to the improvement of entire rural communities (that is, on the majority) rather than on the urban poor. In Iliffe’s words the new ideal ‘undertook to stimulate development rather than spend scarce resources on the least productive members of the community. It planned to encourage African initiative rather than rely upon professional European social workers. It was ‘constructive’ rather than ‘remedial’, active and vigorous rather than patient and gradual. It promised to work with people rather than for them.’79

78 Mair was an anthropologist. During the 1930s she lectured in Colonial Administration at the LSE and spent the war at the Royal Institute for International Affairs. She criticised British educational policy, claiming that it ‘aims at rendering the educated individual superior to his community, not at making him a more valuable member of that community’. Africans were educated for European needs, not for the improvement of African welfare. See: Mair, L., Native Policies in Africa, Routledge, London, 1936. 79 Iliffe, J., The African Poor: A History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987, pg. 201.

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5. The Mass Education Report, 1943

The ACEC formed an Adult and Mass Education sub-committee in May 1941 to look at the practical form this new approach would take. Chaired by Christopher Cox80, it consisted of seventeen experts, and included Arthur Creech Jones, Margaret Read, William Macmillan, Margery Perham, Julian Huxley, Fred Clarke, Arthur Mayhew and Donald Cameron. This ACEC sub-committee was the belated product of earlier suggestions by both Creech Jones and Cox that education among adults that addressed broader social reform be made a priority at the Colonial Office. In 1942 Fred Clarke presented the sub-committee with a confidential memorandum that presented a potential programme as well as initiatives already undertaken by the Soviet Union and China. The sub-committee delivered its report, Mass Education in African Society, in 1943.81 It was aimed at finding some way, ‘other than literacy’ of addressing the ‘gradual ripening’ of social, political and economic problems.82

Social change in the colonies was accelerating and was made more problematic by accelerating economic transformations. The consequent development of ‘an explosive temper’ within colonial populations needed to be addressed with a comprehensive education programme. Africans, according to the sub-committee, needed to be able to plan for their own development. They required the inculcation of a sense of common citizenship within gradually expanding communal and national units. They required the development of a sceptical awareness of their political position, in order that they not be led astray by the unscrupulous or mercenary – ‘wise leadership is not likely to emerge and take effect in a community that has not learned to discriminate between the true leader and the plausible self-seeking misleader’. And they needed to be made aware of the social forces that so greatly affected their lives. Means had to be found ‘whereby the people, as a community, can understand and appreciate the forces which have changed and are changing their lives

80 Cox was appointed to replace Mayhew and Vischer upon their retirements in 1939. Cox benefited from the attention of Secretary of State Malcolm MacDonald, who made him Education Advisor to the Colonial Office. He was to hold this position with the CO until 1961, and then with various successor ministries until 1970, well past his retirement age. Once again, see Op. Cit. Whitehead 2002 for more information. 81 CO875/15/9, Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies, Report of the Adult and Mass Education Sub-Committee, Mass Education in African Society, Colonial No. 186, 1943. 82 Vischer, H., Report of the Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies: Mass Education in the African Colonies, Africa, vol. 14, no. 6, 1944.

METROPOLITAN MASS EDUCATION POLICY 107 so radically. Mass education should, as it spreads and develops, be able to give this knowledge and at the same time call out the ability and the will to share in the direction and control of the social, economic and political forces.’ Sub-Committee members were determined that Africans be actively involved in their own development.

The great departure from the 1935 policy was in the explicit nature of the practical measures through which this involvement was to be encouraged. A campaign method would be used, with experiments conducted in particular districts dealing with locally appropriate issues. This recommendation was the impetus behind later experimental attempts, including the Domasi Scheme in Nyasaland. Expert technicians, and the appointment of a coordinating Mass Education Officer were also recommended. The broad education of the whole community and literacy were placed in the forefront of the programme. While not a literacy programme, ensuring functional literacy was an essential element. According to the report, the African population needed to be able to read in order to develop a broader sense of the world around them, and in order to render welfare interventions more effective. That this was the primary avenue for any intervention is made clear by the very extensive section on the uses to be made of literature to influence and transform African opinions. Novel broadcasting techniques were mentioned, but the written word maintained the central role.

While the focus was on literacy – on universal schooling for children and the promotion of adult education – and the work of education departments, there was, nonetheless, to be a concurrent, comprehensive, but vaguely stated effort by all departments to change the conditions in which people lived and to encourage them to change these conditions themselves. This included a commitment to the provision of cultural and spiritual development, and the development of pride in local history and tradition, along with physical improvements. The ‘curriculum’ of Mass Education covered ‘not only improvement in health and agriculture and rural economics, but the building up of strong units of local government, sound family and social life, and those recreational and leisure time activities without which no people can long survive.’ The overall effort was to be the joint venture of all ‘progressive’ elements within a community – the educated, the more able native authorities, unions, cooperatives, and those willing to volunteer their labour. Local people and associations had to be integrated, and people had to be made aware that

108 DANIEL KARK any success or failure was theirs alone. Mass education, given its first outing in the 1943 report, was a comprehensive venture, both in the scope of its aims, and in the breadth of participation.83

The 1943 memorandum, despite its innovative clarity, met with misapprehension from colonial governments and with apprehension by experts. The retired Vischer, while generally supportive, considered the lack of specification worrying – there was no clear delineation of which particular communities the report was referring to.84 The lack of any clear description by the Colonial Office of how recommendations were to be implemented caused colonial governments concern. In 1945 the Secretary of State set up an informal Mass Education Group (that included Creech Jones, Christopher Cox and Margaret Read) to report on the reception of the 1943 Mass Education report. The responses gathered complained of the very limited interest shown in the ‘creation of initiative’ in the African colonies. Indeed, so little interest was shown that the Colonial Office had, by 1946, received only four official replies to Secretary of State Creech Jones’ requests for gubernatorial opinion on the Mass Education report. The reply from Nyasaland was exceptional in that it did show considerable interest and initiative, thus justifying its later role as the host of the Domasi scheme. But the run of the few other replies was largely negative and provided some explanation of the disinterest shown. The reply from the Gold Coast was particularly revealing – apart from predictable observations, that there was not likely to be enough funding or popular support to make the scheme viable, they did not see Mass Education as having any particularly novel value. The recommendations made in the 1943 report were ‘no more than the general function of government, viz: to improve the condition of the people and to train them to be able eventually to stand on their own feet’. The programme did not therefore require a separate coordinating body employing mass education officers, merely the coordination of technical development efforts within the normal course of colonial administration.85 Philip Mitchell, the caustic governor of Kenya, was less constructive. He considered Mass Education the work of naïfs. He wrote a particularly sarcastic assessment of Colonial Office policy. The unworldly Colonial Office

83 All excerpts taken from: Op. Cit. CO875/15/9. 84 Op. Cit. Vischer. 85 CO859/83/6, Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies, Report of the Mass Education Group, ACEC 4/46, 1946.

METROPOLITAN MASS EDUCATION POLICY 109 saw ‘visions of grateful independent utopias beaming at them from all around the world … there is no understanding whatever of contemporary realities in the CO’.86

The responses from colonial governments indicated a good deal of confusion and reluctance to become involved in what they saw as an ambiguous and ambivalent metropolitan effort. Consideration of colonial responses and reactions to the memorandum led the Mass Education sub-committee to provide a commentary on the memorandum, that, in 1947, was then forwarded to colonial governments by the Secretary of State with comments of his own.87 Creech Jones placed particular emphasis on the need for tentative forays into Mass Education within experimental districts, in order to determine the practical implications of the policy. When Mass Education was eventually implemented in Nyasaland after 1949 it was on this contingent basis – miniaturisation within a single district provided experimental arenas within which success could more easily be demonstrated.

Creech Jones stressed the fact that mass education was certainly not limited to literacy, nor was it to be seen as an adjunct to more traditional school-based education. It was, rather, a comprehensive and cheap method of encouraging development by using the initiative of the local population. It was an integral part of the metropolitan government’s plans for colonial development. Creech Jones’ comments were reinforced by the enclosed commentary. The sub-committee deplored the misconception of metropolitan intent. It was not limited, as understood by colonial governments, to a more traditional educational exercise, nor was it, as understood by many Africans, a plan to provide universal schooling. The scope of Mass Education:

is as wide as the needs of society, but its methods are educational. Neither the subject matter nor the methods are limited to those traditionally associated with the schoolroom. The agents of Mass Education are not only those normally associated with the provision of education in its more limited sense … Every department of the government and every institution whose object is to better the lives of the people is

86 Mitchell quoted in: Meredith, M., The First Dance of Freedom: Black Africa in the Postwar Era, Harper and Row, New York, 1984, pg. 40. 87 CO1045/418, Despatch on Mass Education, 25/4/47, and Commentary by Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies on Colonial No. 186 (Mass Education in African Society).

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concerned, and can contribute by ensuring that in the process of regulation and administration, care is taken to explain, to inform, and to invite response. For example, in such matters as soil erosion or pest control, the departments concerned will not confine themselves to giving instructions and ensuring that they are carried out, but will in addition use every means, direct and indirect, to secure that the relevant scientific and social facts are demonstrated, explained and understood.88

Mass Education was an attempt to create a questioning and literate understanding of all aspects of development among the people affected by it. It was not just a literacy programme, nor was it the reformulation of existing colonial development policy in different words, but a novel approach to development as a whole.

88 Commentary by Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies on Colonial No. 186 (Mass Education in African Society), CO1045/418, PRO.

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6. ‘A Rendezvous with Destiny’: The Creation of Initiative in African Society, 1948

Realisation of the difficulties involved in establishing some sort of consensus on a clear definition of what exactly Mass Education entailed led the Colonial Office, in 1948, to dedicate the second of their annual summer conferences in Cambridge to the consideration of ‘The Encouragement of Initiative in African Society’.89 The summer conferences gathered serving colonial officers, Colonial Office policymakers and expert advisors in the hope that some meeting of minds would result. Creech Jones and over seventy visiting Colonial Service officers were joined by the declared experts on African education. Many of the attendees were Colonial Office advisors and some had long been involved in Nyasaland’s affairs. Appearances were made by Margery Perham, Margaret Read, Professor Platt (responsible for conducting a pre-war nutrition survey in Nyasaland, discussed in chapter two), Julian Huxley (the Director-General of UNESCO), Professor Philips (from the Institute of Education) and Arthur Lewis (from Manchester University). These administrators and experts divided into working groups to consider the fundamental objectives and content of mass education, the necessity of education for citizenship, the part women were to play in the effort, the creation of incentives for progress, and the technique and organization of mass education.

The Colonial Office expected the conference to breathe new life into Mass Education, and provide a clearer definition of Community Development policy. The Secretary of State wanted to ‘get away from the process of forming policy by despatch and white paper’, and move towards the direct discussion of policy by both theorists and practitioners – hence the conference. He wanted a clear understanding of the value, purpose, means, organisation and technique of the programme, keeping in mind the final product – Africans ‘standing on their own feet with adult stature and able to take hold of their tasks … shaking off the shackles of ignorance, superstition and cramping custom, becoming aware and self-reliant and marching with other free people down the great highways of the world to keep their

89 CO852/1053/1, Summer Conference – Cambridge, 1948, ‘The Creation of Initiative in African Society’.

112 DANIEL KARK rendezvous with destiny.’90 Colonial governments had to create a faith in progress and a will to develop, rather than merely providing the development itself.

Rhetoric aside, the practical findings of the conference are summarised in Creech Jones’ 1948 colonial despatch.91 The despatch was the definitive statement of what was now to be called Community Development. The following definition, provided by the Sub-Committee on Mass Education and Development Planning and included in the despatch, was considered ‘authoritative’ by Creech Jones:

a movement to secure better living for the community as a whole with the active participation of the community and, wherever possible, by the initiative of the community. Mass education embraces all forms of betterment, whether in the agricultural sphere by proper soil conservation, better farming methods and better care of livestock; in the health sphere by better sanitation, proper measures of hygiene and infant and maternity welfare; in the education sphere by adult education as well as the improvement and extension of schools for children. It embraces cooperative societies and is intimately bound up with the development of local governments. It is in fact the sum total of the development activities of government in the districts. It is no new movement but the intensification of past plans and development by means of new techniques. Even its emphasis on the part played by the people themselves is not new, since that has always been the basis of British administration in Africa. If there is any novelty in it this lies in the great emphasis placed on the stimulation of initiative.

Also ‘authoritative’ was a note in Creech Jones’ summary of the practical measures to be taken in the implementation of the policy. According to the note community development officers would be appointed, and district and provincial teams formed to ensure progress on the local level. Development work and the creation of initiative would not be the work of one department alone but of the entire territorial administrative structure. It would also be inclusive. Responsibility for community development was therefore to be diffused to the

90 Opening address to the summer conference – Cambridge 1948 by the Rt. Hon. Arthur Creech Jones, CO852/1053/1, PRO. 91 CO847/42/2, Despatch on Community Development, 10/11/48, Report of Sub-Committee on Mass Education and Development Planning.

METROPOLITAN MASS EDUCATION POLICY 113 lowest level possible, along with responsibility for the limited funds available under the CDWA. Local opinion would be involved at every possible stage, through the formation of local development committees and the presence of Africans on the higher policy levels where possible. And the ten-year plans prepared by territories under the 1945 CDWA were to be revised to address this integration and diffusion of the development effort. This diffusion did not imply any lack of coordination. Effective central control of the process was also seen as essential, with a central territorial committee coordinating the effort. It was, overall, a positive and more sharply defined statement of the role community development was meant to play in the colonies. This was not the final form taken by Community Development – it continued to evolve. But this was the definition of Community Development as it stood in 1948, the high-water mark of a policy perceived to be appropriately economical and effective. For the limited purposes of this thesis, this was also the definition of Community Development that informed the efforts of those members of the Colonial Service preparing to implement Colonial Office policy in Nyasaland.

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7. Ambiguity: Individualism, Nationalism and Citizenship

Despite the proclaimed authority of Creech Jones’ definition, several of the axiomatic underpinnings of Community Development remained at odds with one another. Incompatible metropolitan desires competed for attention. While the creation of individualism, initiative and citizenship were all attractive prospects they presented a rather more difficult proposition for the Colonial Office when superimposed upon other official preoccupations. Those attending the 1948 summer conference wanted to create initiative, a ‘progressive’ type of individualism and a sense of African citizenship. But these ideals did not always blend well with other current concerns – the perceived threat posed by nationalist groups and the supposed breakdown of rural African society inspired less than authoritative reflections within the Colonial Office.

a. ‘Progressive’ Individuals Versus ‘Self-Seeking’ Nationalists

Mass Education distinguished itself from general colonial development policy by its emphasis on the necessity of involving individuals and communities in their own development. In Margaret Read’s words the exercise involved ‘helping people to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps’.92 The official creation of this initiative was by nature problematic. But, according to Read and her contemporaries, it also faced particular obstacles in the African context. Read deplored the ‘baffling refusal of peasant peoples to listen to reason as explained to them by the scientist’. The solution was to create ‘free institutions and mature personalities’.93 Community Development officers would give rural Africans the tools to think for themselves, and enable them to realise what they and their communities could gain from colonial development and their own efforts. The desired end was the creation of a particular and unlikely type of disinterested individualism. The 1948 report, Education for Citizenship in Africa, was concerned with the creation of a belief in the value of the individual in African society (‘a belief at the heart of our European civilisation’), and of the fundamental equality of all members of the community. But this individualism was qualified by admiration for a public-spiritedness that those in the

92 Read, M., Common Ground in Community Development Experiments, Community Development Bulletin, vol. II, No. 3, June, 1951, pgs. 44 and 46. 93 Op. Cit. CO852/1053/1, Report of Group IV.

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Colonial Office and Colonial Service may have thought they glimpsed in themselves – they desired ‘an abundance of public-spirited citizens who are prepared to carry out all kinds of public duties merely from a sense of duty and loyalty to the community’.94

The individual was the lowest common denominator in the creation of the type of initiative desired by policy-makers. Mass Education required the creation or encouragement of individuals willing to assimilate information in order to change their circumstances and the circumstances of their communities. It required those assimilating the colonial mantra of ‘progress’ and ‘development’ to take some sort of lead themselves, providing a powerful individual example of the benefits conferred by individual initiative within the bounds of colonial cooperation. The policy group dealing with the content of Mass Education at the 1948 conference considered that the most effective approach to mass agricultural education would be to provide Africans with ‘the sight of one of their number successfully adopting the improved method’.95 Similarly, the transmission of values of citizenship could most effectively and economically be achieved through the raising up of individuals able to interpret and transfer the lessons they had learned to the ‘masses’.96 Arthur Lewis foresaw the creation of a class of skilled and motivated citizens in the British colonies – ‘the leaven which will transform the whole society’.97

This was a prompted kind of individualism and initiative, in the limited sense in which they may be considered individualism and initiative at all. There was a certain amount of irony in this. Creating initiative and fostering individualism were intended to counter any impression among Africans that the colonial state – with its self-image as a beneficent provider of good works – was exemplary of European paternal largesse. And yet the colonial state was now supposed to be the agent dispensing the spirit of initiative and individualism. Africans were once again passive recipients – they were supposed to have the good sense to see what was best for them, but only within the prescribed boundaries.

94 Op. Cit. Education for Citizenship, pg 14. 95 CO852/1053/1, Summer Conference – Cambridge, 1948, Report of Group I, The Content of Mass Education. 96 CO852/1053/1, Summer Conference – Cambridge, 1948, Report of Group II, Education for Citizenship. 97 CO1045/418, CEDC (48) 1, Colonial Economic and Development Council, Principles of Development Planning, Memorandum by Professor Lewis, 11/4/48.

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Those individuals who stepped outside these boundaries were suspect. There was an elemental suspicion within the Colonial Office of the individual – read ‘educated’ – African. The essence of Mass Education may well have been in ‘the betterment of a whole community by educating all its people to be cooperative and progressive citizens’, but, if a choice was to be made between the two qualities, a cooperative mindset was found, in word and in deed, to be by far the more attractive trait.98 There was a general sense of the social damage a self-interested and ‘unregulated individualism’ could do, and a more sharply focused fear of the danger posed by individuals in the subversion of political processes. The creators of Mass Education considered both initiative and individualism good things, but there could certainly be too much of a good thing.

At the same time as it was busy formulating community development the Colonial Office felt itself under threat from a group demonstrating qualities of individualism and initiative. But while the potential challenge was recognised there was not yet the visceral distaste for nationalist activity that was later to colour colonial relationships after the early 1950s. Constructive engagement was not yet an impossible compromise, at least with those nationalists not already seen as irredeemably intransigent. But events in the sub-continent concerned the Colonial Office and the officers of the Colonial Service. The Indian experience reinforced an uneasy sense that the nationalist programme also posed an escalating threat in British Africa. The scepticism that formed a positive part of the development of African individualism and intellectual ability was less welcome when directed back upon the colonial enterprise by those who didn’t owe the development of their individualism or intellectual abilities to Mass Education and Community Development. This critical African glance, broken free of its supposed social moorings, threatened the legitimacy of the colonial state. Perceived social independence made educated African nationalists a less predictable quantity altogether. Mass Education, in conjunction with Colonial Office local government policy provided a different set of incentives to counter and ‘canalise’ this threat. After 1947 the Colonial Office committed itself to the introduction of ‘democratic and efficient’ local government in Africa. Nationalists and educated Africans would be offered a place within the political structures responsible for the implementation of rural development – Creech Jones’ famous 1947

98 Op. Cit. CO852/1053/1, Report of Group I.

METROPOLITAN MASS EDUCATION POLICY 117 despatch stated that ‘local government must at once provide the people with their political education and the channel for the expression of their opinions’99. This would co-opt moderates, replace inefficient chiefs, pull the rug from under the feet of those with more radical methods in mind and forestall the development of politically dangerous resentment caused by racial discrimination in the colonies.

Mass Education was intended to complement this diffuse and inclusive system of local government. It too depended on maximal dispersion of effort, in order to both educate and create interest and initiative in the communities targeted by colonial development. It was also intended as a bellwether for colonial desires, relaying local needs to territorial governments. In this sense the Colonial Office intended that territorial governments would focus on novel and experimental aspects of Community Development, leaving the routine and banal reflection of local opinion to local government structures. District and provincial teams composed of administrative and technical staff would be provided with indications of local development requirements by a parallel network of village, district and provincial committees, whose members would be drawn from all groups (including the educated) and that would be representative of progressive opinion on all levels. But, despite their importance, these were not to be formal bodies, at least not in the beginning. Village committees in particular were meant to be open to all comers. The group concerned with the organisation of Mass Education at the 1948 conference recommended that they be ‘extremely fluid in the first place and only when it has the wholehearted backing of the local community will it emerge as a formal body’. The initial fluid impulse would come from interested individuals, and it must be assumed that the interested individuals were those most politically aware and those with the rudiments of an education. Formal structures would appear where ‘by their own example and with the encouragement of government officers they will arouse the interest of their neighbours and it will soon become apparent that a co-ordinating body is necessary’.100

The Colonial Office intended the relative fluidity and informality of the Mass Education framework to provide a representative cross-section of local society, which it was suspected local government could not – ‘African local authorities did not include in their membership

99 CO525/214/7, Despatch on African Local Government, 25/2/47. 100 CO852/1053/1, CSC (48) 20, Summer Conference – Cambridge 1948, Report of Group VI, Organisation.

118 DANIEL KARK all those interests which the group considered should be represented in any organisation dealing with Mass education’. The overall intent was to create a positive incentive for Africans to become involved in structures dedicated to their own social transformation, rather than circumventing colonial authority through nationalist activity. Frustration would be relieved, radicalisation prevented and the nationalist movement offered such incentives ‘as may turn it away from directionless aggression towards a frame of mind which sees the remaining obstacles between it and its objectives as problems to be rationally solved. The need is indeed vital, because although the active adherents of nationalism may now be few, their numbers are rapidly growing, and it is among them that the pacemakers of the new Africa will for the most part be found’.101

Africans considered to be adequately educated and capable by colonial governments would be included in the system, but not allowed any subversive latitude. The fear of their potentially disruptive influence was informed by a dim view of their intentions. Those developing a political base independent of colonial control or without official approval were dismissed as anti-democratic and careerist rabble-rousers with nothing but their own best interests at heart. It was imperative to counter the development of a class of politicians that ‘finds political catchwords easier than hard thought and knows more of demagogy than administration’.102 Their supposed appeals to emotion and lack of a sense of proportion made nationalists potentially dangerous – they could ‘excite and inflame to irresponsibility and destruction with callous indifference to sound social and economic development’.103 There was implicit in this a fear that such excitement and inflammation could undermine colonial authority and prove more appealing than the combination of development, local government and Mass Education on offer from the Colonial Office, as it eventually did.

The Colonial Office saw nationalist movements as real and growing threats. Yet this sense of impending resistance was matched by an ironic underestimation and denigration of African political development. Nationalism may well have been the result of a ‘burning desire to be equal’, but, according to the Colonial Office it was also the result of contact

101 CO852/1053/1, CSC (48) 18, Summer Conference – Cambridge 1948, Report of Group IV, Incentives to Progress in African Society. 102 CO1045/572, Attachment to report of Group VI, Summer School 1947, Race Relations. 103 CO852/1053/1, CSC (48) 13, Opening Address to the Summer Conference – Cambridge 1948, by the Rt. Hon. Arthur Creech Jones.

METROPOLITAN MASS EDUCATION POLICY 119 with Western ideals. It was not the product of African protest based upon African ideals. Looking back on his initial contacts with African nationalism, Andrew Cohen felt that it owed its origins ‘as do many other new things, to the impact of the West. This has brought Western ideas, above all the idea of progress; education, which supplied knowledge of the outside world and the desire for those political systems which the Western world so highly values …’.104 African individual development was also denigrated. The potential circumvention of colonial avenues by nationalists and educated individuals was countered by official claims that they were less than fully realised individuals – caught between the traditional and the modern, they were simultaneously foreign and threatening to both. The Colonial Office was sure that it alone was uniquely qualified to produce fully developed citizens within secure democratic states, comfortable with their traditional roots and a modern future. Mass Education and local government would channel and develop the capabilities of those individuals who, by virtue of their ‘straddling’ were both a threat and a boon. District officers, for instance, would have to deal with ‘the perhaps rather difficult handful of half-educated men, who on closer acquaintance may prove to be not so troublesome as they seemed, and who, if properly used, can be valuable members of the community’.105

It was not just a matter of incomplete education. Africans were also supposedly incomplete social products. They were often considered little more than children. During the war Herbert Morrison famously claimed that granting colonies independence would be ‘like giving a child of ten a latch-key, a bank account and a shot-gun’.106 In post-war estimations Africans had matured into social adolescents, straddling infancy and adulthood, and in need of a firm guiding hand. The image of Africans as social adolescents provides a counterpoise to the stated and public description of African and Western social forms as of equal relevance to the Mass Education effort. Africans were apparently held back by feelings of inadequacy in the face of Western cultural superiority – ‘in consequence he often tends to be unduly aggressive …the educated African is in fact very much an adolescent and is severely handicapped by the psychological factors which form his background, and owing to them he may very easily be set off along the wrong path if his relations with Europeans

104 Cohen, A., British Policy in Changing Africa, Routledge, London, 1959, pg. 35. 105 CO1045/572, Op. Cit. Attachment. 106 Quoted in: Hyam, R., Britain’s Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation 1918-1968, CUP, Cambridge, 2006, pg.142.

120 DANIEL KARK suffer any setback’. Mass education had to ensure that ‘the African’ was guided towards modernity and a full personal realisation within the bounds of colonial rule. To quote at length from the report on Education for Citizenship:

‘From the Son’s standpoint the value of Education for Citizenship is that it can do much to lift him over the gap between adult capacity and adult function. It can give at least a partial guarantee that development shall not be arrested in the puerile stage. Education does this mainly by building up the power to distinguish between fact and fiction.’107

Until maturity was achieved the inadequacies of African nationalism could provide no substitute for the strong guidance facilitated by colonial rule generally, and Mass Education specifically.

While the proverbial ‘African’ was hedged in by his own psychological inadequacies and mental shortcomings, he also required the establishment of external boundaries, patrolled by a sceptical and vigilant public. The colonial state, that had for so long attempted to establish its hegemonic credentials, was now to be engaged in the encouragement of a scepticism that would limit both its own unquestioned legitimacy and the legitimacy of any successor regime. But, as would be expected in light of the discussion above, there was less of the former, and more of the latter. Mass Education would produce critical initiative on a delayed fuse, unthreatening to colonial governments in any immediate sense. The colonial state claimed to be engaged in a positive exercise, encouraging vigilance in a disinterested manner. But while the purpose of the dialogue between state and ‘masses’ was intended to produce some synthesis, the synthesis was not intended to encourage anything more than suspicion of the motives of nationalist groups and politicians. Colonial governments would develop the critical powers of an uninformed public in order to save them from self- interested nationalist exploitation – ‘instances are not unknown of the astute adventurer exploiting for his own ends such movements of association among a people still inexperienced in the working of the new forms … the surest form of protection for a people

107 CO859/89/8, EC 21/46, Education for Citizenship in the Colonies – First Thoughts on Some Principles Involved.

METROPOLITAN MASS EDUCATION POLICY 121 in such circumstances consists in the development of their own powers of criticism and discrimination.’108

Where criticism and discrimination were not adequately developed, structural constraints had to be imposed. There was, after the initial preoccupation with democratic local government, a move to ensure that structures were representative. James Griffiths, Creech Jones’ successor as Secretary of State after 1950, wanted to ensure that local government, and by implication local involvement in development and Mass Education, was representative of an entire community and not just an educated elite. While the lowest levels of government should be democratically elected, indirect election and appointment to superior bodies linking the local and territorial would preclude the monopolisation of power over the uneducated masses by the educated elite. Unrepresentative domination had to be prevented. Just as colonial policy claimed to be bending itself towards the creation of successor states, it attempted to pull the rug from under the feet of those most likely to challenge colonial rule and dominate these states. The difficulty, of course, was to create a critical initiative through Mass Education sufficient to challenge budding nationalist power, but not coherent or influential enough to provide any immediate challenge to colonial power. ‘Progressive’ individualism – a type uncritical of colonial government – was good. Critical individualism was not.

b. Education for Citizenship: ‘The Death of African Society’

Education for citizenship was central to the success of the mass education effort, and the subject of a report published in 1948 by the Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies.109 It was intended to broach the real and potential divisions within African society, and provide an inclusive incentive for Africans to become involved in colonial development. By combining the best of African traditions and the Western political heritage, it would, according to ACEC, span the growing perceived gap between traditional and modern, old and young, educated and uneducated. The members of ACEC, and the Colonial Office more generally considered that Africans were ready for a mediated

108 CO859/148, Op. Cit. Clarke. 109 Colonial Office, Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies, Education for Citizenship in Africa, HMSO, London, 1948.

122 DANIEL KARK transplantation of Western political values. The growing demand among Africans for education and information, and their growing awareness of, and critical engagement with Western ideology and practice demanded that the colonial authorities influence this ideological assimilation. This required the supervised transplantation of a ‘democratic temper’, coterminous with efforts to implant British political systems through reformed local government. The Sub-committee on Education for Citizenship responsible for developing the idea recognised the great ambition involved – ‘in this matter, as in so many others, the Colonial peoples are setting themselves the task of passing in one generation through a development over which the leading nations of the West have spent two by no means leisurely centuries. Democracy moreover, however imperfect it may be, is not a plant that grows easily in every soil’.110

As with the creation of individualism, citizenship would be inculcated through a comprehensive informal and formal programme of child education, and through an adult education programme that embraced formal aspects as well as practical gains from involvement in local government, associations and cooperatives. The informal and practical aspects were essential for the creation of the idea that good citizenship should be seen ‘as a way of living rather than as a body of knowledge’. The desired end was the creation of leaders and citizens fully subscribed to egalitarian democracy and aware of the dangers of any concentration of power. The authors of Education for Citizenship recognised that this was an unlikely result, ‘that in thus describing the qualities of a democrat we are perhaps describing a citizen and a polity the pattern of which may be laid up in heaven but is hardly yet to be seen on earth. We feel nevertheless that what we have described is capable of achievement and that nothing less should satisfy us in our planning’.

Citizenship required the creation of some sense of national feeling without encouraging the nationalist ‘self-seekers’. This was a problem identified previously by Sir Fred Clarke, Director of the University of London’s Institute of Education after 1936, and author of a memorandum that influenced the 1943 report on Mass Education.111 Complex local

110 CO859/89/8, Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies, Sub-Committee on Education for Citizenship, Introductory section of the preliminary draft report, 21/10/46. 111 CO879/148, Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies, Memorandum prepared by Sir Fred Clarke, Director of the University of London Institute of Education, for the use of the Adult and Mass Education Sub-Committee.

METROPOLITAN MASS EDUCATION POLICY 123 allegiances would have to coalesce in some way, and local and sectional loyalties be overcome. This was ambitious in itself. It addressed a perennial problem for colonial administrators. The degree to which traditional institutions should be preserved or transformed preoccupied both the ambitious first generation of colonial officers and the indirect rulers who, with limited resources at their disposal, subscribed to Lugard and Cameron’s more limited aspirations. This is dealt with more ably and fully elsewhere. The limited focus of this thesis is on the ambitious combination of what the Colonial Office’s expert advisors considered the best aspects of both Western and traditional African social and political traditions within Mass Education and Citizenship policy, and the manner in which they were intended to bridge growing perceived cleavages within African society. The best aspects of traditional society needed to be maintained and revived through Mass Education and through the incentives offered by citizenship in order to ensure that this breakdown was not irretrievably destructive.

Europeans had to be sure that they allowed and encouraged the propagation of constructive African traditions and institutions. The report on the content of Mass Education from the 1948 conference quoted the Rev. R.R. Young – ‘the fruit of Western culture will not grow from seed planted in Africa. It must be grafted onto the indigenous stock so that it derives its strength from the sap that is in the old tree drawing its nourishment from the African soil.’112 In the spirit of initiative Africans should be enabled to pick and choose the aspects of ‘modern’ Western and ‘traditional’ African society that they felt applicable to the creation of their own ideal of citizenship. There was also a small admission, by Fred Clarke, of the educational value offered Europeans by African social practice. No longer could a rapidly changing and uncertain Europe assume African knowledge to be deficient in some way:

Europeans (particularly in the colonies) may find in the difficult task now imposed upon them of reinterpreting their own culture, some help in appreciating the wider and deeper consciousness that can be brought about in the colonial peoples by a combined adventure in mass education and all that this entails … the time may be far ahead when winds blowing from Africa will bring refreshment and a clearing of

112 CO852/1053/1, Summer Conference – Cambridge 1948, Report of Group I, The Content of Mass Education, 1948.

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mists to the harassed Western mind. But we can no longer speak and think as though such a portent were quite inconceivable.113

This was the positive aspiration – a porous, informed, mutual and consensual transfer of social knowledge.

A corresponding note of caution was sounded throughout the policy statements. The negative corollary of the syncretism hinted at by Clarke was to be quite sure that the Colonial Office and colonial authorities did not impose inappropriate solutions or reinforce corrosive social tendencies. The reports, despatches, memoranda and opinion from advisors all repeat the same refrain – Mass Education policy had to be comprehensive and include all members of African society in order to avoid widening inequities and schisms. The potential breach between young and old was a particular concern. Margaret Read emphasised that Mass Education was not ‘revolutionary’, and should not provide children with an education that put them at odds with their communities and social environment – ‘that is to say education on “modern” lines for children in “backward” areas is at variance with the traditional methods of bringing up and training children, and, if persisted in, causes deep-rooted divisions in social and economic and political life.’114

High-blown ideals of harmonious cultural blending aside, Colonial Office policy documents continued to conceive of Africans as underdeveloped subjects rather than reckoning with them as fully realised citizens. In persistently gradual and paternal form Mass Education determined that social transformation preceded political reform – African readiness for self-rule was neatly delayed until some less immediate future. Their institutions and traditions supposedly prevented them from taking any initiative. The 1948 conference considered that Africans had to be convinced of the necessity of change in an era of rapid and inevitable transformation – ‘at the back of Mass Education is the picture of an African way of life which is out of keeping with present conditions and as each year goes by stands less and less chance of giving the people happiness in their lives … times have changed and the clock cannot be turned back now … Mass Education must show [the

113 Op. Cit. CO879/148, Clarke. 114 CO1045/29, ACEC 25/46, Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies, Mass Education, An Introductory Study of Fundamental Education, Margaret Read, 26/7/46.

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African] that he cannot enlarge his house without first enlarging its foundation: and must convince him that whatever he does the impetus must come from him’. Mass Education could provide this initiative, but its very necessity was an on-going indication that Africans were unprepared for self-government.

The Colonial Office recognised the immediate utility of aspects of ‘traditional’ African social practice, particularly those that had some perceived influence on social stability, but were ambivalent about according such practices any legitimacy alongside what were assumed to be self-evidently beneficial aspects of the European social bequest. Even where African mores were admired in some respect it was inevitably as a simulacrum of European or English forms. The citizenship report, for instance, professed admiration for certain African political practices, particularly those in Ashanti and in Northern Rhodesia. It was an admiration for the ‘essentially constitutional authority of the chiefs’. It was also admiration for a romanticised image of the village council, ‘which existed in Attica or in Alfred’s England as it exists in Ashanti today’.115 But these were qualities admired more in their reflection of assumed English virtues than for their own particular merits. They were, additionally, qualities that were seen as exceptional in their potential vitality, elements of a larger and sclerotic African tradition, which required replacement and conservation in equal measure.

Mass Education policy was caught between a desire to ensure that the Colonial Office and colonial state step in to fill the void left by a supposedly moribund traditional system, and the necessity of preserving suitable aspects of social custom. Either way traditional social systems were assumed to be incapable of independent survival. There was a precautionary principle involved – ‘a culture once dead cannot be resuscitated; let us therefore beware of lightly allowing a culture to die’.116 But this was not entirely an exercise in ethnological sensitivity, although it was certainly partially influenced by the partnership forged between the Colonial Office and academic anthropologists in the 1930s. It was, once again, a pragmatic desire to forestall the potential instability caused by a breakdown in systems of traditional authority – the creation of a progressive African was countered by fear of the potential social foment and fission caused by too rapid a transition and by the vacuum

115 Op. Cit., CO859/89/8. 116 Ibid.

126 DANIEL KARK caused by the sudden absence of customary rules and incentives. Colonial officers had to ensure that ‘The African’ preserved irreplaceable elements of his way of life. Discussion of the place of local festivals and markets in the encouragement of African social life was a particularly vivid example of the necessity of colonial social conservation:

… now [Africans] see change in all around them: the vigour is ebbing from their festivals, their rites, even their family ties, and they are fast losing their former ways of self-expression. We are sure that we must restore these and find the people others before their new way of life can have the fullness of the old. We believe that under this vibrant self-expression lies the power of African character and that we must be always searching into, understanding and nurturing these traditional African ways as the new form of society takes its shape. This has not been done enough in the past … we are sure this is the way to arouse in them a sense of each man’s part in the progress of them all. Pageantry and merry-making can often provide an emotional impulse which can be directed towards other ends.

Traditional culture maintained its relevance and could continue to provide some utility, not least to Africans themselves. This was not an entirely selfless exercise. Social stability continued to exercise official minds – ‘we think also that such village festivals are a safety valve, not unknown in other countries, in which there is room for raucous good humour and low comedy’.117 Mass Education required an uneasy balance, somewhere between a pragmatic concern for social order, and an idealised picture of what Africans should be.

Striking this balance was made more difficult by the conflict between normative goals and practical doubts when assessing African social sophistication and individual maturity – the Colonial Office felt that African potential did not equate with current African capabilities. African society, while useful and relevant in particular ways, was assumed to be too unsophisticated to provide a comprehensive long-term framework within which Africans could adapt to a changing environment. There was neither that faith in progress, nor that desire to subsume tribalism within a national society, that, according to expert advisors, was required in order to overcome African inertia and stasis. Europe itself had gone

117 All excerpts taken from: Op. Cit. CO852/1053/1, Content of Mass Education.

METROPOLITAN MASS EDUCATION POLICY 127 through a similar process over a period of centuries. But Africans supposedly lacked any similar exogenous stimulus. There was no seismic African equivalent, forcing increasing economic and social sophistication, and forging a new society.

The policy group responsible for formulating fundamental objectives at the 1948 conference stated that, if the transformation were to have any chance of success, ‘centuries of western social and cultural development have to be telescoped into a much shorter period’. And this was the nub – progress was Westernisation. For all the talk of a hybrid of Western and African social attitudes, the African was ultimately instrumental and the Western the final result. This was stated quite baldly – ‘the political and social values which we assume – either consciously or unconsciously … are those of British society. British preconceptions have inspired the stated policies of Britain in Africa. For example His Majesty’s Government has set up as the political aim nothing less than the creation of democratic states on western lines and the education of African communities in the working of their institutions. Similarly the ideals of social justice in contemporary British society – improved living standards and social services available for all – have been taken as aims of British policy in Africa’.118

Social reform was handed down and was not the product of negotiation. This was the result of a policy that made no reference to an African desire for reform, outside the bounds of a contrived type of nationalist. The 1946 ACEC review of the reception of the Mass Education Report admits as much. Africans were not involved in the preparation of the report, nor were there any noteworthy reports of African reactions to the scheme – ‘we have little information regarding the reactions of such Africans as have become aware of the report. Nor, indeed, have we any idea whether the report has been read by any substantial numbers of those Africans who should be most keenly interested in it: the teachers, clerks, postmasters, dispensers, Native Administration staff and others whom we should naturally expect to carry the main burden of initiating Mass Education campaigns.’119 There was no clear awareness of what form African attitudes towards the programme took, beyond a bland lumping together of generic ‘African’ needs and a general assumption that ‘Africans’

118 CO852/1053/1, Summer Conference – Cambridge 1948, Fundamental Objectives in the British African Territories. 119 CO859/83/6, ACEC 4/46, Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies, Report of the Mass Education Group, 1946.

128 DANIEL KARK desired the fruits of a colonial education. This attitude was a clear indication of official and expert opinion. For all the talk of an integrated approach Creech Jones, Cohen, Read and Lewis were essentially high modernist planners. Africans were, above all else, the under- developed beneficiaries of a Western legacy, incipient citizens of nascent Western states. While there were aspects of African social practice that were valuable in maintaining social order, westernisation was the necessary end. Much like the contemporary and related technical development that it supplemented, Mass Education was the product of metropolitan desire, and not colonial negotiation.

METROPOLITAN MASS EDUCATION POLICY 129

8. Ambivalence: Mass Education and UNESCO

The United Nations took a close interest in metropolitan desires. While the Colonial Office still felt able to dismiss African criticism in the immediate post-war period, it could not afford to do the same with the criticism emanating from the new UN system. An image of colonial beneficence met claims from old and new critics that colonialism was exploitation. Mass Education was part of this image. None of the uncertainties that plagued the ‘authoritative’ definition of Mass Education were allowed to cloud the vision of happy individuals and healthy communities presented to the UN’s Trusteeship Council and UNESCO. Collaboration on Mass Education – what UNESCO called Fundamental Education – was a central and conciliatory element in an uncertain relationship, particularly in light of broader official British relations with the UN. It provided a point of common interest – an opportunity for the CO to demonstrate Britain’s particular bona fides when it came to colonial management and development. African Governors at the 1947 Cambridge Governor’s conference noted that UNESCO was ‘carefully watching’ British education policy. A ‘vigorous effort’ was required to address poor African education.120 For the UN this was a rare opportunity to involve itself amicably in usually inaccessible colonial affairs. Fundamental education was itself the product of close collaboration with the Colonial Office, and bore a striking resemblance to Mass Education. This was no coincidence – many of those involved in formulating Mass Education policy played a major and contemporaneous part in the creation of Fundamental Education policy for the UN. Margaret Read, more than anyone else, was responsible for the formulation of Mass Education and Fundamental Education and sat on the education section of UNESCO’s Preparatory Committee. Julian Huxley, the first Director-General of UNESCO, was very much in favour of stronger links between UNESCO and the Colonial Office.121

Fundamental and Mass Education were identical in almost every respect. The former was broadly defined at the 1947 UNESCO Conference in Mexico and in the UNESCO report ‘Common Ground for all Peoples’. Fundamental Education was intended to ‘help men and women to live fuller and happier lives in adjustment with their changing environment, to

120 Conference of African Governors – 1947, AGC no. 7, Education Policy in Africa, CO847/36/3, PRO. 121 As noted earlier, Huxley visited East Africa in 1929 to study African education on behalf of ACEC and was also a member of the 1943 Colonial Office Commission on Higher Education in West Africa.

130 DANIEL KARK develop the best elements in their own culture, and to achieve the social and economic progress which will enable them to take their place in the modern world, achieving the aim of the United Nations to live together in peace’.122 This vague statement was accompanied by more specific recommendations on implementation, and these mirror CO goals – the promotion of universal schooling, adult education, female education, health education and the sort of moral and personal qualities beloved of CO documents (‘personal judgement, initiative, courage, tolerance, freedom from fear and superstition, social responsibility and appreciation of beauty in Nature and in the arts’). In a more practical sense UNESCO also promoted the experimental project and field team methods proposed by the CO and ultimately used in Nyasaland.

While the broad goals and methods were similar, uneasy relations between the two parties prevented a complete coincidence of interests. Implementation of recommendations required that UNESCO keep policy recommendations to an anodyne minimum. UNESCO policy came more and more to resemble the more limited 1925 and 1935 CO attempts to define education in a more constrained sense – as literacy and formal education rather than broader social prescription. A 1952 definition of fundamental education limited interventions to providing universal primary education and an ‘essential minimum’ of adult education.123 That UNESCO avoided social prescription in favour of relatively technical solutions was unsurprising. While social policy recommendations might have been seen as unacceptable interventions in the internal affairs of a colonial member state, offence would not be caused by innocuous technical solutions given in UNESCO’s limited advisory capacity.124 It was nonetheless important for UNESCO to maintain a policy line that allowed access to colonial populations, even while it maintained its pledge ‘to respect the historical, cultural and political traditions of its Member States and fully [appreciate] variety’.125 It was, similarly, important that the Colonial Office be able to reap the

122 See: CO859/135/2, UNESCO, Fundamental Education – Definition and Programme, Mexico, 20/10/47; and UNESCO, Fundamental Education: Common Ground for all Peoples, Report of a special committee to the Preparatory Commission of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, Paris, 1946. 123 CO1045/30, UNESCO, A Definition of Fundamental Education, Paris, 10/7/52. 124 UNESCO maintained a strictly advisory stance. It directly ran only one project, in Haiti. It was otherwise involved in pilot projects (which were closely associated with UNESCO and involved UNESCO consultants) and associated projects (which shared the general ethos and goals of fundamental education). 125 Op. Cit. CO859/135/2.

METROPOLITAN MASS EDUCATION POLICY 131 international kudos sown by the application of UNESCO’s imprimatur, while avoiding the possibility of any substantial UN oversight or intervention.

UNESCO involvement was important for an increasingly publicity conscious Colonial Office. Britain had to learn to sell itself with a little more righteous vigour. Margaret Read found herself ‘startled by our failure as British people to sell our successes. The story of our achievements in education in British Africa never fails to impress the outside world when they hear of it, and yet most of the time we act as if we were indifferent to world opinion about our achievements or apologetic about them.’126 The links with UNESCO were part of this assertive publicity campaign. But this did not mean an unqualified welcome for international intervention in colonial affairs. Colonial officers resented UN oversight. An editorial in Oversea Education lamented that ‘every year, educationists have to leave their real job and compile the information; every year, someone has to go to New York to explain it before the committee’.127 It was a source of satisfaction to Creech Jones that the British delegation to UNESCO’s 1948 Beirut Conference managed to secure a guarantee that UNESCO not involve itself in colonial affairs without the permission of the colonial power concerned.128 While technical recommendations and oversight were an acceptable and potentially profitable concession, social transformation was solely an internal matter. UNESCO was consigned to fundamental irrelevance. It was constrained from intervening in any but the most politically and socially innocuous ventures. And, perversely, its influence receded when it failed to offer practical value to the colonial community development project. It was a tight bind for UNESCO, but was presumably a happy one for the Colonial Office.

126 Read M., Education and Social Change in Tropical Areas, Thomas Nelson, London, 1955, pg. 127. 127 Editorial – The United Nations and Colonial Education, Oversea Education, vol. XXV, no. 2, 1953, pg. 45. 128 CO859/171/4, Circular, Creech Jones to Governors, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, 30/5/49. UNESCO Conferences were not renowned for efficiency. An editorial in Oversea Education noted ‘UNESCO’s shocking unpunctuality at meetings, and the incessant round of lunch and cocktail parties with which delegates revive their flagging spirits’. The same editorial also noted the ‘frightening’ earnestness of some of the non-Western delegations. Apparently, only the American and British delegations provided any humour and light-heartedness. See: Editorial – The UNESCO Conference, Oversea Education, vol. XXIII, no. 1, 1951, pg. 177.

132 DANIEL KARK

9. Ambivalence: Mass Education and the Colonies

If UNESCO was uncertain of its precise role in implementing Mass Education, Colonial governments were utterly confused. They met the ‘authoritative’ definition with the same ambivalence with which they greeted the 1943 report. Colonial governments remained potentially prickly partners. The introduction of Community Development was part of a shift in the balance of relations between the Colonial Office and territorial governments. Its introduction was, along with simultaneous local government reforms, indicative of an assertion of metropolitan control over colonial social policy, hitherto the domain of governments technically subject to the Secretary of State, but in reality operating under conditions approximating de facto administrative independence. Grumbling and resentment continued to rumble in Governors’ mansions throughout the British African colonies.

Official colonial responses to the Secretary of State’s 1948 despatch on Mass Education were confused and unhappy. The responses were screened by the Committee on Mass Education (Community Development), that was constituted as a body separate from ACEC in October 1949 to evaluate community development in the colonies, and that included among its members Cohen, Cox, Hudson, Philips and Read. Colonial reactions were also later assessed in a 1951 note, produced by the Social Service Department. Both documents are imbued with a sense of disappointed frustration. Colonial governments considered Mass Education ‘projects’ limited ends in themselves, rather than the essential spark that would cause the bush to ‘catch fire’. The crucial centrality of initiative was not appreciated. Mass education efforts in Nigeria, for instance, misconstrued the programme as primarily an exercise in mass literacy. Nigeria maintained the focus of the 1935 memorandum on education in the colonies.129 Kenya – notable in that it ‘alone [raised mass education] above the material plane’ – also failed to embrace the singular importance of African initiative. The chief community development officer in Kenya, T.G. Askwith, described a system whereby Africans were educated to understand why they have to change rather than how they themselves were involved in their own transformation. The aim of community development was ‘to enlighten Africans in the problems of developing a country which only 50 years ago was utterly primitive, and thus to obtain their co-operation in working to

129 CO1000/1, CME (CD) 49 3rd Minutes, Committee on Mass Education (Community Development), Minutes of the third meeting.

METROPOLITAN MASS EDUCATION POLICY 133 solve these problems.’130 But, while Kenyan officers may have misunderstood what was required of them, their misunderstanding was, by necessity, minor compared to the situation in the other African colonies – the Kenyan government was involved in a very immediate battle for minds, and, unlike other colonial governments, was forced to concentrate on weaning social loyalties away from Mau Mau.

The social situation was not as acute in many other African colonies, allowing governments the luxury of a deeper misconception. Mass Education, in much of British Africa, failed to move above the ‘material plane’. The programme was misinterpreted, deliberately or otherwise, as a constituent part of economic development. In Uganda and Northern Rhodesia (and to a lesser extent Sierra Leone and Tanganyika) ‘there is a fairly clear indication that community development was thought of as a device for speeding up economic development plans in the countryside’.131 The specialist departments – particularly agriculture departments – within colonial governments had little interest in promoting a plan that potentially competed with their own productive goals, promoted ideas of voluntarism, consensus and citizenship, and distracted attention away from a determined push towards economic development. The Committee on Mass Education countered this view with the riposte that ‘once the interest of a community has been successfully aroused and is reflected in the desire of that community to bring about improvement of one kind or another, every effort should be made to consolidate initial success by ensuring that material betterment is not sought after without any thought to the social implications attaching to it.’132 The spirit of Mass Education required that sustainable social improvements not be neglected, but this was not a spirit effectively conveyed to colonial administrations and specialist departments.

A related misconception was the sense, current in the colonies, that Community Development was not a novel concept, and included within its bounds all development activity – it was not the encouragement to development, but was development, restated in

130 CO859/356, The Meaning of Community Development, T.G. Askwith, Commissioner for Social Welfare in Kenya. 131 CO852/1341/8, CME (CD) (51) 25, The Social Climate, Note by the Social Service Department ‘A’. 132 CO852/1341/8, Review of Community Development in Africa, Suggested addition to draft paper CEDC (51) 18.

134 DANIEL KARK different terms. This attitude is conveyed in the comments of the Director of Public Relations and Social Welfare in Uganda:

‘No specific mention has been made of mass education in this Report … It is submitted that all the activities of the Department and those of most other Departments and voluntary organisations are mass education – or to use the more modern phrase community development’.133

Mass Education was, in this view, a rehash of work that was already being pursued. It was firmly within the bounds of normal colonial administration, or, at best, an improved colonial administration. This definition of the programme missed the central point – that what was desired was not so much improved administration in the colonies, as the considered use by governments of sound administration to encourage Africans to change their conditions themselves. The Colonial Office saw this misinterpretation as ‘good philosophy but … bad thinking. It can result in complacency on the one hand and an over- abundance of crusading zeal on the other. There is room for the saints and the cynics but the average chaps are most to be reckoned with’.134 The programme was not a crusade intended to transform Africa on behalf of Africans, as broadly intended through economic development. Nor was it a complacent preservation of the administrative status quo. It was somewhere in-between. The ‘average chaps’ – the officers placed in charge of implementing small and under-funded Mass Education schemes – did seem to have a good sense of the work the Colonial Office intended. At Udi in Nigeria, in the Gold Coast, in Kenya and in Tanganyika newly appointed or transferred Community Development officers clearly saw the need to provide the inspiration and encouragement for rural Africans to develop themselves. Promoting small-scale projects and improving cooperation between government departments were the necessary work of these specialised officers. They saw themselves as empathetic realists, ‘with a hard head in addition to a soft heart’.135 Community Development officers estimated the value of their work highly. John Moffett, working in Tanganyika, optimistically forecast the economic benefits of his work – ‘Community Development Officers are a direct means of improving a country’s finances

133 CO852/1341/8, Op. Cit. Social Service. 134 CO852/1341/8, Ibid. 135 Du Sautoy, P., Lessons from Mass Education in the Gold Coast, in: Kirk-Greene, A. (ed.), Glimpses of Empire: A Corona Anthology, I.B. Tauris, London, 2001, pgs. 127-9.

METROPOLITAN MASS EDUCATION POLICY 135 through increased productivity and that by spending a few thousand pounds on them a return measured in millions can be looked for’.136 Many colonial governments saw things differently. The intermediate position of the ‘average chap’ working as Community Development officer was undermined by misinterpreted universality by colonial governments and departments.

There was sense in this misinterpretation. Colonial governments had little incentive to introduce a policy that undermined their authority, and that placed additional strain on colonial administrations already weighed down by economic constraints and deepening social transformations. The late colonial state could not afford to give mass education an opening. Initiative and an open concept of citizenship fulfilled the metropolitan need for international legitimacy, but failed to meet either of the major constraints faced by the state – it provided neither an adequate response to declining administrative capacity, nor a redefinition of the state’s relationship with those it was meant to govern. The two were related, and both had a bearing on state legitimacy. The post-war focus on economic development in the colonies resulted in a tremendous expansion of the technical capacity of the state, but not in administrative control. Personal relationships with the ‘man on the spot’ were less and less a part of the African encounter with the colonial state. Increasingly, Africans were the recipients of metropolitan technical demands filtered through the state. Administrative relationships were, nonetheless, still of crucial importance – as previous discussion of Berman has already suggested, this was the only way in which the colonial state could resist the encroachment of metropolitan demands from above and nationalist demands from below. Technical development deepened the general legitimacy of ongoing colonial rule, but the colonial state itself continued to rely on administrative control to justify its own existence, independent of direct metropolitan interventions. Local government reform could conceivably restore some measure of this independence, despite its metropolitan origins – it could be judiciously controlled by the state. Mass Education could do no similar thing – at least not if implemented in its intended form, and without the half-hearted metropolitan misspecification described above. It had a place as an adjunct to economic expansion, as an element in the normal administration of a colony, or as a series of limited social experiments. But the state had nothing to gain from awakening African

136 Moffett, J., Bridging the Gulf, in: Ibid, pgs. 138-41.

136 DANIEL KARK initiative or potentially threatening demands for equality based on the creation of a shared and deracialised sense of citizenship. The extension of citizenship, in particular, could only weaken the exclusive racial and cultural base on which colonial state legitimacy rested. There was therefore an incentive to dissemble and obfuscate the issue, resisting the employment of potentially subversive community development officers, and avoiding the diversion of stretched colonial administrative resources into a counterproductive exercise. There was also an incentive to redefine mass education into irrelevance. Given metropolitan uncertainty and ambivalence this was not a difficult exercise. Even clearly defined, the concept was ethereal. It lacked both the tangible benefits that attached to economic development, and the increasing immediacy of political and constitutional reform. It was not easily reconciled with either technical development or administrative control, both of which required less African initiative and more African cooperation. Mass education was therefore everywhere and nowhere – it was a relatively simple exercise for unwilling governments to claim that mass education was simply development by another name, and therefore required no concessions.

Despite territorial ambivalence, Mass Education was now briefly at the centre of Colonial Office plans to reform its African policy and recreate African individuals, communities, societies and economies. From 1945 to the early 1950s Mass Education maintained a place – alongside the economic development of the colonies and the restoration of British imperial legitimacy – at the forefront of assertive British colonial planning. The centrality of Mass Education in the minds of many Labour politicians, Colonial Office public servants and colonial experts and commentators is overlooked in most accounts of the late-colonial period. The precipitous decline of the Mass Education programme into irrelevance after Labour’s defeat in 1951 effectively consigned Mass Education to historical oblivion, as a dead-end. This view neglects the very real potential it held at the time as a desirable colonial future. The Mass Education programme needs to be resituated historically. Momentarily, it held the potential simultaneously to legitimate British colonial rule in Africa, gradually prepare Africans for eventual self-rule and create the conditions for the emergence of progressive African societies and modern productive economies. For the politician Arthur Creech Jones, the expert Margaret Read and the administrator Andrew Cohen Mass Education was the appropriate solvent for several difficult problems. High- modernist social planning would finally reshape African bodies and minds into forms

METROPOLITAN MASS EDUCATION POLICY 137 conducive to British colonial interests and liberal dreams. That these dreams ultimately failed is due to a combination of high expectations, poor administrative specification and the colonial political environment into which they were interposed. This environment – and, more specifically, the manner in which welfare was approached in Nyasaland – is considered in the following chapter.

Chapter Two

‘The Imperial Slum’: Welfare and Improvement in Nyasaland, c.1920-1945

[Levin’s] mind was stirred, as never before, at the thought of the disgust that he felt in the administration of his estate. It seemed to him not exclusively his own affair, but a public trust which concerned Russia … a problem to be solved. And it seemed to him that he could settle this problem, and that he must attempt to do so. Levin, thinking about reforming his estate.1

1 Tolstoy, L. Anna Karenina, Vol.1, Walter Scott, London, 1893, pg. 352.

WELFARE AND IMPROVEMENT IN NYASALAND

Nyasaland was a peculiar colonial state. Desperately poor and with few marketable assets, the Protectorate was always the subject of pity rather than the keener interest that Kenya’s farmlands or Northern Rhodesia’s extractive industries received from settlers and investors. Nyasaland was the Cinderella of Africa, neither a settler colony nor an obvious candidate for eventual self-rule. It combined settler estates in the southern region of the colony with terrible African poverty on Crown lands, and the stifled accumulation of African smallholders and tenant producers. From the beginning the government of the Protectorate nonetheless paid lip-service to the protection of African interests. The First Commissioner of the Protectorate, Harry Johnston (1891-7), defied Cecil Rhodes and declared state protection over ‘traditional’ African lands.1 The 1903 Nunan judgement requiring ‘non- disturbance’ of African land-rights made this clear, as did the ruling preoccupations of the colonial administration in Nyasaland.2 The place of women in African society, the effects of migrant labour and the degenerative and individualising influence of capitalism upon an emerging African petit-bourgeoisie exercised the minds of a colonial administration preoccupied with establishing a viable balance between the adaptation and preservation of ‘traditional’ African society. Alternately aimed at shielding Africans from the worst effects of colonial capitalism, and transforming them into more productive and ‘progressive’ citizens, state policy struck an ambiguous and shifting pose. Beginning in the early 1930s, it was aimed at ministering to the welfare needs of Africans, but this ministry was always ad hoc and less than clearly defined. It combined metropolitan preoccupations with local needs in a manner that produced inconclusive and far from consistently effective welfare outcomes. The state busied itself with the experimentation and surveillance intended to prefigure the main attack on the penury of its African subjects, but these preliminary experiments were seldom acted upon in any deeper or broader sense. This chapter is an account of early and occasional state attempts to alternately transform and preserve African life and haltingly improve conditions in Nyasaland. It provides a picture of the confused method and judgement involved in the production of these local and small-scale

1 A sense of the difficulties involved in this declaration and the establishment of British control over Nyasaland is gained from Johnston’s account of his years there. See: Johnston, H.H., British Central Africa: An Attempt to Give Some Account of a Portion of the Territories Under British Influence North of the Zambezi, Methuen, London, 1897. 2 It was more often lip-service than provision of any meaningful protection. The Nunan judgement proved impossible to enforce. African land-rights were routinely infringed upon, although the state did later try to rectify this with resettlement schemes. See: Pachai, B., Land Policies in Malawi: An Examination of the Colonial Legacy, The Journal of African History, vol. 14, no. 4, 1973; White, L., Magomero: Portrait of An African Village, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987.

142 DANIEL KARK antecedents to Mass Education and the Domasi scheme. In so doing it illuminates the creation of the preconceptions formed within a colonial state faced by both metropolitan pressure and an increasingly critical and dissatisfied African population.

WELFARE AND IMPROVEMENT IN NYASALAND 143

1. Administration and Government in Nyasaland

The state, during the 1930s and 1940s, was a demanding presence in the private and productive lives of its African subjects. The degree to which these demands were effectively dictated by metropolitan policy and the moral presence of the state among Africans are important in any determination of the extent to which the administration was able to broadcast its power and ensure compliance with its interventions. The government combined executive and legislative functions in the form of the Governor, the Executive Council (ExCo) and the (LegCo), all in the beautiful and temperate colonial capital Zomba. The Governor represented the Secretary of State, and was the primary determinant of the quality and style of government, as well as of the substance of policy. The Governor essentially ruled by decree, subject to the approval of the Secretary of State for the Colonies, who, as seen in chapter one, was in charge of an increasingly assertive Colonial Office after 1945. The Governor and his government of administrative and departmental officers was very far from representative in the 1940s and early 1950s – the government was not obliged to consult its population and seldom did. It failed to interact with more than a very small part of the European mission and settler population and an extremely selective group of educated Africans and Indians.

The Governor of Nyasaland after 1948, Sir Geoffrey Colby, was determined to stimulate the economic development of the Protectorate and to make the government the agent of this development. In doing so he exercised close control over his departments (essentially ministries) and their heads – the Chief Secretary F.L. Brown, the Director of Agriculture Richard Kettlewell, the Secretary for African Affairs Fox-Strangeways and Development Secretary Henry Phillips, among others, were entrusted with the pursuit of gubernatorial priorities. Colby also took an active interest in the civil servants within the departments. Junior officers, such as A.P.S. Forbes of the Agriculture Department, were given great latitude to pursue their own projects where their views coincided with the Governor’s.

Department heads and technical experts were all members of the Colonial Service (not to be confused with the Colonial Office). So too was another type of colonial officer. Administrative officers, the men responsible for the provinces and districts of Nyasaland and British Africa more generally, were the last link in a chain of government that stretched

144 DANIEL KARK from London to the locality and village. The officers of the Colonial Service were mythologized as a thinly stretched network of scholar princes, but they were more frequently forced into compromising positions, masters of improvisation and the measured use of bluff.

The Service was the product of a singular and influential personality. Sir Ralph Furse, from 1910 to 1948, exercised an extraordinary influence over the selection of officers for service in the colonies. After 1932, when a unified Colonial Service was created, Furse created a close collaborative relationship with Oxbridge and London University.3 Graduates were interviewed to determine whether they were men ‘of character’, with steady eyes and firm lips. Entry was not by examination, but by interview, recommendation and athletic and classical prowess. The successful applicants were turned into administrators of empire.4 After 1945 recruits were put through a year-long Devonshire Course, that covered the basic principles of administrative practice, economics and anthropology and instilled an ‘Elizabethan ethos of a love of learning combined with a life of action’.5 Furse was responsible for the creation of two generations of officers selected on the grounds of their perceived gentility and ‘character’. The officers of the Service were, in fact, appointed by the governor of a particular colony and paid by the territorial government. The Colonial Office and the Protectorate government considered these officers the crucial administrative link, with these ‘men on the spot’ representing the state to the African population.6 District Commissioners (DCs) were expected to learn the local language, occasionally lived in fairly basic conditions and relied on their African messengers to supply local knowledge and, frequently, ensure the day to day running of districts. DCs enforced government regulations, tried cases, ensured tax collection and managed the Native Authorities (discussed below). They were the initial contact with the state and the physical embodiment

3 The universities competed to host the courses for colonial trainees. This competition and its outcome are documented in: Dimier, V., A Science of Colonial Administration in the UK, Public Administration, vol. 84, no. 2, 2006. 4 Furse wrote of his experiences and his selection criteria and style in: Furse, R., Aucuparius: Recollections of a Recruiting Officer, OUP, London, 1962. Heussler wrote an account of the Colonial Service which discussed the reforms Furse attempted during the late colonial period, whereby Service officers were also men better trained for the more demanding administrative aspects of the job. Heussler considered the reforms too late to influence the course of events. See: Heussler, R., Yesterday’s Rulers, OUP, London, 1963. 5 Quoted in: Herbert, E., Twilight on the Zambezi: Late Colonialism in Central Africa, Macmillan, 2002, pg. 22. The Devonshire courses were the product of a review of Colonial Service training initiated in 1943, chaired by the Duke of Devonshire and supervised by Furse. The Devonshire Report was published in 1945. 6 And they were men on the spot. Women were nurses, educators or wives, and nothing else. It was most certainly a man’s world.

WELFARE AND IMPROVEMENT IN NYASALAND 145 of state power. The relationship between a District Commissioner and ‘his’ people frequently determined the political atmosphere in a particular district.

This relationship was changing during the 1940s and 1950s, and this was due, in part, to the increasing importance of the specialist departments and technical ‘experts’. Furse recognised this, but still saw a need for the personified link between African villager and administrative officer. At the 1949 Cambridge Summer Conference Furse said that administrative officers were responsible, more than ever, for frontline reconnaissance and liaison, determining what ‘the intermediate mass of what I might call the partially-educated Africans want. This mass is continually growing, and, in the words of an African, will be the petrol that drives the African car’. Technical considerations were secondary according to Furse, for ‘what shall it profit the African if we save his soil and he loses his soul?’7 The relationship in certain places was still intimate in the late-colonial period. District Commissioners (including Thomas Thomson in Domasi District after 1949), supervised by their Provincial Commissioners (including Eric Barnes and William Rangeley in the Southern Province8), were the men responsible for saving both souls and soil. The difficult mediatory position this entailed is the subject of the later chapters of this thesis.

The Governor met the members of the ExCo at fortnightly meetings at the Secretariat building in Zomba. The ExCo advised the Governor on Protectorate policy. Upon the ExCo sat a mixture of officials and, after 1940, ‘unofficials’ – the latter group represented European settler interests. The officials on the ExCo included the Governor, Chief Secretary, Financial Secretary, Director of Agriculture, Secretary for African Affairs, and Attorney-General. The two European unofficials on ExCo – M. Barrow and G. Hadlow – were chosen by the Governor. Below the ExCo sat the LegCo, a body able only to oversee

7 Furse elaborated on these points in grandiose terms: ‘I believe that what we are really trying to do in the Colonial Service and in the Colonial Office is to write the last and most difficult chapter in the record of a great experiment on which the British people, whether they always knew it or not, have been engaged since the time of Humphrey Gilbert – and that, if my history is correct, must be the last 400 years. The experiment is nothing less than the greatest experiment in the association of free peoples which is recorded in history’. From: Furse, R., First Things First, Corona: The Journal of His Majesty’s Colonial Service, vol. 1, no. 10, 1949. See the anthology: Kirk-Greene, A., Glimpses of Empire: A Corona Anthology, I.B. Tauris, London, 2001. 8 Barnes was Provincial Commissioner of Southern Province from March 1949 to 1952, and was remembered by his colleagues for the manner in which he handled the famine of 1949. Rangeley, who succeeded Barnes, was renowned among fellow officers for his anthropological and historical knowledge and was, apparently, very well-regarded by the African population.

146 DANIEL KARK government legislation, but not to amend or veto it. The majority of LegCo members were official appointees and included the Chief Secretary and Attorney-General. Settler interests were represented by five ‘unofficials’. The European unofficials on the LegCo were not elected, despite settler representations to this effect. They were selected by the Governor (and approved by the Secretary of State) from a list of candidates drawn up by the Convention of Associations, a body representing settler commercial and agricultural interests.9 When the state is discussed it is this group of representative unofficials that is included, and not the settler population in general.

Africans were comparatively voiceless. Most important to note here is that, during Colby’s term, there were no African members of the ExCo.10 Africans had no executive authority. In line with Colonial Office policy in the rest of British Africa, Nyasaland was moving towards greater representation for Africans, but this was a deliberately slow and gradual policy. It is discussed in fuller terms in chapter five. In short, the gradual enfranchisement of Africans in the late 1940s involved the establishment of African Provincial Councils and a Protectorate Council whose members included chiefs and other prominent African individuals. This was part of a deliberate and long-running attempt to dilute the influence of educated African opinion within a larger group of ‘traditional’ Native Authorities. The voices of African leaders such as Levi Mumba and Charles Matinga11, along with those of their followers were restricted to the African associations and independent churches.12 The North Nyasa Native Association, started in 1912 under Mumba and Simon Mhango, condemned the 1915 Chilembwe rising and made limited demands for representation and education. In terms that would later seem naively limited Mumba asked that Africans be ‘taken into the confidence of the government as His Majesty’s subjects like all others … [We] are aware that natives are considered as children in these matters, and so they are, but it is as children when they can better be initiated into what is demanded of them when they

9 From: Note by Nyasaland Government, Constitutional Development: The Background, CO1015/1010, PRO. 10 Africans were not appointed until 1959. 11 Levi Mumba was instrumental in establishing the North Nyasa Native Association in 1912. Mumba was the first African to be appointed to advisor to the Nyasaland government, appointed to the Advisory Board of Native Education in 1933. He was also to become the first President-General of the Nyasaland African Congress in 1944. He died shortly afterwards. Charles Matinga was appointed to the Advisory Board in1937. He was one of the key members of the Native Association and became Mumba’s deputy in 1944. 12 The churches, not dealt with in this thesis, included Mpingo wa Bafipa wa Africa and the National Church in the Northern Region, the African Methodist Church in the Central Region, and the Providence Industrial Mission in the South. Millennial movements were started by Elliot Kamwana and Charles Domingo. Shepperson and Price dwell upon these movements in their classic work on Chilembwe’s 1915 rising. See: Shepperson, G., Price, T., Independent Africa, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1958.

WELFARE AND IMPROVEMENT IN NYASALAND 147 grow up’.13 The example of Mumba’s association was emulated by the Southern Province Native Association (founded in 1923), the Mombera Native Association (1920) and the twelve other associations formed by 1933. Men who would later adopt a more strident tone in their interactions with government began their careers in the associations – the Rev. Charles Chinula, George Mwase, Ralph Chinyama, Andrew Mponda and Charles Matinga were all later involved, to varying degrees, in the Nyasaland African Congress, founded in 1944 by Domasi resident James Sangala. The African associations consciously represented the opinions of educated Africans, addressing issues of particular importance to their members, including racial discrimination and education. The Nyasaland government, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, isolated the African Associations, ignoring their articulate and constitutionalist demands for recognition in favour of ‘traditional’ leadership. The same policy was maintained after the formation of the Nyasaland African Congress. Educated African opinion was rarely considered with any degree of seriousness – regardless of its reasonableness.

Less critical African men were included within a gradually expanding official framework. Provincial Councils nominated members of the Protectorate Council, and it was the Protectorate Council that was responsible for the recommendation of the two African members sitting on the LegCo after 1949.14 Unofficial bodies, such as the Nyasaland African Congress, had no direct say in the selection of these men. The African members were supplemented by a European representative of African interests appointed by the Governor.15 An Indian representative also sat on the LegCo, but even the combined non- European voice could not match the five unofficial European members. Two African members represented over 2.1 million Africans on a purely advisory body, while a total of seven unofficial Europeans represented 1,948 settlers, officials and missionaries on both the LegCo and ExCo.16 The appointment of a third African member in 1953 squared the voting in only the loosest possible sense. The state, at the highest levels, functioned in the absence of any substantial African presence.

13 Mumba quoted in: Rotberg, R., The Rise of Nationalism in Central Africa: The Making of Malawi and Zambia 1873-1964, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1965, pg. 124. 14 The first African members of the LegCo were E.A. Muwamba and K Ellerton Mposa. 15 Until 1944 this was Bishop Thorne of Nyasaland. He resigned his place shortly after Matinga made a strongly worded attack on African ‘representation’ in Nyasaland. 16 Report of the 1945 Census, LB14/3/3, MNA.

148 DANIEL KARK Africans, while disenfranchised, were still subject to close control. The government of Nyasaland distributed its power through a finer, localised set of alliances. Harry Johnston solidified British control before 1893 by signing a series of agreements with willing chiefs, and subjugating the less willing by force.17 The agreement signed with Chief Malemia in Domasi on the 26th of March 1892 which ceded control of the Chief’s land to the Crown, was one of these unequal treaties.18 These chiefs had to be turned into subordinate allies. Before 1912 chiefs were recognised by their people as a link with ancestors, leaders of ritual, intermediaries in disputes and symbols of group cohesion. After 1912, with the promulgation of the District Administration (Native) Ordinance (DANO), the most useful and powerful chiefs in each area were also appointed principal headmen or village headmen.19 While limitations of cash and staff meant the legislation was more theoretical than real in many districts, DANO still meant the creation, by the state, of both a hierarchical tradition and discreet ‘villages’ that did not necessarily coincide with the villages defined by the villagers themselves. Amendments to DANO in 1924 conferred even greater power upon these headmen – to tax, hear cases and distribute certain local resources, including the right to cut trees and limited control over allocation of land. Conflict ensued, as various candidates vied to land one of the lucrative chieftainships. In 1933 Indirect Rule was introduced. This crucial piece of legislation brought Nyasaland into line with similar systems in Nigeria and Tanganyika, where the precepts laid out by Lugard and Cameron integrated chiefs into the colonial administration. ‘Native Authorities’, or NAs, replaced the principal headmen, and exercised the codified power to issue orders, collect tax and try their subjects, all in line with notions of ‘traditional’ African rule. This was the period described by Mamdani’s ‘decentralised despotisms’. Before the 1940s the government openly relied upon their functionaries, the NAs, to enforce the official will at a fraction of the cost of the equivalent police force and bureaucracy. In reality, this essential

17 Africans were not victims everywhere and always. The Yao chiefs led resistance to the initial British incursion under Johnston. In 1895 Kawinga attacked the tiny village of Domasi with 2,000 men. The Sikh and Tonga garrison held them off. Kawinga was ultimately defeated after , Johnston’s successor pursued him back to his area. Twenty years later open rebellion flared up again in the southern region of the Protectorate. In 1915, John Chilembwe led an uprising against the government and settler producers, beheading William Jervis Livingstone, the manager of the A.L. Bruce estate and a relative of David Livingstone, and killing a number of other men involved in estate agriculture. The uprising was swiftly suppressed. 18 Treaty with Malemia, 26/3/1892, NSG1/9/3, MNA. 19 In 1899 the Portuguese government in introduced forced labour, sending thousands of ‘anguru’ across the border into southern Nyasaland. Some of the more powerful Yao chiefs, previously involved in slave-raids, took these migrants into their villages, bolstering their influence around Zomba – most of these were the chiefs eventually recognised as Native Authorities by the British, including Chief Malemia in the area around Domasi.

WELFARE AND IMPROVEMENT IN NYASALAND 149 element of state power remained a crucial arm of administration and government well into the 1950s. The attempt to adapt and transform the NA system during the 1950s is discussed at greater length in chapter five.

150 DANIEL KARK

2. Indirect Persuasion: Welfare Experiments in Nyasaland c.1930-1945

The Domasi Scheme was not solely the product of the metropolitan Mass Education policy discussed in chapter one. Its roots also tapped territorial antecedents produced by the state system described above. In fact, concern for the welfare of Africans in Nyasaland ran parallel to equivalent metropolitan concerns. Government concern for African welfare during the 1930s established the background and framework within which Mass Education and Domasi were eventually introduced in Nyasaland. The establishment of the Native Welfare Committee in 1935 was the first in a series of small steps taken by the administration in Nyasaland. The Welfare Committee was a novelty, both within Nyasaland and British Africa. It was the first state body concerned entirely with African social issues and the welfare of African subjects. While it was established in an advisory capacity only, it was intended to be influential – its first chairman was Provincial Commissioner J.C. Abraham (later to write the 1937 report on conditions for migrants in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia and head a commission on the development of Nyasaland20), and included among its membership the Directors of Education and Agriculture.21 It had no financial resources of its own, but was enabled to call upon the assistance of any departmental head, and was granted the right to review all policy affecting Africans in Nyasaland and to make recommendations directly to the governor. The Committee was established initially in order to deal with migrant labourers and the poverty that so badly affected them.22 It quickly broadened the scope of its enquiries, and took on the role of coordinating the welfare activities of government departments, as required by the 1935 Memorandum on the Education of African Communities.23

‘Welfare’ was interpreted by the Committee in its broadest sense, as ‘the promotion of the welfare of the natives by general material development along approved social, economic

20 Report on Nyasaland Natives in the Union of South Africa and Southern Rhodesia, Zomba, 1937; Commission appointed to enquire into the financial position and further development of Nyasaland, Col. No. 152, London, HMSO, 1938. 21 A.C. Lacey and W. Small respectively. 22 The government of Nyasaland decided in 1935 that it would allow the recruitment of migrant labourers for the mines. It also issued the Lacey Report into migrant labour in Nyasaland. 23 The Memorandum was issued to all African governments by the Colonial Office. It is discussed at length in chapter one.

WELFARE AND IMPROVEMENT IN NYASALAND 151 and political lines’.24 The problems that preoccupied the Committee are emblematic of the ruling concerns of the day – concerns that eventually fed the creation of the Domasi scheme. These concerns predicted what were shortly to become empire-wide preoccupations. The West Indian riots and the disorders on the Copperbelt in the late 1930s raised metropolitan awareness of colonial poverty and dissatisfaction. But the extreme poverty of Nyasaland’s position accelerated the development of official consciousness. African penury in Nyasaland shocked officers in the highest echelons of the Colonial Office. Leo Amery, the Secretary of State from 1925 to 1929, stated in 1928 that the Protectorate’s social services were ‘at a scandalously low ebb. The death rate is disgraceful … everything in Nyasaland is below the standard of other African colonies’.25 750,000 Africans had no access to medical facilities and 60% infant mortality and almost no spending on education Nyasaland was, in Leroy Vail’s words, ‘a monstrous slum’. Lord Passfield, Secretary of State from 1929 to 1931 and formerly the Fabian Sydney Webb, worried that ‘grave public discredit would attach to HMG both in this country and abroad should the present scandalous state of Nyasaland attract attention’.26

The Welfare Committee was established to address HMG’s scandalous dereliction of its trusteeship. Poor nutrition, the low status of women in African society, environmental degradation and the need for cooperative development received the Committee’s active consideration, if not its active engagement. The solutions proposed by the body, and the methods used, were a ragged mix of utopian vision and ad hoc reality, and are a very useful guide to the constituent parts of the colonial development idea in Nyasaland during the 1930s and 1940s. Social surveillance through limited survey techniques, the use of focused welfare experiments, and an addled and unresolved combination of inducements and coercion in order to gain African assent gave the Committee’s activities an air of unconvinced impermanence. They were, nonetheless, methods later used in planning and implementing Domasi. The Committee also shared with Domasi its inability to resolve two irresolvable tensions – between the temptation to coerce and the desire to persuade, and

24 Annual Report, Native Welfare Committee, 1936, Nyasaland Protectorate, 1937. 25 The letter, written by Amery and addressed to Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill, was intended to persuade the Treasury to declare a moratorium on Nyasaland’s debt repayments. It failed. Quoted in: Vail, L., The Making of an Imperial Slum: Nyasaland and its Railways, 1895-1935, The Journal of African History, vol. 16, no. 1, 1975, pg. 108. 26 Ibid., pg. 109.

152 DANIEL KARK between the idealisation of traditional African forms of social cooperation and scorn for the perceived reality of African decrepitude.

The state in Nyasaland could utilise neither direct coercion nor direct persuasion. It had neither the staff nor the financial means with which to distribute its administrative influence both broadly and deeply. The gradual expansion of the Nyasaland police force in the 1940s still only allowed minimal supervision, with poorly educated policeman fully committed to tax raids.27 With the limited administrative resources at its disposal the state could maintain only the most rudimentary or spatially focused of supervisory networks. This was Cooper’s colonial arterial network in action. Indirect coercion was another matter. As already discussed, the introduction of Indirect Rule in Nyasaland in 1933 allowed the administration to use a dense network of appointed Native Authorities and chiefs to administer and enforce its will. Everything from beer-drinking rules to dog licenses and environmental restrictions could be promulgated and enforced in a very cost-effective manner through this ‘decentralised despotism’. Dependent Native Authorities were placed in a very uncomfortable position, accountable to both their people and the state. For the state, however, it was an effective system of government on the cheap.28

Indirect persuasion, likewise, proved cheaper in its optimistic use of demonstration in order to convince and convert. The activities of the Native Welfare Committee were circumscribed by its lack of budget and its reliance on the departments to implement welfare policy. The direct welfare efforts of the departments were ad hoc and necessarily limited by small budgets and skewed priorities. The Department of Education could claim in the Native Welfare Committee reports that its goal was ‘to promote not only the literacy of the vast mass of the rural population, but their health, wealth and their moral character’, but in reality the opportunities for this kind of direct intervention and integration were

27 McCracken reports that, even after the expansion of the police force under Governor Colby there were still only 51 European officers (many from veterans from Palestine after Israel’s independence) and 743 poorly educated African constables in 1952. They apparently ‘spent most of their time cutting thatching grass and patching up the roofs of their mud huts’. From: McCracken, J., Coercion and Control in Nyasaland: A Study of a Colonial Police Force, History Seminar Paper no. 6, 7/3/83. 28 The use of these collaborators was only one element within a system which also relied on coercion, confidence and competence to rule. The combination of these elements, according to Kirk-Greene, allowed the state to govern large populations with few administrative resources. See: Kirk-Greene, A.H.M., The Thin White Line: The Size of the British Colonial Service in Africa, African Affairs, vol. 79, no. 314, 1980.

WELFARE AND IMPROVEMENT IN NYASALAND 153 limited.29 Both the Committee and the departments consequently relied on the considered use of the individual example and the demonstration garden, hoping that the multiplier effect would be large enough to reach the poorest corners of Nyasaland. This attempt to win hearts and minds is neglected by Mamdani in favour of the more heavy-handed administrative coercion involved in Indirect Rule. The use of chiefs and African community workers to demonstrate the benefits of improved domestic and agricultural techniques, and the implementation of agricultural and social demonstration projects nonetheless represented the first appearance of indirect persuasion in late-colonial Nyasaland. The Native Welfare Committee’s 1937 report is imbued with the optimism invested in these limited demonstrative and experimental efforts:

it is felt that a demonstration, even on a small scale, of cooperation and coordination of effort of all technical departments working in rural districts would be of great practical value and would afford data of considerable importance for any further development schemes which might be planned on a wider scale in the future … it may be anticipated that new villages will spring up or old villages be remodelled, thus presenting opportunities for better and more sanitary houses, for the provision of latrines, for purer water supplies, for control in the use of land, for communal forestry, for improvement of agricultural methods, for the planning of better food crops for home consumption, for animal husbandry, for schools, for maternity centres, etc., etc.30

Persuasive experiments would not only convince Africans of the superiority of certain development methods, but would help the state to perfect its administration of African welfare.

The line between coercion and persuasion was not clearly drawn by the Administration. Mamdani’s claim that power was ‘fused’ within Native Authorities under Indirect Rule may be adapted by adding that persuasion and coercion were ‘fused’ by the colonial state. The desire to impose technical solutions for the good of Africans, and the desire to preserve

29 Op. Cit. Native Welfare Committee, 1936. 30 Excerpt from a memorandum addressed to District Commissioners, Blantyre and Ncheu. From: Annual Report, 1937, Native Welfare Committee, Nyasaland Protectorate, 1938.

154 DANIEL KARK the idealised easy relations between district officers and the African population were never adequately separated. This confused stance would only worsen with the post-war technical ‘second colonial occupation’. At no time during this period could the colonial state distinguish between a desire to promote consensual and communal values within African communities and a proscriptive attitude towards aspects of African life considered corrosive, such as ‘individualism’ or poor farming practices. The Native Welfare Committee could state in its 1939 Memorandum on Native Policy in Nyasaland that, on the one hand, Native Authorities should gradually be trained by district officers to assume greater local responsibility and encouraged to work more closely with educated Africans within their communities, and, on the other, that officers should intervene with imposed technical solutions in order to protect land from overcrowding and misuse.31 Africans would require constant supervision in order to ensure that the benefits of persuasion took root. In encouraging the development of African cooperatives, the Nyasaland Cooperative Officer, H.F. Bingham, felt that ‘the cooperative movement needs to be introduced gradually and societies should not be set up unless they can be properly supervised. A policy of gradual infiltration is slow and unspectacular but I am satisfied that it is the only way which will bring permanent benefits to the native community’.32 These mixed attitudes also affected the way colonial administrators characterised problems. Discussion of African agricultural practices varied from sophisticated discussion of the social context to recommending decontextualised prescriptive and technical solutions.33 Antecedents to the Domasi scheme were as much demonstrations of confused method and motive as they were demonstrations of improved African welfare.

31 Native Welfare Committee, Memorandum on Native Policy in Nyasaland, Nyasaland Protectorate, January 1939. 32 Annual Report, Cooperative Movements, 1938, 25/1/39, in: Report of the Native Welfare Committee, 1938, Nyasaland Protectorate, 1939. 33 The soil erosion progress reports attached to the 1938 Native Welfare Committee report display the capacity for both approaches. The report for Ncheu District is sophisticated, dealing with the historical and political reasons for erosion. This was, in part, a result of reference to Margaret Read’s work in the area. Reports from other districts are less impressive, dealing only with the technical aspects of erosion.

WELFARE AND IMPROVEMENT IN NYASALAND 155 a. Welfare Evangelisation – The Jeanes Training Centre, Domasi, 1928-49

The first coherent welfare project attempted by the state in Nyasaland was imported and adapted. The Jeanes Centre was established in Nyasaland in 1928 as a result of the visit and recommendations of the American Phelps-Stokes Commission in 1924.34 African colonial governments adopted an American solution in order to answer critics (some of them American) of British colonial education. Phelps-Stokes proposed that Nyasaland emulate the Jeanes system used in the American South. The American Jeanes Schools were maintained by the Jeanes Fund, which was started by Pennsylvanian Quaker Anna Jeanes in 1907.35 The American schools trained teachers and home demonstrators – mainly black women – to demonstrate improved education and domestic standards in rural African American communities. Colonial governments modelled a solution to their own educational problems on the methods used to educate blacks in the American south. Thomas Jesse Jones, educational director of the Phelps-Stokes fund, propounded the benefits of an ‘adapted education’ for blacks. Blacks, according to Jones, were different and needed to be educated differently. His four ‘simples’ were ‘first, sanitation and health; second, agriculture and simple industry; third, the decencies and safeties of the home; and fourth, healthful recreations’. Blacks, in the American south and British Africa, were to remain compliant and rural. The creation of an educated black elite was a thoroughly undesirable outcome. Jones wanted to avoid following the ‘diseased’ Indian model whereby the education system ‘overstocks the market with clerks, talkers and writers’. Blacks had, instead, to be ‘educated for life’ through a specially adapted curriculum.36 Nyasaland was not the only British African colony to attempt the recreation of the American model. Kenya was the first to set up a Jeanes system at Kabete in 1924, and Northern and Southern

34 The Commission was privately run and was supported by the missions, and conducted a tour of the British African colonies in 1924. Its purpose was to push for greater cooperation between missions and governments. As stated in the first chapter, it was the motivation behind the 1925 Memorandum on Education Policy in British Tropical Africa. 35 Jeanes willed her money to start an organisation she wanted called ‘The Fund for Rudimentary Schools for Southern Negroes’. Jeanes stipulated that her fund be used ‘solely for the assistance of Rural, Community or Country Schools for Southern Negroes, and not for the benefit or use of large institutions, but for the purpose of rudimentary education, and to encourage moral influence and social refinement which shall promote peace in the land, and good will among men’. From: From Jeanes Training Centre to Malawi Institute of Education 1928-1998, A working paper on a project to establish a Jeanes Memorial Centre, MIE, March 1998. 36 Hunt Davis, R., Producing the “Good African”: South Carolina’s Penn School as a Guide for African Education in South Africa, Mugomba, A., Nyaggah, M. (eds.), Independence Without Freedom: The Political Economy of Colonial Education in Southern Africa, ABC-Clio, Oxford, 1980, pgs. 84-9.

156 DANIEL KARK Rhodesia later attempted something similar. But the system, as implemented in Nyasaland, proved particularly innovative and influential.

The school was established in Domasi – indeed its physical infrastructure was to form the nucleus of the later Domasi Scheme – and initially trained limited numbers of teachers and their wives to become supervisors and demonstrators. It was partially funded with a generous grant from the Carnegie Corporation.37 The first intake, in May 1929, consisted of 23 men, 21 wives and 56 children. The wives were a crucial element, and it quickly became mandatory for men attending the supervisor’s course to be married and accompanied by a wife. While the primary function of the scheme was to train supervisors, the encouragement and demonstration of good living was a powerful secondary motivating factor. The manner in which supervisors and their families lived would provide others with an example of improved rural African life. Wives were crucial to the success of the scheme. Indeed, in this it differed from its American equivalent – according to the first principal of the school in Nyasaland, the Rev. Bowman, whereas the American scheme used black women to convey the primary message, ‘the low standard of education of the women in Nyasaland and the restrictions of tribal life made it impossible to begin at that time to train single African girls for this type of work’.38 Wives were to provide an example of the very best domestic practices, maintaining a good home and raising good children – ‘the women are taught not only midwifery, but how to look after their children and husbands, how to make their homes healthy and attractive, how to become advisors to women in the villages’.39

For his part, the male supervisor, when not supervising teachers, was to spend his time creating a model village and demonstrating the knowledge acquired at Jeanes. He was to exhibit model soil erosion techniques, encourage hygiene, develop community life and ensure the proper education of a community’s children. This demonstrative effort

37 The corporation intended that the scheme be funded by the government in equal measure, and that its component of the funding be used on the training itself rather than on capital expenditure. It pledged 1000 per year for the first five years. This was later renewed and the funding doubled after the 1935 inter-territorial Jeanes conference held in Salisbury in 1935. In total, Carnegie provided 191,000 for seven Jeanes centres in Kenya, Northern Rhodesia (two), Southern Rhodesia (two), Nyasaland, and . The Phelps Stokes Fund provided funding for an additional centre in Mozambique. 38 Bowman, E.D., Jeanes Training in Nyasaland: The Story of its Development, Oversea Education, vol. 16, no. 3, April, 1945, pg. 98. Much of the early history of the scheme is taken from this account by its first principal. 39 Letter from Director of Education Lacey to Treasurer, Cost, Working and Future Policy of the Jeanes Training Centre, 19/9/32, S1/308/27, MNA.

WELFARE AND IMPROVEMENT IN NYASALAND 157 established among the general population a subconscious link between Jeanes and social improvement. One elderly gentleman, recalling his experiences of Jeanes training insisted in interview that ‘Jeanes is cleanliness. It is derived from the word hygiene. We benefited a lot from this’.40 According to the Director of Education bringing the school and community together and developing community life prepared ‘the men and their wives and families to exert a powerful influence on village life by teaching them how to raise the standard of health, agriculture and domestic economy not only by advice, but by example’.41 This strongly foreshadowed later state attempts at community development, including the Domasi Scheme. Demonstration was aimed at convincing rather than coercing or enacting the change directly.

The supervisors’ scheme stimulated interest among both Africans and administrators. Although it did not initially have a high profile among administrators42, it soon attracted gubernatorial interest. Bowman records a governor (he does not say which) stating that the programme existed in order to encourage ‘the infusion of all that is best in modern civilisation. The model village (in which the families in training live) is a true model not merely of what every village in this country ought to be but of what, under the guidance of native authorities, every village could easily become. It is a striking example of severely practical education and proves that the guiding principle of those who direct the centre is not to set up an unattainable ideal but to show what really can be done and how it should be done’.43

Native authorities and chiefs were equally impressed, if official accounts and correspondence are to be believed. A group of chiefs visiting in 1933 left the centre so impressed with what they had seen that they decided to set up a model village of their own. Favourable African responses, and the introduction of Indirect Rule in 1933 meant that effectively influencing these chiefs required both the coercive enforcement of the government line and the encouragement of good practices. They were, moreover, too good an administrative resource to be wasted. As Bowman reported to the Carnegie Corporation,

40 Interview conducted at TA Malemia, 3/9/05. 41 Op. Cit. Lacey, Emphasis in the original. 42 Lacey records that two Legislative Council members visiting in 1932 ‘admitted candidly that they had had not the slightest idea of the purpose of the centre nor of the work being done’. 43 Op. Cit. Bowman.

158 DANIEL KARK ‘the influence of native authorities must be utilised; they are the representatives of native public opinion and, unless they can be educated to recognise the importance of community work and to give their influence to what have hitherto been isolated attempts to improve the conditions of native life, the whole programme for the moral, social and economic uplift of the communities must be abortive’.44

The Advisory Committee on Education approved the course in 1934 and the first intake of chiefs and their wives was accepted. This was supplemented in 1944 with the addition of lower ranked village headmen and counsellors, who were selected to accompany their Native Authorities. The Native Authorities, chiefs, counsellors and their accompanying families were to reinforce the demonstrative role of the Jeanes supervisors. They and their wives were to take much the same line as the teaching staff, with the added benefit that chiefs were able to exercise their ‘fused’ judicial and administrative power in order to enforce improvements in the practices of those under them. In this respect they represented an exercise in the combination of both coercion and persuasive demonstration, although it was, of course, the latter that was emphasised in grant applications and memoranda. NAs were to be taught to use persuasion and encouragement in order to develop cohesive communities. Apart from the informal and discursive aspects of the course, their syllabus included both basic numeracy and literacy, and courses teaching simple economics, civics and ‘agriculture and nature studies’. The consensual nature of the development chiefs were to encourage was suggested in the syllabus descriptions. Historic Geography taught ‘how all peoples are interdependent for their welfare, social and economic, peace and progress, etc.’ Civics emphasised ‘the rights and duties of citizenship and their relation to the rights and duties of chieftainship’. The Northern Rhodesian Jeanes School produced a picture booklet explaining in very simple terms the informal and formal aspects of the Jeanes course. The booklet follows Chief Katyetye through his Jeanes course, discussing his progress and education. One page shows him being taught to manage livestock and agriculture, to maintain their environments and the theoretical aspects of community development. The last mentioned is pictured below, as Chief Katyetye studies alongside his fellows.

44 Memorandum on Application to the Carnegie Corporation for a grant of 2000 per annum for a period of five years, 1935, E2/1/1, MNA.

WELFARE AND IMPROVEMENT IN NYASALAND 159

Figure 1 Chief Katyetye attends class. Nigel Parry, H., African Advance, Government Printer, Lusaka, 1945.

NAs and their wives were to encourage change as well as supplementing the supervisors’ efforts with their own model homes and model villages. Improved sanitation, hygiene, home-building, village-planning and farming would create these persuasive models. A chief’s wife played no small part in this, responsible for the creation of a home that would set a very positive example for their communities. ‘Alice’ is shown sweeping the backyard of her Jeanes home, while her husband attends the Jeanes classes. On Alice’s left stands a grass bathroom, and on her right a model chicken house. The overall goal of the course was the inculcation of the ethos of the Jeanes Centre within the chiefs, and, indirectly, within their people – the goal was the creation of ‘better, healthier and happier citizens and cooperation for social improvement’.45 Consensus, consent and community building were the watchwords.46 NAs were to be equipped to deal with the rapid changes occurring within their communities – the state needed to shore up local respect for its intermediaries, and

45 Memorandum on Courses Given to Native Authorities at the Jeanes Training Centre April/July 1934, E2/1/1, MNA. 46 ‘I emphasised the importance of setting a good example, and of giving all possible support short of compulsion to Jeanes supervisors, community workers, teachers, technical capitaos and anyone else who could help. It appeared from subsequent discussion that the importance of persuasion as compared with compulsion had been stressed throughout the course, for all the native authorities mentioned at one time or another. I also advised them to remember that it was difficult to put new work in hand when many of the men are away from home, and that new ideas should not be forced on the old people’. From: Jeanes Training Centre, Course for Native Authorities, 1939, NS1/8/4, MNA.

160 DANIEL KARK reduce the risk that they would be undermined by social and economic change.47 The older traditional leadership had to be reshaped in order to be seen as initiators of change, and the Jeanes course was ‘a definite attempt to get chiefs to travel along with all their people in all village progress’.48 In this sense the courses were a success. Chiefs returned home apparently transformed and the transformation was noted by their subjects – ‘You know that time the chiefs behaved like lions. Tough and frightening. After attending leadership courses at Jeanes the behaviour of our chiefs cooled down. We could now chat and discuss issues affecting us with our chiefs without fear as was the case before. Thanks to Jeanes school, they were taught that “dziko ndi anthu” [meaning you cannot claim to be a leader of a country without people to lead].’49 The Jeanes school promised to produce chiefs filled with a sense of communal consensus. According to one elderly informant ‘one would easily distinguish between those chiefs who attended Jeanes courses and those who did not just by looking at the way they related with their people and the kind of development initiatives they carried out in their areas.’50

Figure 2 Alice’ at work in her backyard. Nigel Parry, H., African Advance, Government Printer, Lusaka, 1945.

47 The issue of respect preoccupied administrators. Local authority needed to be reinforced. One solution mooted was to introduce the ‘Hitler salute’ as a sign of respect. 48 Bowman, E.D., Report on the Second Course for Native Authorities at the Jeanes Training Centre, May- August 1935, Nyasaland Protectorate, 1935, NS1/8/3, MNA. 49 Village Headman Mwalasa, TA Liwonde, Interview conducted 12/9/05. 50 Village Headman Mwalasa, TA Liwonde, Interview conducted 12/9/05.

WELFARE AND IMPROVEMENT IN NYASALAND 161

The sections on Native Authorities in District annual reports and the recommendations written for candidates for the Jeanes courses by District Commissioners suggest the state struck a different balance between coercion and persuasion. What it expected of chiefs in practice was quite different. The reports and recommendations evaluate the widely varying abilities of chiefs to perform the coercive and demonstrative roles simultaneously expected of them. Trained returnees were, in the main, the ‘good chiefs’, comparing very favourably with those who, through their demonstrated inadequacies or intransigence had not been selected to attend the courses at Jeanes. The Jeanes graduates – some of whom are recorded standing with the Rev. Bowman in figure three – demonstrated their difference and their commitment by transferring the values and enforcing the practices taught them, often against the wishes of those subjected to them. Enforcing natural resource restrictions, and responding quickly to state demands were the marks of a good Jeanes graduate. The course gave chiefs ‘knowledge and practical experience in how to make the best use of their authority to improve living conditions in their villages’.51 A chief exercised his authority and gave orders. Persuasion was incidental – ‘if [the chief] knows that an order is good for his people he must see that it is carried out, and this will take time and patience’.52 Consensus would only stretch so far. The course had another authoritarian motivation. The state could exert its authority over the chiefs themselves, shaping them in its image. They were reminded of their place in the colonial order. NA Liwonde, just north of Domasi, was ‘an intelligent though somewhat lazy ruler, who would on account of inordinately grand ideas as to his prestige benefit by closer contact with his fellow chiefs [at Jeanes]’.53 Teaching could humble as well as empower.

51 Ibid. 52 Leslie, M.E., Chiefs Course at the Jeanes Training Centre – The Importance of Understanding, 18/11/38, NS1/8/4, MNA. The text from which this was taken was intended to form a chapter within a ‘Book of Civilisation’, ‘in which would be stated simply for the villager the main facts which we are teaching at the Jeanes Centre for rural betterment’. 53 Letter DC Zomba to Deputy PC Southern Province, 1/3/43, NS1/8/5, MNA.

162 DANIEL KARK

Figure 3 ‘Chiefs attending a Jeanes Centre Course and the Principal, the Rev. E.D. Bowman. Photo taken by Lord Bledisloe during his visit in 1938’. Bowman, E.D., Jeanes Training in Nyasaland: The Story of its Development, Oversea Education, vol. XVI, no. 3, 1945.

The course was not universally successful, despite the high expectations of the Jeanes staff. Not everyone was redeemable at Jeanes. NA Msamala, for instance, proved himself beyond the pale. His obstinacy and illiteracy were apparently insurmountable hurdles. Bowman requested that the DC for Zomba not send Msamala to Jeanes ever again, ‘for the good of his soul … the only hope for his area is a new NA’.54 Even where chiefs did not prove to be recalcitrants it was difficult for those running the course to determine whether it was having any durable effect. As the DC for Zomba discovered in 1937 it was difficult to determine whether improvements were a consequence of selecting the best chiefs to attend or of the course itself. NAs Malemia, Kumtumanji and Chikowi were ‘all men of ability and it is difficult to assess to what degree practical improvements in their areas results from the instruction received or how much is due to their own efforts and willingness to learn from other sources’.55 Perhaps the greatest worry was the durability of the training received at Jeanes. Chiefs could be trained to propel rural change, to maintain government authority and to provide an example of better living for their people, but there was no real way of ensuring that chiefs maintained a long-lasting commitment to the principles learned. Their

54 Handwritten note Bowman to DC Zomba, 29/2/44, NSG1/4/1, MNA. 55 DC Zomba, Report on Native Authorities, Supervisors and Welfare Workers in Zomba District who have received instruction at the Jeanes Training Centre, S1/17F-I/38, MNA.

WELFARE AND IMPROVEMENT IN NYASALAND 163 commitment to improving the welfare of their subjects was considered ephemeral by European administrators.

The course for chiefs was suspended in 1949 pending investigation of results achieved. The response from the Provincial Commissioner, Southern Province, was unequivocal – the courses for NAs and chiefs had achieved little. While the courses had ‘in a few cases resulted in inculcating in those attending them a genuine desire to improve conditions in the villages in their areas … these efforts in the majority of cases were not maintained long and the chiefs lost interest unless they received continual support from administrative officers’. In several cases ‘extreme disappointment’ was expressed at a failure to do anything at all in their villages and areas.56 Chiefs could not be relied upon to have any lasting commitment to the improvement of African welfare, or at least welfare as defined by the state. This was noted by the African populations affected. The courses were ‘very helpful because the chiefs were able to preside over traditional disputes competently and objectively. But when it stopped all these competencies are no longer there and the chiefs are just hearing and assisting in settling disputes in their areas anyhow’.57 Chiefs were not consistent intermediaries, frequently bewildering rather than transforming their subjects – ‘As for the benefits, it was difficult for us to see because the chiefs did not tell us what they learned [at Jeanes].’58 It is difficult to assess what the chiefs themselves thought about these courses. Their attendance placed them in an impossible position, more visibly the purveyors of ‘British cruelty’ than social progress.

A Community Worker course was introduced at Jeanes in 1936 to complement and reinforce work performed by Supervisors and Native Authorities. The Community Worker course was the closest Jeanes came to the principles of Mass Education and Community Development. It was also the final attempt by the Jeanes Training Centre to transmute African welfare conditions through the use of African intermediaries. The new course was intended to provide chiefs with ‘right-hand men’, trained community workers (and, again, wives) able to reinforce the efforts of the Native Authorities and supervisors. They were trained to demonstrate agricultural techniques through the preparation of demonstration

56 Letter PC Southern Province to Chief Secretary, 28/2/51, PCS1/8/9, MNA. 57 Interview conducted with Group Village Headman Balamanja, 1/10/05. 58 Interview conducted at TA Mkumbira, 24/9/05.

164 DANIEL KARK plots, to organise community work and to convey practically the benefits of better living through their own exemplary domestic arrangements. The focus for the male community workers was on agriculture – ‘the possibilities of a higher standard of living through agricultural development and consequent economic improvement’.59 The scheme was, in fact, originally intended to be a smallholder training programme, with the emphasis entirely on the improvement of agricultural production. Further consideration by the Native Welfare Committee and representations by departments concerned with social services resulted in the scope of the scheme being broadened to include a more general approach to African welfare.60 Interestingly, the Director of Agriculture himself, in his written opinion on the content of the community worker course, stated that, while demonstration of the benefits of cash-cropping was of primary importance, it was still only a means to an end – ‘in other words, my aim is the raising of the standard of health, wealth and happiness of the community as a whole’.61 Wives, for their part, were expected to emulate the wives of supervisors and chiefs and present model homes and families. Bowman wrote an article on his school in which he included a photograph of the ideal – pictured below is a rectangular home with a well-thatched roof, a tidy yard and a ventilated interior. Houses were to have separate rooms and were to be of the Ngomi type, with four walls and four panels on the roof, instead of the two panelled Libanda homes and the round Sonjo or Ndendela types. The demonstration homes at the Jeanes Centre had two main rooms and two verandah rooms, an outside kitchen and pit latrine, stone foundations and plastered walls, and ‘a low trimmed mulberry fence’.62 Women were committed to the demonstration of a domestic role within the home. They, ‘by precept and example can help in this urgent problem of reaching and raising African womanhood and motherhood’.63 Community workers and their families were thus to be transformed into demonstrative units, displaying to their communities the benefits conferred by the colonial approach to welfare.

59 Op. Cit. Bowman. 60 The smallholder scheme was originally ‘put forward at a time when the intensive production of native crops was engaging the close attention of the administration’. From: Memorandum on application to the Carnegie Corporation for a grant of 2000 per annum for five years, 1936, E2/1/1, MNA. 61 The training of community workers at Jeanes Training Centre and their subsequent work in the field, 1935, E2/1/1, MNA. 62 Presented to delegates in the ‘Nyasaland Protectorate Report on the Jeanes Centre prepared for the Inter- Territorial Jeanes Conference 1935, S1/85/34, MNA. 63 Op. Cit., Bowman.

WELFARE AND IMPROVEMENT IN NYASALAND 165

Figure 4 ‘A house in Matula Village exemplifying Jeanes Centre influence’. Bowman, E.D., Jeanes Training in Nyasaland: The Story of its Development, Oversea Education, vol. XVI, no. 3, 1945.

Just as the supervisor and courses failed to produce trainees committed to the transfer of colonial values of community and agricultural development, the course for community workers failed to produce the results expected of it by the state. The basic principle of both community worker and supervisor courses was the demonstration of the effect of improved techniques upon welfare, in combination with whatever direct changes the trainees could effect directly. The articulation of this principle was a consequence of the discovery that direct efforts alone were too widely scattered to achieve ‘permanent results’ – indirect demonstration sought ‘to avoid this mistake and to ensure the development of a series of model schools, model homesteads and model villages which, by example more than by precept, will become centres of propaganda for surrounding areas’.64

The results of this experiment in persuasion proved less than permanent. The community workers too, failed to maintain a lasting commitment to the lessons learned at Jeanes. A 1944 government review of the scheme found that community workers were ‘disheartened and disgruntled’ and ‘were not carrying out properly the work for which they had been

64 Memorandum on the field work of supervisors and community workers trained at the Jeanes Training Centre, July, 1938, NS1/8/4, MNA.

166 DANIEL KARK trained’, which is unsurprising considering their 10/- a month salaries.65 The review committee found that there was a lack of support for the workers from technical officers, a lack of coordination and considerable friction between them and their village headmen, and weak state supervision. It recommended that, among other things, the probationary period, during which community workers and their wives were to prepare model gardens and homes, be used more effectively for close supervision. Those found inadequate and uncommitted to their community work were to be dismissed. It appears, from the reports describing some of these visits, that those committed to welfare evangelisation were few and far between. In the caustic reports written by ‘Misses Smith and Kennedy’, female instructors at the Centre, the efforts of most supervisors and workers were found to be less than adequate. Davidson, a supervisor in Ncheu, ‘has a very uphill task, but there is nothing to prevent his wife keeping the house cleaner. I promised to come and visit them on my return journey and found things had been cleaned up a bit for my visit but Ferenesi (Davidson’s wife) had merely hidden the dirty bedding in a corner, thinking I would not see it’. In Witness’ village not much had been done ‘apart from sweeping up, and building latrines, some of which evidently are being used’.66 In Zomba District Macdonald and his wife were ‘severely reprimanded for the generally neglected appearance of his house and family and warned that they could not be retained as workers unless there was evidence of improvement’.67

These African intermediaries faced more than the scorn of European supervisors. Community Workers also faced the hostility of Village Headmen fearful of any externally imposed usurpation of their authority. The Jeanes Advisory Committee noted the extremely poor relationship between the two groups. Even where Community Workers did create model homesteads and gardens, conveying the message to the general population was forestalled by the active hostility of local leaders. Those involved in the programme thought it ‘unwise to continue with the training of community workers who are not linked with the social system as the village headmen are not prepared to support their village work’.68 The Committee decided after 1947 to discontinue the community worker course, and replace it

65 Committee examining the original scheme and subsequent development of the Jeanes Training Centre, 1944, NS1/8/5, MNA. 66 Extract from Ncheu District Annual Report written by Miss Smith, undated, S26/3/3/1, MNA. 67 Report on visits paid to Jeanes trained women by Misses Kennedy and Smith, October-November 1941, NSG1/4/1, MNA. 68 Annual Report of the Department of Education, 1946, CO626/24.

WELFARE AND IMPROVEMENT IN NYASALAND 167 with a course for village headmen and their wives. But both this and the Native Authority course continued to face the problems already discussed –the colonial authorities doubted the commitment of African leadership. They were considered ineffectual and incapable of imparting the desired lessons.

The Jeanes Centre achieved limited success. African intermediaries did not produce the results expected of them. After 1949, the Centre was subsumed, physically and ideologically, within the Domasi Scheme, a project that relied less upon the training of African agents, than upon the indirect persuasion of Africans through the presentation of preferred methods of production and modes of living.69 Those in the administration concerned with African welfare and production needed to ensure that the message intended was not being reinterpreted for them, or lost altogether.

69 The Centre was transformed back into the teacher training centre it had originally been, leaving behind aims of general social upliftment. Rev. Bowman predicted this in 1941, when he confronted the Native Welfare Committee with rumours that the purpose of the Centre was again to be the training of teachers, and that the training of community workers was to be transferred to the Department of Agriculture. He stated to the committee that he ‘would be exceedingly dismayed if the special activities of the Jeanes School were to come to an end’. From: Minutes of the 44th meeting of the Native Welfare Committee held on 27/3/41, S43/3/1/2, MNA.

168 DANIEL KARK b. Colonial Preoccupations: Nutrition and Soil Erosion in Nyasaland, 1936-45

The gradual use of African intermediaries did not fulfil state expectations of them. But the Jeanes Centre’s limited gradualism was not the only state attempt to indirectly influence the rural population. Comprehensive schemes aimed at the presentation of modern agricultural techniques and more effective welfare interventions were also attempted. The schemes were intended to persuade Africans of the superiority of introduced methods without the use of African agents to convey the message. Since the mid-1930s the Native Welfare Committee had been pushing for ‘experiments in certain selected areas in which [heads of the departments] could formulate and pursue a detailed and coordinated programme of welfare work’.70 Initial attempts at coordination reflected the metropolitan and state preoccupations of the period. Nutrition and soil erosion dominated administrative minds in Nyasaland during the 1930s and 1940s, the former a proxy for African welfare, and the latter for agricultural production.

Productive and welfare motives were themselves the product of growing international scrutiny and metropolitan need. The colonial disorder of the 1930s suggested that imperial trusteeship was being betrayed by Britain, and this resulted in increasing attention being paid to very unpleasant African conditions.71 Similarly, depression, war and metropolitan penury resulted in the state exerting increasing pressure on African smallholders to produce more efficiently, or at least to limit their subsistence claims upon the colonial state. Sometimes conflicting, sometimes conflated, these very different propellants produced schemes that were themselves combinations of confused method and motive, of persuasion and coercion, and of administrative aspiration and frustration.

70 Annual Report, 1937, Native Welfare Committee, Nyasaland Protectorate, 1938. This passage actually referred specifically to two small regional attempts at coordination in Ncheu and Blantyre Districts – little more is said of the two schemes. But they may be seen as small-scale dress-rehearsals for the later effort in Domasi. 71 Indeed the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations was among the first to take an interest in nutrition in order to assess conditions in the colonies. See: Lewis, J., Empire State-Building: War and Welfare in Kenya 1925-52, James Currey, Oxford, 2000, pg. 59.

WELFARE AND IMPROVEMENT IN NYASALAND 169

i. ‘Casting Pearls Before Swine’ – African Nutrition and the Kota Kota Scheme

The colonial powers developed an interest in African nutrition and malnutrition after the 1920s. Iliffe links this interest to the decline in periodic famine mortality during the period – a long-term lack of adequate nutrition replaced regular food crises as the primary subsistence problem facing the African colonies. The official fascination with African nutrition was also a product of enquiries made by the League of Nations. A resolution, adopted in September 1935, urged governments to investigate the ‘practical means of securing better nutrition’.72 In 1936 the Economic Advisory Council of the Colonial Office initiated a study of nutrition in the empire, and the Secretary of State for the Colonies issued a despatch on the subject in the same year.73 The result was the publication of a report, ‘Nutrition in the Colonial Empire’, in 1939.74 Nyasaland’s contribution to this empire-wide study was an intensive nutrition survey. This proved to be ‘the most elaborate investigation of the mid colonial period’.75 It also resulted in the constitution of a Nutrition Unit tasked with testing and implementing schemes to improve African nutrition. From the beginning the administration realised that addressing malnutrition required a scope not limited to nutrition itself – ‘the problem of nutrition, apart from its obvious medical implications, has economic, agricultural, educational and commercial aspects, all equally important and interdependent’.76

While its conclusions were inconsistent, the investigative efforts of the Nutrition Unit, and others involved in studying the problem, ascribed blame in varying measure to the breakdown of African traditional society, the rise of individualism, and inefficient, insufficient and destructive African agricultural production. Recommended solutions were equally inconsistent, including the use of both compulsion and education, and efforts to find some way of reducing the workload of administrative officers in order to allow them greater contact with ‘their’ Africans. The investigative work conducted during this period varied in the depth of its research and the complexity of its findings and recommendations. The initial investigation, conducted in 1937 by a team that included a medical officer,

72 The United Nations Food Conference and Colonial Nutrition, 12/43, CO996/1, PRO. 73 Issued on 18/4/36 by the Colonial Office. 74 Nutrition in the Colonial Empire, Cmd 6050, 1939. 75 Iliffe, J., The African Poor: A History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987, pgs. 160-1. 76 Enquiry into the nutrition of Africans, Appendix IV, Annual Report, 1936, Native Welfare Committee, Nyasaland Protectorate, 1937.

170 DANIEL KARK anthropologist and analyst, was necessarily the most general, but also provided what were probably the most sophisticated findings. The team studied the social conditions of village life, the physical condition of residents within a selected district, and the way in which these factors affected nutrition. It was preliminary to work by the Nutrition Unit. Their findings, issued as an appendix to the 1937 Native Welfare Committee Annual Report, did not dance around the complexity of the issue – it stated clearly that poverty, disease and the lack of adequate incomes were all responsible for poor nutrition. Although it does spend considerable time looking at nutrition itself in great detail, this is not the only focus of the report. The solution recommended by the team foreshadowed and later fed the comprehensive ethos of the Domasi scheme. Given a situation in which ‘it is obvious that the standard of living must be raised before a substantial improvement can be expected from any other measures which may be advised’, the only solution was coordination of the efforts of district administration, Native Authorities and technical departments.77 This meant improved sanitation, better education for women and children and demonstration of improved agricultural techniques, among other measures. Compulsion is not discussed. Persuasion, optimism and a central role for the state are guiding principles – ‘existing conditions can only be improved by the efficient and willing cooperation of all members – European and African – of the various departments of government’.78

In October 1938, a commission was appointed, under the auspices of the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures and the leadership of Dr. B.S. Platt, to conduct a detailed study of nutrition in rural areas. Two appointees to this Nutrition Survey Party are worthy of note and have already made an appearance – Richard Kettlewell, seconded from the Department of Agriculture and later to head the Department under Colby, and Margaret Read, working for the African Institute at the time and shortly to play the leading role in developing Mass Education and Fundamental Education policy for the Colonial Office and UNESCO respectively. Kota-Kota, a district on the shores of Lake Nyasa, was chosen as the site of the study. Three villages were selected, one on the lake-shore, one in

77 Nutritional Review of the Natives of Nyasaland, Appendix II, Annual Report, 1937, Native Welfare Committee, 1938. 78 Ibid. Optimism pervades the final section of the report. Improvement in nutrition and coordination by government would result in higher incomes, a better educated population able to imbibe improved production techniques, and – importantly for Britain – a market for industrial goods. ‘A larger, healthier, wealthier and better-educated population would make increased demands for imported goods and this in turn would be of benefit to industrial countries exporting manufactured articles’.

WELFARE AND IMPROVEMENT IN NYASALAND 171 the highlands and one between the two, all operating under differing climatic and agricultural conditions. Over a period of eighteen months a great mass of material relating to almost every aspect of rural African poverty and nutrition was collected. Platt never published a report on the findings of the party – McCracken feels his inertia ‘provides an example of academic procrastination on a positively heroic scale’.79 The investigations were nonetheless comprehensive and formed the basis of Platt’s memorandum to the Native Welfare Committee in June 1939 recommending that the area be turned into an experimental development area.80

The experiments conducted by the Survey Party were turned into demonstrations of good nutritional and social practice, intended for both for Africans and the government. The model recommended by Platt, shortly before he left Nyasaland in February in 1940, was remarkably similar to the structure used later in Domasi, with agricultural and medical officers members of a Nutrition Development Unit headed by the District Commissioner. It was a demonstration of ‘what could be done by a small team of enthusiasts, working in the closest cooperation, to improve local conditions affecting nutrition’.81 The timing was poor though – the activities of both the Nutrition Unit and those involved in this experiment were shortly curtailed as staff and funding were drained away by the War. The efforts of the unit failed to prevent the withdrawal of funding in 1943.

The Kota-Kota project was never developed on anything like the scale attempted in Domasi. It nonetheless confronted many of the issues faced by those implementing the later scheme. Two basic contradictions dogged the Kota-Kota planners. The first was between a desire to create ‘progressive’ Africans and a fear of the threat posed to traditional African society by individualism. The second was between a hopeful faith in the efficacy of persuasion using established administrative relationships and a perceived need to coercively protect Africans them from themselves. These contradictions are themselves related. ‘Progressive individuals’ were held up as exemplars of modern agricultural and domestic practice and used to influence those around them. The traditional structures these

79 McCracken, J., Nutrition in Nyasaland, The Journal of African History, vol. 36, no. 1, 1995, pg. 158. 80 The results of Platt’s survey were only very belatedly published – they were edited and released in 1992. See: Berry, V., Petty, C. (eds.), The Nyasaland Survey Papers 1938-1943: Agriculture, Food and Health, Academy Books, London, 1992. 81 Report on action taken in Nyasaland on the report of the committee of the Economic Advisory Council on Nutrition in the Colonial Empire, NS3/3/3, MNA.

172 DANIEL KARK individuals were perceived to threaten most were simultaneously used to coerce, even as reactionary African social traditions and land-use practices were derided. Whereas the initial 1937 study was relatively sophisticated in its ascription of nutritional deficiencies to Nyasaland’s ambient poverty, later reports fell back on these contradictory yet reliable bogeymen.

Those involved in the Kota-Kota scheme undoubtedly preferred the use of indirect persuasion. Converting the nutritional survey into a development project would persuade Africans, demonstrating ‘by methods strictly within the capacity of the native population measures which they believed would lead to the better use of land, the conservation and better use of water, improved production of foodstuffs now grown by the native population, the trial of new foodstuffs imported from abroad and not previously tried locally, reafforestation and the prevention of soil erosion’.82 That the demonstrations were not having the desired effect is evinced by the frustrated note sounded in the project reports, a tone later echoed in Domasi. Rural Africans were allegedly stubborn reactionaries. The demonstration work of the Survey Party and the Nutrition Unit was, after a period of two years, ‘brought to a standstill’. The introduction of new crop varieties and new farming and sanitary methods were ‘doomed to a polite interest which went no further’. Those who adopted the new techniques were ‘fewer than one in a thousand’.

The problem was not only a lack of interest, but also an admitted basic lack of understanding of local conditions and dynamics – new ideas had been injected into ‘one small portion of the body African. Their further spread depended upon factors within the body which we could not control’.83 The author of these comments nonetheless went on to lay out the traditional roots of this obduracy. Initiative was stifled by jealousy within the community. Worse, initiative was smothered by a social atmosphere that undervalued the importance of individual success and progress, not only among the people, but among their leaders too. The minds of chiefs and headmen in the areas under observation were ‘not at all inflammable. They are mostly pleasant, sleepy, courteous old men, sometimes heavily addicted to alcohol, whose main object in life was to get through it with the minimum of effort and change … they are not yet, most of them, willing to be efficient in the cause of

82 Ibid. 83 The development of backward rural areas of Nyasaland – Report based on the work of the Kota-Kota Nutrition Unit, 262/10F, MNA.

WELFARE AND IMPROVEMENT IN NYASALAND 173 better living’. The problem was not so much that there was no change, just that the change was gradual and too slow to adequately address the dire environmental crisis facing Nyasaland. Soil erosion – the other preoccupation of the African colonial state in the 1930s – was seen by administrative and technical officers alike as an immediate threat, and one closely related to poor African nutrition and living conditions. Africa faced a Malthusian crisis. Environmental degradation and population growth were immediate threats – ‘there is no alternative for the Bantu save to go through the ordeal of overpopulation. They will be driven into it by their sexual potency, their irresponsibility, and, above all, their lack of foresight’.84

It was therefore not enough to wait for Africans to be persuaded to adopt less damaging techniques – they occasionally had to be forced to mend their ways in order to avoid catastrophic damage. The demonstration team concluded that ‘compulsion was necessary to check the destruction of natural resources which were vital to any future prospect of progress in our area … there are lazy and thoughtless people in every community and it is on their account legal sanctions are necessary’.85 Luckily for the demonstration team the NAs held – and were encouraged to exercise – the required legal sanctions. Legislated coercion trumped persuasion, the product of a refrain later repeated in Domasi. In his response to a request from the Secretary of State for the Colonies for a report on progress made in addressing African malnutrition in light of the 1939 Empire report, Thomas Thomson, District Commissioner for Liwonde District, gave his opinion that compulsory measures were preferable, and ‘more potent than hours of persuasion or years of work on a demonstration plot’. Thomson’s opinion is particularly worthy of note – he was later to become the officer in charge of the Domasi scheme. He wasn’t alone in recommending administrative coercion. His preference for mandated change was shared by his fellow administrative and technical officers in Kota-Kota.

There was some small hope for those involved in demonstration in Kota-Kota. There were individuals among the African population considered worthy of emulation by their contemporaries. Exercising appropriate agricultural care and sound domestic standards, these African individuals demonstrated initiative and were quick to adopt the improved

84 Ibid. 85 Ibid.

174 DANIEL KARK techniques recommended by technical officers. Nothing, in the eyes of these officers, was as convincing for an African as seeing a neighbour succeed using appropriate methods, ‘because natives judge by results’.86 The intemperate comments of Dr. W.T. Berry, the medical officer working in Kota-Kota, provide a sense of the bewildered frustration induced by mutual incomprehension, but they also reveal the hope produced by promising and ‘progressive’ individuals, those apparently adopting European techniques for cultivation, husbandry and domestic life. Berry ‘began to realise that at this rate I would be a pretty old man before I had got my district in proper trim. I also began to get very tired of casting my pearls before swine. So I revised my approach. Instead of addressing a crowd of want-nothing, care-nothing, try-nothing, do-nothing natives, I began to look around for people with a little spark of initiative, and confined myself to them. If a man had a well- fenced well-cultivated Dimba garden, or a really nice hut, I had a talk to him’.87 This was the policy adopted, in a more systematic manner, by the Nutrition Unit. At a meeting of the Unit held in December 1942 it was decided, in the interests of ‘cooperation and continuity’ to keep a graded register of villagers deemed to be ‘enlightened and progressive’.88 The Unit’s work would focus upon these progressives. It was through these men that the state would demonstrate the value of improved homes and gardens.

The persuasive potential of these progressive individuals was limited. According to the officers involved in Kota-Kota, they were regarded with suspicion and faced the ‘jealousy and enmity of their reactionary relatives and neighbours’.89 A far greater and unacknowledged hindrance, however, was the suspicion with which they were regarded by the officers themselves. As later occurred in Domasi, ‘progressive’ Africans were simultaneously given the task of persuading their communities and regarded darkly, blamed by administrators for tearing the fabric of the traditional African community. Officers complained of the individual ambition that drove selfish accumulation and the breakdown of rural African social mores. Increasing African immersion in the cash economy and involvement in cash-crop production was interpreted as a self-interested withdrawal from the community. Without subscription to a communal ideal ‘there is likely to be a progressive concentration upon personal ends, a narrowing of the circle of those to whom

86 The Importance of the Problem – commentary on ‘Nutrition in the Colonial Empire’, NS3/3/3, MNA. 87 Letter from Dr. W.T.C. Berry, Medical Officer, to Director Medical Services, Zomba, 3/6/43, M2/17/16, MNA. 88 Minutes of a meeting held at Mwera Hill, 26/12/42, M2/17/16, MNA. 89 Op. Cit. Development of Backward Rural Areas of Nyasaland.

WELFARE AND IMPROVEMENT IN NYASALAND 175 the individual feels bound by ties of duty and affection, a struggle, each for his own, but with it all an increasing toll of affliction’.90 It was also seen by some District Officers as irresponsible – the production of commodities rather than food crops resulted in greater vulnerability to malnutrition and food-deficits for the community as a whole. ‘Progressive’ Africans were placed in an impossible position, simultaneously promoted and suspected by the administration that created them. In its promotion of ‘Master Farmers’ and resettlement schemes, the Domasi Scheme was to establish exactly the same tension between encouragement and suspicion.

‘Progressive’ Africans were not the only individuals attempting to hold an untenable line. The tension between surveillance and encouragement was also evident in the individual relationships between the administrative officer – the ‘man on the spot’ – and ‘his’ African subjects. There was, throughout this period, a recurrent fear that these relations were breaking down, forestalling the use of either persuasion or more forceful measures. The fears of the Kota Kota demonstration team, the Nutrition Unit and general district staff were expressed repeatedly and unequivocally – resources were too scarce and the workload too heavy for officers to maintain an effective relationship with Africans. Romanticised regret was the universal response to this passing colonial relationship. The 1955 handbook for administrative officers in Nyasaland nostalgically recalled pre-war friendships – ‘Old Africans still speak of early administrative officers as men who understood them, who spoke their language with fluency and idiom, and who were familiar with their customs; men on whom they could rely for justice in disputes, for advice when they were in doubt, and for help in trouble, and whom they regarded as tried friends.’91 While a little rose- tinted, this contrasted with a present reality that denied officers the opportunity for time on ulendo or the satisfaction of establishing constructive relations with local collaborators. The post-war weight of administrative work and lack of staff kept district officers in the boma and out of the field. There was not the time to encourage the development of progressive Africans, nor an administrative presence thick enough to ensure compliance with government orders. This atrophied relationship was of particular concern regarding the creation of the desired class of progressive African individuals. The administration had to

90 Ibid. 91 Nyasaland Protectorate, Notes on the Duties of Administrative Officers, June, 1955, PAM 718, MNA. This handbook compares poorly with the lifestyle described in its 1930 equivalent. Found in the draft Notes on the Life of a District Officer, S1/828/30, MNA.

176 DANIEL KARK ensure that a level of continuity and a degree of support were maintained sufficient to prevent the descent of administrative officers into an ineffective torpor – ‘the officer, who comes to the country as a young man full of energy, ideals and eagerness to help the backward native, runs the risk of lapsing into hopelessness, cynicism or impotent resentment after a few tours of hammering against the closed door of African apathy’.92

What the colonial administration in Nyasaland desired, above all, was the creation of a state presence heavy and focused enough to broadcast authority to the physical and social boundaries of the state – the creation of a capillary network for the dispersion of power. Lack of funding and staff prevented this from being achieved. This was also something the Kota Kota project failed to achieve. It was an under-engined vehicle, lacking the administrative and departmental staff to properly demonstrate improvements to Africans. It was, additionally, ad hoc in its transition from survey to demonstration project, and too focused on an issue – nutrition – that lent itself to neither the determination of levels of African cooperation, nor to the clear demonstration of social improvement. This very particular focus, combined with the absence of an adequate and dedicated staff, limited the effectiveness of the project. Links between individual officers and individual Africans could not be maintained with any consistency. Poignant ‘colonial cock-ups’ the nutrition survey and Kota Kota project may well have been, but they were nonetheless, dress- rehearsals for the more closely integrated and better resourced efforts later attempted at Domasi.93 The belief that a district-level demonstration project, integrating the efforts of administrative officers and all departments, could effectively change the way Africans lived their lives was not abandoned.

92 Op. Cit. The Development of Backward Rural Areas in Nyasaland. 93 The phrase is McCracken’s. Op. Cit. McCracken, 1995.

WELFARE AND IMPROVEMENT IN NYASALAND 177

ii. ‘European Madness’: Soil Erosion and the Misuku Agricultural Project 1938-43

Where the Kota Kota survey and demonstration project concentrated on improving African welfare directly, a contemporary development scheme was directed instead towards the improvement of welfare through improved land use, and therefore greater agricultural production and increased incomes. The Misuku Agricultural Scheme chose a clearly defined issue and a clearly demonstrable result – soil erosion and the improvement of crop yields. Where nutrition was dependent on improvements in peripheral factors soil erosion was conceivably easy to address. It was also the issue of most immediate concern to colonial administrators in the late 1930s and 1940s. During this period environmental protection displaced nutrition as the chronic problem that most perturbed policy-makers in the Colonial Office. One step back in a deadly causal chain, soil erosion was the key to resolving chronic rural African poverty. At the 1943 United Nations conference on food policy in Hot Springs delegates linked African nutrition directly to the adoption of better land use techniques and husbandry within the European empires. The Colonial Advisory Council of Agriculture, Animal Health and Forestry issued a memorandum shortly afterwards highlighting the same link.94 Poor land use by African agriculturalists was responsible for the persistently poor standard of life in the colonies. This shift in perceived causation transformed Africans from victims of malnutrition into the guarantors of their own poverty.

Soil erosion on settler lands was initially a major official preoccupation in Nyasaland, but the official gaze was quickly deflected to African tenants on European estates, and eventually to African agriculturalists anywhere in Nyasaland.95 Traditional African agricultural techniques – shifting agriculture, matutu mound agriculture, burning and stream bank cultivation – were roundly condemned by agricultural officers and settlers as destructive. But African ‘tradition’ was only partly to blame. Many colonial officers took a dim view of what they saw as the increasingly egregious manner in which African individuals were subverting traditional notions of landholding and misusing land for their own ends – indeed ‘the weakness of the present political system is that it places no check

94 Memorandum on Colonial Agricultural Policy, 28/1/44, CO996/1, PRO. 95 This is discussed in the introduction and in Beinart’s article on soil erosion as an official preoccupation.

178 DANIEL KARK on this exploitation of the land’s resources’.96 Traditional misuse and individual abuse were thus combined in an unlikely and dangerous alliance.

These critical attitudes appeared repeatedly in district and Native Welfare Committee reports. The 1938 annual report for the Southern Province declared that there would soon be little reason to combat soil erosion as ‘the place will be a bare desert’ within two or three years.97 Sheet, gully and riverbank erosion – the latter pictured in figure five – were dire threats to the economic future of the Protectorate. Similarly dire predictions were issued by the Welfare Committee in the district level reports on erosion issued in 1938. The general opinion was that the economic future of the Protectorate and the welfare of its inhabitants depended on how erosion was addressed in the very immediate future.98 For many of the officers in Nyasaland coercive action was an attractive response to the perceived immediacy of the problem. Thomas Thomson, District Commissioner of Liwonde District and later the officer in charge of the Domasi scheme, recommended administrative compulsion in his area and argued that this was the only way to convince ordinary villagers of the benefits of soil conservation.99 He was not alone in doing so. But, as in Kota Kota, there was also an inconsistent stated commitment to demonstration and persuasion. Native Authorities were encouraged to issue orders requiring ridge cultivation and bunding, but this was to be combined with the creation of demonstration plots and supervision by agricultural officers. Persuasion, at least initially, was the ideal. The officers offering supposedly persuasive demonstrations argued that African farmers would find incentives for participation in demonstrable improvements in agricultural yields and lifestyles. This was the route initially taken by the Misuku scheme. But, just as Kota Kota initially relied on persuasion only to recommend coercion in frustration, Misuku ultimately produced a focused and coercive relationship with rural Africans.

96 Soil Erosion, Ncheu District, Appendix II, Excerpts from the reports of the Soil Erosion Officer, Annual Report, 1938, Native Welfare Committee. 97 Annual Report, 1938, Southern Province, NS3/1/7, MNA. 98 This was the opinion stated in a circular issued in 1939: Circular no. 1 of 1939, Land Conservation Policy. The circular and the district reports are found in Op. Cit. 1938 Annual Report of the Native Welfare Committee. An idea of how widely this consensus was held see Op. Cit. Beinart. 99 Op. Cit. Report from Liwonde District, NS3/3/3.

WELFARE AND IMPROVEMENT IN NYASALAND 179

Figure 5 Riverbank erosion in South Africa. It was the South African preoccupation with this kind of erosion that influenced agricultural officers in Nyasaland. Bennett, H.H., Soil Erosion and Land Use in the Union of South Africa, Department of Agriculture, Pretoria, 1945.

The Misuku scheme, which ran between 1938 and 1943 under the supervision of Major D.N. Smalley, reflected a preoccupation among administrators in inter-war British Africa with halting soil erosion, improving African agricultural methods and increasing output. Smalley was allocated five hundred square miles in District inhabited by the Asukwa in the north of Nyasaland. The steep hills and deep water courses were described in Smalley’s report on the scheme as badly affected by shifting agriculture, burning and overstocking. Strip farming, crop rotation, improved husbandry, controlled grazing, burning controls and measures protecting riverbanks were introduced. A teaching model of the area was produced and a demonstration plot opened. As was later to occur in Domasi, the activities of the project team, district administrators and technical officers were coordinated. These efforts, attempted in the first year of the scheme’s life, produced little more than ‘a rather disillusioned demonstrational staff, and a more or less truculent resident population’. The scheme inspired complete indifference among Africans, who saw it as nothing more than ‘a new form of “European madness”, [which] would no doubt soon blow over’. The second and third years of the scheme were little more successful, with a very limited response to attempts to involve willing individuals in training and land improvement. Progress was clearly inadequate at the end of the third year. Persuading

180 DANIEL KARK ‘truculent’ Africans proved unexpectedly difficult for Smalley and his team. The response was compulsion. Purportedly to get the ‘last few laggards in line’, but really to get the majority moving, the Asukwa population of Karonga was now presented with a fait accompli – the necessary conservation work would be completed by hired labour and the cost of the work charged to landholders by the local Native Authority. Smalley reported great success, and in terms that betrayed little self-effacement – by 1941, ‘for the first time in their history’ people found themselves with an adequate food supply and a saleable surplus. He observed optimistically in his report on the scheme that ‘today the Asukwa people marvel, and often laugh at their own past stupidities, and are extremely lavish in their laudings of the work done for them but which in reality was done for themselves … it is the hope of the writer that others who may chance to read this article may be heartened in their tasks in combat against erosion, apathy, opposition and undertakings far greater than those grappled with in the Misuku area of Nyasaland’. Yet this optimism is contradicted by Smalley’s own reports of an alienated local population and by the large number of cases still appearing before the courts involving environmental infringements. The apparent success of the scheme is belied by the admitted necessity of ongoing and strict controls – ‘it is by no means to be assumed that after ten years careful management the teachings of the Misuku scheme could be termed ingrained, habitual, and freely accepted by the Asukwa people’.100

The Kota Kota project and Misuku scheme, despite their differing parameters, were afflicted by the same failing. Neither could convince Africans of the benefits of the methods proposed and demonstrated. Those ‘progressive’ African supporters they did attract were regarded with suspicion by their communities and effectively had the ground cut from beneath their feet. The state continued to rely on the coercive power of a group – the Native Authorities – it claimed to be replacing with a system of efficient and democratic local government. But this was a system rendered increasingly unviable by a post-war international and colonial climate hostile to systems of compulsion and by the clear failure of coercive measures to produce the desired improvements in African welfare and economic life. The African population, while receptive to ideas and ideals of social improvement, were increasingly intolerant of ‘British cruelty’. Malawians remember the

100 All from: The Misuku Land Usage Scheme, 1938-43, prepared by D.N. Smalley, Agricultural Assistant, Mss/Afr/s/918, Rhodes House.

WELFARE AND IMPROVEMENT IN NYASALAND 181 period in a dim light – ‘Indeed a long time ago there was a British colonial government. We men of colour, when we saw a white man we used to be very afraid. We thought he was there to arrest people. So when these white men introduced new methods of cultivation, we just followed or obeyed out of fear. The British colonialist introduced ridging and terraces. They argued if we ridged our gardens and prepare terraces to preserve soil erosion we would harvest more crops than we would get if we used matuto. So if they found you preparing your gardens the old way you were arrested and fined. So because of this we were forced to do things against our wish. This was the time I saw that we did not have freedom’.101 It was the forceful delivery of the message rather than the message itself that lingered longest in the collective memory.

101 Interview conducted at TA Malemia, 3/9/05.

182 DANIEL KARK 3. The Road to Domasi – Mass Education Arrives in Nyasaland

Mass Education came along at the right time. It provided an apparently consultative and effective welfare ameliorative, just as the empire began to suffer serious international criticism. It provided a programme that promised both legitimacy – domestic and international – and a comprehensive approach to the tangle of welfare issues affecting rural Africans in Nyasaland. Rather than a limited focus on agricultural or domestic demonstration, or improvements in welfare through improved nutrition or soil conservation, Mass Education promised to comprehensively transform African communities. Better hygiene, schooling, land-use practices and local government were all basic requirements. Rather than increasing agricultural production through improved welfare, or improving welfare through increased agricultural production, the programme would pursue both simultaneously with thorough teaching, demonstration and supervision. It also promised to be novel in its concentration upon the entire rural community, rather than solely on the very poorest – upliftment would affect everyone from the Native Authority down.102 More important, in light of the failings of the Jeanes School, the Kota Kota scheme and Misuku, implementation would depend upon the involvement of the whole community. Where Jeanes relied on the evangelical vigour of African intermediaries, and Kota Kota and Misuku ultimately relied upon coercion exercised through orders and the Native Authorities, the new philosophy required that the entire community be involved in their own development. The groundswell expected from such involvement would encourage the development of self-reliant communities and present outside observers with an image of constructive colonial partnership. Inclusion would succeed where unreliable intermediaries and compulsion failed.

Adding to the appeal was the opportunity Mass Education allowed the state to regain the initiative with a social programme that rested well with the post-war ethos of planning and progress. In the same way that metropolitan policy was guided by a desire to subject post- war social and economic uncertainty to assured planning, the post-war state wanted to regain the initiative and develop a momentum of its own. The post-war development plan,

102 This change in focus is noted by Iliffe in: Iliffe, J., The African Poor: A History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987. Lewis describes the way in which the very poorest lost out as a result of this change in priorities in: Lewis, J., Empire State-Building: War and Welfare in Kenya 1925-52, James Currey, Oxford, 2000.

WELFARE AND IMPROVEMENT IN NYASALAND 183 and detailed schedules and targets would convincingly banish memories of Depression doldrums and wartime stringency. Planned social progress and reform would encourage the development of a sense of inclusion and imperial cooperation among Africans. A colonial social welfare programme would create a sense of colonial citizenship and would reward Africans for the sacrifices made in pursuit of a common imperial cause. The piecemeal and reactive attempts to improve African welfare at Jeanes, Kota Kota and Misuku would give way to a well-planned experiment in comprehensive community development. Domasi represented an aspiration to a new sort of colonial partnership.

Section Two

The Domasi Community Development Scheme: Education, Environment and Government in Nyasaland, 1949-55

The following chapters look at the practical change wrought by Mass Education. They relate the ways in which the influences described in the previous chapters intersected to create the Domasi Community Development Scheme in Nyasaland. Awareness of international observation, metropolitan conceptions of the purpose of mass education, relations between the state and metropole, and state interpretations of the utility of the programme, all played a part in the creation of the Domasi project. Metropolitan concern for its image abroad, resulted in UNESCO involvement in the initial development of the scheme. The experimental campaign method recommended after 1943 resulted in an intensive effort to create a sense of initiative and citizenship within a single district in Nyasaland’s southern province. The good relations between Nyasaland and officials concerned with Community Development cultivated an increasingly rare sense of common purpose. And the territorial conditions into which the scheme was born lent it a flavour particular to the concerns of Nyasaland and central Africa.

But the intersection of international, metropolitan and territorial influences was never a happy coincidence of interests. Metropolitan misspecification of both the means used by, and the ends desired through Mass Education inhibited the practical performance of the programme. There was no consistent ideological base. Its roots simultaneously tapped economic necessity, political expediency and liberal-humanitarianism. Nor did it have any consistent sense of the desired social result, despite the very attractive sense of liberal social progress exuded by the policy documents. Individualism was constrained within the bounds required by social order. Citizenship was based on an unaltered sense of the superiority of Western social forms. And the value of African initiative was depreciated by the assumed limitations of African ways of living. The introduction of the programme into an atmosphere increasingly determined by political factors and characterised by a reassessment of the sustainability and value of colonialism further muddied the picture. Increasingly complex and unreliable relationships between metropole, international community and colonial state degraded the unity of purpose that effective colonial social reform required. Diversity of opinion and divergence of purpose on all levels created a complex inhibiting matrix. An added dimension – and one hitherto neglected by both metropolitan assessments – were the responses and involvement of Africans in the scheme, that bent and gave lie to the optimistic expectations of metropolitan policy-makers and territorial administrators, as means and goals were adapted by local interests. A colonial

188 policy aimed at remaking African social forms and attitudes could not expect to remain unchallenged by the people and communities it affected. The remainder of this thesis will develop these themes.

Chapter Three

Adaptation – Education, Hygiene and Nationalism in Domasi, 1949-52

Mr. Biswas saw himself leading a singing village as they cooperatively mended roads, cooperatively put up superhuts, cooperatively dug wells; singing they harvested one another’s fields. The picture didn’t convince: he knew Indian villagers too well … He doubted whether he could even get them to sing. He read of cottage industries: romantic words, suggesting neatly clad peasants with grave classical features sitting at spinning wheels in cooperatively built superhuts and turning out yards and yards of cloth before going on to the folk singing and dancing under the village tree in the evening, by the light of the flambeaux. But he knew what the villages were by night … Mr. Biswas working for the Community Welfare Office.1

1 Naipaul, V.S., A House for Mr. Biswas, Picador, London, 2002, pg. 526.

EDUCATION, HYGIENE AND NATIONALISM IN DOMASI 191

The British colonial venture was redefined in the late colonial period as an exercise in education in its broadest sense. No longer the subjects of colonial authority, Africans were now junior partners, imbibing from a pool of conferred and filtered knowledge and gradually learning how to govern and administer themselves. The central focus of this chapter is on a narrower aspect of this education. Schooling in its more limited and formal sense and the teaching of preventative primary health care and hygiene – undoubtedly the aspects of colonial control most popular among Africans during the late colonial period – form the core, but not the whole, of this examination.

Peering through the lens provided by the Domasi Scheme, the narrative reveals something of the attitudes and aspirations of the main actors involved in education in Nyasaland, and British Africa more generally – the administrators, advisors, missionaries and nationalist leaders whose interests intersected within the boundaries of social welfare provision. It describes the manner in which these attitudes, aspirations and interests changed before, during and after the brief years of Domasi’s existence and plots the trajectory of colonial social welfare ideals. The period straddled by the scheme saw the appearance of the first spidery cracks in the colonial edifice, cracks that rapidly spread and grew into the great structural break that finally removed any British misconceptions regarding the immediacy of decolonisation. Domasi, to a certain extent, aimed to plaster over these growing and irredeemable differences.

In the first years of its life the scheme made a strenuous effort to do so. These were the best and briefest of years for Nyasaland and for the British ideal of cooperative development imperialism. Provision of both education and preventative health care were the clearest and most tangible methods of bridging the divide between African aspiration and colonial legitimation. The African population – and the increasingly coherent nationalist cohort claiming their loyalties – aspired to these social provisions, assumed by them to be basic elements of contemporary post-war development. The colonial state (for which we may read Nyasaland), on the other hand, saw the expansion of social services as an indication to both a critical international community and Africans themselves, that ongoing colonial rule was nothing if not legitimate. This coincidence of interests was not durable. The growing strength of the nationalist movement in Nyasaland and the dissatisfaction produced by the Federation project in central Africa aggravated existing fissions and replaced education and

192 DANIEL KARK the provision of social services as the primary focus for both African nationalism and colonial administration. Domasi provided a focus for these experiments in social service provision. But the scheme was also a demonstration of deep mutual miscomprehension and the intrusion and localisation of external events.

EDUCATION, HYGIENE AND NATIONALISM IN DOMASI 193

1. Adaptation: Education in the British Colonial Empire, 1925-50

British approaches to African education changed substantially in the immediate post-war period. Metropolitan loyalties turned from theories of ‘adaptation’ and the transfer of technical skills to the provision of both a broader and deeper academic curriculum. Before this change occurred Africans received an education based on a curriculum adapted to particularly African conditions, with the emphasis on practical skills in a rural setting. These particular African conditions were defined, not by Africans, but by their colonial protectors, educators eager to preserve the ‘best’ aspects of African culture and transfer only the necessary and least corrosive elements of a British education. This selective system was motivated by a protective duty in the most benign estimation, and by racist assumptions of African intellectual inferiority in the least.1 In a more functional sense, subscription to this selective ‘adapted’ curriculum was a response to the colonies’ requirements for apolitical and skilled workers and professionals. But this is contested ground. Whether British intent was benign or malevolent is not established in any clear sense. There is no clear consensus on whether ‘adaptation’ was the product of a desire to fit African communities for life in sustainable rural communities, or a need to ensure that Africans remained inadequately educated and therefore politically subordinate.

Those emphasising the latter motivation stress the premeditation involved in the formulation of a policy designed to subject Africans to colonial rule, or at the very least ensure that they resigned themselves to it. The colonization of minds and the deliberate use of education by those in power to amplify imperial authority were ideas most famously articulated by Martin Carnoy.2 Chanaiwa placed Carnoy in a British African context. Colonial education, according to Chanaiwa, ‘is an appropriate barometer of the effects of European colonialism upon African individuals and groups’. The effects were corrosive for Africans – ‘politically the settlers wanted an educational curriculum that would be

1 Penny Hetherington notes the prevalence of racist assumptions amongst policy makers in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s. Oldham and Lugard believed there was a difference in the mental abilities of Europeans and Africans. W.M. Macmillan, Norman Leys, Leonard Barnes and Julian Huxley did not. In 1937 Empire Review published an article by Dr. H.L. Gordon, an expert on mental disease, which stated that ‘there is accumulating evidence that the native brain differs materially from the European brain, and that there is a definite racial inferiority in quantity as well as quality in the actual brain tissue’. See: Hetherington, P., British Paternalism and Africa 1920-1940, Frank Cass, London, 1978, pg. 81. 2 Carnoy, M., Education as Cultural Imperialism, David MacKay, New York, 1974.

194 DANIEL KARK revolutionary in creating efficient workers and dependent consumers out of the Africans, but conservative in matters of politics and civil rights … while [settlers] saw the need for African doctors, engineers, teachers, ministers, and administrators to relieve the problem of manpower among white minorities, they did not want these educated Africans to question colonial rule and morality, to qualify as voters, and to provide leadership for the African masses’.3 More subtle application of these ideas is found in work by Stephen Ball4 and Udo Bude5, among others. They contend that the school became the node through which the colonial authorities hoped to maintain political control over the colonies. It was a response to the perceived problems previously experienced with school leavers in India, and to ‘the increasing manifestation of social problems of various kinds among school leavers in the African colonies’. The problem posed by Africans given a literary education could be resolved with the deliberate introduction of the more limited adapted curriculum. This was not the only limitation placed upon African education – it was, moreover, stunted by the limited provision of education, and not just the limited adapted curriculum. Indeed, ‘the main feature of social control is the denial of schooling to the vast majority of the African population’.6

Clive Whitehead is convinced of the need for a more nuanced appreciation of the practical difficulties faced by colonial authorities with few resources and appreciable challenges.7 The colonial education system was not the product of a methodical exercise, but pieced together from the first diverse mission attempts to provide Africans with an education, from the advice provided by the Phelps-Stokes commissions in the 1920s, and from the current wisdom that Africans would be best served by an education that preserved vulnerable rural

3 Chanaiwa, D., The Political Economy of Colonial Education in Southern Africa: Summaries and Conclusions, in: Mugomba, A.T., Nyaggah, M. (eds.), Independence Without Freedom: The Political Economy of Colonial Education in Southern Africa, ABC-Clio, Oxford, 1980, pgs 227-9. 4 Ball, S., Imperialism, Social Control and the Colonial Curriculum in Africa, Journal of Curriculum Studies, vol. 15, no. 3, 1983. 5 Bude, U., The Adaptation Concept in British Colonial Education, Comparative Education, vol. 19, no. 3, 1983. 6 Both quotations from Op. Cit. Ball, pg. 245. 7 Whitehead has published extensively on the issues discussed here. See: The Advisory Committee on Education in the [British] Colonies 1924-61, Paedagogica Historica, vol. 27, no. 3, 1991; Education in British Colonial Dependencies, 1919-39: a reappraisal, Comparative Education, vol. 17, no. 1, 1981; The Historiography of British Imperial Education Policy, Part II: Africa and the Rest of the Colonial Empire, History of Education, vol. 34, no. 4, 2005; The Impact of the Second World War on British Colonial Education Policy, History of Education, vol. 18, no. 3, 1989; and British Colonial Education Policy: A Synonym for Cultural Imperialism?, in Mangan, J.A. (ed.), Benefits Bestowed? Education and British Imperialism, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1988.

EDUCATION, HYGIENE AND NATIONALISM IN DOMASI 195 social structures. The 1925 Education Policy in British Tropical Africa – discussed in the first chapter – was the product of this mix of influences. Education had as its aim the preservation of the ‘good’ aspects of African culture and the introduction of new methods that would transform the least attractive elements. Just how this would occur was not clearly articulated, but the locally contingent and penurious nature of the system Britain cobbled together in its African colonies doubtless precluded any uniform application. This chapter tends towards this contingent and piecemeal perspective – that there were racist and reactionary responses to African education within African colonial administrations is undoubted, but the chapter deals rather with the uncertainties and challenges faced within an essentially liberal gradualist British colonial agenda. Whitehead suggests that perhaps the best way of doing this would be to present the finer points raised by detailed case- studies. Domasi presents just such a case-study.

The war was a turning point for colonial education policy, and it is at this point that the thesis picks up the thread. Just as the war encouraged a tremendous outpouring of innovative reform within the Colonial Office and encouraged the expansion of the Office’s administrative ambit, so the Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies – and the Colonial Office more broadly – directed substantive change. With the direction of the African empire towards ultimate self-rule, an education system, both broad and deep, was required. The ideal of a comprehensive universal education system flourished in the post- war liberal Fabian environment and exercised the minds of the same group involved in the formulation of mass education. W.E.F. Ward, Deputy Educational Advisor to the Colonial Office from 1945-56, explained the new feeling clearly.8 While the colonial education system was adapting its curriculum to African conditions, African conditions were changing – ‘the weekly wage-packet and the store full of consumer goods, the cinema, and a high price for cocoa are far more powerful educational influences than the school. We need more and better schools quickly in order that the colonial peoples may learn that our civilization contains more and better things than money and material comforts’.9

8 For more on Ward and other metropolitan policy makers involved in colonial education see: Whitehead, C., Colonial Educators: The British Indian and Colonial Education Service 1858-1983, I.B. Tauris, London, 2003. Many of those discussed by Whitehead make appearances later in this chapter and in other sections of this thesis, particularly Christopher Cox, Margaret Read and Freda Gwilliam. 9 Ward, W.E.F., Education in the Colonies, in: Creech Jones, A. (ed.), New Fabian Colonial Essays, Praeger, New York, 1959, pg. 189.

196 DANIEL KARK The problem for Ward and his contemporaries was that, for very sound reasons, Africans desired free access not just to the cultural values but to the money and material comforts then denied them. For many Africans the colonial education system seemed to offer a good chance of accessing both spiritual and pecuniary benefits, but only where it provided the same literary education to all students regardless of race. The adapted curriculum, taught in the vernacular, was seen by Africans as a second best alternative, apt to keep them linguistically divided and subject to an inequitable system. Hygiene and village crafts were no substitute for mathematics and English. The very general African dissatisfaction with this curriculum was expressed clearly by a Ugandan respondent, quoted by Bude – ‘what we want is general education, as it is known. We say that we should be given education which is not set aside particularly for us, because the tendency has always been that ways should be found to discover a suitable system of education for the Africans … we should be given the standard course of education which would enable those can to come and join universities or certain colleges in this country’.10 Inferior health care, while neither the focus of African aspirations in Nyasaland nor of this chapter, was also a particular gripe. The fitful British focus on preventative public health and hygiene was a paler and inferior version of the curative medicine given European administrators and settlers. The Colonial Office and territorial administrations faced increasing pressure from below to broaden the scope and limit the mediation of the education and health care offered to African subjects.

The place of Mass Education in this scheme was ambiguous. As seen in chapter one, it was far from clear whether the scheme was intended to be a novel method of transforming the vast mass of the rural African population into modern, critical citizens through self-help, or, like the apparently moribund ‘adaptation’ concept, a convenient combination of African tradition and mediated European know-how. The method of implementation was also uncertain. Whereas mass education, like adaptation, depended on locally appropriate education, the territorial administration and African population in Nyasaland preferred the direct transfer of formal education and social services. Clearly, African local appropriation was possible without the colonial authorities deciding once more what was locally appropriate. This was the challenge facing the authorities in Nyasaland and those involved in the Domasi scheme – how to maintain the integrity of ideals of self-help and African

10 Op. Cit. Bude, pg. 353.

EDUCATION, HYGIENE AND NATIONALISM IN DOMASI 197 initiative elaborated within the Mass Education ethos while simultaneously and rapidly expanding formal education and other social services.

198 DANIEL KARK 2. ‘Urgent and Intractable’: Education in Nyasaland, 1891-1950

Africans in Nyasaland received only the most truncated and limited education. Despite an official colonial presence in the territory from 1891, it was not until 1926 that an Education Department was set up, and not until 1952 that the first government secondary school was opened. Before this Africans and the government relied heavily on the not insubstantial but essentially ad hoc efforts of the missions. The early history of education in the colony was the history of church efforts to mould Africans. Provided with paltry government grants-in- aid the missions, ranging from the dominant Presbyterian missions (UMCA and Livingstonia), to the Dutch Reform missions and the Catholic White Fathers provided an education to a very large number of African children.11 But the missions never had the funding to provide a comprehensive system. Given the diversity of mission beliefs the system was, of course, also far from coordinated.12 Africans themselves were not passive. Levi Mumba, a member of the Advisory Committee on Education after 1933, wrote a memorandum in that year demanding that the state ‘educate the masses to stand on their own feet’.13 Additionally, independent schools were set up by Africans, many by men who would later involve themselves in either outright rebellion or concerted efforts to reform the colonial state. But independent schools too suffered from a lack of funding from the protectorate government, and, moreover, were the subject of official suspicion. Their efforts were not always methodical.14

Method and direction had to come from what was then an inert state. Stimulus was provided in 1924 by the visiting Phelps-Stokes Commission. The commission’s report

11 The grants were miniscule: despite the fact that African taxpayers contributed 277,000 in tax revenue to the Nyasaland government they received only 2,000 in grants to the eleven missions providing African education. Just how many students had to be served by this grant is demonstrated by the efforts of the Blantyre and Livingstonia missions. The former had 15,000 pupils under its control in vernacular and English medium village and central-village schools by 1920. The latter had 45,000 pupils in its care. From: Pachai, B., A History of Colonial Education for Africans in Malawi, in: Op. Cit. Mugomba. 12 Although there were five education conferences held between 1900 and 1926. The conferences resulted in the promulgation of an education code in 1905 and, according to Pachai, were the first step in directly involving the government in African education. 13 Op. Cit. Pachai, pg. 146. 14 Pastor Kalinde Malinki, Charles Domingo, Hannock Phiri, Charles Chinula and, of course, John Chilembwe were all influential African educators. For more on both mission and African involvement in education see: Banda, K., A Brief History of Education in Malawi, Dzuka, Blantyre, 1982; Ranger, T., African Attempts to Control Education in East and Central Africa 1900-39, Past and Present, no. 32, 1965; and D’Souza, H., External Influences on the Development of Education Policy in British Tropical Africa from 1923 to 1939, African Studies Review, vol. 18, no. 2, 1975.

EDUCATION, HYGIENE AND NATIONALISM IN DOMASI 199 decried the lack of provision for an adequate state education system for Africans. It stung the government into appointing an education director in 1925 and convening an education conference in 1927. But Nyasaland had to wait for the arrival of Geoffrey Colby in 1948 for education to take any sort of notable place in development plans for the colony. The newly assertive government began to jettison the cautious alliances previously forged with the missions. Education was now to be the concern of government employees and government schools.15 Colby did not make social services his top priority, but they were certainly more of a priority now than they were before.16 The beneficiary of greater funding from both the Protectorate government and the Colonial Development and Welfare Acts, departments involved in social welfare could afford to be a little more ambitious. Indeed, funding, while still inadequate, expanded far beyond the paltry grants-in-aid made to the missions – over 90,000 in capital expenditure and 560,000 in recurrent expenditure was approved for the period 1945-50 by the protectorate government and under the 1945 CDWA.17

The scale of the problem was still daunting, even with the promise of expanded funding. Ensuring universal primary education for African children and expanded education for women and girls were two of the goals Nyasaland’s Post-War Development Committee set for the Protectorate in its 1946 report.18 The same report noted the huge disparity between these goals and the situation as it stood. In 1943, of 922,900 African children only 173,692 attended school with an average school attendance of 123,083. Clearly, both non- attendance and sporadic attendance were major problems. As was staffing – there were, in 1942, 608 teachers in training in Nyasaland and 1,180 certificated teachers working in the protectorate. This handful of teachers was disenchanted with inadequate pay, below that awarded to African public servants. Most African children did not have the benefit of a trained teacher. The 1948 report on education in Nyasaland by the Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies (ACEC) – the metropolitan body concerned with education –

15 For further discussion of how the state set about forging labour and education policies independent of labour recruiters and the missions see: Fairweather-Tall, A., From Colonial Administration to Colonial State: The Transition of government, education and labour in Nyasaland, c. 1930-1950, PhD Thesis, Oxford, 2002. 16 Not too much should be made of Colby’s efforts. There was certainly a massive increase in staff levels from 5,112 in 1948 to 10,693 in 1956, but almost all of the increase was directed towards productive agriculture, works and law and order. See: Baker, C., Development Governor: A Biography of Geoffrey Colby, British Academic Press, London, 1994. 17 From: Nyasaland Protectorate, Report of the Education Department, 1949, CO626/25, PRO. 18 Nyasaland Protectorate, Report of the Post-War Development Committee, 1946, CO626/26, PRO.

200 DANIEL KARK recorded that 137,000 pupils attended informal ‘bush schools’ taught by ‘totally unqualified teachers’. While there was evidently a desire to learn, there was an equally evident and dire lack of expertise.

All pupils and teachers suffered under these conditions, but women and girls were increasingly recognised to be particular victims. Margaret Read and Freda Gwilliam visited central Africa in 1947 and produced a report on the education of women and girls in Nyasaland – Gwilliam, like Read was dedicated, very influential and well-travelled, and was education advisor to Christopher Cox at the Colonial Office. Their report made for ‘depressing’ reading for some at the Colonial Office.19 Indeed it was. Not only did it confirm the generally depressed conditions in Nyasaland, but revealed a systemic and systematic discrimination against girls – they did not ‘get as square a deal as boys’. They were discriminated against at home, leaving school earlier for marriage and work. They were not promoted at school, with boys routinely favoured. And they were seen by parents and teachers to have few prospects after finishing school, and were therefore not a worthwhile investment. Read and Gwilliam described a tight and closing vicious circle for Nyasaland’s girls and women. The consequences of female poverty were even broader. As long as women remained uneducated and mired in persistent poverty Nyasaland as a whole would not succeed. Educated women were essential to Nyasaland’s development. Mass Education policy simultaneously emphasised the innately ‘progressive’ potential of women within the home, and the current regressive reality. The 1948 conference reported that ‘it is often the power held by African women over their men that keeps the latter to the more conservative superstitions and primitive lines of activity’20 Educated women could change this. According to the Colonial Office, they were best placed to use scarce resources to care for ‘progressive’ men and create happy and clean homes.

The ‘depressing’ news and promising future led ACEC to comment that Nyasaland’s situation was ‘unusually urgent and intractable. Urgent because, in spite of its long history and early promise, education has yielded such meagre results; intractable because, after years of discussion, Government has not succeeded in giving a firm direction to educational

19 Gwilliam, F., Read, M., Report on the Education of Girls and Women in Nyasaland August and September 1947, Nyasaland Protectorate, 16/1/48, CO525/213/5, PRO. 20 Op. Cit. CO852/1053/1, Report of Group V.

EDUCATION, HYGIENE AND NATIONALISM IN DOMASI 201 policy’.21 The situation was further aggravated by friction between the state and the missions, and between the state and Africans. Both missions and Africans were dissatisfied with the increasing assertiveness of the state. The missions, accustomed to running their own affairs with little supervision from the state, bridled at more stringent regulation and inspection. This stringency grated upon the missions, particularly since non-government schools accounted for 680 out of 682 educational institutions in the protectorate.22 This is not to say that the missions and the state did not share many of the same opinions. The level concurrence is demonstrated by both the report released by the Church of Scotland in 1947, and by the correspondence between the Director of Education in Nyasaland and Ward in the Colonial Office.23 The ill-feeling was, rather, in the degree of control to be exercised by the missions. Africans, too, were increasingly unhappy. The exclusion of many children regarded as overage and inadmissible to the appropriate standard, and the still inadequate provision of education overall were interrelated sticking points. Education was becoming more restrictive without becoming more expansive. Moreover, as noted in the 1948 ACEC report, there was little African involvement or co-operation on school boards or in education policy generally. The administration faced an intimidating combination of challenges.

Optimistic planning and scholarly investigation dispelled these brooding clouds. Post-war territorial policy-makers involved themselves in the same sunny plans and earnest enquiries as their metropolitan equivalents. The expansion of higher education, technical education and the general education of entire populations were intended to produce respectively an informed and cooperative elite, a group of skilled professionals and technicians, and populations prepared for ultimate self-rule. The first two aspirations – expanded higher education and technical education – did not lend themselves easily to application in Nyasaland. The first was not considered practical and the only response within Nyasaland was to suggest bursaries for external study. Technical education received more interest, but

21 ACEC (48) 45, Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies, Report by the Africa Sub-Committee on Education in Nyasaland, 1948, PRO, CO525/203/2. 22 This changing relationship between missions and state was explored by Fairweather-Tall. The state was no longer as reliant on the missions as allies and could afford to neglect the relationship cultivated before 1945. See: Fairweather-Tall, A., From Colonial Administration to Colonial State: The Transition of government, education and labour in Nyasaland, c. 1930-1950, PhD Thesis, Oxford, 2002. 23 See: Commission of the Church of Scotland Foreign Missions Committee, Some Proposals for the Improvement of Education in Nyasaland, 30/9/47; and Letter from A.G. Fraser to W.E.F. Ward, 21/12/47. Both from: CO525/202/6, PRO.

202 DANIEL KARK was limited to more ad hoc efforts within departments, with recourse to apprenticeships on the railway and the training of agricultural demonstrators.

Broader and general education, more than either tertiary or technical education, preoccupied Nyasaland’s administration in the five years after the war. Given the scale of the problem the education department was not deaf to the promise held out by mass education. While the Post-war Development Committee did not regard Mass Education as immediately worthy of attention beyond experimental attempts, it did actively endorse these attempts and endorsed the programme’s emphasis on literacy and popular support. The programme also met with an enthusiastic reception from missions, visiting metropolitan advisors and Africans alike. At least one mission, the DRCM, pre-empted the government with its own version of mass education. J.L. Pretorius, the educational secretary of the mission set up a scheme involving almost 24,000 people in adult literacy, general education and demonstration projects. The DRCM scheme proved influential upon the government’s initial forays into mass education. Read and Gwilliam, who both visited Pretorius’ scheme during their visit, also leant their support to Mass Education techniques – not surprising considering that Read was responsible for writing much of the policy herself. They also noted considerable enthusiasm among those African women aware of the programme – ‘Africans have seen the relation of Mass Education to the backwardness of girls’ education’.

EDUCATION, HYGIENE AND NATIONALISM IN DOMASI 203

3. ‘A Heaven-Sent Opportunity: Mass Education comes to Nyasaland, 1945-47

Although Mass Education was not intended to equate to mass literacy, the provision of a basic education to a very large number of African children and adults was a central element of the programme. The additional provision by the state of basic and new ways of thinking about initiative and citizenship and the programme’s focus on encouraging self-help promised to produce Africans prepared for ultimate self-rule. It promised to be cheaper and faster than the wholesale transformation of the Protectorate’s education system – something that was not to occur prior to independence anyway. Mass Education would provide a cheap expedient. Mass Education also offered a broader approach to social improvement. Hygiene and local cooperation were elements of this big educational push. Contingent upon performance under experimental conditions, the programme offered a near-perfect ameliorative under difficult circumstances.

Nyasaland’s government reacted favourably and fast. Edmund Richards was one of very few African Governors to show interest in metropolitan plans for Mass Education. The ACEC’s report on the reception of the Mass Education Report in the African colonies gratefully accepted Richards’ 1946 response as an ‘interesting and encouraging document’.24 Richards supported the appointment of Mass Education Officers (not to everyone’s taste in Nyasaland), the use of demobbed African troops as exponents of the scheme, and the facilitation of links between the state and chiefs in order to ensure Mass Education’s success. It was at this stage still intended to be a fairly limited exercise – it was to be confined to an experimental wing at the Jeanes Centre and mass literacy campaigns. The focus on the use of chiefs as well as the vernacular suggested an ongoing commitment to indirect rule and adaptation.25

The Mass Education effort did not gain any significant momentum until after 1947. Other British African colonies failed to show the requisite interest in the intervening period. Creech Jones issued a despatch (discussed in the first chapter) stating the case for Mass Education more clearly. He pushed the colonies not only to appoint specialised Mass

24 ACEC4/46, ACEC: Report of the Mass Education Group, CO859/83/6, PRO. 25 Richards to G.H. Hall, 10/1/46, CO859/83/6, PRO.

204 DANIEL KARK Education officers, but to set up experimental areas in which the proposed precepts could be tested. There was initial interest within the Colonial Office in setting up projects in both Nyasaland and as part of the ill-fated Groundnuts Scheme in Tanganyika. The latter was not to prove a viable prospect, but Nyasaland was energetically pursued by both members of the Mass Education Subcommittee within the Colonial Office and Andrew Cohen, the new head of the Africa Division in the Colonial Office and the most enthusiastic exponent of both democratic local government and Mass Education. Cohen wrote to Richards endorsing the governor’s plans for an experiment in Nyasaland. Nyasaland, he wrote, ‘seems to us in the Colonial Office an ideal field for such a project, with its highly intelligent Africans anxious for education and with all the work which has been done recently by the Nyasaland government in this particular field’. On a more prosaic level, he mentioned the appointment of two Mass Education officers – the McLarens, of whom more later – and the affiliation of the Nyasaland project with UNESCO.26

Nyasaland was to be the site of one of the very few ‘pilot projects’ affiliated directly with the UN and UNESCO. The Nyasaland scheme was of particular interest to both UNESCO and the Colonial Office for reasons already discussed in chapter one. What distinguished a ‘pilot project’ from the more common ‘affiliated projects’ was the presence of a direct link between the territorial government and UNESCO – a consultant was to be appointed to establish this link. The Nyasaland project was to be under the direct, but non-executive, supervision of UNESCO.27 UNESCO saw Nyasaland as ideal, admirably suiting its requirements for a reasonably homogenous ethnic and administrative area, with potential for rapid development, and representative of the development problems suffered by colonial Africa generally. It also had the benefit of being the subject of a visit by Read, who was at this time a member of the UNESCO expert panel, as well as advising the Colonial Office. Julian Huxley, the first Director-General of UNESCO, wrote to Creech-Jones in 1947 stating that the work in British Africa was a ‘heaven-sent opportunity for linking up UNESCO’s work with colonial development’.28

26 Cohen to Richards, 26/6/47, CO859/135/1, PRO. 27 The distinction between and affiliated and pilot project was established at the November 1947 UNESCO Conference in Mexico City. See: Associated Projects in Fundamental Education, CO859/171/4, PRO. 28 Huxley to Creech Jones, 14/5/47, CO525/202/7, PRO.

EDUCATION, HYGIENE AND NATIONALISM IN DOMASI 205

Creech Jones wrote formally to the Governor of Nyasaland in July 1947, urging all possible haste in setting up a scheme in Nyasaland, and recommending the use of the services of both the newly appointed mass education officers (who were due shortly in the Protectorate) and the UNESCO consultant. He wanted the experimental Mass Education scheme in operation no later than the start of 1948.29 The Mass Education Subcommittee contributed its own advice. Metropolitan sentiment and advice interpreted the project as primarily focused on the educational aspects of the scheme rather than the administrative elements. The Subcommittee recommended that the head of the scheme in Nyasaland be an educationalist and not and administrator.30 As will be seen shortly, the territorial government in Nyasaland demurred. The government nonetheless set Nyasaland’s Mass Education effort in motion in October 1947, informing the Secretary of State that the Mass Education officers and assistants were on the way to Mponela, an area in central Nyasaland.

29 Creech Jones to Acting Governor Brown, 10/7/47, CO525/202/7, PRO. 30 Draft minutes of the meeting of the Mass Education Subcommittee, 24/6/47, CO525/202/7, PRO.

206 DANIEL KARK 4. A False Start: Mponela, 1947-8

Mponela, Domasi’s predecessor, was stillborn. The area chosen for this first attempt was promising. Established on the reasonably fertile and watered plains of Dowa District, sixty kilometres from Lilongwe, the project area encompassed 100 square miles and contained a population of 15,000. It was chosen because it promised to respond rapidly to any injection of knowledge and funding – the population had previously responded well to a soil conservation scheme and had proved suitably cooperative. It was not therefore the potential of the natural surrounds or of the population that drew this initial foray into Mass Education down. Mponela’s failure owed far more to the personal failings of those involved in running the scheme, and to the lack of commitment of the state, that found the Mponela experiment rapidly running beyond its control. Nyasaland’s government drew lessons from the experience at Mponela that fundamentally affected the manner in which Domasi later operated and transformed Mass Education as it was implemented in Nyasaland.

Mponela was faithful to the goals of Mass Education, at least in its stated aims. It was aimed at eradicating illiteracy among the 85% of the population unable to read. But this was only part of the programme. The priority was to encourage development ‘by evoking specific demands among the people for social betterment and a higher standard of living and, by teaching and demonstration, to show the people how they themselves can satisfy those demands’.31 The creation of a spirit of self-help was the focus. Evoking this spirit required closer integration of local schools and the community, the encouragement of local crafts and recreational activities, and the coordination of UNESCO, mission and administrative efforts. The last requirement was particularly important, given the arrival at Mponela of the two Mass Education Officers – the McLarens, a husband and wife team – in October 1947, and the UNESCO consultant – Marius Gormsen, a Danish agronomist – in early 1948. These administrative relationships turned out to be the weak link in the project plan.

As it turned out, certain groups among the African population required neither administrative coordination nor a great deal of encouragement. With little urging

31 CDWAC No. 1142, Colonial Development and Welfare Act 1945, Central Africa, Mass Education Further Free Grant of 15,500, 1948, CO525/202/8, PRO.

EDUCATION, HYGIENE AND NATIONALISM IN DOMASI 207 enthusiastic self-help groups were quickly set up. The Ukani ‘Rise Up’ society was formed in January 1948. It met weekly, discussed local development issues and involved itself in well-cleaning and general sanitary activities. Until the scheme’s abrupt closure the group also involved itself in preparations for a mass literacy campaign and in the establishment of a buying cooperative. Women were involved in a group chaired by Mrs. McLaren.32 The group attracted between 200 and 300 women and girls to its meetings, at which they learned about knitting, sewing, cooking and hygiene. The women, on their own initiative, undertook to spread the knowledge to villages in the area. A mobile cinema van, the use of puppetry and the building of a meeting hall also proved popular and encouraging schemes. The McLarens, who had previously worked in Ethiopia on education projects, seem to have established an initial rapport with the local population, as well as encouraging a basic understanding of Mass Education.

The problem lay in the relationships established between the McLarens, the administration and UNESCO. They were uniformly bad. McLaren or Gormsen, or both, proved abrasive and prickly characters. Gormsen was not an educationalist by training, and couldn’t bring himself to see the point of either the scheme or Mass Education, an unfortunate point of view for a man appointed by UNESCO to provide expert advice. After a visit to the DRCM education experiment, Pretorius described Gormsen’s less than suitable opinions – ‘he wasn’t sure that literacy was necessary for all … agriculture should decide: the family following the garden and villages gradually disappearing’.33 The fact that he also spent the first part of his stay housed in a caravan in Mponela did nothing to improve his opinion of Mass Education. He also unfortunately developed terrible relations with McLaren. Gormsen considered that he was proceeding far too slowly and monopolising far too much of the work without coordinating with other departments or UNESCO. UNESCO responded by suggesting that single resident UNESCO experts should no longer be attached, and that itinerant experts be appointed instead.34 Gormsen was encouraged to leave Mponela and go on a tour of British colonial education projects. The governor, Colby, still wanted to keep him in Mponela – he still valued the link Gormsen provided

32 Mrs. McLaren’s initial or first name fails to appear in any of the Mponela documents. She consequently appears here as Mrs. McLaren. 33 Extract from letter from Mr. L. Pretorius, The Dutch Reformed Church Mission, Mkhoma, Nyasaland, dated 11th March, 1948, CO525/202/8, PRO. 34 Bowers to Beeby, 11/6/48, Fundamental Education Pilot Projects, CO525/202/8, PRO.

208 DANIEL KARK between the Protectorate and UNESCO. McLaren could curry no such favour. According to the Director of Education in Nyasaland, D.S. Miller, McLaren had succeeded in alienating all the administrative officers whom he had come into contact with. He described him as essentially ‘unstable and unlikely to show that persuasiveness which is essential in putting over a project such as this to a backward African community’.35 Word spread to the upper reaches of the Colonial Office. Cohen wrote to Colby that, while it would be a great pity to lose Mrs. McLaren, ‘McLaren himself is unsatisfactory’.36

Governor Colby went further. He was ‘frankly sceptical’ and saw fault not just with McLaren – who was redeemed only by his wife – but with the project itself. Mponela was far too closely focused on education, and not on broader aspects of development – ‘we are faced in this country with the problem of raising the standards of living of a very backward community, where local administration is rudimentary or even non-existent, where systems of land tenure are a brake on progress, where agricultural methods are primitive and wasteful and where sanitation, literacy, craftsmanship, etc., are in a most primitive stage’. In a more functional sense, Mponela had now run too far from the administration’s control and needed to be replaced by a scheme more closely supervised and centralised under a senior government administrator.37 Colby wanted a fresh start with a closely supervised and coordinated project under the control of an administrative officer rather than a Mass Education officer.

Cohen wanted to avoid both the international embarrassment of closing down the collaborative scheme and any damage caused to the relationship so carefully cultivated with UNESCO. He also wanted to avoid alienating the African population whose hopes had been raised by the project. There was a balance to be maintained however. Cohen wanted to shut the project down quickly in order to save face – it was felt that if Gormsen were left any longer in his position he would harm the reputations of both the UNESCO Fundamental Education and the Colonial Office Mass Education programme with increasingly critical reports. A meeting at the Colonial Office attended by Cohen, Cox, Read, Miller and Dr. Beeby, the Assistant Director-General of UNESCO, resolved that the project should be abandoned immediately. The immediacy and lack of consultation

35 Note prepared by Miller after a visit to Mponela, 12/7/48, CO525/202/8, PRO. 36 Cohen to Colby, 19/7/48, CO525/202/8, PRO. 37 Colby to Cohen, 15/7/48, CO525/202/8, PRO.

EDUCATION, HYGIENE AND NATIONALISM IN DOMASI 209 involved in Mponela’s termination was such that McLaren first learned of it when workers ceased work on building projects. He was left to communicate this closure to the African population as best he could. There are unfortunately no African voices from Mponela, but there is an understandable note of disappointment in McLaren’s extant letters to his African constituents. The closure of the scheme came to them as to McLaren himself, ‘as a bolt from the blue, suddenly and abruptly’.38

Miller complained of the ‘vague character of [McLaren’s] work to date’.39 Ignoring his obviously abrasive personality, McLaren may well have developed a better understanding of the nebulous nature of Mass Education work than his critics in UNESCO and the administration and his successors at Domasi. The work demanded of McLaren was inherently ‘vague’, but the results expected of him were anything but. As discussed in chapter one, Mass Education was, by nature, a worthy but amorphous mass of largely intangible methods and outputs. The goal was the creation of initiative within a group of educated, hygienic and thoughtful citizens. This could only reasonably be the product of years of adequate education, but the expectation among McLaren’s critics was that this platonic and otherworldly African citizen could be created in a relatively short period. McLaren himself pointed out this unrealistic impatience for results, an impatience that was shortly to characterise Domasi – the administration wanted immediate results when Mass Education could only realistically be a long-term programme. It is hard not to feel for McLaren, and wonder whether he didn’t have a better idea of the complexity of what Mass Education in its unadulterated form entailed. In his final letter to Cox at the Colonial Office he stated with pathos that ‘We came to give 10 years to Mass Education, and leave asking, “What happens next?”’40

38 Letter from McLaren to Cohen, 14/11/48, CO525/202/8, PRO. 39 Op. Cit. Note by Miller, 12/7/48. 40 McLaren to Cox, 14/11/48, CO525/202/8, PRO.

210 DANIEL KARK 5. A False Start: Domasi, 1949

The Colonial Office and the administration in Nyasaland did not waste time in determining what happened next. Plans were already afoot to shift the effort to an experimental Mass Education ‘development district’ centred on the Jeanes School at Domasi. Miller wrote to Cox sketching the proposed scheme in December 194841, and Colby did likewise in a letter to Creech Jones at the beginning of 1949. This was to be a different type of Mass Education project. Firm control was going to be maintained by the protectorate administration, with the succeeding scheme to be the province of administrative officers rather than specialist mass education officers. UNESCO no longer had a substantial role in the scheme. Rather than being a pilot project upon which the metropolitan government and UN could found a symbiotic relationship, the Domasi Development District was to suit local needs and a local conceptualisation of what Mass Education should mean. The head of the new project was to be a ‘correspondent’ with UNESCO and no more.42 He was, moreover, not to be a Mass Education Officer selected by the Colonial Office, but a proven administrative officer selected by the governor – ‘to obtain results in operations of this nature it is essential, in my view, to work through officers who are already in close touch with the African and who enjoy his confidence; such are the officers of the administration’.43 Domasi was to concentrate on the development of a sense of ‘responsibility’ among Africans as well as effecting an improvement in standards of living. And it was to succeed where the attached Jeanes School had failed, by ensuring that the lessons learned were reinforced by able and firm administration. The articles of Mass Education were already being bent by an increasingly assertive Protectorate government towards their more stringent administrative requirements, and away from metropolitan needs.44

41 Miller to Cox, 1/12/48, CO525/202/8, PRO. 42 Cohen to Read, 1/7/49, CO847/42/2, PRO. The Colonial Office continued to insist however, that the scheme was still an important element in the establishment of a viable relationship with UNESCO and of great propaganda value ‘as an example and proof of the desire of the United Kingdom to develop methods to improve the lives of dependent peoples’. From: Armitage Smith to Mackay, 18/8/49, CO847/42/2, PRO. 43 Colby to Creech Jones, 29/1/49, CO847/42/2, PRO. 44 The Colonial Office nonetheless saw the scheme as worthy of continued funding – Cohen leapt to the scheme’s defence when the Treasury threatened to demand that the Nyasaland government pay for at least part of Domasi. He stated the need for Domasi as an experiment which would influence British policy in Africa as a whole. The Treasury demand would be ‘seriously embarrassing’ to the Colonial Office’. From a note to Gorell Barnes from Cohen, 15/8/49, CO847/42/2, PRO.

EDUCATION, HYGIENE AND NATIONALISM IN DOMASI 211

The area to be included in the scheme enclosed some 100 square miles (half of which was inhabited and the rest forest reserve) and a population of around 14,000. Population density, at 250 to 300 per square mile, was much higher than the Protectorate average of 60 per square mile. The density actually varied, from well over 250 people per square mile in the southern areas near Zomba township, to around 50 per square mile in the northern areas around Malosa. Domasi coincided with the area of Native Authority Malemia, a Yao. A study conducted by J. Clyde Mitchell, a sociologist employed by the Nyasaland government to survey the area, provides a picture of the economic and cultural conditions within Malemia in the late 1940s.45 The region was culturally diverse, three quarters of the population being from the mainly Muslim Yao, and the balance from the Nyanja (today referred to as Chewa) and Lomwe (who were initially labelled Nguru). The Yao were relatively recent interlopers in the highland territories, originally inhabiting the area between the Rovuma and Lujenda Rivers in Portuguese East Africa. Famine and attacks upon them forced the Machinga division of the Yao to migrate to what became Nyasaland. The Malemia Yao group arrived in the area around Domasi after 1865. Occupied by a group of Nyanja under their chief Nyani, the original inhabitants were soon overwhelmed by the Yao. The inherited mythology was that Chief Nalutumbo Malemia bought the land from Nyani after giving him a red blanket and calling on a clan-name shared by the two men. It was more likely that Nyani was forced to concede his territory to Chief Malemia and beg his protection. Regardless, by the time Anglican and Presbyterian missionaries arrived in the area after 1878 Malemia’s Yao had established themselves as the dominant group in the area and Malemia himself was the undisputed chief.46 The Yao conquerors steadily established ties with the local Nyanja population, integrating them into their social structures. Along with the chief’s matrilineal relatives, the wapa pewele, and the Yao slaves, the acakapolo,47 the Yao also allowed groups to live under the protection of the

45 The results of the study eventually appeared in: Mitchell, J.C., An Outline of the Social Structure of Malemia Area, The Nyasaland Journal, vol. iv, no. 2, 1951. The following paragraphs draw heavily upon his study. Mitchell later wrote a study of the Yao in the southern region of Nyasaland, from which much of the above information is taken. See: Mitchell, J.C., The Yao Village: A Study in the Social Structure of a Nyasaland Tribe, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1956. 46 An account of the Yao migrations which resulted in Malemia’s arrival in southern Nyasaland is found in: Funsani, H.F.G., A History of T.A. Malemia, Chancellor College History Seminar Papers, 1971-2. The fact that the first Malemia was the undisputed head did not mean that succession was a process similarly free from dissent. The second Malemia, Kasabola, was challenged by the first Malemia’s brother, Kumtaja. Kasabola had to campaign 47 Yao slaves enjoyed a great deal of social mobility and were frequently trusted advisors to the chief. They could be redeemed by relatives upon payment ivory or calico or the provision of a similar slave.

212 DANIEL KARK chief. Called wakwisa, these groups ‘grasped the leg of the chief’ and were accepted into Yao chieftainships. This meant that, while 25% of the population in Malemia’s area was not Yao in 1945, there was almost no indication of social friction.

Under Yao control the local economy became increasingly diverse and specialised. Slaves and ivory were traded at the coast for beads, guns and gunpowder. Relationships with the first wave of British missionaries and settlers were similarly promising for Malemia.48 The Reverend Duff MacDonald and Acting-Consul for Lake Nyasa John Buchanan met with the chief in 1879 and secured land for a mission on the slopes of Zomba Mountain. While the third Yao chief in the area, Nkola (1892-1905), ceded all his sovereign rights to Queen Victoria in March, 1892, he remained amenable to colonial rule, welcoming missionaries and earning in return British military assistance. Two hundred Sikhs helped him to defeat his Yao rival, Kawinga in 1894. Nkola’s successor, Mpila (1906-28) was similarly loyal to the British. He provided support during the Chilembwe rising in the Southern Province in 1915. He reputedly stated that ‘I’m not going to let Europeans get killed just to make John Chilembwe governor’.49 His successor, Gerald Malemia (1929-45) was appointed NA after the arrival of Indirect Rule and the Native Authority system in 1933.50 When he died in 1945, Gerald Malemia was succeeded by Allan Masokonesya, who was renamed Allan Malemia. He was the chief when the Domasi Scheme was established.

The Malemias’ dealings with the British were not always profitable. Their trade in slaves was suppressed after Harry Johnston’s proclamation of the Protectorate in 1891.51 The Yao were then forced onto the Protectorate’s labour market by the introduction of currency and tax in 1893. They nonetheless maintained a privileged political position and prestige among

48 The first Malemia’s life is obscure. He spent some time around Mlanje after quarrelling with his uncle. His nephew, referred to in the footnote above, became the second Malemia (1875-91). The latter was also known as Malemia Wandalama, a name which referred to his preference for jewellery made of coins. He was not Christian, but developed a good relationship with European missionaries 49 See: Shepperson, G., Price, T., Independent Africa, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1958, pg. 251. Mpila is known as Malemia Wakucipilala – Malemia of the Pillar – as he had himself buried under a brick tomb which looks like a pillar. 50 It must be emphasized that there is a difference between the traditional functions of a chief conferred upon them by traditional rites and mores, and the administrative functions which were conferred on Native Authorities after 1933. 51 Johnston’s initial impression of the Yao was not flattering: ‘I felt bound to make our Protectorate of Nyasaland a reality to the unfortunate mass of people who are robbed, raided and carried into captivity to satisfy the greed and lust of the Yao race, these again being incessantly incited to engage in internecine war and slave-raiding forays by the Arab and Swahili slave-traders who travel between Nyasaland and the German and Portuguese littoral.’ From: Mitchell, 1956, pg. 29.

EDUCATION, HYGIENE AND NATIONALISM IN DOMASI 213 the Nyanja, Lomwe and the British invaders. The economy within Malemia’s area was divided between subsistence production, cash-cropping and peri-urban activities focused on the nearby capital, Zomba, and on the arterial road bisecting the area on its way north to Liwonde. Family incomes were estimated to be at least 14.10/ per annum, mainly from agricultural production, but also through livings earned as part-time blacksmiths, bicycle repairers, diviners and tailors. Incomes varied widely between the 3,199 male taxpayers in the area. Some earned little. 579 unskilled labourers earned little more than 1 a month for half the year, 539 artisans earned 1.10/ per month for 9 months, and 94 traders earned 12 per year. Others earned a little more – 93 teachers and clerks earned 36 per annum. Twelve per cent of the male population (392 men) was absent, working as migrant labourers in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia.52 Another 15% were regularly away from home. A few Africans ran small road-side canteens, but the field was dominated by the bigger Indian shops. Of the total area income of 51,000, 19,000 was earned through wages, 28,000 from agricultural production, 3,600 was held in livestock, and 400 was returned in migrant remittances.53 Incomes were spent on a growing range of goods. According to Mitchell, most young men wore European-type clothing. Many African households owned sewing machines, bicycles, beds, enamel dishes and mosquito nets, lived in houses with glass windows and panelled doors, drank tea, used soap, salt and sugar, and bought scarves, ink, dark glasses, brilliantine and playing cards.54

Agricultural livelihoods were dependent on a good rainy season between October and May (called cuku by the Yao) in order to provide sustenance through the long dry season (called cau) and into the next rainy period. Heavy labour, including hoeing, planting and weeding, was carried out during this period, mainly by women. Cau, by contrast, was a period of social interaction, involving the eagerly anticipated initiation rites, visiting and dances. The area’s natural setting consisted of forested hillsides and plains dissected by the Domasi River and perennial and seasonal streams.55 Trees covered the hillsides along the edge of Zomba Mountain (much of which was declared forest reserve), with rainforest along the

52 In 1953 over 159,000 Nyasaland men were absent in Southern Rhodesia and South Africa. Debenham, F., Nyasaland: The Land of the Lake, HMSO, London, 1955, pg. 175. 53 Income statistics from: Domasi Paper 2, An Area Assessment, 18658, MNA. 54 Mitchell made a note of the varied inventories of Indian shops and smaller African canteens. 55 The area derived its name from the streams and rivers which run through it. The Ngoni – itinerant descendents of the Zulu – passed through the area and named it ‘Awa ndiwo madzi’ – ‘this is good water’. The later Yao settlers in the area transliterated this into Ndomasi. The British in their turn converted this into ‘Domasi’. This story was related by Gibson Zembeni at the Malawi Institute of Education.

214 DANIEL KARK few perennial mountain streams and trees over thirty feet high in the forestry reserves. On the open plains to the east of the mountain the tree cover had long been cleared for agricultural land. Crops or elephant grass grew between the few remaining large trees. The southern boundary was roughly defined by Zomba township and a few European estates.

A broad range of problems faced the scheme. Education and health care had always been fairly rudimentary in the district. There had long been a missionary presence, partially due to the less hostile reception given Christianity by the chiefs in the area. Church of Scotland missionaries were welcomed into the area by Mkoola Malemia in 1884. Dr. Henry Scot and his ministers built a church, hospital and school, the latter initially open only to chief’s sons. While the first Malemias refused to become Christians, their successors converted, including the man appointed NA in 1946, Chief Allan Malemia. The first African minister, the Rev. Steven Kundeca was ordained in 1911. The area was consequently a hospitable centre for the Christian mission to proselytize and educate. Despite the presence of missions and missionaries, education had advanced little since 1884, when the Domasi Mission School was established. The large number of Muslim Yaos felt the lack of educational opportunities particularly keenly.

Read was not given to optimism regarding the scheme’s chances – the area ‘has so far resisted twenty years of being in the neighbourhood of the Jeanes School, making little or no progress as a result’.56 Cohen was more optimistic, stating that the Nyasaland government believed ‘the support of the bulk of the people there was … assured’.57 Colby agreed, despite initial assessments that the project should be situated in a less challenging area more clearly disposed towards a successful outcome. He was in favour of concentrating on the region surrounding Domasi based on the unfavourable circumstances facing the population there.58

Unreformed local government, overcrowding, poor natural resource use, rudimentary education and substandard hygiene were all addressed in the initial plan for Domasi. Where the focus at Mponela was predominantly on gradually raising consciousness, particularly with respect to education, Domasi was intended to be a comprehensive and functional

56 Note from Read to Cohen, 4/7/49, CO847/42/2, PRO. 57 Cohen to Read, 7/7/49, CO847/42/2, PRO. 58 Note by Colby on The Development District – Preliminary Operations, 18/10/48, 262/10F, MNA.

EDUCATION, HYGIENE AND NATIONALISM IN DOMASI 215 development district from the very beginning. It was also intended to be the germ of a far greater change – the project was to expand to encompass the whole of Zomba District by the end of the first phase in 1951, and to provide inspiration and precedent for change in the rest of Nyasaland and British central Africa. To this end the Protectorate government expected tight administrative control from senior officers, compliance from Africans. The consensual aspects of Mass Education were watered down – the administration still wanted the ‘willing cooperation of the people concerned’, but required African ‘initiative’ only ‘where possible’.59

This chapter deals with attempts to improve education and hygiene during the early years of the Domasi Scheme.60 ‘Education in its widest sense’ involved the improvement of the physical infrastructure in the Domasi development district and the encouragement of formal learning among children and adults of all ages, but it also encouraged Africans to change the way they thought about their broader living circumstances. As will shortly be seen, this could extend to the use of natural and social turmoil as object lessons.

Domasi was constituted a separate administrative district in 1949 and letters were sent to all department heads informing them of the importance the administration attached to the project. An experienced administrative officer was placed in charge of Domasi District. Thomas Thomson was, in 1949, in his fifteenth year of colonial service in British Africa. He had previously served as District Commissioner of Liwonde district just north of Domasi. During the war Thomson gained experience in adult education while serving in East Africa, and, as Captain Thomson, wrote a guide to military Chinyanja.61 He stayed on as a Civil Demobilisation Officer in its immediate aftermath. He believed in the importance of his teaching work, stating, a little immodestly, that it constituted ‘the greatest undertaking in adult education in the history of the empire’.62 Having joined the Nyasaland

59 CDW (D) no. 1444, Nyasaland Community Development Scheme, Further Free Grant of 7,750, 27/7/49, CO847/42/2, PRO. 60 This broad ‘Education’ also included changing the way Africans dealt with natural resources and political reform, but these attempts are dealt with in succeeding chapters. The distinction is somewhat artificial given the intended comprehensive nature of the scheme, but it is nonetheless made in order to provide a coherent account of the diverse challenges which faced different aspects of the scheme. 61 Thomson, T.D., Military Chinyanja, East African Army Education Corps. Thomson also later wrote a handy general Chinyanja guide and lexicon. See: Thomson, T.D., A Practical Approach to Chinyanja, Government Printer, Zomba. 62 Thomson, Educating the East African Soldier, MSS/Afr/s/1158, RH.

216 DANIEL KARK Secretariat after the War, Thomson was relieved of his duties in anticipation of his new appointment as District Commissioner for Domasi. He was asked to go on a study tour of other British African colonies where similar education schemes were under way. Mass Education projects in Tanganyika, the Kabete Social Welfare Training Centre in Kenya, the Teso scheme in Uganda and the Udi scheme in Nigeria were all recommended to Thomson and his wife, Marjorie. During his leave in Britain he bought equipment needed for Domasi, attended the Cambridge Summer School (that he found ‘very useful’), visited the Colonial Office and consulted Margaret Read at the London Institute of Education.63 Thomson took pains to use his two months leave to study Mass Education and Community Development thoroughly. His account of the Domasi Scheme, his reports and his other writings reveal a sharp eye and a particular nature. Details mattered to Thomson, and he was consequently considered by Colby and by the administration to be an appropriate choice for DC Domasi.

Thomson was, according to the Colonial Office, a man ‘from whom the best could be expected’.64 He possessed a number of qualities that were to give the project an advantage over its antecedent at Mponela. He knew Nyasaland well, was fluent in what is now called Chichewa, and considered himself an amateur anthropologist.65 He was determined to develop a coherent team in Domasi – one of the key goals of the experiment was to determine whether Mass Education could be encouraged by a team of non-specialist administrative officers in the normal course of their duties. Each of the five European officers was required to have a good idea of what the others were driving at. Thomson was also intensely focused. He believed it important to have a handful of key project goals. Dispersing funding and effort served nobody’s interests. He turned up at Domasi ‘with a notebook full of bright ideas that seemed to cover a large number of desirable improvements and innovations in local life. A month or two after starting work I fortunately lost it’. The effort needed to be focused on a few key ideas – ‘members of a team must be discouraged and must discourage themselves from having too many bright ideas too often … the few main objectives must be decided upon and stuck to unless exceptionally good reason arises for giving time and effort to some particular sideshow.

63 Talbot Edwards to Thomson, 7/2/49, 262/10F, MNA. 64 Minutes of the third meeting of the Committee on Mass Education (Community Development), 2/12/49, CO1000/1, PRO. 65 After finishing his work as DC in Domasi, Thomson wrote an ‘anthropological primer’. See: Thomson, T.D., Notes on African Customs in Nyasaland, Government Printer, Zomba, 1956.

EDUCATION, HYGIENE AND NATIONALISM IN DOMASI 217

This calls for the thrashing out by all concerned of the points to be included in the programme and also may require the Officer in Charge to be a little heavy-handed at times’. Thomson sounds a bit of a bully, but he recognised the purpose of the Community Development programme and paid lip-service to the need for consultation with the African population. Thomson spoke the language of Community Development fluently and presented the scheme as a persuasive and consultative experiment:

What is required is a study of local problems, first of all from any papers which may be available and then of course on the ground. From this will emerge not only a list of immediate desiderata as the outsider sees them but also some idea of what the people themselves regard as problems, and of their main interests. It so happened that in Domasi the main interest of the people themselves … was in education. The three main immediate problems from the outsider’s point of view were development of Local Government, fundamental soil conservation, and improvements in village hygiene … attention must first be given, so far as the public is concerned, to what people recognize as a pressing problem. There is no harm done if those who have come to help them proceed to deal with one or two other problems which the outsider regards as of first importance, but it will usually be possible to link progress in dealing with these to the efforts made to solve the recognised problem.

Thomson, while convinced of the need for administrative coercion under certain circumstances (as shall be seen in the succeeding chapters) appeared faithful – at least initially – to the values of Mass Education. He extolled the virtues of his inquisitorial approach. When determining the solution to a particular problem his officers had to ask ‘“What do you want? Why do you want it? What are you going to do about it?”’66 The onus was supposedly placed on Africans to rely on their own initiative rather than depending on the government to meet their needs. Spoon-feeding was ‘sedulously avoided, and reasoned presentation of ideas and requests is insisted upon; a combination, in fact, of the techniques of Socrates and Tom Sawyer’.67

66 All above quotations from: Thomson, Draft of Domasi First Stage, MSS/Afr/s/1158, RH. 67 Thomson, Summary and Note on Domasi Scheme, NSG1/6/3, MNA.

218 DANIEL KARK

Figure 6 Governor Colby opens the Domasi Scheme, 14th of January, 1950. Debenham, F., Nyasaland: The Land of the Lake, HMSO, London, 1955.

The scheme started hopefully. Colby officially opened it in January 1950, with the summer rains looming in the background. He declared his desire to bring progress to Domasi ‘very much faster than it has ever been in the past’. Europeans, he claimed, had devoted their lives to helping Africans in Nyasaland for the previous sixty years, and were to do so again at Domasi.68 Preliminary work began immediately. Construction of housing and classrooms commenced and there was a mini-boom in construction employment in the Domasi area. The area was surveyed, partially by Thomson himself using a bicycle wheel and compass – ‘it became a standing local joke that Government could only afford half a bicycle for the job’.69 The district team also began revising the unreliable population and social statistics then available for Domasi. The material assembled, particularly for education, revealed a dismal situation. Only around ten per cent of the total population was literate in the vernacular. Of around 4,000 children aged between five and eighteen in Domasi District,

68 Colby also had to allay people’s suspicions that the scheme was really a cover for the alienation of land. ‘I understand that idle people have been saying that the reason for this is that government proposes to take your land away from you. I should like to take this opportunity of telling all of you that this is untrue; indeed, the reverse is the case. We have created a separate district of Domasi in order that we can confer particular benefits on the inhabitants of it.’ From speech given by Colby opening Domasi Scheme, 14/1/50, MSS/Afr/s/2200/2/3, RH. 69 Annual Report for the Domasi Community Development Scheme, 1950, Nyasaland Protectorate, MNA.

EDUCATION, HYGIENE AND NATIONALISM IN DOMASI 219 only 1,138 attended school and only 700 of these were actually from Domasi itself – the remainder were boarders at the three best schools in the district, at the Jeanes, the Universities Mission and the Church of Scotland schools. Over half of the students were concentrated in the first few years of school. As in the rest of Nyasaland, there were very high drop-out rates, a wide spread of ages within each standard and particularly poor performances and attendance by girls. A particular problem was the absence from schools of those children too old for entry into district schools and the absence of Muslim Yao students, unwilling to attend Christian schools.

The health of the population of Domasi District was in an equally dismal condition. There was, for a start, inadequate statistical information on health and morbidity within Domasi. A detailed survey was not completed until the end of 1950. Until then the district team had to make do with the records of the Jeanes’ dispensary and a pre-war school survey. Preliminary results for the survey, combined with these records, nonetheless revealed the deep physical poverty of Domasi’s inhabitants. Only twenty per cent could be considered in ‘negative good health’ – in other words only twenty per cent showed no obvious signs of ill-health. Most children were anaemic and malaria and bilharzia were endemic. Half of women and two-fifths of men tested positive for syphilis. The ‘main enemies’ causing this were ‘dirt, disease and ignorance’.70 ‘Ignorance’ was the key, and was intimately tied up with the goals meant to be instilled through Mass Education. The health sister, Mary Kennedy, and the hospital assistant, Mr. Kumsinda, immediately began touring the district making presentations on diet, the protection of stream banks and water sources, the digging of latrines and ash-pits, and the planting and use of bananas and sugarcane.71 The health sister’s interest in traditional African diets and the hospital assistant’s penchant for conveying these messages through song would, it was hoped, add to the message already put across through literacy pamphlets and newsletters.

‘Ignorance’ apparently had deep and tangled roots. According to Thomson deficiencies in knowledge were rather more easily corrected than what he believed to be malformed cultural institutions and social practices. The district team was happy to co-opt the best of

70 This phrase appears over and over again in the hygiene sections of the annual reports for the scheme. It first appears in the Annual Report for 1950. 71 Mr. Kumsinda’s first name does not, unfortunately, appear in the reports.

220 DANIEL KARK the traditional, but set itself against what it saw as the most destructive aspects of African social mores. The equation of voluntary work with forced labour, individualism and the uxorilocal-matrilineal system – whereby a husband was expected to live in his wife’s village – were all blamed in varying degrees for the social dysfunction observed by the team. Thomson decried the lack of voluntary effort from Africans in the area. He claimed they offered ‘nothing for nothing and precious little for sixpence’. This social insularity was tied closely, he felt, to the rise of individualism and a wage-labour mentality among Africans. The ties of community and family were breaking down and not being replaced by anything quite as binding – ‘there is a social void ready to receive either good or evil, and a vast amount of jealousy and suspicion … to stand in the way of social development’.

Thomson and many of his fellow officers nonetheless felt the breakdown of certain African institutions to be a desirable end. Thomson reserved a particular scorn for uxorilocal marriage ties. Tying a man to his wife’s village caused him to be bogged down by an extended network of maternal nephews and nieces. He was required to move to his wife’s village, and work for his wife’s family. Homes in the wife’s village were frequently abandoned upon a spouse’s death, as men were expected to move away. This, according to Thomson, discouraged economic development as men had no incentive to invest in their property, families or land – they had no incentive to stay at home in an economy that offered men increasing opportunities as wage and migrant labourers. These weak familial and communal links resulted in the ‘tragedy of broken homes’. The Domasi team saw themselves facing a multifaceted problem, the major causes of which ‘appear to be lack of early training in the home and at school, imitation of the bad side of European individualism, the matrilocal system, and ignorance, all aggravated by boredom. It is against such a background that social development in detail must be considered’.72

Thomson and the district team were caught in a familiar bind, one the Colonial Office faced in the immediate post-war period, and continued to face in its efforts to educate Africans for eventual independence. ‘The bad side of European individualism’ and the dangers inherent in such traditional African social practices as uxorilocal marriage, were both berated in equal measure. Africans had to be protected from the deleterious effects of both African and European social practices. The administration in Domasi was faced with the

72 All quotations taken from Ibid.

EDUCATION, HYGIENE AND NATIONALISM IN DOMASI 221 familiar problem of what to include and exclude in a selective presentation of European and African mores by Europeans to Africans. Africans were again to be presented with an ‘adapted’ curriculum, based on what was felt to be best for them. But they were no longer willing to accept the curriculum as given.

Education, ‘the main interest of the people themselves’, was nonetheless initially tackled by both Africans and administrators with enthusiasm. The district team began organising for a mass literacy scheme. Plans for the opening of mass literacy centres were made, and two- dozen men and women were recruited to be trained as emergency literacy officers. The centres were aimed both at children who had dropped out of school or had never been to school, and at illiterate adults. They were to operate during the dry season between April and November, ‘thus avoiding the need for anything more substantial than the shade of a mango tree’. Adult education night schools were revived at the Jeanes Centre. Africans provided a demonstration of the initiative desired of them. Four unofficial and independent ‘village’ schools were set up in quick order, catering for almost seven hundred pupils. While the results produced by the unqualified teachers were not exemplary, over a fifth of the original enrolment of 683 students passed a basic literacy test after three months. An unofficial adult night school, intended to ‘raise up’ the status of participants, was set up near Zomba and quickly attracted over 150 pupils.73 There was also heavy and spontaneous demand for access to the new official services provided by the government. Women were particularly enthusiastic students – of the 700 odd adults who started attending the literacy schools over 450 were women. The only people more enthusiastic than women in their desire to acquire the very basic education on offer were children. They too turned up at the mass literacy centres expecting a basic vernacular education in the ‘three Rs’. As the demand for a basic literary education grew resourceful use was made of whatever facilities were available. The classes frequently met under trees in the open. Teachers were often volunteers with a level of education scarcely more advanced than those they were teaching. One teacher was found leading a class of 193 assisted by a barely literate girl. Equipment was rudimentary – ‘it was a proud centre that had a scrap of blackboard’.74 These conditions failed to act as an effective deterrent. Families continued sending children in the hope that a literary education, however basic, would facilitate access to highly desirable

73 See: Zomba Night School Constitution, DCZA1/8/8, MNA. 74 DP5, Kwaca Schools: An Emergency Education Scheme in Nyasaland, NS3/3/2, MNA.

222 DANIEL KARK clerical and professional careers. This presented Thomson and his team with a problem – the presence of so many children caused the number of adults attending literacy centres to dwindle. Only 25 of the 704 adults who started at the centres reached testing point. Separate facilities were required for Domasi’s adults. A beginning had, nonetheless, been made. Despite Thomson’s desire for a deeper selective and adapted approach to education, a rapid expansion of facilities for propagating basic literacy was now underway. Domasi had already passed the point at which Mponela had faltered.

EDUCATION, HYGIENE AND NATIONALISM IN DOMASI 223

6. Famine as Education – The 1949 Nyasaland Famine

Towards the end of 1949 famine intervened in Nyasaland’s south. Megan Vaughan wrote about the famine at length in her ‘Story of an African Famine’.75 She compared the very different conceptualisations of the famine’s underlying causes and the manner in which it was interpreted by those involved. The famine was variously seen by government officers to be a result of marketing failures, poor African farming techniques, weak African social structures and coping skills, and the rapid expansion of the African population. Vaughan took these perspectives as her starting points and demonstrated that those who suffered were not Africans in general, but very particular groups. The famine was not general, nor was it primarily a result of the causes posited by those organising relief. It was caused, according to Vaughan, by the failure of those without the necessary entitlements to access adequate food.76 Single or abandoned women, the aged and children were among those most deeply affected.

This part of the study doesn’t take issue with Vaughan’s conclusions. Rather, it looks at the manner in which the famine was conceived by the colonial administration as a timely object lesson for Africans – indeed the famine became part of the colonial curriculum. This perhaps portrays administrative motives as more callous than they actually were. There was, in fact, a genuine sense of dismay at the way in which the famine disrupted the progress of the Domasi scheme and the post-war development programme, and at the great suffering it caused the African population. But the district team and the Protectorate administration took their opportunities where they could, and saw this as a salutary experience for Africans. The famine, moreover, confirmed the administration and the Domasi district team in their opinion that African traditional structures and a warped assumption of ‘individualism’ by the African population posed threats to the colonial development project that had to be eliminated. Education was crucial.

The failure of the 1948/9 rains was the proximate cause of the famine. The lack of rain after November 1948 resulted in a very poor maize crop. The government began to express

75 Vaughan, M., The Story of an African Famine, CUP, Cambridge, 1987. 76 The word ‘entitlement’ here connotes the meaning attached to it by Amartya Sen. Vaughan’s work was primarily a contribution to a body of work informed by Sen’s theories of famine.

224 DANIEL KARK alarm in the first months of 1949 as the scale of the failure became apparent. The African population reacted to the first signs of food-shortage by falling back on alternative wild foods and extended kinship networks. Men, as family providers, began to migrate in search of food. Petty crime rates and prostitution increased in the towns. As the famine worsened, families began to withdraw behind closed doors – Vaughan describes the manner in which the immediate family began eating away from the eyes of neighbours. Marriages broke down, and Vaughan also describes collective memories of the event as a period during which many husbands disappeared or failed to live up to familial responsibilities. The government responded slowly, and with little metropolitan help. Food was imported from surrounding territories. Distribution centres and food-for-work relief schemes were established, with rationed food sold cheaply and distributed free only in cases of clear destitution. Migrant workers were exhorted to send more money home.77 The Native Authorities were involved in supervising distribution. Government officers, including members of the Domasi team, were assigned to famine-relief duties in order to bolster the relief effort. Most of the development work then underway was delayed as the famine worsened towards the end of 1949. The relief works were not adequate in all areas of southern Nyasaland, and a large unrecorded number of African Nyasalanders died.

Relief was adequate in Domasi, and the district was less badly affected by the famine than others. There were no recorded fatalities other than an infant ‘scandalously neglected’ by its mother. Domasi, in actual fact, proved more resilient than other regions – certain parts of the district were still in food surplus during the worst parts of the famine and the population managed to survive by eating wild foods, undeveloped mangoes and other fruits, and small amounts of maize carried by young men on bicycles from the Namwera Hills in Fort Johnston District. Conditions were still tough. Young men were away looking for food or work. The aged were ‘universally thin and unhealthy looking’. And there was ‘no doubt’ that by far the greater majority of the children in the district were malnourished and wasted.78 Thomson began distributing maize in November, 1949. He found himself intermittently concentrating relief efforts on the northeast and southeast corners of the district, as the situation changed over time and from place to place. He and his team

77 The government ran a press campaign in English and the vernacular. Africans working in Southern Rhodesia and South Africa were reminded that costs had risen for their families and that ‘a hut without a roof is not a home’. From: Your Family Needs More Money Nowadays, Press Statement, AFC8/7/1, MNA. 78 Description and quotation taken from: Watson, D., Report on an examination of the nutritional state of the population of N.A. Malemia’s section, 19/11/49, NSG1/9/3, MNA.

EDUCATION, HYGIENE AND NATIONALISM IN DOMASI 225 managed to avoid overwhelming hunger despite an admonishment from Blantyre that Domasi’s requests for food aid were extravagant and that policy was ‘to prevent starvation and not, repeat not, appease hunger’.79 Regular patrols by district staff ensured that there were very few cases of outright starvation in Domasi. Miss Kennedy and Mr. Kumsinda were particularly vigilant, with the latter ‘found to be feeding cases awaiting hospitalisation from his own pocket’.80 Free issues of food were limited, but were directed towards elderly women and abandoned wives. Thomson and his team averted the worst effects of the famine in Domasi. At least one elderly person remembers their efforts with appreciation.81 Together with Chief Malemia, Thomson ‘saved the people of Domasi’.82 There was cause for disappointment, despite this negative success. The famine required the temporary abandonment of the promising early Mass Education work in the District, despite encouraging signs of progress, particularly with literacy.

General lessons were drawn by the administration both for itself and for the African population – lessons that reinforced the ideals and stereotypes imprinted on the minds of the Domasi staff. A report was published by the protectorate government in the aftermath of the famine. It drew several conclusions. The abandonment of wives and the elderly were taken as evidence that African familial bonds were not sufficiently durable. The vilified uxorilocal system was not durable under stress, and actively encouraged husbands to abscond. Broader social bonds broke down. Young migrant labourer husbands were not found willing to assist their families when placed under severe strain. African society in general was not judged durable enough to cope with the stress caused by the famine – the crisis revealed ‘the present incompetence of the Native Administration to deal with an

79 Outward telegram from PC Southern Province to DC Domasi, 27/2/50, AFC8/2/1, MNA. 80 This and report of infant being ‘scandalously neglected both from: Thomson, T.D., Domasi District Famine Report, 1949-50, 2/5/50, NSG1/2/3, MNA. 81 These memories seem deeply felt. In the space of a minute one respondent (VH Malidadi, TA Liwonde, 12/9/05) went from an explanation of British cruelty and the unfairness of British taxation to a description of how quickly and generously the British responded during the famine. Of course, as Vaughan demonstrates, this was certainly not the rule in all parts of the Protectorate. Interviews in TA Mkumbira confirmed that this isolated part of Zomba on Lake Chilwa was neglected by the government, with little relief reaching the starving (Interview at TA Mkumbira, 24/9/05). 82 Mr. Nangupeta, Kwaca teacher and small farmer, Village Kanache, GVH Mtogolo. Another Kwaca teacher, Mrs. Kagaso remembered Thomson working ‘hard to save our lives. He brought in maize that he sold to the people and honestly speaking from what I saw with my own eyes, we survived because of Thomson. He took his 10 o’clock tea there at T.A Malemia while serving people. He was a well-organized D.C.’ Mrs. Kagaso, Kwaca school teacher and small farmer, Village Kwidyo, GVH Mtogolo.

226 DANIEL KARK emergency, and the fact that it is no longer possible to rely on native tribal and family laws and customs for the maintenance of the destitute’.83

The famine was supposedly a salutary experience for many Africans. According to Thomson, they learned that the government was not a source of handouts – he felt that Africans should rely at least as much on their own initiative in order to survive. This was one of the reasons the administration decided against widespread free food distributions. Indeed the African Foodstuffs Commission stated in one of its reports that ‘the African must not be deprived of the opportunity of exercising his own judgement in the matter. After all, quite apart from educational considerations, he is the actual sufferer, and it is only reasonable to accept the fact that he is in a better position than anyone else to judge how long he can hold on without making substantial financial sacrifice’.84 Paying for food was, in this view, meant to have an ‘educative effect’. But paying for food and relying on African initiative and judgement was not the same as allowing Africans to continue to depend on a social system that was being consumed by a combination of traditional familial dependence and the worst aspects of selfish individualism. A visitor touring Nyasaland in 1949 opined that, for an agricultural officer, ‘the occasional bad season is not half a bad thing; it enables him to drive home lessons that would not have been learned otherwise’. Famine ‘scared the villagers into action’.85 The famine was taken as evidence that confirmed the preconceptions of African social incapacitation formed by the Domasi district team and the Nyasaland administration. The provision of education and social services at Domasi was based upon these confirmed preconceptions, shifting blame onto Africans themselves.

83 Nyasaland Protectorate, Draft Report on the Famine, 1950, MS1/17/41, MNA. 84 Note on the food supply position as at 30th September, 1949, African Foodstuffs Commission, 10/10/49, AFC7/4/1, MNA. 85 Debenham, F., Nyasaland: The Land of the Lake, HMSO, London, 1955, pg. 199.

EDUCATION, HYGIENE AND NATIONALISM IN DOMASI 227

7. ‘Kwaca!’ – Mass Literacy Takes Off in Domasi

The famine proved disruptive, not only for the special projects pursued within Domasi, but also for the limited regular social services provided by the state, the missions and Africans themselves. The district team resumed its duties as soon as it could, as those seconded to famine relief duties returned to Domasi. The social development agenda again settled into its pre-famine framework. In its broadest terms the education effort was again focused on changing attitudes supposedly influenced by suspicion of the state and ‘the barrier to almost all forms of progress which is formed by the matrilineal and uxorilocal system of social organisation’.86 But Thomson and the team did not want to push aside African institutions and social forms without replacing them with something else of value – ‘no society can flourish without focal points. The traditional African society here and elsewhere is passing away under contact with changing conditions; its more valuable attributes have gone or are going but those which either pose definite problems or positively stand in the way of social and economic development tend to remain. To push these aside (on the surface) with a bulldozer is to run the risk of creating a spiritual dust-bowl, as dangerous to its neighbours as to itself; to pursue the agricultural metaphor, plant-breeding is what is needed’.87 Education, along with communal activities, voluntary organisations and social self-service was required to replace these moribund traditions. Among the minor projects pursued by the team with this end in mind were several women’s groups (seven by the end of 1952) focused on the discussion of local issues and village hygiene, the formation of a league of eight football teams (by the education and works officers) and the establishment of boy- scout troops.

Literary and formal education remained the central initial focus of the scheme. The methods used were not entirely in keeping with the plant-breeding metaphor used by Thomson. The broad mass literacy campaign had more in common with a bulldozer’s less discriminating blade. The Kwaca literacy scheme – named after the primer used to teach literacy – was one of the centre-pieces of the Domasi project.88 It was the subject of two

86 Domasi Community Development Scheme Annual Report for the year 1951, Nyasaland Protectorate, 1952, MNA. 87 Ibid. 88 Kwaca means sunrise in Chichewa and was, confusingly, to be the catch-cry of the Nyasaland African Congress, the major nationalist organization of the day. The NAC will be introduced later in the chapter.

228 DANIEL KARK Domasi Papers, both of which were part of a collection of reports on various aspects of Mass Education in Domasi intended to disseminate results and methods throughout the British African Empire. Kwaca was an experimental response to the increasing pressure being placed on the government by Africans to provide a much broader literary school education. Investigation by the district staff revealed that it was not so much children being turned away from school that was the major problem – this group accounted for less than one and a half per cent of the school age population.89 A far greater problem was the number of children who had never been to school at all, and who were therefore illiterate and beyond the reach of the Mass Education programme. Mass Education required an informed and literate population. Focusing on adult illiteracy without reaching school-age students would ultimately achieve little, with the annual addition of a ‘mass of illiterate adolescents to the illiterate adult population’. In more graphic metaphorical terms, ‘to tackle adult illiteracy without trying to ensure that every child who wants the three Rs can get them is to waste time, money and effort. A parallel is the dosing of a hookworm- stricken community with drugs without ensuring the construction and use of proper latrines; reinfection will be chronic’.90

The district team estimated that at least 2,500 school-age students required the ‘three Rs’ in order to avoid the growth of the illiterate population. Thomson, after a review conducted by him and the Nyasaland Director of Education, attempted to put the scheme on a firmer footing than it had been before the famine. An Education Officer, Mr. Prescott, was appointed to look after the Jeanes centre and the Kwaca schools. 23 teachers (with an average education level of Standard III) completed a two month training course run over two dry seasons by the Mass Education Assistant, Mr. Kalinde, and the African Inspector of Schools, Mr. Chakanza. The team expected around 1,000 students to enrol after the teachers were posted to their schools at the end of March 1951. In the event, over 1,800 students enrolled out of a total school-aged population of approximately 4,000. Most children were between the ages of nine and fourteen, but some were accompanied by very young siblings. Conditions were still fairly rudimentary for both teachers and students –

89 This group was the subject of the fourth Domasi Paper. See: DP4, The Education of the Overage Child, NS3/3/2, MNA. 90 DP5, Kwaca Schools: An Emergency Education Scheme in Nyasaland, NS3/3/2, MNA. This paper was later more widely disseminated through the pages of the Community Development Bulletin. See: Kwaca Schools: An Emergency Education Scheme in Nyasaland, Community Development Bulletin, vol. 3, no. 3, June 1952.

EDUCATION, HYGIENE AND NATIONALISM IN DOMASI 229 they made resourceful use of whatever facilities were at hand, meeting in prayer halls, on verandas and under mango trees. The team members dealing with Kwaca initially had trouble dealing with the mainly Muslim Yao students. Muslim students were apprehensive at first, expecting an education similar to that previously offered at mission schools. Arabic script was also a point in contention. Discussion between Muslim leaders and the education officer resulted in an offer to teach Arabic script, but the offer was not ultimately taken up, despite the local Shehe being appointed to the NA Education Committee. Thomson nonetheless reported good attendance by Muslim students at two of the schools.91

Attendance overall remained reasonably steady during the first term at around 75%, although it did vary as employment in the brickfields drew students away during June. The schools broke up for July after the staff arranged with the local traditional authorities for initiation ceremonies to take place before the schools started again, in order to reduce disruption for the children involved. The ceremonies were held instead in August, disrupting the programme for many of the students. Truancy was dealt with in a manner that suggested African initiative was not the only measure of success – Native Authorities were asked to pass rules requiring ongoing attendance after commencing study at a Kwaca school, rules that resulted in 23 convictions and fines for parents.92

Despite this compulsive element, and despite the unsuitability of some of the teachers, testing demonstrated the value of the literacy centres – the results compared very favourably with another local formal school staffed with certificated teachers. The favourable results encouraged optimistic forecasts that the Kwaca experiment could point towards a universal and cheap alternative to formal vernacular education – indeed ‘this scheme, as an experiment, may have a considerable influence on the whole educational future of Nyasaland’.93 The scheme was expanded in 1952. 44 pupil-teachers were put through a training programme. Kalinde and Chakanza, responsible for the training of these teachers, maintained a considerable degree of enthusiasm for their work. The latter started Young Farmers Clubs for Kwaca students and involved the agricultural assistant, Mr. Seago, in their operation. Thomson was quite pleased that these clubs were free of

91 Ibid. 92 Ibid. 93 Ibid.

230 DANIEL KARK European involvement and relied upon local initiative. The local population also demonstrated increasing enthusiasm. The extent of local involvement in the scheme was most promising for the district team. Mass Education required that Africans take the initiative wherever possible, and this they did. According to the Domasi Paper on the scheme, Africans provided the initial demand for education, the finer detail of the scheme, and the men and material required for its operation. Best of all, Kwaca was having a secondary impact. An elderly former Kwaca teacher recalled that students did not just learn how to read and write, but also imbibed ‘general principles of how the students would live peacefully in their communities. In other words we taught them good manners’. The literacy centres were, moreover, providing a ‘social focus’ and a ‘source of communal feeling, since it is the people’s own’.94 The schools were being used to organise women’s institutes and football clubs and to teach the practicalities of sewing, weaving baskets and making hoe handles. These were the broader implications hoped for by the district team and proponents of Mass Education – ‘no scheme for any form of special progress should ever be viewed in isolation from the problem of the general development of the community’.95

Not all comment was favourable. There was disquiet over the longer term impacts of the scheme, and over how effective the scheme actually was. Metropolitan opinion was cautiously optimistic. Tommy Baldwin, an assistant educational advisor to the CO, was concerned by the definitional boundaries of Kwaca – there was, he argued, no clear definition of either literacy or of the positions of the teachers involved in the scheme. R.J. Harvey (Assistant Education Adviser to Cox in the Colonial Office) provided a particularly prescient comment when he questioned the efficiency of the scheme and the long term implications of raising parental hopes with little chance of fulfilling them. Parents and children might be led into believing that the schools were part of the formal schooling system rather than a very basic expedient – ‘the children will think that they are going to schools which are a part of the ordinary educational ladder, and if they find that this is not the case, there will be very considerable disappointment among both them and their parents’.96 Considerable disappointment in the social mobility offered by the colonial

94 Interview with Mr. Nangupeta, Kwaca teacher and small farmer, Village Kanache, GVH Mtogolo. 95 Op. Cit. Domasi Paper no. 5. 96 Note by R.J. Harvey, 31/1/52, CO1015/571, PRO. In interview it was not at all apparent that this was the way Kwaca was remembered. One female respondent recalled that ‘when you graduated from these schools you would not be selected to go to secondary school.’ From interview with Mr. Makilinesi – Village Nyamuka, TA Malemia, 28/06/2006.

EDUCATION, HYGIENE AND NATIONALISM IN DOMASI 231 system was not something the Colonial Office or the Protectorate administration was willing to risk at the time. He was also understandably concerned that students could quite easily lapse back into illiteracy were follow-up material not provided. Regression was a common long-term result in other literacy programmes. A report on the Dessa scheme in revealed that the lapse back into illiteracy due to lack of appropriate reading material was up to 70% of those taught.

Thomson was aware of these potential criticisms, and posed two ‘fundamental questions’ about the methods adopted in his final report on the Domasi Project – ‘does such instruction stick? And: does it provide a good foundation for further education?’97 He thought it too early to answer the first question, but answered the second affirmatively, comparing the results of education ‘under mango trees’ and at formal schools in the district. Students at the Kwaca schools performed comparatively poorly in the non-literary subjects, such as rural science, hygiene and social studies, and were not able to achieve a level of literary attainment quite as high as the formal schools. Certain of the schools were very poorly run and children were capable of little more than repetition of texts rather than any functional level of literacy or comprehension.98 Kwaca schools, he concluded, were nonetheless still a valuable temporary expedient, clearing a serious back-log of overage and uneducated children. They were also valuable in their active integration and encouragement of female education. Girls were pushed to attend, despite the fact that their presence apparently made men ‘shy’.99 This resulted in girls accounting for close to forty per cent of the school population of Domasi, ten per cent higher than attendance in the rest of Nyasaland. In the immediacy of these successes the experiment had been a valuable one.

Education was almost universally popular among the African population of Nyasaland. So too were efforts aimed at improving African health and hygiene in the district. The former promised social mobility and status, the latter offered more basic physical integrity. Health care for Africans in Nyasaland had long consisted of hygiene education and public health schemes rather than treatment. Residents of Domasi remember that ‘these people encouraged people in the village to keep their homes clean and hygienic by sweeping daily

97 Thomson, Domasi Community Development Scheme, 1949-54, NS3/3/1, MNA. 98 Report on 1951 examinations, from: Domasi Community Development Scheme Annual Report 1952, Nyasaland Protectorate, 1952, MNA. 99 Interview with junior policeman, village Kusalangwe, GVH Mtogolo.

232 DANIEL KARK and also ensuring that we had pit latrines and rubbish pits. Women were taught to keep their houses clean and smart by plastering the walls and floor with good black soil [known as kudzira]. They were also taught basic sewing and knitting for sale to assist in supporting their families.’100 Homes were to be spick and span, inside and out, and were of the Ngomi type. Homes and villages were beautified and sanitized. Africans would be made house- proud in numerous small ways: bright light and fresh air through open windows; separate rooms for domestic privacy; and flower beds and kapinga grass to keep the dust down and make homes attractive. Water was to be boiled in order to reduce the frequency of cholera and bilharzia outbreaks. Bushes and standing water around homes were cleared to prevent mosquitoes from breeding.

Phyllis Whittaker, a member of the Nyasaland Education Service, started a supper club at Domasi in order to encourage both women and men to take a hand in household care. According to Whittaker, engaging male interest was crucial to ensuring long-term improvements in hygiene and nutrition. She wanted ‘the African husbands to regard it as a privilege and not a degradation to help in the house’. The supper club, at which this lesson was imparted, involved a small group of married couples, each of whom contributed 3d in cash or kind. Every Wednesday the couples would turn up in order for the wives to learn nutritious recipes – including fritters, fried egg and chips, Lancashire hotpot and vegetable pie – and for husbands to take notes on comparative cost and to do the washing up.101 The members apparently ‘all came to the supper club exceptionally well groomed and well turned out, and enjoyed as they said, “playing at being Europeans” on Wednesday nights’.102

Encouragement trod a fine line between raising consciousness on the one hand and didactic exhortation. The public health campaign, in its concentration on ‘ignorance, diet and dirt’, was not always clearly an African initiative and was breathtakingly patronising. Whittaker’s claim that Africans really did enjoy ‘playing at being Europeans’, was based on the assumption that the couples at her dinners enjoyed discussing letters from The Times at high table, preferred Lancashire hotpot to nsima, and appreciated having their sugar limited

100 Interview conducted in Chitenjere Village, TA Malemia, 29/06/06. 101 There was little chance of getting the men to actually take part in the cooking themselves. Malemia’s daughter recalled that men were considered ‘stupid’ if they were seen involved in women’s work. From: TA Malemia’s daughter, small farmer, Village Magwira, GVH Mtogolo. 102 Whittaker, P.H., Supper Club at Domasi, Nyasaland, Oversea Education, vol. XXIII, no. 1, 1951, pg. 199.

EDUCATION, HYGIENE AND NATIONALISM IN DOMASI 233 to the British ration. Local memories of the Domasi staff and their methods are ambiguous. They are remembered well, as being committed to their development goals, but locals also remember them being less than fully dedicated to encouraging initiative. Memories of Mary Kennedy and Elta Smith, both previously registered nurses, are clearly fond – ‘Miss Kennedy was the first to come and later Miss Smith. They were at Jeanes. They were health and home craft educationists respectively. They were nice ladies. If people started to talk about Domasi it was also because the contributions that these two made while here’.103 But Miss Kennedy, everywhere at once in the accounts of the scheme, is not striking as a person tolerant of dissent once she had conveyed the appropriate message, despite the flattering description of her above. Her ability to encourage compliance with all the means at her disposal was recognised by Thomson – ‘the welfare officer has a very sharp tongue when dealing with the slovenly and the dirty and her staff have had to initiate prosecutions for breaches of the public health legislation’.104

Thomson himself is also remembered ambiguously for his occasionally coercive construction work, as ‘the one who face-lifted Domasi and Malemia. He built the prison here. He was the one who introduced terraces, ridges … he built bridges. Generally he improved our living standards here’. He was ‘the one who came up with rules’.105 The implication in many of these memories of the methods used by the Domasi staff is that encouragement of African initiative was secondary to ensuring the required message was conveyed clearly and ultimately complied with. Domasi residents recall that ‘these people would appreciate our living conditions. That is why they were able to come up with health and sanitation policies.’ But they also recall the manner in which these policies were conveyed – ‘they would tell us, build a fence here. Build a pit latrine and rubbish pit there …’106 And there were consequences for those who failed to comply, with ‘government agricultural officers and home craft workers who went around in the villages to monitor, demonstrate and enforce these rules in addition to the government’s tough stand that whoever defied them would be fined or arrested’.107

103 Interview with Mr. Matereko – Village Sani, TA Malemia, 27/06/2006. 104 Op. Cit. Domasi Phase, Mss/Afr/s/1158, RH. 105 Interview with Mr. G. Malemia, Village Magwira, 30/6/06. 106 Interview with Mr. Matereko, Village Sani, TA Malemia, 27/6/06. 107 Interview at Chitenjere Village, TA Malemia, 29/6/06.

234 DANIEL KARK The team attempted to raise public awareness on several issues, including housing, domestic sanitation, and the need for clean water supplies – the local population (particularly the female population) was educated on the merits of square, airy, and clean pise-de-terre houses, and on the benefits of clean water-supplies. The African population was also presented with an outright rejection of matrilineal and uxorilocal practices. The rejection of ‘African’ social ideals was part and parcel of a European cultural tradition that blamed degeneration on African social forms, hygiene and sexuality. Megan Vaughan argues that European biomedical discourses in Africa reinforced European power over their African subjects by describing ‘poverty, subordination and exploitation in terms of the ‘sickness’ of African peoples who were subjected to these processes, a ‘sickness’ for which they could then be held largely responsible’.108 The dismissal of Yao and Nyanja marital traditions was thus interleaved with its more tangible consequences. Poorer families, lower incomes, and poorer child-care were interpreted as the consequence of absent or disinterested fathers and superstitious, uneducated mothers. Housing standards suffered when family members stripped a house of its fittings upon the death of a spouse. The prospects for children remained poor as long as women failed to take basic precautions, such as boiling and covering water. Africans were never likely to develop into serious, prosperous and healthy yeoman farmers without the investment that uxorilocality so deeply undermined. The worst parasites, according to European officers, were apparently not in the bloodstream, but within the family. Africans in Domasi therefore had no-one to blame for their poverty but themselves.

The Domasi team was not averse to applying legal pressure where its efforts were not met with an appropriate level of enthusiasm. The construction of pit latrines was a good example of this. It was considered that four years of education on the construction of sufficiently deep latrines was enough to expect compliance from African households. This expectation was frequently frustrated – ‘we were apt to find an elaborate superstructure over a hole two feet deep, or the entrance to a latrine permanently barred with thorns to keep the goats out’.109 A thorough inspection of latrines in Domasi was conducted in 1954 and 47 households were taken before the Native Court and convicted. People living in Domasi still remember the measures implemented during the period with a measure of

108 Vaughan, M., Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness, Polity, Cambridge, 1991, pgs. 204-5. 109 Op. Cit., Final Report.

EDUCATION, HYGIENE AND NATIONALISM IN DOMASI 235 ambivalence. They accepted the message but not the means – ‘the starting point was the intensification of hygiene in the homes by ensuring that each household had a pit latrine, rubbish pit, bathroom, eating good food, prohibiting people to shit in the bush and encouraging general cleanliness around the homes. Government had its officers who monitored people’s adherence to these measures. If you defied them you would pay dearly.’110 The government was ‘tough and serious on this’.111

The apparently inconsistent attitude of a large proportion of the African population was met with uncomprehending frustration by the district team. The benefits of campaigns against devastating parasitic diseases such as Malaria and Bilharzia, clear to the health workers involved, were evidently not as clear to locals. Technical solutions – such as treating water with copper sulphate – were easily implemented. But when it came to mobilising locals for preventative work, such as clearing the approaches to water sources of grass and reeds, the efforts of Kennedy and her assistants were thwarted by a lack of interest and cooperation. Thomson, in frustration, could only ascribe this response to a tendency towards laziness and to ‘the general social and political malaise during most of the time when the campaign was in progress’.112

Cooperation was also undermined by suspicion. Health and morbidity surveys were met with very wary responses from a large part of the local population. When health assistants turned up in Domasi’s villages to collect stool and blood samples, a large number of villagers disappeared into the bush, afraid of rumours that the stools were to be made into medicines for Africans, and blood into a soup for vampiric Europeans. These rumours attached themselves to the most contentious political issue at the time – vampires were sapping Africans of their will to resist Nyasaland’s incorporation into the Central African Federation. D.H. McCalman, who took over from Thomson while the latter was away on leave in 1952, put this down to ‘rumour mongering’ by ‘unscrupulous people’, but these responses reflect, rather, a profound mutual incomprehension.113 The rumours of European vampirism were particular reflections of the very different approaches to European biomedical methods. The District team quite clearly advocated the benefits of European

110 Interview conducted with Mr. Matereko, Village Sani, TA Malemia, 27/6/06. 111 Interview conducted with Mr. Makilinesi, Village Nyamuka, TA Malemia, 28/6/06. 112 Annual Report of the Domasi Community Development Scheme, 1953, Nyasaland Protectorate, MNA. 113 Annual Report of the Domasi Community Development Scheme, 1952, Nyasaland Protectorate, MNA.

236 DANIEL KARK medication and care, but did not know how to interpret seemingly irrational African approaches to what were, to the team members, clearly rational methods. European methods of care, including the use of needles, stethoscopes and pills, were integrated into African healing practices rather than being adapted by Africans wholesale. Even more frustrating for the team were the unpredictable nature of African responses. Luise White, in her study of rumour and health in Northern Rhodesia, Uganda, the Congo and Kenya, describes the mutual incomprehension and disbelief felt by European medical practitioners and African patients when the latter requested that stethoscopes be used on heads, selected pills based on colour and removed dressings in order to pack wounds with mud.114 Apparent inconsistency of response was similarly fraught with misunderstanding. Rural Africans simultaneously queued enthusiastically at dispensaries for inoculations and remained credulous regarding rumours of vampiric European doctors stealing African blood. Domasi, with its temporally and spatially concentrated focus upon hygiene and corporeal improvement, was a concentrated site of disbelief and incomprehension for both European and African. The surveys and campaigns against Bilharzia and Malaria were clearly not adequately predicated upon local initiative, understanding or agents, despite Thomson’s protestations that campaigns were preceded by full explanation and reiteration. Technical campaigns against the diseases were effective, but often succeeded in spite of a lack of local cooperation and comprehension. Cooperation and comprehension were the basic precepts upon which Mass education was based, but they remained unfulfilled.

114 White, L., Speaking with Vampires: Rumour and History in Colonial Africa, UC Press, Berkeley, 2000.

EDUCATION, HYGIENE AND NATIONALISM IN DOMASI 237

8. ‘A Promising Plank’: Nationalist Demands for Education in Domasi and Nyasaland

Kwaca was not an uninspired project. Negative inspiration was drawn from increasing pressure exerted by Africans on the colonial government for adequate access to formal literary education. Kwaca was, in part, an attempt to diffuse this pressure. Education was seen by many Africans as the critical access point through which social and political progression would be achieved. The fundamental inequalities between the well-funded and formal European literary curriculum and the under-funded adapted African system were not lost on the more socially mobile elements of the African population. Domasi, in its peri- urban setting, and with its emphasis on initiative and the employment and training of African clerks and civil servants – the very men most likely to demand improved access to improved education – was a focal point for these demands.

Accounts of the earliest nationalist organisations in Nyasaland (proto-nationalist in some estimations) describe their preoccupation with education. Native Associations, precursors to the more determined Nyasaland African Congress (NAC), were formed after 1912, initially mainly in the north of the Protectorate. Levi Mumba, appointed the first African member of the Advisory Committee on Education in 1933, assisted in the formation of the Representative Committee of the Northern Province Associations in Zomba in 1929. The Nyasaland (Southern Province) and Chiradzulu Associations were also established in the south of the country. The associations were conciliatory and liberal organisations, justifying their existence as mediators between government and the African population. Their members were, in the main, educated Africans – ministers, teachers and civil servants rather than the traditional leadership privileged by the government. The tone set in meetings and in the minutes was not too far removed from the broader goals of the Mass Education programme – the associations aimed ‘at making the people understand the necessity and value of order, and the importance of becoming law-abiding citizens and also of the value and importance of industrious labour – and in short the value of civilization as against ignorance, laziness, disloyalty and anarchy’.115 Convinced of the benevolent intent of the

115 Mombera Native Association quoted in: Van Velsen, J., Some Early Pressure Groups in Malawi, Stokes, E., Brown, R. (eds.), The Zambesian Past: Studies in Central African History, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1966.

238 DANIEL KARK Protectorate government, they were also determined to make the administration understand the need for a universal state education system for Africans, particularly ‘free education for the poorer class of natives’.116 Education was the central demand for a group of educated Africans convinced that this was the lynchpin of a colonial system they wanted to transform rather than subvert.117 Their demands were nonetheless dismissed by a colonial government suspicious of educated Africans and as yet unwilling to conciliate African opinion.

The formation of the NAC in 1944 provided Africans in Nyasaland with a more coherent voice. The organisation maintained a sharp focus on education. That they were responding to a clear and growing demand for expanded formal learning was clearly demonstrated by the alacrity with which Africans in widely varied social situations and with very different incomes attempted to access the fairly limited Kwaca experiment at Domasi. In an international and colonial environment less forgiving of failed imperial trusteeship, both the metropole and the colonial government in Nyasaland recognised the need for a response to both the organised demand and the more incoherent groundswell. Gorell Barnes was one of the Colonial Office mandarins awake to this need. He recognised ‘that something will have to be done about what are normally called the social services and social development generally. In particular I am one of those who believe that … some way has to be found of giving increasing satisfaction to the growing African desire for education; and I understand that on education generally … Nyasaland lags rather behind the rest of British Colonial Africa’.118

The NAC was in large part a product of the efforts of James Frederick Sangala, a resident of Domasi and for a number of years a teacher in the area. He was exemplary of the group of educated Africans simultaneously mistrusted and desired by the Protectorate administration. He was educated, articulate and, in a very small way, financially successful – he ran both a small farm and a transporting and brick-making business. Sangala was a key member of the Blantyre Native Association and after 1943 poured much of his time and

116 Minutes of a general meeting of the Blantyre Native Association, 25/9/37, S1/3263/23, MNA. 117 An anecdote concerns the views of an African Oxford graduate who, in an effort to transform and understand colonial society, suggested an unorthodox solution – he wanted to see ‘young Africans trained as anthropologists, who would study the white people, especially the English (whose manners, customs, and institutions were difficult for Africans to understand) and interpret them to their fellows in order that the two peoples might attain a better understanding of one another’. From: Minute, 15/8/35, S1/3263/23, MNA. 118 Gorell Barnes to Colby, 19/11/53, CO1015/669, PRO.

EDUCATION, HYGIENE AND NATIONALISM IN DOMASI 239 most of his financial resources into the foundation of Congress.119 Sangala maintained the central focus on education established by the associations. The NAC, at its inaugural conference in Blantyre in October 1944, and at subsequent conferences in the immediate post-war period, repeatedly stressed the need for a free, universal and literary education. Education was the key policy platform for the NAC during this period. The demands remained essentially the same – universal education, improvement of education for girls, improvement of working conditions for teachers, the appointment of a on Education in Nyasaland and the abolition of age restrictions in schools. Delegates to these conferences wanted a curriculum that focused on the English literary education that allowed access to better paid jobs. The comments of delegates from Mlanje were revealing – ‘it was a pity that the pupils spend time making useless material such as ropes and hoe handles. Children should not waste their time at making of these things for they can learn better at home’. This demand was of great importance to delegates. They passed a resolution at the second conference in Lilongwe ‘that syllabus for African education must be the same as is provided for in European schools’.120 The NAC memorandum on African education, presented in 1947, expressed these desires clearly. English and an education fitted for modern and technical employment was required – ‘the vernacular languages are useless for full knowledge’, and ‘in all schools the aim is only to educate the African as a worker for privileged races’.121

The result of the annual NAC conferences was a series of meetings with the Governor in Zomba, and – after sufficient funds were raised through the ‘Educational Deputation Fund’ – a delegation to the Secretary of State of the Colonies in 1948. The delegates were met

119 Sangala was born in 1900 near the Domasi Presbyterian Mission. He was educated up to standard six and taught at Domasi from 1921-6. From 1930 to 1942 he was assistant to various District and Provincial Commissioners in Blantyre, and became a interpreter in 1943. During his time working for the administration Sangala was also heavily involved in the Blantyre Native Association. In setting up the NAC Sangala was assisted by W.H. Timcke, a British South African with left leanings, along with Matinga, Mponda, Mposa and other members of African Associations. Biographical information from: Rotberg, R., The Rise of Nationalism in Central Africa: The Making of Malawi and Zambia 1873-1964, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1965. Henry Chipembere, one of the leading lights in the NAC during the late 1950s and 1960s described him as ‘a man I deeply respected and loved. In my great nationalist feeling of those days, he personified all that I held dear. The fact that he was living on the verge of bankruptcy and sometimes having hardly enough to eat endeared him even more to me. He was utterly selfless, and his financial problems did not shake his great faith in his own mission or in the cause he led’. Chipembere, H.B.M., Hero of the Nation – Chipembere of Malawi: An Autobiography, Kachere, Blantyre, 2002, pg. 167- 8. 120 Minutes of the Second Annual Meeting of the NAC, 15th to 19th October, 1945, S15/1/7/1, MNA. 121 Nyasaland African Congress Memorandum on Education, 1947, S15/1/7/1, MNA.

240 DANIEL KARK with universal disdain both within Nyasaland and in London at exactly the time the CO and the government of Nyasaland were planning to introduce a Mass Education programme based squarely on cultivating African initiative. While the results the delegates demanded were not at all dissimilar to the goals of ACEC, they were still seen to be opportunists misleading the African population with their demands for expanded educational opportunities. The comments of the Director of Education in Nyasaland, R.H.W. Wisdom, made after a three hour meeting with thirty delegates from the NAC, were particularly scathing – ‘I came away with the impression that they are not particularly interested in education and they are not prepared to work themselves or to advocate sacrifices for the improvement of education. They are out to score political points and to advertise themselves and their movement. Education seems to them to be a promising plank in their platform at present, but if they could find anything better, such as a real injustice, they would no doubt drop education in its favour’.122 Wisdom did not elaborate on what he considered a real injustice. Even the liberal and equable Creech Jones, responding to advice that the NAC were sending a delegation to London, was less than welcoming in his response, and this before meeting the delegation – he was not sure that they had made a ‘genuine effort’ to define the issues they wished to discuss, and he considered it ‘an essential part of their political education that they should learn to approach such matters with a due sense of responsibility’.123 When they met the Secretary during his 1949 tour of Nyasaland they were told that they should exercise patience. Britain had made sacrifices during the war and could not afford comprehensive education for Africans.124

It was no great surprise that the inconclusive meetings that the delegation attended at the Colonial Office in London in May and June of 1948, and in Zomba in 1949 failed to satisfy the NAC.125 The preliminary meetings were steered away from education, but not by the CO staff – Dr. Hastings Banda, future president of the NAC and ultimately of Malawi,

122 Wisdom to Chief Secretary Zomba, 31/3/47, S15/1/7/1, MNA. 123 Creech Jones to Hinden, 26/6/47, CO525/212/6, PRO. 124 ‘Britain has passed through a very difficult time as a result of the war, in which she gave all she could in her contribution to the freedom of the world. This left her badly in debt and the people of Britain had had to make a very great effort to recover their industrial strength …’ Creech Jones was clearly attempting to manage growing expectations’. From: Meeting of the NAC delegation with HM’s SoS for the Colonies in the Chiefs’ Council Chamber, Blantyre, 23/4/49, CO822/120/3. 125 The delegation was a source of controversy within Congress ranks. Matinga and Andrew Mponda attended the meetings in London. The Rev. Charles Chinula was supposed to attend, but Matinga secured his dismissal and replaced him with Mponda, a close friend. Matinga was accused of embezzling 162 and this, combined with the Mponda affair, guaranteed his dismissal barely a month after returning to Nyasaland.

EDUCATION, HYGIENE AND NATIONALISM IN DOMASI 241 demonstrated greater prescience than his fellow delegates by pushing the discussion towards political reform and away from limited social reforms.126 But Banda took a back seat at the subsequent perfunctory meeting with Andrew Cohen, Christopher Cox and the Secretary of State, Creech Jones, in June of 1948. Little was achieved beyond Creech Jones’ fairly anodyne assurance to the President-General of the NAC, Charles Matinga, that the delegates were ‘pushing against an open door’.127 Creech Jones assured them that everything that could be done was being done. Both parties could be satisfied by the cordiality of the series of meetings. The Nyasaland administration and CO were both still willing to engage with the NAC, and vice versa. Relations had not yet reached the nadir they were to reach in the years to follow. But it is not difficult to imagine the NAC disappointed with the reception given their grievances, and ultimately with the comparatively limited efforts of the Nyasaland government, including the Kwaca experiment at Domasi. Kwaca was not more than a temporary and unsatisfactory expedient. It was true that Kwaca and the other attempts by the district team in Domasi to improve social services in the area did meet with some small successes. But the wider goals of Mass Education – to inspire a sense of self-help and social development – were neglected by a state and metropole unwilling to countenance or recognise any genuine expression of African assertion. The African population of Nyasaland remained trapped within a system that offered them very limited social and professional options.

126 Banda was at this point still working in London, running a medical practice. He was to return to Nyasaland in 1958 at the instigation of Chipembere and Sangala among others, and was to run a far more militant campaign for access to real political representation. The above should not imply that Banda was disinterested in African education. On the contrary, he made education the subject of a long letter to Creech Jones immediately after the war. He also considered Congress and educated Africans to be far more truly representative of the people of Nyasaland ‘than any chief or group of chiefs can claim to be’. He was to radically reverse this position when president of the country. From: Banda to Creech Jones, 14/6/46, CO525/199/10, PRO. 127 Note of a meeting held on the 3rd June, 1948, between the Secretary of State and a delegation from the Nyasaland African Congress to discuss the educational problems of the Territory, CO525/212/6, PRO.

242 DANIEL KARK 9. “Bunds are Bad”: The Masses Turn Against Education

It quickly became clear to members of the NAC, and to the African population more generally, that the limited reform and expansion of social services was not adequate – the government in Nyasaland had to be pushed towards deeper political transformations. Once it was clear that education would not provide an avenue through which Africans could achieve some level of equality an alternative was required. The Director of Education, Wisdom, was incorrect when he described Africans as insincere when pushing for education as a ‘real injustice’. It was, indeed, seen as a real injustice by Africans. But he was correct when he predicted that they might find themselves attracted to larger injustices. The Federation issue, lack of political representation and coercive relations on the land all interposed themselves as issues around which the NAC could mobilise support for more substantial change than they had demanded previously. The financial and administrative disarray in which the NAC found itself after 1948 made a coordinated campaign against the state all but impossible. Banda’s biographer, Philip Short, describes Congress’ nadir after 1948, before the Federation dispute resurfaced – he claims that Congress was an organisation serving only the African elite, ‘without charismatic leadership and without mass support’.128 Opposition and protest took a less coordinated form, despite Congress’ withdrawal as a credible African voice. It involved not just the educated and political elites, but a broader rural mass of peasants and semi-educated Africans dissatisfied with coercive administration.

Many Africans no longer perceived the classroom to be an entry into political or administrative life. Nor could the administration any longer use schools as apolitical vectors for the introduction of ideals of self-help and citizenship. They became contested spaces, where African students and teachers challenged the curriculum conferred upon them. Domasi saw only the beginnings of this transformation. The Kwaca scheme, after its early successes with literacy, found itself the subject of this challenge. The 1953 disturbances, discussed in chapter five, resulted in the politicisation of the classroom. As shall be seen, one of the injustices resented most by rural Nyasalanders was the construction of earthworks – in this case large parallel ridges called bunds that were intended to halt soil erosion. The children at the Kwaca schools were asked in their exams

128 Short, P., Banda, Routledge, London, 1974, pg. 54.

EDUCATION, HYGIENE AND NATIONALISM IN DOMASI 243 what good purpose bunds served. The children ‘with one accord answered “bunds are bad”’. The classroom was clearly not the only source of information for Domasi’s children. Colonial educators were finding their adapted curriculum being adapted for them.

There was, of course, no alternative to this politicisation of colonial education and the colonial curriculum. The government of Nyasaland, Thomson and his team could not countenance doing nothing at all. The lesson drawn from the Indian experience was that an education system that produced a profusion of dissatisfied and ‘semi-educated’ clerks was a dangerous prospect.129 Offering no solution would also open the field for unofficial and unsupervised African schools – ‘it therefore seems wiser to accept [politicisation of the government curriculum] and counter it, than to stick to a nominally safe path beset by boot- leggers’.130 The solution offered – and not just for education, but for social services more generally – was no longer acceptable to Africans in Domasi and Nyasaland. It is difficult not to feel some small measure of sympathy for Thomson and his district team. They were involved in a high modernist scheme that offered Africans a product they were no longer interested in. Too little was offered too late. Bewildered by the refusal of the local population to accept what were self-evidently good ideas, Thomson and his team fell back on those aspects of colonial rule that had encouraged Africans to seek education and social advancement in the first place – prescription and coercion. These were not the precepts from which Mass Education and the Domasi scheme drew sustenance.

Africans in Domasi and the nationalist leaders of the NAC were initially interested in education as a political goal, but by the end of this period their goals had shifted.131 No longer willing to fight for education as a method of accessing power and credibility, they began to challenge the power and credibility of the state itself. This desire for deep social and political transformations tied in closely with the events that were to shake the liberal

129 The Fort Johnston DC summed this perceived threat up best: ‘This present system is only producing two classes (a) these [sic] who forget all they have learnt as soon as they finish school and (b) the minority who go a little further to train as clerks, thus producing a fair number of semi-educated people for whom there are a very few jobs. This is the basis of the present day trouble in India’. From: DC Fort Johnston to PC Southern Province, 23/5/47, NS1/15/4, MNA. 130 Op. Cit. Final Domasi Report. 131 This is not to say Kwaca Schools did not remain popular. Right up until the beginning of 1958, when the schools were officially closed, letters arrived begging the DC Zomba to keep the schools open and publicly funded. Some of these letters were written by James Sangala. See: Correspondence, Education, Kwaca Schools, DCZA1/8/6, MNA.

244 DANIEL KARK foundations upon which both the Domasi scheme and broader colonial development were based, events that are discussed more fully in the chapters which follow. The cracks in the colonial development edifice were widening and spreading. Colonial education and social policy in Domasi, Nyasaland and British Africa during the late colonial years was not malign. It was, rather, inadequate, providing neither the social advancement demanded by many Africans, nor the type of patient citizen desired by the state.

Chapter Four

‘A New Grammar of Agriculture’ – Coercion and Resistance in Domasi 1949-55

Whether you wear a suit or a necktie, o-ye think carefully of this path. Whether you are a European, Whether you are rich or you wear a headdress, This path, yes, this path, yes, think carefully of this path. Malawian oral poem.1

1 Mpanje, J., White, L., Oral Poetry from Africa: An Anthology, Longman, New York, 1983, pg. 99.

COERCION AND RESISTANCE IN DOMASI

The post-war state in Nyasaland attempted to inscribe itself upon the lives of rural Africans. Pre-war relationships depended on African intermediaries and minimal intervention to govern without serious opposition or fiscal deficit, but these relationships were no longer adequate. The imperial and international conditions described in the first chapter broke the back of agnostic colonial rule in post-1945 rural British Africa. The state in Nyasaland required a new and expansive approach to administration and development. The establishment of direct relationships between state and subject, the regularisation of these relationships, and the creation of an efficient and productive economy were the three sides enclosing an expanded administrative space. At the core of this space was the transformation of rural society. A productive agriculture, a secure and sustainable landscape, and a population catalogued and defined through census and taxation would remake and sustain rural Africa. An alien social and physical environment was systematically translated and rendered legible to Western eyes in ways it was not before.

Mass Education was instrumental in this translation. The basic tenets – the creation of progressive citizens, the encouragement of self-help and initiative and the development of coherent communities – were all consistent with the Colonial Office image of a rejuvenated and comprehensible countryside. But the relationships actually cultivated by the colonial administration in Nyasaland with rural Africans sat uneasily with the more liberal and consultative aspects of the Mass Education programme. While even the most technocratic employees of Nyasaland’s Department of Agriculture admitted the desirability of persuasion and demonstration, impatient legislative coercion was more frequently the tool relied upon. More forceful transformative methods crossed district boundaries into Domasi, particularly when it came to activities deemed essential by the state and district team. Coercion was considered particularly necessary in situations where Africans failed to perceive the dangers posed by agricultural failure and environmental degradation.

These dangers were, of course, defined for Africans by the state. Certain ends, including the transformation of uxorilocal African families, the individualisation of tenure, the rationalisation of land-holdings, and the creation of African yeoman farmers could be pursued using intensive demonstration and persuasion. These projects met with varied success. But there were other agrarian problems that both the state and officers at Domasi considered too urgent to be left to chance. When it came to environmental problems such as

248 DANIEL KARK soil erosion, the administration felt that people had to be forced to change, even where compulsion resulted in the alienation of the larger part of the rural population. These methods were counter to those defined as ideal by the authors of Mass Education. Coercion cultivated neither initiative nor a sense of citizenship. But it did have a perverse and wholly unintended outcome. In attempting to render rural African society comprehensible, the state in Nyasaland transformed it into something it found distasteful. Forceful and coercive methods alienated the rural African population in Domasi and roused an inchoate resistance. While this resistance was far from coordinated, it was the first widespread stirring of sentiments that later fed directly into the nationalist struggle with colonial power in Nyasaland. The coercive elements of a Mass Education scheme inspired indigenous forms of rural initiative and citizenship. This chapter establishes the link between both coercive and persuasive state attempts to reform African agriculture and enforce tax payment and these initial stirrings of resistance to colonial rule in Nyasaland.

COERCION AND RESISTANCE IN DOMASI 249

1. Sighing Dictators: Approaches to Coercion and Production in the Colonial Office and Nyasaland, 1945-50

The Colonial Office and the administration in Nyasaland found themselves in an irresolvable bind in the immediate post-war period. They were caught between a desire to develop local government and communities in preparation for self-rule on the one hand, and the necessity of colonial productive expansion in support of an ailing metropolitan economy on the other. They pursued both with an even-handed lack of success. This chapter deals primarily with the productive imperative, and the corrosive effect it had on colonial community development and rural relationships in Nyasaland. The creation of viable and productive African economies was a Colonial Office day-dream with roots in pre-war Depression and social instability in the colonies.1 An efficient and profitable agriculture was assumed by policy makers as a precondition for both imperial prosperity and local social stability. These imperial aspirations were tied closely to contemporary ideas of technical expertise, environmental conservation and the use of legal sanctions to ensure rural compliance.

Post-war Metropolitan insolvency turned these axioms into the lynchpin of the African development programmes formulated in response to the 1945 Colonial Development and Welfare Act, and the formation of the Colonial Development Corporation and Overseas Food Corporation. The need for Sterling earnings from colonial primary resources and prosperous markets for metropolitan goods resulted in a flurry of ambitious projects and development planning on the grandest of scales. The east African groundnuts scheme, the Gambian poultry scheme, and the Tung projects in northern Nyasaland were all products of expansive metropolitan imaginations, and all expired without meeting any of the expectations invested in them. Domasi was certainly not a project in anything like similar vein – it sprang from the quite different stream of Colonial Office thinking described in chapter one. The project nonetheless imbibed from the same pool of colonial axioms tapped by the grander productive schemes. The relative neologisms of Community Development

1 Anderson establishes a link between pre-war concerns – ranging from preoccupations with soil conservation to the reactions of the threatened European settler population – and the large-scale conservation and agricultural development projects established after the war. In: Anderson, D., Depression, Dust Bowl, Demography and Drought: the Colonial State and Soil Conservation in East Africa during the 1930s, African Affairs, vol. 83, no. 332, 1984.

250 DANIEL KARK became tangled with the deeper roots of colonial coercion and the exigencies of colonial production.

Not all metropolitan calls for African productive development were as strident and ill- considered as the 1947 report compiled after a tour of the continent by Field-Marshall Montgomery. Arthur Creech Jones criticised Montgomery for ignoring the social consequences of his African ‘Grand Design’. Creech Jones placed a premium on the maintenance of ‘friendly relations with African peoples’, arguing that the ‘imposition on the African territories of a grand design or master plan by central control and direction from London would not be practical politics … such a course would not secure the co-operation of the local people, without which effective development cannot take place’.2 But while he was certainly not in favour of an approach counter to the perceived needs of Africans, he did add his own, more qualified impetus to plans for a productive African empire. His ideas – and the approaches proposed by his Colonial Office mandarins – sat uneasily with many of the precepts upon which Creech Jones based Mass Education and his Fabian-socialist imperial ideals. Plans for productive expansion were based on several assumptions – that viable African economic development had to be based on agricultural expansion, that agricultural expansion was the only way African lives would improve in the short term, and that, in pursuit of this expansion, it was permissible to gain African consent through the use of administrative and legal coercion. In his 1947 despatch on agricultural productivity to African governors – perhaps the central statement of this vision – Creech Jones stated that ‘there can be no question that existing agricultural practices are almost everywhere incapable of yielding a production which will support the standards of life at which we are aiming for the African cultivators’. These practices included ineffective systems of land tenure, inappropriate social and familial structures and the very low productivity of the African peasant who held back development ‘by his unwillingness to adopt improved agricultural methods and by his failure to take proper measures for the conservation of the soil’.3 Reforming local government, reorganising African families and ownership of land, and introducing individualised tenure or cooperative farming were all possible elements of

2 DO35/2380, no 3 [Development of Africa]: Memorandum by Mr Creech Jones, commenting on Field- Marshal Montgomery’s memorandum, 6 Jan 1948, in: Hyam, R. (ed.), The Labour Government and the End of Empire 1945-51, vol. 2, Economic and International Relations, British Documents on the End of Empire, HMSO, London, 1992, pg.196. 3 Despatch from the Secretary of State for the Colonies to the Governors of the African Territories on Agricultural Productivity in Africa, 22/2/47, CO852/1003/3, in: Ibid, pgs. 252-5.

COERCION AND RESISTANCE IN DOMASI 251

Colonial Office plans to make ‘progressive’, productive agriculture the plinth on which African development was erected.

There were two potential flies in the ointment. There was, firstly, no clear idea of what agricultural model would most effectively replace the small-scale African peasant systems derided by agricultural officers in the colonies and the Colonial Office. Colonial governments had to strike a balance between a system that would maximise agricultural production and one that would most effectively promote land husbandry. Officers of the Colonial Service, Directors of Agriculture in the colonies and technical advisors within the Colonial Office were unable to strike this balance in the immediate post-war years, making instead ambiguous statements on individualised systems of tenure and communal control over land. An informal conference of agricultural officers in 1946 saw individualised freehold tenure as potentially detrimental to standards of environmental stewardship – ‘the continuation of a considerable measure of control by the authorities is essential’.4

There was no consensus regarding the form of control to be exercised and the type of tenure to be introduced. It was a commonplace among delegates to the epochal 1947 Governor’s Conference and the 1948 Africa Conference that African agriculture had to be specialised, extensive, not reliant on small and inefficient family farms and, wherever possible, mechanised and capitalised.5 But whether this meant forming large individual holdings, cooperative ventures or communal farms was not made clear. Each of the three models had its own particular attractions and drawbacks for the delegates and the Colonial Office. Discussion of individual and communal models revealed a particular picture of the economic and social preferences and values inspiring change. Individual tenure would ‘encourage individual stabilisation and division of labour and, in the sense that certain individuals could from the economic point of view best cease to be cultivators of the land and become specialised mechanics or salesmen or book-keepers, emergence of a landless

4 An Informal Conference of Directors, Deputy Directors, and Certain Senior Officers of Colonial Departments of Agriculture held at the Colonial Office, 17th-19th September 1946, CO852/548/6, PRO. 5 The Report of Mechanisation Mission, submitted in April 1949, stressed the advantages to be reaped from access to capital and from mechanization, particularly in the savannah regions. For a summary of the findings of the Mechanisation Mission and of other documents relevant to the formation of metropolitan agricultural policy see: Clay, G.F., Memorandum on Rural Economic and Social Development of Peasant Communities, 25/1/50, CO852/1377, PRO.

252 DANIEL KARK class would not be wholly disadvantageous’.6 Communal farming, on the other hand, was conceivably inappropriate – ‘it would be foreign to our system of democratic development to attempt to … create by compulsion a system of state collective farms in the manner of the Russians’.7 But even with the preferences revealed by these metropolitan deliberations the Colonial Office remained admirably free of dogmatism. While the need for change was perceived to be urgent, there was still an awareness of the extreme diversity of African social systems and agricultural methods. ‘Varied and bold’ experiments were required, ‘a combination of deliberate conscious investigation and of less closely organised trial and error’.8 The ill-fated groundnuts scheme in Tanganyika was of the first, deliberate order. This proved to be a spectacular failure. Domasi was intended to be closer to the second experimental type, a loose trial of various agricultural methods and forms.

African ‘unwillingness’ to fit themselves to the desired mould was the other potential pitfall. Perceived African reluctance to take measures that were felt by most of the colonial establishment to be of clear benefit was met with incomprehension within the Colonial Office. Sir Frank Stockdale, Agricultural Adviser to the Colonial Office after 1929 and Adviser on Development Planning from 1945-7, published a major report on the soil erosion problem in British Africa. Stockdale failed to understand what he considered ‘unthinking behaviour’ in the face of the demonstrable superiority of introduced conservation schemes.9 Where this incomprehension combined with a sense of urgency it frequently resulted in calls for legal compulsion. Nowhere was this combination clearer than when dealing with environmental conservation. After the late 1930s there was a near hysterical obsession with colonial environmental degradation within the CO. The result of international concern regarding the threat posed by soil erosion, this preoccupation resulted in a flurry of conferences and circulars, and in increased influence for technical advisors to the CO. While compulsion was increasingly out of favour within the Colonial Office, it was still countenanced when the perils of potential environmental destruction in the colonies were considered. Educating African farmers on the effects of erosion was the desired method – indeed, the 1949 Colonial Office report on extension work in the colonies was the very model of consultative development work, stressing that ‘people must be made to feel

6 AGC No. 5, Conference of African Governors, 1947, The Economic Development of Agricultural Production in the African Colonies, CO847/36/3, PRO. 7 AC (48)7, African Conference 1948, Improved Agricultural Production, CO847/39/4, PRO. 8 Op. Cit. AGC No. 5, CO847/36/3, PRO. 9 Stockdale, F., Soil Conservation in the Tropics, June 1939, CO852/249/17, PRO.

COERCION AND RESISTANCE IN DOMASI 253 that the extension programme is their own’ and that ‘extension cannot be blueprinted nor carried out by remote control’. It also stated very clearly that, while ‘agricultural officers have often sighed for the powers of a dictator … in the last resort it is very difficult, if not impossible, to force people to farm better. The methods of the dictator have no place in extension work’.10 But where officers felt the problem was too urgent to convince Africans of the need for change, agricultural officers and colonial governments were not obliged to restrict themselves to sighing alone. As discussed in later sections of this chapter, the use of more forceful legal sanctions was a fairly straightforward tack for many of the agricultural and technical officers and advisors within both the Colonial Office and colonial governments.

Many liberal metropolitan policy makers were convinced of the need for conciliatory and consultative interactions with Africans. They found the use of coercion a personally problematic and ambiguous issue. It was particularly difficult to reconcile voluntary action with the vogue for a type of social planning that did not always take local opinion into account. Fred Clarke, one of the authors of the 1943 Mass Education Report, foresaw the danger of closely planned social transformations. While much of Clarke’s contribution to the report was included in the final version, his hesitant approach to planning was not. He noted that ‘it is becoming apparent that grave dangers to liberty may be involved in this trend [towards planning], inescapable as it appears to be.’11 With discomfort, Clarke clearly saw the basic contradiction between gradual social inclusion through planning and a stated commitment to the cultivation of African initiative. Instead of including Clarke’s caveat, the report remarked favourably upon the planning successes of the Soviet Union and nationalist China.

Creech Jones and Cohen – proponents-in-chief of Mass Education, Africanisation and eventual self-rule for the African colonies – also had difficulty articulating their relationship with coercive power. Creech Jones’ Fabian-socialist intellectual ideals made him coy and ambivalent when describing his attitude towards more forceful measures. He may have stated in his 1947 despatch on forced labour that coercion ‘shall be suppressed in

10 Lynn, C.W., Report on Agricultural Extension and Advisory Work with Special Reference to the Colonies, Colonial Office no. 241, HMSO, 1949, Foreign Office Library. 11 CO879/148, Op. Cit. Clarke.

254 DANIEL KARK all its forms within the shortest possible period’, but subjected his statement to the caveat that ‘recourse to forced or compulsory labour may be had during the transitional period for public purposes only and as an exceptional measure’.12 He also qualified his support for voluntary relations on agricultural land, albeit in a manner that avoided direct responsibility – ‘there can be no question as to the necessity of ensuring that proper methods of cultivation are adopted and that the soil is conserved, and if this can only be achieved by the use of compulsory powers, then the native administrations will have to take such powers since neither they themselves nor the Government can stand by and see the soil ruined and the well being and development of the people prejudiced’.13 This was a different message to that presented in his despatch discussing Mass Education, sent to African colonial governments two months after he made the above statement.14

Cohen, the firmest advocate of African self-government, also approached the issue uneasily. He saw African peasant ‘unwillingness’ – read resistance – as the greatest bar to economic progress and agreed with many of his contemporaries in the CO that compulsion was occasionally necessary in order to change minds. He was as ambivalent as his Secretary of State, stating that ‘compulsion may have to be resorted to, but inducement will I think be a more powerful method and it is to the kind of inducement required that we ought to direct our attention’.15 The Colonial Office labour advisor, G. St. Orde Brown, reinforced the mixed messages received by colonial governments. He wrote an annex to Creech Jones’ forced labour despatch in which he explored the degree to which coercion could be exercised within the bounds of the ILO’s Forced Labour Convention. Orde Brown concluded that it was all essentially a matter of communal necessity and consent, however dubious its acquisition. In other words, if colonial governments could get chiefs to do the dirty work, coercion would be perfectly acceptable – ‘where the work consists of activity organised on tribal lines, under the supervision of the native authorities, or where it involves only the observation of certain recognised principles of agriculture, it can be

12 CO859/145/2, nos. 18-25, ‘Forced Labour’: despatch from Mr Creech Jones to the governments of various colonies, 9/7/47,, in: Op. Cit. Hyam, vol. 4, pgs. 54-5. 13 Op. Cit. CO852/1003/3. 14 Creech Jones sent two key despatches regarding Mass Education policy, the first on 25/4/47, and the second on 10/11/48 after the Summer Conference on Mass Education. Both of these despatches, and the values distilled within them, are discussed in chapter one. 15 CO852/1003/3 [African agricultural policy]: minute by AB Cohen, 6/5/46, in Op. Cit. Hyam, pg. 237.

COERCION AND RESISTANCE IN DOMASI 255 regarded as a legitimate object for compulsion.’16 R. S. Hudson, an advisor with expertise in African administration, laid out his own views in his contribution to a discussion paper on Community Development and Local Government prepared for the 1951 Local Government Conference. He too deplored the decline in the traditional use of ‘free labour’ for communal purposes. Community development should have access to this labour, and Native Authorities should be able to rely on ‘a little light prodding’ or compulsion of the reluctant minority ‘who would be reluctant to help the good cause without direction backed by sanctions’. It was open for consideration ‘to what extent powers to require the performance of free labour for community development projects desired by the mass of the people should be exercised’.17 This represented an altogether different and subversive use for local leadership and ‘initiative’. It was a far cry from the fairly clear ideal that ‘community development is so essentially dependent on initiative and securing the co- operation of the whole community for the scheme in hand, that the element of compulsion should be foreign’.18 The liberal humanitarians in the Labour government and in the Colonial Office seemed actively engaged in a regressive campaign to undermine the principles of initiative and individualism enshrined in their own colonial Mass Education project.

The contrast between these opinions – and they were not exceptional within the Colonial Office – and the consensual values presented to Africans and international critics through Community Development was jarring. It was due less to the insincerity of official policy within the Colonial Office than to the existence of two parallel streams, one with its source in the conditions described at length in chapter one, and the other rising in the perceived imperial crisis of the post-war years. The two streams presented colonial governments with a mixed message, simultaneously calling on them to convince Africans to transform local conditions and recommending the use of compulsion to ensure an agricultural revolution where Africans proved intransigent. The manner in which the Protectorate government decided to deal with these confused demands, and rural African responses to this decision form the core of this chapter, with Domasi again the laboratory in which various ideas and

16 CO859/145/2, Annex: ‘Forced Labour Convention’, memorandum by G StJ Orde Browne, 1/11/46, in: Ibid. vol. 4, pgs. 55-9. 17 CO859/169/3, R.S. Hudson, Local Government and Community Development. 18 CO1045/30, CSC (51)(10), Summer Conference – Cambridge, 1951, Group IV, Local Government and Community Development (including Local Government Training)

256 DANIEL KARK methods were tested. They were ideas and methods that sat uneasily with the original consensual intentions of the scheme.

Nyasaland’s administration, and more particularly the Protectorate’s Department of Agriculture, shared many of the same preoccupations exercising Colonial Office minds. Agricultural expansion was the engine driving development. The post-war Protectorate development plan presented a smooth procession away from a disorderly peasantry to a large-scale, orderly and productive agriculture. Rapid expansion of cash crop production, the production of ‘more and better food’ and the ‘intensification and speeding up’ of soil conservation’ were the three key goals.19 Colby considered agricultural development the essential driving force behind any development effort, arguing that ‘it will be primarily on the improvement of agricultural practice and in particular the adoption of modern methods of soil conservation that the achievement of higher standards of living will depend’.20 This was the public and benign face of colonial agricultural development.

The deeply rooted obsession with rapid expansion, modernisation and environmental conservation was combined with a less frequently stated conviction that Africans were unwilling and unlikely to change what the government saw as obsolete and destructive social and agricultural practices. The result was a prescriptive relationship with African farmers. A territorial focus on the costs of apparent environmental destruction merged with an obsessive approach to conservation within the Colonial Office of the late 1930s. Circulars (the most important of which was issued in 1938 to remind colonial governments to report soil degradation) and agricultural consultants warned of the potential social and agricultural collapse threatened by a destructive relationship with the colonial environment.21

19 The Nyasaland Development Programme, Nyasaland Protectorate, 1947, CO525/208/4, PRO. 20 Colby quoted in Baker, C., Development Governor: A Biography of Sir Geoffrey Colby, British Academic Press, London, 1994, pg. 81-2. 21 Beinart and Anderson dealt with the rise of official concern regarding environmental destruction, and soil conservation in particular. They emphasise the links between international awareness of the issue and trace the ways in which this concern was transformed into a colonial policy that penalised African producers, encouraged large-scale planning and alienated African opinion. See Op. Cit. Anderson, and Beinart, W., Soil Erosion, Conservationism and Ideas about Development: a Southern African Exploration, 1900-1960, Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, 1984.

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Beinart pointed out the transformation this approach caused within the Protectorate government’s approach to agricultural and development issues after the late 1930s. Not only did initial concern with soil conservation transform itself into a desire to change more fundamental aspects of agrarian society and economy, but technical imperatives began to override the administrative need to maintain social order – the opinions of agricultural advisors began to outweigh those of administrative officers. G.B. Masefield, an Oxford lecturer on the Overseas Service Courses, wrote a contentious article for Corona in which he described the relationship in the following terms: ‘As a professional [the technical officer] is not interested in democracy or dictatorship; nationalism and the advance towards self-government do not touch him closely, for he knows that British technical advisers will be the last to leave and will be required even after British administrative officers have been dispensed with. He therefore in his turn is sometimes tempted to regard the Administrative Officer as a mere nuisance, fussing about things which are not vital, stingy with the money, and encumbering his pet projects with unnecessary rules and regulations’.22 Masefield referred to the ‘second colonial invasion’, a wave of technical experts sent to dispense advice in the colonies as part of the post-war development effort. These experts reinforced notions of the replacement of moribund African practices with a superior colonial knowledge.23

The transfer of technical knowledge increasingly eclipsed good administration as the legitimising narrative for British rule during this period. In Nyasaland this took shape in the very close focus on agriculture and soil as the base upon which Nyasaland’s future was to be established. There was a disproportionate expansion in both the budget and staff of the Department of Agriculture in Nyasaland. The concentration on guaranteeing adequate food production, increasing cash crop production and conserving natural resources resulted in a tremendous increase in recurrent expenditure from 17,132 in 1948 to 314,054 in 1956, and, more importantly, an increase in staff of 126% from 628 to 1417 during the same period.24 The Maize Control Board was replaced in 1952 with a monopoly marketing board for the maize staple. And a comprehensive Natural Resources Ordinance defining how land

22 Masefield, G.B., Colonial Aims, in: Kirk-Greene, A. (ed.), Glimpses of Empire: A Corona Anthology, I.B. Tauris, London, 2001, pgs. 11-12. 23 The arrival of the ‘expert’ is discussed at greater length by John McCracken in: McCracken, J., Experts and Expertise in Colonial Malawi, African Affairs, vol. 81, no. 332, 1982. 24 All figures from Op. Cit. Baker, 86-7.

258 DANIEL KARK was to be used and maintained was passed in 1946 and reissued in a more comprehensive form in 1949.25 In one visitor’s casual assessment, the Director of Agriculture in Zomba was ‘a kind of king-pin, on whom the wealth of the country depends’.26 Agriculture was clearly the official development priority.

This intense administrative concentration was received almost entirely by African agriculturalists. They were thought to be the key to any rapid expansion in agricultural production. Their potential contribution was evident – Africans occupied 95% of the land and produced only 40% of exports by value. Nyasaland differed from Southern Rhodesia, Kenya and the Union in the emphasis it placed on African production alongside settler interests. The Protectorate government was, according to McCracken, more an arbiter between these often opposing interests than a proxy for settler producers. An expanded extension service was an element of this comparatively favourable treatment, as were attempts to resettle Africans on less crowded land purchased for the purpose.27 More unpleasant for African farmers was the invasive raft of rules and inspections that weighed heavily on them after the late 1940s. The administration was ‘incapable of offering the sustained support to settler interests that was provided in Southern Rhodesia, yet often obstructive and threatening in its attitude to independent peasants’.28 The influential 1946 Abrahams Report was emblematic of this ambivalent attitude – it recommended the purchase of estates to alleviate crowding on African trust lands, but simultaneously recommended that ‘indiscriminate settlement’ be avoided in order to prevent the destruction of the land by ‘wasteful and short-sighted methods of native cultivation’.29

The remainder of this chapter discusses the manner in which these ambiguous approaches to policy and to African farmers themselves actually played themselves out in the minds of colonial administrators and African farmers, and in the fields surrounding the Domasi

25 Nyasaland Protectorate, The Natural Resources Ordinance 1949 (Ordinance no. 2 of 1949), DCZA2/1/1, MNA. 26 Frank Debenham produced a guide to Nyasaland for HMSO. He travelled extensively and spent a good deal of time with Richard Kettlewell, the Director of Agriculture. See: Debenham, F., Nyasaland: The Land of the Lake, HMSO, London, 1955, pg. 192. 27 Overcrowding and the rapidly growing African population were major preoccupations of the Protectorate government – ‘over-population precludes the application or implementation of any sound policy of agricultural reconstruction or development along modern scientific lines’. From: Memorandum on the Land Problem in Nyasaland, Southern Province Natural Resources Board, 9/9/54, DCZA2/1/1, MNA. 28 McCracken, J., Planters, Peasants and the Colonial State: the Impact of the Native Tobacco Board in the Central Province of Malawi, Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, 1983, pg. 192. 29 Abrahams, S., Land Commission 1946, Nyasaland Protectorate, CO1015/848, PRO.

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District Boma. It is a narrative of how the public transcripts of agricultural development and Mass Education interacted, and of how the hidden transcripts of persuasion, coercion and resistance both reinforced and undermined the development agenda at Domasi.30

30 This chapter discusses transcripts with the work of James Scott in mind. This was the period during which hidden African transcripts first emerged publicly in Nyasaland.

260 DANIEL KARK 2. Regularity, Rationality and Reform: Tax and Agriculture at Domasi, 1949-1955

According to Thomson, the ‘fundamental problem’ in Domasi was agrarian. The project proposals for the initial stage of the scheme stated that the larger part of administrative attention was to be directed ‘largely to securing that the most suitable use is made of all land available, and that this use is on the lines of good husbandry’.31 Before this could happen, the District Team required a comprehensive idea of the particular local problems facing them. They used surveys, census data and the rationalisation of the tax register to produce a catalogue of the major obstacles. This investigative project was, itself, a process of regularisation, rendering the district more clearly comprehensible to British administrative minds. Of the six Domasi Papers written in order to disseminate the results produced and methods used by the scheme, three were dedicated to the revision of census results, the tax register and social statistics.

The 1949 tax register was revised by Thomson and his staff over a period of two months, with Group Headmen visiting all of the villages in their respective areas, removing the names of ‘dead men’, weeding out defaulters, and dealing with the considerable number of duplications and omissions. The revised tax rolls were supplemented by a survey conducted by the sociologist J.C. Mitchell. Over a period of two and a half months, from June to September 1949, Mitchell sampled the local population and mapped village gardens with the assistance of six African clerks and the Agricultural instructor at Jeanes, Carrall Wilcox. Mitchell faced the suspicion of the local population. His presence was not properly explained by the Boma and villagers disappeared into the bush whenever he approached, convinced of various rumours that Mitchell was recording the names of conscripts for the next war, was an American spy, or had been sent by the Portuguese to claim the area for Mozambique. His study, when finally completed, was intended to provide a qualitative evaluation of the prospects for the Community Development scheme. It attempted to render matters previously opaque clear for the district team. Agrarian issues were a central aspect of the study. In the area surrounding Chitenjere village, Mitchell constructed genealogies, studied kinship groups, counted huts and families and mapped the area. The allocation of

31 Community Development Project – Description of the scheme, stating its objects and advantages, together with any plan or specification that may be available, CO1000/2, PRO.

COERCION AND RESISTANCE IN DOMASI 261 land, the status and ownership of uncultivated land, attitudes towards the fragmentation and consolidation of land, the means by which people accessed land and the personal histories and social status of landowners were all issues considered by Mitchell and his group.32

The concerns revealed by this quantitative and qualitative surveillance were far from novel, although some were certainly the product of Domasi’s exceptional peri-urban situation. Administrative officers in other parts of Nyasaland had long perceived mixed livelihoods to be a corrosive problem. Migrant labour took almost thirty per cent of men away from their homesteads and it was on men that productive agricultural supposedly depended. Zomba’s proximity to Domasi and the capital works associated with the Jeanes School and the Domasi Scheme itself provided the African population with other temptations. Thomson estimated that one tenth of fit adult men were abroad, while two thirds were in local paid employment for part of the year and one third for the entire year. Women were left to cultivate while men found paid employment elsewhere. This was an acceptable situation for the district team where the social context was appropriate – in the southern and central sections of the district, including the upper Domasi valley, high population densities precluded productive agriculture. But in the northern and less densely populated sections mixed incomes prevented the development of dedicated, efficient and productive farms and farming systems. The team felt this unacceptable – ‘this economy is not sound …it is based on most people trying to do two jobs at once, one for wages and one as a subsistence cultivator, and doing neither particularly well’.33 Division of labour was essential, ‘so that farmers are farmers and nothing else, and clerks and artisans are that and nothing else’.34 According to Thomson, a lack of commitment to agricultural production produced inadequate farmers and non-committal responses from African men confronted by officers demanding to know the reasons for intransigence. He recalled ‘a significant letter … received from a man who had been summonsed for prolonged delay in constructing his bunds: “I am not a farmer; I am only a clerk who gets a little food from a piece of land hoed by my wife”’.35

32 Letter from Mitchell to PC Southern Province, Progress of land holding study in Domasi District, 14/9/49, PCS1/23/4, MNA. 33 Domasi Community Development Scheme Annual Report for the year 1951, Nyasaland Protectorate, 1952, MNA, pg. 8. 34 Domasi Community Development Scheme Annual Report for the year 1953, Nyasaland Protectorate, 1954, MNA, pg. 13. 35 Op. Cit., Domasi Report 1951, pg. 7.

262 DANIEL KARK

Thomson and his team believed that this lack of productive focus was tied to an even more fundamental flaw in rural African lives and livelihoods. They, along with most administrative officers in Nyasaland, fulminated consistently and at length against the matrilineal and uxorilocal practices favoured by many groups in Nyasaland. The Lomwe, Nyanja and Yao – groups that together accounted for a large proportion of the population in Domasi – were all practitioners of a system that allocated land use rights through the female line, and required men to reside in wives’ villages. Outside sizable forest reserves most of Domasi District was Trust Land, with usufructuary rights to the land allocated by chiefs through the female line. This was a very unsatisfactory system for an agricultural service and development team fixated on men as the vectors for agricultural development. Men, according to this view, had little reason to invest capital or labour on land in which they had no vested and lasting interest, and that often had to be forfeited upon the death of a wife. Elderly African men in Domasi remember this as a very common quandary for men marrying into local society – ‘the problem that was there is that men would not do tangible developments at the wife’s home for fear that if the marriage ended through divorce or death he was going to leave everything there and return home empty handed. Sometimes when the husband wanted to build a permanent house thatched with iron sheets or he wanted to do big developments he would do that at his [pre-marital] home’.36

The team saw a further disincentive to productive investment in the large extended families that characterised rural African families in Nyasaland. The redistribution of earnings among these ‘passengers’ was seen to weigh heavily on men showing an unusual degree of initiative – ‘the African in a good position held back by a swarm of parasitical relations is a familiar figure; he is the personification of an economy in which the deserted wife and children, the physically handicapped and the bone-idle all receive more than they give’.37 This gloomy characterisation of African social mores was complemented by an equally pessimistic evaluation of African proclivities towards cooperative and voluntary activities. There was not felt to be the spirit of cooperative advance abroad required in order to encourage comprehensive community development. This was not a system felt conducive to the steady reinvestment of capital in profitable agricultural enterprises.

36 Interview with Mr. Maosa, Village Sani, TA Malemia, 26/6/06.. 37 Domasi Community Development Scheme Annual Report for the year 1950, Nyasaland Protectorate, 1951, MNA, pg. 7.

COERCION AND RESISTANCE IN DOMASI 263

The situation was further aggravated by ongoing subdivision of land into what Thomson called ‘sub-economic’ units as land was reallocated and inherited. The consolidation of scattered and small plots into economically viable units was a basic precondition of the production of a class of yeoman farmers committed to good stewardship and profit. In the absence of consolidation and the clear delineation of land ownership and use rights Africans were supposedly liable to neglect and ignore both decent land-care standards and incentives to produce more efficiently and intensively. This lack of consideration for long term husbandry was also, at least partially, the result of a hangover caused by what administrators considered to be archaic forms of shifting agriculture and Matuto cultivation (with crops sown and cultivated around a mound rather than along ridges).38 Dimba lands – plots on low lying and perennially moist land – were suitable for sustained use. But on all other land the priority was the reinforcement of methods that sustained the productive value of rain-fed and vulnerable land. According to the district team, population pressure meant that Africans could no longer practise shifting agriculture – the abandonment after four seasons or so of land too tired to be of any productive use. But the district team felt that African use of land was still improvident. They felt that minds one generation away from land-clearing, shifting agriculture and Matuto cultivation were likely to regress, back to agricultural practices incompatible with the standards of cultivation and husbandry maintained by British farmers. Rotation, fallowing, the application of compost, the appropriate care and use of livestock and the use of correct ploughing techniques were necessary to transform ‘the ignorant family with a hoe’ and raise yields above the two bags of maize per acre produced in Domasi.39

Transforming agricultural techniques was a necessary but insufficient change. Thomson and his staff did not feel there to be a universally cooperative attitude among rural Africans. Officers reported that Africans were often suspicious of their motives, and fearful of potential forced labour. They generally subscribed themselves reluctantly to reform where the benefits were not clear. There was, nonetheless, potential for change – ‘if the people of some villages are loath to work together on voluntary improvements or for healthy

38 Matuto was known as katutu in Yao. 39 Domasi Community Development Scheme Annual Report for the year 1950, Nyasaland Protectorate, 1951, MNA, pg. 9.

264 DANIEL KARK recreation there are others who do it cheerfully, and if a well-to-do artisan is unwilling to give even his advice free to neighbours wanting to build a village hall there is a humbler one who gives his time voluntarily to building a foot bridge’. There was ‘plenty of good material which only needs the encouragement it is now receiving’.40 Just as the Kwaca scheme and comprehensive schooling aimed to encourage the development of an ethos of benign individualism and a sense of citizenship, so agricultural reform and cooperative development were intended to produce a society recognisable to British eyes. The best aspects of an idealised British society – voluntarism, dedicated specialisation and an enlightened self-interest – were to be inculcated through a steady campaign of instruction in keeping with the principles of Mass Education.

Demonstration was intended to be both direct – with the benefits of agricultural change demonstrated through such measures as the reorganisation of landholdings – and indirect, with ‘progressive’ African individuals made exemplars of the potential of modern techniques. Instruction through agricultural extension and the employment of field workers were also part of this education. So too was the use of group discussion, the physical involvement of field officers and film strips. The latter was a particular hobby horse within both the Colonial Office and the Federal government and led to initial attempts to organise ‘circus’ tours around Domasi, at which instructional films were shown.41 Thomson expressed reservations about the value of film, particularly since ‘the canny Nyasa was not much impressed by such methods and might in fact be suspicious about them; there was nothing to beat the informal chat with a small gathering around the waterhole and the examination of a few specimens on the spot’.42 Film was not used again. Regardless of the method, the intention was to avoid compulsion wherever possible.

Thomson divided the methods he wanted used according to whether the outcomes were ‘desirables’ or ‘essentials’. The former were to be encouraged through the use of consensus and persuasion. The latter were to use similar methods, but, where Africans proved

40Ibid., pg. 12. 41 The enthusiasm which the Colonial Office and Federal government showed regarding film is discussed in: Smyth, R., The Roots of Community Development in Colonial Office Policy and Practice in Africa, Social Policy and Administration, vol. 38, no. 4, 2004. Smyth discusses the Colonial Film Unit was established during the war by the Ministry of Information ‘to raise the primitive African to a higher standard of culture’. The separate Central African Film Unit served the Central African territories between 1948 and 1956. Almost all the films produced dealt with agricultural topics. 42 Op. Cit. Final Report, pg. 89.

COERCION AND RESISTANCE IN DOMASI 265 intransigent, legal coercion through the chiefs could be used. This is not to say that Thomson necessarily preferred coercion. He felt that coercion ‘may provide lip-service, but in its bald form it does not lead to genuine progress’. Thomson’s willingness to countenance coercion in order to ensure ‘essentials’ was still, nonetheless, antithetical to the principles of Community Development. His belief that ‘essentials are matters where the welfare of the community is seriously involved, such as soil conservation, village sanitation and school attendance’ implied a diluted commitment to the self-help ethos of his development scheme.43

43 Ibid, pg. 99.

266 DANIEL KARK 3. ‘Desirables’ – Creating a Progressive African Agriculture

In 1950 Zomba district officers prepared a report on the future of agriculture in the district surrounding Domasi. In it they proposed the introduction of a new ‘grammar of agriculture’. The grammar was intended to change specific African agricultural practices, but the report in its entirety was more ambitious and was indicative of contemporary thinking in Domasi District – excised from territory in Zomba District – and in British Africa more generally. The old methods used by African agriculturalists were to be replaced by progressive techniques and modern social forms – matrilinearity and uxorilocality by male yeoman farmers, and an unspecialised countryside by a landed agricultural elite and a specialised landless class. In Domasi this resulted in two different approaches. For the select few a system of incentives and subsidisation was constructed, through which the administration hoped to create a class of yeoman farmers. For less promising producers resettlement schemes involving the documentation and rationalisation of landholdings would change both the physical pattern of ownership and the social map of personal and familial agrarian relations. This transformation was intended to operate on the most intimate of levels.

On the broadest of levels the creation of model farmers and resettlement schemes would transform Africans into the modern citizens so desired by the Colonial Office. In a far more focused sense these elements of the Mass Education scheme would create the individualistic producers and workers responsible for the maintenance of progressive nuclear families. This was a transformation attractive to teleological British minds, familiar with enclosure and a very specific conception of what a viable agricultural reformation should look like:

Essential to the development of farming in larger and economically sound units is the creation of a landless class; thus making possible the creation of larger individual holdings within the group framework. Though such a development will, no doubt be anathema to the “peasant on the land” sentimentalist, it should be remembered that English Agriculture only attained the high state of efficiency

COERCION AND RESISTANCE IN DOMASI 267

which it now enjoys through the elimination of the smallholder during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.44

For Thomson this focus was a personal volte-face. He had himself once been a dedicated ‘peasant on the land sentimentalist’. His correspondence as DC of Liwonde District on the northern border of Zomba and Domasi, suggests that he did not always subscribe to notions of specialisation and individualisation. Apart from his recommendation that coercion should be used in order to achieve the desired results, he also stated his preference for the food security provided by mixed incomes – ‘there is a widespread idea (not only in Nyasaland) that the possession of money will always ensure an adequate food supply. I am doing my best to disillusion the local population on this subject, and to encourage men in regular employment to grow at least part of what they require, if only to prevent them becoming divorced from the land.’45 Ten years later, as he assumed control of Domasi, Thomson had become an enthusiastic convert to persuasive individualisation.

Thomson’s reconsidered position is exemplary of the broader reassessment of colonial prospects occurring within the Colonial Office and Colonial Service during this period. In the same way that the African Empire was redefined after the 1940s as an exercise in education and modernisation, resettlement and the creation of a new class of model farmers were now among Thomson’s persuasive ‘desirables’. They were intended to be tangible and convincing demonstrations to ‘those who have eyes and ears’ of the benefits of participation in colonial development and the Mass Education scheme.46 This section deals with the two projects attempted by the district team in Domasi – the resettlement of particular villages along ‘rational’ lines, and the creation of a group of African yeoman farmers both as part of an experiment in social construction and as an example to other Africans. Both projects were tied in with efforts to stimulate the development of cooperatives in the district and the intensification of agricultural extension work.

The district team settled on individualised tenure as the model to be tested in Domasi. While some of the district and agricultural staff hoped to test a range of landholding forms,

44 Statement of Policy, Zomba District, NSZ1/2/1, MNA. 45 Thomson to PC, Southern Province, 7/2/40, NS3/3/3, MNA. 46 Op. Cit. Final Report, pg. 13.

268 DANIEL KARK the experiment in Domasi District involved the installation of progressive individuals on discrete plots of land rather than the creation of group or cooperative farms. Forbes, the Senior Agricultural Officer for the Southern Province criticised this unnecessary experimental pre-selection with a great deal of prescience. He stated himself ‘in complete agreement with principle [sic] of land reallocation into standard holdings, registration and the stopping of all fragmentation but, so far as this country is concerned, we have no information with regard to the best approach and the reaction of our African cultivator. Thus I consider it is essential that as many approaches as possible are tried in Mr. Thomson’s “laboratory” of Malemia in order to explore every practical avenue … Let us make Malemia the “laboratory” in fact as well as theory and suggest to Mr. Thomson questions which require answers and should any political trouble arise make sure it is localised’. The greatest danger, Forbes felt, was in ‘assuming that any one method is the correct answer and applying it generally only to find a mistake has been made and the cultivators in an area are so antagonised and suspicious that any further approaches meet with complete non-cooperation’.47 His concerns were not addressed. Thomson decided to proceed with an approach based on individual tenure.

Thomson was not going out on a limb by deciding on this approach. It was an approach with a respectable pedigree. The 1946 Abrahams Report traced favourable reports of African individualism all the way back to Nyasaland’s first Governor, Sir Harry Johnston, who described African enterprise as ‘much more like the occupation of a European than the hand to mouth existence of a savage’.48 The extension of individual tenure to small-scale African farmers deemed ‘progressive’ was also an approach common to almost all of the British African colonies in the post-war period.49 It was also the preference of many of the more influential officers within the Nyasaland administration. A series of meetings in 1947, arranged in response to Creech Jones’ despatch on agricultural development, placed a great deal of emphasis on individualisation and the depopulation of agricultural land as the ideal combined approach to agricultural reform. The countryside needed to be transformed from a ‘hotch potch patchwork quilt of gardens, varying in shape, size and crop, interspersed by

47 Forbes to PC Southern Province, 29/12/49, PCS1/23/4, MNA. Forbes was a relatively young officer, but was to win Colby’s confidence with his handling of the 1949 famine. He later became Director of Agriculture in Tanganyika. 48 Op. Cit. Abrahams 1946, CO1015/848, PRO. 49 Kalinga mentions the Land Consolidation Plan and Swynnerton Plan in Kenya, the African Farming Improvement Scheme in Northern Rhodesia, and other schemes in Uganda and Tanganyika.

COERCION AND RESISTANCE IN DOMASI 269 varying areas of forest, scrub and grazing land, indiscriminately dotted with villages’, into something recognisable and familiar.50 Hoes would be replaced by ploughs, better farmers would gain personal control of increasing areas of good agricultural land, unproductive peasants would be pushed off the land and into towns, and secondary industries would be established to soak up the excess labour created by agricultural reform. At one of the 1947 sessions – a meeting of Southern Province administrative and technical officers, including the Development Secretary Keppel Compton – ‘grave misgivings’ were expressed regarding individualisation. Giving individual Africans control over their own land would reduce the amount of leverage the government could exercise over them.

The arguments provided by Richard Kettlewell, the Senior Agricultural Officer in Lilongwe, proved more convincing. His opinions were influential. Kettlewell was later to be the driving force behind the development of the Master Farmer scheme, that was instituted after 1954 and picked up where the Domasi Scheme left off. He developed a close relationship with Colby after the latter became governor in 1948 – Colby appointed him Director of Agriculture in 1951, and he served in this capacity until 1959. They shared a conviction that agriculture based on capitalised individual production was essential for Nyasaland’s development. This was Kettlewell’s argument in the 1947 meetings at which the future direction of Nyasaland’s agriculture was discussed. They were, incidentally, meetings that Thomson convened in his role as Acting Chief Secretary for the Protectorate. Kettlewell pushed for the development of a capitalist agriculture, and strongly supported ‘the alienation of limited acreages, on conditional leasehold, to the better native agriculturalists. This I think would be an incentive both to do better in order to acquire land in this manner and also the incentive of possession afterwards. Conditions would require good farming, no fragmentation or disposal without Government’s permission and no mortgage’.51 This was to be a limited experimental prelude to the long-term transformation of African agriculture – ‘the furtherance of the yeoman farmer was the ultimate ideal’.52

50 Forbes to Director of Agriculture, 11/6/47, NS1/15/4, MNA. 51 Letter from R.W. Kettlewell, Senior Agricultural Officer, 19/9/47, NS1/15/4, MNA. Kettlewell also pushed for the collation of detailed information within a ‘Doomsday Book’ for Nyasaland. 52 Minutes of meeting held to discuss Secretary of State’s Circular no. 45 at Mzimba on 8th August, 1947, NS1/15/4, MNA.

270 DANIEL KARK Domasi was chosen as one of the testing grounds for individualised tenure at a 1949 meeting on land tenure attended by all three Provincial Commissioners, the Secretary for African Affairs, the Director of Agriculture, the Development Secretary and Thomson.53 The District Team initiated the experiment by seeking African exemplars of sound agricultural and social practices. This was the latest incarnation of the search for ‘progressive individuals’ begun in the late 1930s in Kota Kota and Misuku (discussed in chapter two). These progressives would benefit from advice and technical assistance unavailable to African farmers held in lower esteem. Planned fallowing, rotation and composting would only be taught to potentially productive farmers – according to Thomson, ‘to attempt to preach and teach them to all and sundry is only a waste of our small extension force, and half-hearted toying with them may discredit them’.54 Those selected to benefit were allocated large plots of six acres at Malosa in the less crowded northern section of the district. The district team felt that this was the only region in which extensive productive agriculture could be practised. The rest of the district was held to be too crowded and at best could only serve as a semi-productive dormitory for the peri-urban areas of Zomba. Conditions were attached to the land. Applicants had to be screened in turn by the traditional ‘landlord’ responsible for the land, the Agricultural Officer, the Native Authority, and, finally, Thomson. The applicant had to guarantee productive use of all of the six acres allotted. They would invest labour and capital in infrastructural improvements, of the type pictured in figure seven, with a progressive farmer shown in front of his new poultry house. They also undertook to follow the ‘advice’ given by the team regarding good husbandry, and not to alienate or subdivide the land. This was not solely an attempt to encourage the occupation of vacant land – ‘we hoped to provide a full-scale demonstration, by Africans, to Africans, of the benefits of consolidated holdings under good husbandry’.55 It was to be a demonstration of the potential of investment in those Africans who were willing to display both the initiative required to apply for land, and a willingness to comply with state directives.

53 Note of a Discussion on Land Tenure, 23/11/49, PCS1/23/4, PRO. 54 Op. Cit. Final Report, pg. 13. 55 Ibid, pg. 46.

COERCION AND RESISTANCE IN DOMASI 271

Figure 7 ‘Master Farmer’s poultry house in Lilongwe District, Central Province’. Department of Agriculture, 1956 Annual Report of the Department of Agriculture, Zomba, 1957.

There was no great rush to apply for the newly opened land. Despite the ‘not very onerous conditions’ and a local land shortage, only eight six acre allotments were occupied by the end of 1951. Most locals did not see the need to involve themselves in the project. Successful local farmers could already access adequate land in various ways. African farmers with commercial production in mind could lease land from European estates, although this came with its own set of problems.56 More frequently small producers accessed land through their chiefs, without the preconditions attached to land at Malosa – ‘there was no limit in terms of size. What I saw was that those people who were strong enough and had keen interest in farming possessed a big land and those that were lazy had little land to cultivate … no conditions were attached. If you were given land and you prospered, it was up to you to say thank you to the one who gave you that land, in this case the chief not as a precondition but just as a gesture of appreciation. If it never appealed to you to do so, fine and well. There was no problem. The kind of ‘thank you’ that people

56 Leasing from Europeans often required that African producers sell their produce at unfavourable rates through the landlord. Nonetheless, as Lonje notes, there were during the 1920s and 1930s Africans producing for market on substantial acreages in Zomba District. See: Lonje, A.M., African Responses to Cash-Crop Production in Zomba District 1881-1930, History Student Research Seminar, Chancellor College, 12/3/80.

272 DANIEL KARK normally did was to prepare local beer and invite the chief. That was the kind of respect that we did’.57

These recollections run counter to claims by the Land Officer, Colonel Feeny, that ‘Africans would only be too eager to take up leasehold from government or freehold from private owners if the land was made available to them’.58 Interest in the land did indeed grow slowly with time. When the Domasi scheme closed in 1955, there were only two allotments left, and these were put aside as a reserve for population expansion. The Malosa project nonetheless remained a confirmation of the exceptionalism of those involved, rather than a demonstration by Africans to Africans of the potential of initiative and cooperation. The result was that the examples provided by these progressives ‘were almost universally ignored’.59 The land was, for the most part, held by a very particular group. Occupants were almost entirely outsiders. Of the original eight settlers, seven were from outside Domasi, and therefore outside the local social structures governing the allocation of land. The men involved were also almost all artisans or semi-professionals, often with occupational links to the colonial administration. The former head carpenter at the Jeanes Centre, the former senior instructor at Jeanes (a man who also combined his farming with membership of the Legislative Council), a retired hospital assistant, and a retired detective sub-inspector were among the most promising farmers at Malosa. One elderly man recalled that these men were successful because ‘these people had money’, or at least more money than the average peasant.60 They still struggled. Many of the men were already engaged in agricultural production prior to the introduction of this system of individualised tenure and none of them were able to commit themselves completely to agriculture. All but one were reliant on outside sources of income to supplement their agricultural earnings. Production on the six acres that the team calculated to be adequate turned out to be insufficient to support the desired nuclear families. Not only were the men involved not representative of the broader population in Domasi District, but they were also imperfect examples of the

57 Interview with Mr. Maosa, Village Sani, TA Malemia, 26/6/06. 58 V. Fox-Strangeways to Branney, 25/3/53, CO1015/594, PRO. 59 Op. Cit. Final Report, pg. 38. This does not mean the men are not remembered, although this also points to their remembered exceptionalism. One interview respondent exclaimed the names of two of the Master Farmers upon being asked about the scheme – ‘Oh! Yes this scheme was the one that was introduced at Malosa where we had people like Mr. Kumakanga and Mr. Makhumula just to mention a few’. He also later recalled a Mr. Mgwede. From interview with former junior policeman, Village Kusalangwe, GVH Mtogolo. 60 Ibid.

COERCION AND RESISTANCE IN DOMASI 273 specialised and individualised social and agricultural lives the district team wished to promote.

This was, nonetheless, the seed from which the Master Farmer programme sprang. Kettlewell was instrumental in promoting Master Farmers after 1954, and the programme ran until 1962, when Hastings Banda, Natural Resources Minister and President-in-waiting, replaced it with his Integrated Rural Development Programme. Several of the original group of Master Farmers were chosen from among the progressives cultivated by Thomson prior to the termination of the Domasi Scheme. The Master Farmer programme was a more demanding version of the programme at Domasi.61 By the end of 1955 three Domasi men had qualified for the Master Farmer programme, with twelve potential participants. The ultimate objective of the programme was still the promotion of ‘the prosperous individual yeoman farmer’62, and it shared many of the implicit goals and failings of the earlier effort. Owen Kalinga discussed the Master Farmer programme in some detail. He noted both the ultimate success of the programme in attracting applicants, and its failure to provide a viable living for those involved. In much the same way that the programme in Domasi attracted applicants who were already reasonably well-off and well-connected, Master Farmers were generally men of means and influence and members of the petty bourgeoisie – ‘the government did not necessarily create a class, it consolidated one’.63 But this was also a class of farmers that, despite its relative wealth and influence, was forced to depend on mixed livelihoods to support their agricultural pursuits. According to Kalinga, the men involved all relied upon pensions, canteens, brick-making and other activities to supplement their incomes.

These were not the only flaws detracting from the overall performance of attempts to create an individualistic and progressive agricultural class. The caveats attached to the manner and form in which land could be held contradicted the basic principles upon which Mass Education was based. Progressive individuals meant progressive men – men would be freed from the confining ties of family and kin. As already described, the colonial administration

61 There were two classes of Master Farmer, but farmers generally had to own over eight acres, leaving a third fallow, had to follow local guidelines as stipulated by agricultural officers, and had to consolidate their land- holdings. Master Farmers qualified for a government subsidy. 62 Colby to Lennox-Boyd, Secretary of State for the Colonies, 24/3/56, CO1015/1133, PRO. 63 Kalinga, O., The Master Farmers’ Scheme in Nyasaland, 1950-1962: A Study of a Failed Attempt to Create a Yeoman Class, African Affairs, vol. 92, no. 368, 1993, pg. 385.

274 DANIEL KARK considered the uxorilocal and matrilineal marital ties that predominated in Domasi and most of the rest of Nyasaland a key factor retarding rural development. Men were averse to any substantial investments in their land lest it be removed from their control by a wife’s family or village, or lest their earnings be spirited into the pockets of countless dependent relatives. Leasehold had to be passed from father to son, supposedly in order to encourage long-term investment, and to prevent the subdivision and fragmentation of land. Hostility focused on a wife’s relations rather than on the extended family generally – ‘the progressive was always liable to the comment “Who does he think he is?” and to criticism by ostracism or witchcraft or even by arson. Among a uxorilocal people there is always the possibility of losing the land or the house one has improved because one is too progressive for one’s relations-in-law. If these troubles are escaped, the prosperous man is likely to be battened upon by most of his relations. In passing, it is noticeable that the most progressive people in Domasi are those who have escaped to some degree from the traditional family system; they also tend to have the happiest families of their own’.64

Not only were women not considered likely candidates for involvement in the programme, they were seldom discussed by policymakers beyond references to the dangers posed by uxorilocality and the poor influence they had upon their men-folk. African men seemed to take their cue from this official bias – ‘the standard excuse for any agricultural malpractice was (and still is) “I knew nothing about it; my wife (or my labourers) did it’.65 Despite the insistence that Mass Education included among its aims the improvement of female prospects, this particular aspect of the Domasi Scheme exemplified the broader ethos – it privileged the interests of individual men over the prospects of both their wives and their extended families. While there seemed to be a genuine interest among administrative officers in improving the relative position of women within rural households –from promoting an equal stake in the domestic income to ensuring that they ‘should emerge from the “beast of burden stage”’ – there still seemed to be a conviction that women were restricted to domestic pursuits. Women were assumed to be preoccupied with the home, rather than being the primary producers in a subsistence economy, which they were. The important thing was ‘to rouse the interest of women in themselves. It was essential to awaken the women’s desire for a better standard of life, i.e. to encourage the women to

64 Op. Cit. Final Report, pgs. 79-80. 65 Ibid. pg. 38.

COERCION AND RESISTANCE IN DOMASI 275 wear better clothes and so to make them wish to earn money in order to buy them’.66 This domestic focus produced counterproductive results. Women appeared to behave in a reactionary manner, but it was more probably a risk-averse response to novel and poorly explained ideas. The African instructor at the Local Government School in Domasi exemplified the cross-purposes that developed within households. In keeping with the ideas promoted at Domasi, he decided to give up farming in order to specialise and concentrate on his work as an instructor. His wife responded by leaving him for a month and planting a plot of maize for herself and her family.

Individual and ‘progressive’ men were not free to do as they pleased, despite the favour shown them. They too were restricted in a manner that contradicted the precepts of Mass Education. Tenure was individualised rather than individual. Individuals could apply for land use rights but could still not own land in their own right. Control over inheritance and land-titling were both still in the hands of the district administration. This ran counter to the cultivation of initiative and citizenship preached by Mass Education. But it was consistent with another set of administrative goals. The guiding principle might not have been the injection of African agency into relationships with the state, but the creation of a class of Africans who were loyal to the state, committed by their economic interests to political obedience. Thomson saw the absence of political foment among the progressive farmers during the 1953 disturbances (discussed in chapter five) as evidence of the efficacy of this ‘economic solution to an economic problem.’67 Kalinga comes to no firm conclusions regarding the political loyalties of the Master Farmers, but does state that there were both those who supported the government in order to protect their vested economic interests, and those who opposed government attempts to prevent moves towards self-government during the 1950s – it is just as likely that the Master Farmers chose a number of simultaneous political approaches, in the same way that they relied upon mixed livelihoods to survive economically. They had to maintain official favour while simultaneously avoiding the enmity of nationalists hostile to these exclusive official relationships.68 The latter they were

66 Minutes of meeting held to discuss Secretary of State’s Circular No. 43 at Mzimba on 8th August, 1947, NS1/15/4, MNA. 67 Op. Cit., Kalinga, pg. 368. 68 Kalinga makes it clear that the Master Farmers and the nationalists represented two sides of the same coin. Apart from the fact that the two groups often overlapped, it was clear that both were also pursuing the same ends by different means. Both wanted access to the economic and political levers which governed power in

276 DANIEL KARK not always able to do – progressives were ridiculed for their servility.69 Both progressive farmers and the state relied upon a mix of contradictory motives and strategies to maintain threatened positions, strategies that undermined consensual Community Development.

Communal values were also undermined. The incentives provided for progressive farmers were nothing if not exclusive. It was certainly intended that Mass Education focus on developing the capabilities of certain groups in order that they provide a positive object lesson for other Africans. But the explicit exclusivity of the programme ran counter to efforts to empower the entire community and raise their standards of living. It was clearly described and foreseen as the exploratory first step in a process that would eventually empty the countryside of the majority of the people Mass Education was intended to assist. Kettlewell and others involved in formulating the policy spoke repeatedly of the inevitability of rural ‘depopulation’.70 The only people to survive this process would be the economically specialised and politically cooperative progressive farmers selected on terms dictated by the state. The group of farmers the state ultimately ended up creating – or reinforcing – was a pale reflection of this ideal. Unable to earn an adequate income from specialised farming and representative of nothing more than their own exceptionalism, ‘progressives’ were an unsustainable and contradictory attempt by the state to recreate the countryside.

Nyasaland – Nationalists by challenging and seeking to assume political power, and the Master Farmers by utilising the economic opportunities offered by the state. 69 The Master Farmers were later to become the objects of nationalist scorn in the late 1950s. After the NAC was reorganised under Banda in 1958 they party used the Master Farmer scheme as an example of undesirable colonial interference. 70 ‘… provision must be made for the better agriculturalists to acquire more land so that they could achieve the scale and status of “Yeoman farmers”. They could only do this if a measure of rural depopulation took place to allow for their expansion. Those so displaced would be employed in secondary industries which would have to provide the social security at present afforded by the garden. On that premise being accepted, rural depopulation was inevitable’. From: Record of provincial conference held in the office of the Provincial Commissioner, Central Province, on 12th September, 1947, NS1/15/4, MNA.

COERCION AND RESISTANCE IN DOMASI 277

4. ‘Just another form of cruelty’? – Resettlement in Domasi

Depopulating the African countryside was neither feasible nor foreseeable in any immediate sense. The development of secondary industries and orderly urbanisation essential for this to occur were not realistic short-term prospects for Nyasaland. Some other method of reordering and redefining the ‘unprogressive’ mass of the population had to found. There was some immediacy in the administration’s search for a solution to perceived overpopulation and agricultural degradation. It was an immediacy felt by other British colonial administrations in Eastern and Southern Africa. Kenya’s experience during Mau Mau highlighted the links between environmental collapse and rural dissent and foment. Colonial administrations wanted to find a method of rendering rural communities comprehensible in order to assert control over aspects of domestic and productive life previously beyond their reach. The District Team experimented with a method increasingly popular in the post-war African empire. Many African colonies trialled resettlement programmes, aimed at the redefinition of physical and mental boundaries and the transformation of living conditions. The team chose Chitenjere, a village neighbouring the Malosa project and consisting of 660 relatively uncrowded acres and around 55 households. After a long period of consultation with the villagers, it was chosen as the site for an experiment in resettlement. This project was included among Thomson’s ‘desirables’. He recorded his methods and outcomes in a paper drafted for publication and in his Domasi reports. He represented the programme as an example of consultative and consensual development, in spite of the substantial changes he proposed.

Mitchell and his agricultural assistant, Carall-Wilcocks, surveyed Chitenjere Village in 1949, in the months before the Domasi Scheme was inaugurated.71 Mitchell was a sociologist and included his findings in his survey. He repeatedly made the point that land redistribution would not work without a sound understanding of the social dynamics of villages. Boundaries could be straightened and land ownership ‘rationalised’, but deeper communal change was necessary in order to render physical changes sustainable. The village – the musi – was the single most important social category defining Nyasaland’s

71 Mitchell surveyed over fifty villages in Domasi, but Chitenjere enjoyed a very particular focus. See: Mitchell, J.C., An Outline of the Social Structure of Malemia Area, The Nyasaland Journal, vol. 4, no. 2, 1951.

278 DANIEL KARK rural landscape, and it was more than a spatial group. It was also a social entity, with members of the village aware of their fundamental unity. Women shared labour in the fields and wealthier households provided food for the less fortunate. Kin relationships linked many of the individual families in the village and particular non-kin relationships linked individuals, with women maintaining close relationships with certain friends, their chinjira.72 Unity did not imply the absence of internal divisions. Different social categories – the product of Yao mores and historical circumstance – defined the character of individual villages. Mitchell made a detailed study of the history of Yao habitation at Chitenjere, producing an account of the village’s social milieu. It was of a type that Mitchell termed a ‘complex village’. By far the largest group in Chitenjere was called the Chitenjere Group. It consisted of forty huts in which lived the members of the dominant matrilineage. All descendents of a single ancestress – the likolo – the group was pewele pamo or ‘of one breast’. This group was exogamous and men married into the community. Husbands were foreign to the village. The second group, consisting of four huts, was led by Tawere and was a part of Chitenjere when the village moved to Malemia from the north in 1928. They originally joined Chitenjere after their soil was depleted in Chief Jalasi’s area. Similarly, Mlekere’s group of eleven huts joined Chitenjere after 1945. When Mitchell visited Chitenjere in 1949 he also found George’s group of six huts, but the families were to leave the village shortly after Mitchell departed. Finally there was Joisi, a woman who lived on the main road and maintained no connection with the village.

Mitchell’s primary finding was the fundamental instability of village life. The main group was united by a common lineage, but this did not prevent periodic disputes that occasionally led to social fissures. Particularly fractious was the relationship between sister’s sons and mother’s brothers as the uxorilocal system pitted the former against the latter in disputes for power. These disputes often led to sections of the lineage leaving the village and finding new land. Disputes also arose between the main group and the other minor groups. As George’s group demonstrated, this too could lead to exit and migration. Divorce was another cause of village fracture, causing frequent changes in household composition and land distribution as husbands left the village and the chief reallocated

72 Vaughan writes of the complexity that continues to define familial relations in rural Malawi. She uses the non-kin relationships between women to define what kin relationships are not. See: Vaughan, M., Which Family?: Problems in the Reconstruction of the History of the Family as an Economic and Cultural Unit, The Journal of African History, Vol. 24, No. 2, The History of the Family in Africa, 1983.

COERCION AND RESISTANCE IN DOMASI 279 fields. Population growth and resource depletion were yet another reason for village communities to split and seek new land. When parts of the community departed the village ‘Phoenix-like, emerges from the disintegrative process, reconstituted in a simpler but restrengthened form’.73 Mitchell’s essential point was the malleability and swift recreation of African village communities. ‘Rationalising’ villages and land in order to render them ‘progressive’ required far more than redrawing boundaries:

It is clear that the task of development is enormously complex and difficult. The technical aspects of the problem in development may be difficult enough but may be solved by a process of designed experiment. But the more difficult problem, when the technicalities are solved, is the political one of persuading the people to accept the innovation … Thus the solution of an apparently simple problem such as increasing the yield of an acre of land, may lie partly in tackling so ostensibly disparate a problem as the conjugal relationships of man and wife.74

Mitchell’s plea to address social nuance fell on deaf ears. The district team were more concerned with his technical and material results. The findings the team deemed relevant related to the size of agricultural holdings, the number of holdings, their current usage and soil types.75 The survey reported widely dispersed dwellings and land-holdings. Mitchell’s maps demonstrated this graphically, with a messy patchwork of fields, paths, reserves and dwellings. The untidy boundaries did not appeal to administrative officers trained in what were considered to be the best, rational methods of English yeomanry. Families in Chitenjere very often used land divided into several non-contiguous plots. There were 406 separate plots in Chitenjere with the average household dividing its attentions between six different pieces of land. The additional complications provided by social division remained unaddressed beyond plans for a physical rearrangement of boundaries. Thomson complained that ‘the social organisation and the general layout in themselves gave little hope of either agricultural progress or of the development of a real community’.76 The

73 Ibid. pg. 41. 74 Ibid. pg. 46. 75 Thomson, The Organisation of Agriculture on African Trust Land, An Experiment in the Consolidation of Holdings, 18658, MNA. 76 Op. Cit. Final Report, pg. 39.

280 DANIEL KARK frustration this caused the district team was aggravated by the regularity with which the pattern of holdings changed – in the five years between the first survey and the second the mapped boundaries changed substantially, as residents left, land was redistributed, and portions fallowed. This not only made the provision of extension services difficult, but prevented the precise cataloguing of the African population. The European administrative mind boggled. The control exerted by the government through census and taxation was perpetually undermined by a mobile and amorphous population.

The district team claimed not to want to replace traditional methods of land ownership and control, or to reform practices without preliminary consultation with villagers. They ‘intended to improve on traditional arrangements without their complete abolition and replacement’.77 The chief in charge of the land, the mwinji dziko, was still to exercise his power over the distribution of land-use rights. The physical distribution of the land and the concentration and building of dwellings was to change. The team issued a steady stream of propaganda during 1949 and 1950. A demonstration area was opened within which villagers could assess the benefits of concentrated and improved dwellings. Houses were rebuilt in a ‘better style’ in straight lines and with improved latrines. This was a technique adopted throughout Nyasaland. The Department of Agriculture was trialling small demonstration plots that showed ‘passers-by what is being done’, including correct techniques of spacing, fallows, ridging and rotation.78

The agricultural supervisor visited Chitenjere on a weekly basis to answer questions and attend meetings ‘at which diametrically opposed views on the idea were expressed in alternate weeks’.79 Opinion at these meetings fluctuated wildly – at the first meeting there was universal enthusiasm, at the second the project was considered too difficult a prospect, and at the third ‘one or two bold spirits’ asked for help reorganising their land and housing.80 There was open and covert opposition to the proposals. One family ‘would have no truck with new ideas’ and moved away, while recently arrived sons-in-law expressed disapproval with the potential redistribution of land. This seemed counterintuitive, given their status as outsiders and their lack of control over land, but makes more sense when

77 Op. Cit. Experiment in the Consolidation of Holdings. 78 Nyasaland Protectorate, Report of the Department of Agriculture for 1947, 1948, CO626/24, PRO. 79 Op. Cit. Experiment. 80 Op. Cit. Annual Report for the year 1950, pg. 8.

COERCION AND RESISTANCE IN DOMASI 281 viewed through the eyes of a recent arrival faced with a redistribution of land in an unknown landscape and within an alien community. Others likely to object were those with more substantial landholdings. Mitchell found an element of social stratification in the distribution of land. Some landholders clearly had something to lose and sensibly changed their minds after initially agreeing to the redistribution of land and rebuilding of homes. That Chitenjere was not a uniform social landscape and included within its boundaries outsiders unrelated to the dominant matrilineal line meant that outsiders with no connection to these lines stood a fair chance of receiving inferior or inadequate land after a redistribution. Support was, understandably, temperamental. The district team could not always count on complete support from the chiefs either. They had their legs ‘badly pulled’ by the headmen of two villages near Chitenjere. While the headmen expressed a general desire for change they had ‘at the same time, been telling the villagers that they themselves were helpless tools in the hands of the Boma, which had ordered that the new measures should be taken’.81 Quite how this subterfuge was exposed was not stated in the reports.

Figure 8: The Jeanes Centre housing at Domasi – straight roads and social order. Bowman, E.D., Jeanes Training in Nyasaland: The Story of its Development, Oversea Education, vol. XVI, no. 3, 1945.

81 Ibid. pg. 9.

282 DANIEL KARK

Figure 9 Illustration from Community Development training booklet. Nigel Parry, H., African Advance, Government Printer, Lusaka, 1945.

The team nonetheless managed to win over enough of the villagers by 1951 that ‘the atmosphere was becoming favourable’. The team was excited by the prospect of straight roads, rectangular houses, quadrilateral plots and a rational village layout. The desired product was demonstrated by the housing provided at the Jeanes School at Domasi (figure eight). It was also demonstrated in a Mass Education booklet produced at the Jeanes School in Northern Rhodesia for use with village communities. The booklet narrates the journey of a chief through a course in Community Development. One section provides an illustration (figure nine) of what ‘native’ housing should look like – neat gardens, newly thatched roofs, whitewashed walls and straight, shady roads. Thomson reported that ‘the people as a whole began to take considerable pride in the layout of the village and in their own new houses and surroundings’.82 The exercise was a good demonstration of the persuasive power of an idea explained well and approached critically. Persuasion was ultimately inadequate. The intervention of local and regional events prevented the implementation of the project until it was too late. The chief of Chitenjere died in 1951 and disputes over his successor caused rifts in the village and prevented any sort of decision making. The political atmosphere in Nyasaland during and after the 1953 disturbances also forestalled

82 Op. Cit. Final Report, pg. 46.

COERCION AND RESISTANCE IN DOMASI 283 progress. That access to land was one of the key issues for Nyasaland’s rural population during the 1953 protests made government intervention an unlikely proposition.

It was not until early 1954 that African agricultural assistants, the agricultural supervisor and mass education officer once again started making inroads. They approached the new chief who had no recollection of the previous meetings. Thomson attended a village meeting at which the purpose of the project was reiterated, and local feeling was again ‘sufficiently strongly in favour of finding out more about the proposal to justify going further’. A census to revise the 1949 data was conducted. It was decided to allocate each household a plot of no more than five acres, as experience with the progressive farmers in Malosa ‘suggested that one household could not manage even a 6-acre holding comfortably’.83

In contrast to the Malosa project, farmers in Chitenjere were not expected to be full-time farmers and the project was not intended to be a long-term proposition. Farmers were meant to rely on mixed incomes – these uncommitted livelihoods ‘cannot be regarded as a final solution except in the remoter areas’.84 This was an intermediate stage preceding rural depopulation. Dividing the land equitably was a tricky proposition – the team had to take soil type into account, eliminate ‘odd corners’, disturb existing arrangements as little as they could and distribute the fallows fairly. Local elders advised the agricultural officers to concentrate on eliminating odd corners and to distribute land fairly according to soil type.

The result is demonstrated most clearly in the maps produced before and after the redistribution (parts of which are seen below in figures ten and eleven). Where before there was a profusion of fields of different sizes and shapes, there was now a standardised template for the redistribution of land in Nyasaland. Regularity replaced randomness. To the eyes of the British officers, geometric modernity replaced chaotic tradition. The chiefs were taken out into the fields and shown where the new pegs had been placed. Villagers signalled their assent by hoeing ridges along the new boundaries and demarcating their new fields. The maps and the straight boundaries hoed by Chitenjere’s peasant farmers were the most striking visual demonstrations of the ‘totalizing classification’ and revolutionary

83 Op. Cit. Experiment. 84 Op. Cit, Final Report, pg. 11.

284 DANIEL KARK consequences intended by the administration in Domasi – this was the first step in a process with its terminus in the creation of a countryside of yeomen farmers in the Malosa mould.85

Figure 10: Part of map of Chitenjere village before redistribution. File 18658, African Local Government Domasi papers (16/5/9F, 4979, MNA)

85 Anderson, B., Imagined Communities – Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, London, 1991, pgs. 164-78.

COERCION AND RESISTANCE IN DOMASI 285

Figure 11: Chitenjere Village after the redistribution. File 18658, African Local Government Domasi papers (16/5/9F, 4979, MNA)

The production of an ordered countryside extended beyond the creation of a physically regular landscape owned by discrete farming families. It was instrumental to the attempt to reorder the social landscape, although not in the manner suggested by Mitchell. An agricultural society recognisable to British eyes would be reinforced by a tangible connection that would link citizen and state. The experiment in land redistribution around Chitenjere was closely linked to the creation of a system that enforced the regular payment of tax. Productive, progressive farmers would pay more tax more regularly. Registered and regimented landholdings would, equivalently, make the collection of tax a far more efficient exercise. The revised tax registers both provided a ready source of information on

286 DANIEL KARK African production, and inserted government control into village communities. The register allowed ‘duplication to be avoided, unreported movements and assumption of aliases to be checked, and individual particulars to be easily obtained or confirmed’.86 They also allowed the state to define the tax-paying household, and it was not the same institution as the uxorilocal type regularly decried by Thomson. The 1939 African Tax Ordinance had already determined that African men would pay tax and not women. The Domasi Scheme would enforce this legislation and, moreover, encourage households headed by settled men to pay taxes, rather than the supposedly itinerant husbands created by matrilineal Yao society.87 The willing payment of tax thus became an essential step towards the creation of the individual yeoman farmer and the regulated countryside beloved of British planners.

Of course, taxation was not presented to rural Africans as a profitable extension of government control. The Mass Education literature described the payment of tax as a reflection of a community’s civic mindedness – in Nyasaland ‘payment of poll tax is a sign of good citizenship … prompt payment and efficient collection are vital to the progress of local government and local social development’.88 Taxation defined the relationship between villager, NA and state, and determined who was a good and loyal subject. The payment of tax was by far the most direct and, among the African population, the least popular link between state and subject. Thomson’s study of the revised tax register in Domasi was an attempt to demonstrate the strength and value of this link. The first group that Thomson assessed not only had the lowest rates of default, but ‘is small, sells much produce, and also works mainly for government … its standards of contentment and village discipline are higher than elsewhere’. The third group, with a default rate of over fifty per cent, offered a negative contrast – there ‘discipline is poor and social life is unstable’. The best and most orderly villages – in other words those that appeared orderly and readily comprehensible to British eyes – paid their taxes. Revision of the registers allowed the state

86 Domasi Paper 1, A Study of a Tax Register, 18658, MNA. 87 The payment of tax in Domasi had an interesting history. When Johnston imposed a poll tax on men and a on women in the southern region of the Protectorate, the missionaries in the area advised Africans to refrain from payment. See: Baker, C., Tax Collection in Malawi: an Administrative History, 1891-1972, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 8, No. 1, 1975. 88 ‘Tax collection and community development are closely linked. Apart from providing much of the money needed for development, payment of tax and good citizenship go together and the defaulter is frequently a bad citizen’. From: Thomson, T.D., Domasi Community Development Scheme, Final Report 1949-54, Nyasaland Protectorate, 1955, pg. 20, MNA.

COERCION AND RESISTANCE IN DOMASI 287 to restore discipline and tighten the administrative hold on the ‘undisciplined, unstable’ remainder.

It was felt that a more efficient tax system, under the control of the central government and removed from inefficient local control, would draw the African population closer to the Boma and remove the unreliable mediation provided by the Native Authorities. The relationship between African population and the administrative officer, so often soured by the pursuit of tax defaulters (‘especially the “smart-alec” type’) would be strengthened and sweetened through the revision of an inefficient and burdensome tax system.89 Whether the system was overly punitive was the subject of one of the Domasi papers written by Thomson. Revision of tax records revealed incomes higher than the nominal amounts recorded. Supplementary earnings were provided from minimal economic crop production, and the use of local resources and foodstuffs. The tax burden placed on the African population in Domasi was, according to the survey, well within their means, even if the load fell unevenly on different parts of the district. Default or household deficit was the result of lack of initiative or inadequate planning. The annual hungry period was consequently not so much an indicator of poverty as a sign of ‘the improvident use of supplies’, a social failing later held partially responsible for the 1949 famine.90 The ability to pay tax on a regular basis was therefore interpreted as an indicator of both providential planning and good citizenship. A countryside of productive citizen-farmers dutifully paying their taxes was just the outcome imagined by the creators of Community Development and the Domasi Scheme.

How natural increase and the ongoing fluidity of the population would have affected rationalised tax registers and neatly redrawn boundaries can only be guessed at. Indeed, by the end of 1956 the agricultural officer in Zomba was already complaining that unregistered people from the plain were encroaching on the valley.91 There was little he could do. The end of the Domasi Scheme in 1955 put an end to the Chitenjere project, despite plans to extend it to include a nearby village that expressed interest in being similarly treated. The Chitenjere experiment was aborted, but nonetheless demonstrated administrative intent.

89 Domasi Paper 3, Thoughts on Tax Collection, 18658, MNA. 90 Domasi Paper 2, An Area Assessment, 18658, MNA. 91 Agricultural Officer to DC Zomba, 29/8/56, DCZA3/3/6, MNA.

288 DANIEL KARK Persuasive demonstration and argument achieved their very limited purposes. Whether consensus, persuasion and modest administrative means would have been adequate to rationalise land and housing in all of the other estimated 12,000 villages in Nyasaland is open to question. Given that this redistribution of land was intended to be the prelude to a depopulation of the countryside it is unlikely that persuasion would have been adequate in the longer term. It is also worthwhile considering whether rationalised and recognisable homes, boundaries, land-use practices, and tax registration made Africans any more comprehensible or pliant for the colonial administration, and whether Africans found these methods convincing in any long term sense. It is unlikely on both counts. The relationship between the agricultural officers and the African population at Chitenjere seemed to be reasonably amicable for a large portion of the period 1949-54. But it was not consistently so, preventing all but the most superficial and temporary changes in boundary lines. The events of 1953, discussed in the next chapter, finally revealed the fragility of the relationships established between African farmers and administrative officers during the previous three years. Mutual incomprehension continued to dog rural relationships in Domasi and Nyasaland.

The Chitenjere project is still remembered in ambivalent terms, coloured by ingrained mistrust of colonial intent – ‘the idea was good because the aim was to separate land devoted to farming or cultivating from the one used for construction of dwelling houses. The white men wanted to have homes built properly in lines. This would mean having dwelling houses in one line and toilets and rubbish pits in another line behind them thereby introducing some sort of planning in the way we established our homes This would in turn result in orderliness and also enhancing hygiene in the process but people misunderstood it, I think looking at the past experiences with the white men, they thought it was just another mode of cruelty. The idea therefore did not go down well with the people and was never implemented’.92 Malemia’s daughter provided an incisive assessment of the project’s failure to account for the social diversity of the people it attempted to amalgamate. Chitaganya, the federation of villages, never succeeded because ‘the initiators of the idea ignored the social aspect of it. It was not proper to merge different villages and different families as one. These social units had different social and family beliefs and principles.

92 Interview with Mr. Maosa, Village Sani,, TA Malemia, 26/6/06. Another respondent remembered that the Chitenjere scheme was ‘development land only on paper’. It seemed to have made little lasting impression. From: Interview with Junior Policeman, Village Kusalangwe, GVH Mtogolo.

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Group cohesion can never occur where the beliefs of the members are diverse … one-by- one we began to split and return to our roots and the idea eventually fell apart’.93 In 1983 Village Headman Chitenjere told Megan Vaughan that people in Chitenjere ‘breathed a sigh of relief’ when the resettlement scheme ended. Things could ‘return to normal’.94 Where the firmly held convictions of colonial officers relied on coercive measures and met with intransigence and resistance, mounting frustration on both sides raised mental boundaries less easily mapped and registered than houses, fences, ridges and taxes.

93 TA Malemia’s daughter, small farmer, Village Magwira, GVH Mtogolo. 94 Interview recalled in: Vaughan, M., “Better, Happier and Healthier Citizens”: The Domasi Community Development Scheme, 1949-54, History Seminar Paper no. 4, 7/2/83.

290 DANIEL KARK 5. ‘Essentials’ – State Coercion and Hidden Resistance

Thomson never ruled out the use of legislated compulsion in Domasi. On the contrary, he openly stated the need to use NA powers in certain situations. In the précis of the Domasi Scheme presented to the Colonial Office’s Committee on Mass Education he stated that only in such ‘vital matters as soil conservation will compulsion be exercised’.95 Three years later, presenting to the same committee during a visit to London, Thomson made a virtue out of compulsion, claiming that ‘apparently, the African outlook on innovation was that if government felt something was really important it would resort to legislation – if not, then the general public saw no reason to take notice’.96 The Colonial Office shared the view that certain colonial imperatives, environmental protection and the enforcement of taxation in particular, could not depend on persuasion alone. They had to be ensured utilising existing legal tools.

The indirect compulsion instituted during the 1920s and 1930s and exercised through the Native Authorities continued to be used in Domasi in spite of the stated subscription to democratic local government and African initiative. This indirect exercise of power was reinforced in Domasi by the unusually focused administrative network installed in the district. State power was distributed through a dense capillary structure of administrative and technical officers. The concentration of administrative personnel in the district, so unusual in British Africa, was intended to impel community development, but also had the un-stated effect of allowing an uncommon degree of surveillance and enforcement. ‘Essentials’ could be demanded and extracted where they were not voluntarily complied with. This was the administration’s hidden transcript – Mass Education could be adapted to provide altruistic cover for an administrative experiment. This aspect of the scheme could be interpreted as much as an exercise in the de-politicisation of state power in Nyasaland’s countryside as an experiment in focused development through Mass Education. Compulsory demands could be made while still maintaining the pretence of disinterested community development. As Thomson himself put it, ‘this is fundamental education with a

95 Annex: The Development Area Project, Committee on Mass Education (or Community Development), 13/10/49, CO1000/2, PRO. 96 Committee on Mass Education (Community Development), Minutes of the 29th meeting held on Friday the 5th of December, 1952, CO1015/652, PRO.

COERCION AND RESISTANCE IN DOMASI 291 very heavy hand’.97 Where ‘essentials’ were concerned the founding precepts of Mass Education policy could be adapted to suit Metropolitan and state needs.

The use of compulsion was not a novel instrument of control for the colonial state. The experience of coercion was not a new experience for Nyasaland’s Africans. Indeed, coercive relationships were still a fundamental part of the relationship between technical and administrative officers and the Africans under their control in the late 1940s. The most embarrassing aspects of these coercive relations were gradually being eliminated. Forced labour in the southern estate areas of Cholo and Mlanje was increasingly seen as an egregious abuse. The use of collective punishment was restricted, and the Colonial Office stated it as ‘firm policy’ to ‘minimize its use and resist its extension’.98 But daily relations were still framed by the coercive potential invested in Native Authorities and supervised by colonial officers. This relationship governed the extraction of taxes and labour, but was nowhere so clearly exercised or resented as in the implementation of natural resource rules. The roots of concern for the colonial environment and the broad rationale for the implementation of environmental rules have already been discussed briefly above. This description represents only part of a fuller picture. A narrative of how these attitudes and restrictions actually operated on the district and village level reveals the manner in which they affected local relationships and depleted the goodwill earned through other aspects of the Domasi Scheme and through colonial administration more generally.

Colonial environmental measures took several forms, requiring the elimination of certain activities and the enforcement of others. The focus of these measures was almost entirely upon African land-use practices, despite an initial interest in European agricultural land. The hypocrisy of this approach was not lost on the African population – George Mwase wondered whether it was ‘not clear that whiteman is the person who cuts a lot of trees in the country? He owns big acreage of land and hoe very big area of land. Cut all the trees, dig out the stubs, and make the land impossible to grow more trees on it’.99 Regardless, from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s colonial officers in Nyasaland attempted to transform the methods used by African agriculturalists that were thought to aggravate soil erosion and

97 Op. Cit. Annual Report 1951, pg. 9. 98 Note on Collective Punishment, CO955/113, PRO. 99 Mwase, G., Strike a Blow and Die: A Narrative of Race Relations in Colonial Africa, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1967, pg. 125.

292 DANIEL KARK deforestation. They promoted ridging and bunding along contours, afforestation, intercropping, fallowing and composting, and preached against tree chopping, planting on stream-banks, mono-cropping, mound agriculture and shifting cultivation. Natural Resources Boards were established in the districts and their recommendations funnelled through the Native Authorities. Zomba’s Natural Resources Board met for the first time in August 1950, and consisted of the District Commissioner, agricultural advisors and local farmers. The NAs were expected both to enforce the rules recommended by the boards and suffer the consequences of their extreme unpopularity. They were at the apex of a network required to disseminate and enforce government Rules. NAs were required to ‘make known to the head of each family all orders he receives’ and ensure that they carry out such orders. Heads of families were similarly required to make sure all members of the family obeyed.100

A host of natural resource rules were passed during these years governing almost every aspect of African agricultural practice. Crops were to be planted along ridges hoed along natural contours and not on steep hillsides. Further protection against soil erosion was to be provided by bunds, compacted earth walls that were generally two feet high and four feet wide and raised along the contours at fifteen to thirty yard intervals depending on how steep the land was. The Matuto mound agriculture favoured by many African farmers was to be eliminated in favour of strip and ridge farming. Crops had to be planted by certain dates in order to ensure adequate food supplies. Fertile stream banks were out of bounds for cultivation in order to prevent their erosion. Certain trees could not be cut in proscribed areas. The burning of bush prior to the planting season was restricted. Of all of these measures it was ridging and bunding that inspired the greatest resentment among African farmers and came closest to imperilling colonial authority. When open resistance broke out in Domasi and several other parts of Nyasaland in 1953 these particular environmental restrictions – the hated malimidwe – provided one of a handful of common uniting threads. But this is to jump ahead of the narrative – open resistance was preceded by a good deal of local negotiation, sublimation and passive refusal.

Environmental restrictions played an influential role in the determination of local relationships in Zomba District after the mid-1930s. Reports on environmental conditions,

100 Department of Agriculture to DC Zomba, NA Agricultural Rules, 3/7/45, NSZ1/2/4, MNA.

COERCION AND RESISTANCE IN DOMASI 293 annual district reports and the district correspondence are suffused with concern for the degradation of the landscape and the damage this would do to long-term development prospects. Africans had to be educated to prevent this damage, and, where this did not work, had to be prevented from doing themselves damage. Extension officers spent considerable time setting up demonstration plots and working with local farmers perceived to be ‘progressive’. The goal was not just to transform the physical environment but to transform Africa society. Thomson connected a social erosion to the physical erosion that so exercised his mind. Indeed, Thomson considered the heavy labour involved in bunding a bonding experience for married couples. Before men had little to tie them to land that was distributed uxorilocally. Now their hard labour would make them ‘think twice about casually breaking up marriages when they have to put work into the land’. The invasive prevention of soil erosion would, he felt, lead to the emergence of a very different social pattern ‘and we must be sure that pattern is one which we want to see’.101

African farmers were not always convinced by this social and environmental education – ‘instruction, demonstration, and propaganda regarding the various forms of soil conservation, composting, drainage, and rotation continue, and no opportunity is lost to impress on the native the increasing importance of proper land usage … the fact is that the considerable extra thought and slight extra work necessary for more intensive cultivation do not commend it to the majority of natives; they prefer to scratch the ground and live from hand to mouth and, when the soil is exhausted, to emigrate …’102 African farmers had good reason not to have some of the new methods commended to them. The methods were labour intensive and required far more than ‘slight extra work’. Bunding, in particular absorbed a very large amount of labour. Bunding schemes in Zomba were stopped periodically in 1951 due to their unexpected expense.103 It was a consistent challenge for officers in Domasi to find enough voluntary paid labour for the bunding works in the district. The absence of adult men, away from the district as migrant labourers, meant that old men, young boys and women were the only source of labour available, and even then only during the hot, dry season. In one typical instance soil conservation officers attempted to find willing paid labour in two villages in order to dam a gully – of the seventy people

101 Domasi Paper no. 6, Soil Conservation – Some Implications, 18658, MNA. 102 Zomba District Annual Report for 1938, NSZ4/1/4, MNA. 103 Draft minutes of the joint meeting of the Zomba District Natural Resources Board and the Zomba District Team held in the District Commissioner’s office, Zomba on Friday 6th of July, 1951, NSZ1/2/1, MNA.

294 DANIEL KARK who turned out, four were adult men, and of these four one was over sixty and one had very poor eyesight.104 The district team was frequently forced to depend on prison labour and on those sentenced to periods of communal work for environmental infringements.

The environmental aspects of the Domasi Scheme were prefigured by measures imposed in the district after 1943. The steep slopes of the Domasi Valley were the site of an earlier attempt to halt degradation. Several meetings between the Soil Conservation Officer, the Village Heads, and the Agricultural Capitaos charged with the enforcement of restrictions resulted in the extraction of promises to comply with and enforce various requirements. Villagers were forced, through a combination of legal pressure and surveillance, to plant away from steep slopes and stream banks. The capitaos – essentially agricultural policemen – uprooted crops that infringed upon these boundaries. The capitaos, with very limited job security, could not afford to be lenient – ‘if an agricultural capitao is found not to be doing his work well he is either moved to another area or sacked’.105 Compulsory land redistribution and the inclusion of agricultural land in conservation areas in which crops could not be grown removed land from productive use. Communities dwelling in areas regarded as threatened were required to turn out for communal labour in order to build and maintain bunds and tend reserves, duties that were particularly resented during the busy planting season.106

Ensuring consistent compliance with the measures was clearly problematic. There was little respect among young men for many of the chiefs responsible for enforcing the restrictions. Dawson, the soil conservation supervisor, reported that ‘one gets the impression that [the chiefs] have not very much authority, as regards land usage, with the younger men, and that more direct and exemplary measures may have to be adopted with some of the latter’. He also expressed disappointment with the uncertain commitment of chiefs themselves, a consistent theme that also runs through Thomson’s accounts of the later Domasi Scheme. Dawson described the poor performance of VH Arthur Kasonga, who cultivated his gardens on extremely steep slopes – ‘most of his gardens do little more than provide his

104 Op. Cit. Final Report, pg. 31. 105 Domasi Valley and NA Malemia Ulendo Report, DCZA3/3/3, MNA. 106 Report on Ulendo carried out in the Domasi Valley area and recommendations for future work, NSG1/6/3, MNA.

COERCION AND RESISTANCE IN DOMASI 295 women with work and Lake Shirwa with silt’.107 As discussed in the next chapter, Chiefs were placed in an extremely difficult position, caught between the demands of the administration that paid them and the dissatisfaction of their villagers. Their roles as administrative tools and their traditional duties conflicted in a very public way. This initial tilt at environmental protection in the Domasi Valley placed them in an untenable position, responsible for a land-use policy not of their making. Environmental restrictions alienated not just the chiefs, but their people too, and provided Africans with a first taste of the more methodical approach attempted as part of the Domasi Scheme.

The Domasi Scheme had a consultative style and coercive method. Thomson was clearly of the opinion that environmental degradation was beyond the point where consultation and persuasion were effective – ‘in Nyasaland conditions it is too late to depend on education and persuasion, and compulsion, accompanied by full explanation, must be applied’.108 He was determined to ensure methodical compliance with the environmental safeguards he felt were required. These demands required a heavy commitment of labour, no task more so than the construction of bunds. The five acre holdings determined by Thomson’s agricultural officers to be adequate to support an African family each required the construction of 800 yards of bunds, a task requiring four weeks of hard labour. Bunding one square mile of land cost the equivalent of 130 in labour, a considerable expense when farmers on five acre holdings were barely breaking even, and when the average family income in Domasi was little more than 15 a year in cash and kind. Where these bunds were found to run away from the natural contour or cause waterlogging they had to be realigned, not an infrequent problem. More problematically, they reduced the amount of land available for planting by 5-15%. As an additional nuisance they obstructed cyclists.109 Despite these drawbacks individuals were made responsible for the construction of these earthworks on their land, using their own labour and funds. Making individual men responsible was intended to have a similar effect as giving individualised land-use rights to ‘progressives’ – where a man was forced to make a heavy investment of time, labour and money in a piece of land he was more likely to regard it as his land and not the property of

107 C.A. Dawson, Further Report on Domasi Valley, September 1st-12th, 1943, 18/10/43, NSG1/6/3, MNA. 108 Op. Cit. Final Report, pg. 11. 109 Thomson mentioned in his report that the bunds obstructed cyclists, but also provided anecdotal evidence of more positive effects – a number of burglars tripped over the bunds whilst trying to escape and were captured.

296 DANIEL KARK his wife’s family. It was an exercise that further minimised female control over productive resources and struck at the uxorilocal system so detested by Nyasaland’s administration.

While Thomson and his team maintained that there were benefits, they also conceded that these benefits would not be apparent for several years. Unsurprisingly, they were deeply unpopular. The agricultural officers involved in enforcement made an effort to explain the reasoning behind the measures. There still remained a residuum of the educational ethos that Mass Education was intended to inspire. The officers found that poorly explained ideas frequently had worse consequences than no explanation at all. Before 1949 ridging in the Domasi Valley was poorly performed, with ridges running down rather than along steep slopes. Soil loss was aggravated with every rain fall. When confronted on these ridges by the Domasi officers after 1949 ‘the usual explanation given by garden owners was “So-and- so (invariably a man) came back from a meeting and told us that government insisted that we should hoe ridges instead of our old mounds. He didn’t know why, or how these ridges should run”’.110

The reasoning behind hoeing along ridges and the construction of bunds was explained more thoroughly by visiting extension officers and demonstrated on plots farmed by ‘progressive’ individuals. These were not the only methods. Far more often this agricultural education relied on chiefs relaying district orders to the villages, and on a series of field inspections and convictions for breaches. The construction of bunds was particularly closely policed. After the first visit by capitaos and technical officers farmers were given a day or two to peg the line of the bunds, after which the land was inspected again and five weeks given for the construction of the bunds. The district subordinate courts dealt with infringements. In 1951 there were 1,018 reported breaches and 213 convictions. Those convicted were sentenced to up to two month’s labour on the construction of bunds, ridges and other earth-works on land owned by those convicted of similar crimes, and by the aged and infirm. The photograph (figure twelve) of a group of villagers filling an eroded gully

110 Ibid. pg. 40. Often villagers failed to carry out orders simply because they did not understand and were not willing to risk an officer’s anger by asking for an explanation. ‘We did not understand what they said and what they wanted. A simple example, they would say ‘go and do this’ and you would just say ‘Yes Bwana’ despite that fact that you didn’t know how to do it. You wouldn’t say, ‘sorry boss but, I don’t know how to do it’. So if you go there and do something totally different from what the white man wanted, you think he would just be smiling at you? No, he would definitely shout at you. So that is why we labelled the whites harsh people.’ From interview with junior policeman, village Kusalangwe, GVH Mtogolo.

COERCION AND RESISTANCE IN DOMASI 297 demonstrates clearly the heavy work involved. Hard labour was intended to re-educate, and improve upon fines and imprisonment – ‘if a man is fined for some breach of conservation legislation he regards the penalty as payment for a licence to continue the breach; if he is imprisoned for not doing what he should have done, the job remains undone’. If, on the other hand, ‘he’ was closely supervised and instructed while sentenced to labour then the rudiments of bunding and other environmental measures might be conveyed. The irony of course was that women were usually both responsible for the construction of bunds and held responsible when they failed to meet the demands made of them. In attempting to praise his compulsory labour system Thomson admitted as much – ‘the considerable number of women involved meant that for the first time this section of the community enjoyed some real agricultural instruction’.111

Figure 12 Villagers filling an eroded gully in Domasi. Debenham, F., Nyasaland: The Land of the Lake, HMSO, London, 1955.

There was no doubt these measures served a purpose. Bunding was well advanced by the end of 1952, and Kettlewell expressed his satisfaction with progress after seeing Domasi

111 Ibid, pg. 43.

298 DANIEL KARK from the air. The district received an average annual rainfall of over 40 inches, most of which was concentrated in the period between November and March. In 1951, before most of the bunds were constructed the district was losing over 19 tons of soil per month per square mile into the Domasi River. It was to stem this loss that over 40 square miles of Domasi District was bunded in the three years after 1951. This resulted in a substantial decline in rates of soil loss. The heavy rains of 1953 resulted in a loss of only 9.5 tons of soil. But while Thomson expressed considerable satisfaction with these noteworthy gains, he both contravened the most basic principles of Mass Education and deepened African dissatisfaction through the use of forceful methods. The extension officers responsible for demonstration and enforcement could have told Thomson that the latter exercise diminished the gains of the former. Extension workers, reliant on good working relationships with ‘their’ farmers, resented the fact that they were responsible for reporting and prosecuting breaches.112 They were the first line of ‘fundamental education with a heavy hand’. For every person they convicted for breaches there were others more compliant who nonetheless resented the heavy-handed, intrusive and prescriptive presence of state agents on their land.

Most African farmers were alienated by the invasive approach as well as the heavy demands made by the state. While the official reports emphasise the pedagogical aspects of inspection and conviction, accounts of the actual visits made by agricultural and administrative officers give a different sense of the relationships between the state and rural Africans. Far from creating an atmosphere conducive to the creation of initiative and a sense of citizenship, heavy-handed methods produced an atmosphere characterised by fear and resentment. While elderly farmers and chiefs still recall with some appreciation the beneficial results produced by the environmental measures the same cannot be said for the means by which they were achieved. Though conservation was ‘good and helpful … the manner in which these good things were being advocated and implemented was rather harsh and cruel. Because as you know cruelty is one thing and peace and freedom is another. So the kind of freedom that was there was not substantial. It was in most cases spiced with cruelty. Even the [chief] would get worried when he saw one of his children [people] being brought before him arrested by the colonialists. He would automatically

112 See: Kadzamira, Z.D., Agricultural Policy and Change During the Colonial Period in Malawi, History Staff Seminars, 1975-6.

COERCION AND RESISTANCE IN DOMASI 299 know that his child is in trouble and he too, would be partly answerable. And so this British colonial government we are talking about here, I can say, was cruel’.113 Group Village Headman Chilembwe recalled a similar experience during interview – ‘I myself saw and went through this and I am not telling a story that I heard from somebody. Our life was spent through conflicts with colonialists. If you were found cutting down trees like Naphini and Mlombwa you would be in trouble. If you prepared matuto in your garden instead of ridges, you were arrested and only set free after paying a fine. We went through all these troubles and we couldn’t defy government rules because we were afraid of the punishment that would follow’.114 The same recollections were expressed in several interviews, and in response to questions posed in several different contexts. The irony is that recollections by elderly Malawians are in most senses generally favourable to British rule. The current poor state of the Malawian environment led several respondents to romanticize their accounts and emphasize the success of British methods. Rivers were perennial and well-stocked, forest cover was dense, and fields were productive. Despite this nostalgic background, British methods were still poorly remembered and unfavourably compared with the message being conveyed – ‘though this was said to be development most natives felt that this was part of the British cruelty because we were being forced as opposed to doing it as we pleased’.115 Officers were repeatedly referred to as ‘cruel people’, and the coercive experience as ‘painful’.

The average African farmer was not the only victim of colonial ‘cruelty’. The administrative officers maintained a dismissive relationship with chiefs, treating them courteously when they carried out orders, and less so when the slightest intransigence was shown. When a district officer visiting NA Liwonde described him as an ‘execratory dreg of predatory humanity’ he was expressing a sentiment that, while more strongly worded than was normal, was typical of the relationship between chiefs and administrators. Chiefs were considered inadequate servants of the state, and many district officers longed for the power to enforce orders with more vigour than the distribution of fines and labour sentences allowed. Kettlewell himself fondly recalled his early years of colonial service, a period when he was still able to use physical force to set Africans straight. He remembered

113 Interview with G.V.H. Mwalasa, TA Liwonde, conducted 12/9/05. 114 Interview with G.V.H. Chilembwe, TA Liwonde, conducted 12/9/05. 115 Interview conducted at TA Mkumbira, 24/9/05.

300 DANIEL KARK a meeting at which ‘I became exasperated by a most unusual occurrence of heckling by a man too full of beer. I despatched him from the meeting with my walking stick and more respectful attention prevailed’.116

In 1951 the Protectorate government made an unsuccessful application to the Colonial Office asking for permission to invoke the use of collective punishment for environmental offences. The village community as a whole would be made responsible for individual infringements. The Colonial Office disappointed them, stating that ‘to invoke collective punishment in such circumstances would constitute grave injustice and would have serious repercussions’.117 The repercussions were not limited to the rural backlash the Colonial Office expected from heavy-handed measures. Official awareness that the UN and US were interested in colonial conditions ensured that collective punishment was no longer a possibility. The high profile of the British Empire on the UN’s Trusteeship Council meant that the hint of undemocratic abuse in the colonies was enough to prevent permission being given to Nyasaland’s government.

That the administration was asking for permission is itself indicative of an incipient breakdown in the personal relationships between district officers and rural Africans. Administrative officers were expected to demonstrate an unquestionable authority and authoritative capability in their dealings with the African population – in other words the polar opposite of the relationship intended by Mass Education. Local and personal ‘prestige’ was all. Berman put it best – ‘no action could be taken that might appear to be a concession forced by African demands or opposition; all policy had to appear to be the result of the unconstrained will and benevolent concern of the state’.118 The ability to maintain this illusion was steadily being eroded by widespread and steadily mounting resistance. This affected not only the state’s ability to assert authority through taxation, but the capacity to enforce unpopular environmental restrictions.

This breakdown was evident in the region surrounding Domasi. Officers regularly went on Ulendo, or tours of inspection. The tours were intimate points of contact between the state

116 Kettlewell, R.W., Memories of a Colonial Career, pg. 13, MSS.Afr.s.1811, RH. 117 Lambert to Talbot-Edwards, 4/3/52, CO1015/654, PRO. 118 Berman, B., Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya: The Dialectic of Domination, James Currey, London, 1990, pg. 204.

COERCION AND RESISTANCE IN DOMASI 301 and rural areas, with officers walking to outlying rural areas, setting up camp and meeting local chiefs, headmen and capitaos. The intimacy of these visits is well demonstrated in illustrations from booklets intended to guide administrative officers in the performance of their duties. Clearly meant to demonstrate convivial rural relationships, one picture from 1955 records a DC meeting with villagers while on tour (figure thirteen) while another shows the DC enjoying a tête-à-tête with a smiling chief (figure fourteen). Ulendo personified the link between state and subject and directly educated public opinion.

Figure 13 ‘A Village Meeting’. Nyasaland Protectorate, Notes on the Duties of Administrative Officers, Zomba, 1955.

302 DANIEL KARK

Figure 14 ‘Discussions with a village headman’

The tours changed during the 1940s and 1950s. They increasingly became drives to round up villagers defaulting on their taxes and discipline those defying environmental measures. The political and technical environment in which officers had to operate also caused them immense frustration and not a little nostalgia. Michael Leonard, an officer serving in Nyasaland during this period, wrote that ‘the day when household furniture was taken on ulendo and one lived in grass houses and dressed for dinner are gone. The coming of the jeep and the aeroplane, V.H.F. and bulldozer, the pollster and the politician, the Information Department handouts and the Nationalist broadsheets are sounding the death- knell of ulendo. Carriers will not carry, villages boycott meetings and there is no time for quiet amid the shouting of slogans, the demands for rights and the denial of responsibilities’.119 Ulendo reports for the period reveal the public emergence of local defiance and resentment.120 This tentative and uncoordinated public declaration of the hidden transcript consisted partly of longstanding practical failures to comply with colonial demands – the most common manifestations of these failures were pretended ignorance and

119 Leonard, M., Ulendo, in: Op. Cit. Kirk-Greene, 2001, pgs. 32-5. 120 Officers returning from Ulendo wrote detailed accounts of their tours that were not intended for public consumption. These reports were a little more unguarded than the published accounts when discussing African responses.

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‘laziness’. But it also necessarily involved the first widespread instances of publicly- declared refusals to comply. Open verbal defiance of restrictions made a very uncertain outing, but an outing nonetheless. Both practical and declared refusals became increasingly common in the area during the early 1950s. In NA Mwambo’s area both the Group Headman and the Village Headman complained to the touring ADC that ‘this year people were very troublesome and lazy preferring Kachasu [beer] to Khasu [hoeing]’.121 This was a ploy frequently adopted. An elderly gentlemen recalled in interview the manner in which some farmers equivocated when confronted, pretending to be lazy or to have forgotten the lessons taught them, ‘yet they just wanted not to do as asked by government’.122

Others argued openly, but from the relative safety of an anonymous crowd. Public meetings became forums for grievances – ‘to date at every meeting there have been lengthy arguments and discussions about the ridging method for cultivating gardens. The people seem to have little faith in this and in many cases no ridging has been done at all due I feel to extreme laziness’.123 A large crowd at NA Mlomba put up ‘a very spirited argument’ regarding ridging, despite the nominated topic being Group Councils.124 The Zomba ADC, Hitchcock, was ‘heavily attacked’ for disallowing the cultivation of stream banks in Chinkwezule and Ndaje Nkula villages.125 Chiefs, caught in a deeply contradictory position between the demands of the state and their dissatisfied constituents, were immobilised. One officer reported that it was ‘heartbreak … to take the chief round bad areas and on asking him what was wrong in each case to be given the correct answer each time. And to cap it all perhaps the worst bit of cultivation was just outside the Chief’s front doorstep’.126

State legitimacy was also undermined by withdrawal of labour and non-compliance with government directives. Villagers did not always pay fines or turn up for labour sentences. NA Chikowi wrote to his DC complaining that the people of Songolo Village refused to pay fines issued for infringements. He complained that ‘I am not pleased with this village

121 Ulendo in Jali area, NA Mwambo: from 23rd to 28th October 1950, NSZ4/4/2, MNA. 122 Interview with Makilinesi, Myamuka Village, GVH Mtogolo, TA Malemia, 28/0/06. 123 Report on Ulendo carried out in NA Kawinga’s area from 8th January to 13th January 1951, NSZ4/4/2, MNA. 124Ulendo Report for the Period 19-24th February, NSZ4/4/2, MNA. 125 R.G. Hitchcock, Ulendo Report, 23rd-28th October, 1950, NSZ4/4/2, MNA. 126 Ulendo report for the period 12th-17th February, SNA Mposa, NSZ4/4/2, MNA.

304 DANIEL KARK because their village-headman is the ringleader who is always disobeying my orders’.127 Touring officers instilled more fear and carried more clout. Rumours of approaching officers would send young tax-dodgers or rule-breakers running from their villages. They would hide in the forests and hills during the day and only return to their villages at night to eat. They would not return to their homes until the ulendo moved on, or until they were extracted by threats to imprison their wives.128 Officers on ulendo frequently had to go to great lengths to round them up along with the normal haul of tax defaulters.

Tax, interpreted by the government and district team as an indicator of loyalty and good citizenship, was a particular cause of withdrawal and non-compliance. The people of Domasi had little conception of what purpose taxation served other than to harass them periodically. They seldom linked taxation with the provision of local services, and did not conceive of payment as the mark of a good citizen. Ignorance and resentment are the primary local memories of colonial taxation. Uneducated people in Domasi ‘hardly knew the importance of paying tax; nor did they relate local services like clinics and schools with the taxes that they paid to government’.129 This message was not always clearly conveyed, least of all by the administrative officers tasked with the collection of tax and the punishment of defaulters while on Ulendo. Village headmen were responsible for recording the names of defaulters in registers – kaundula. ‘There was no joking about it’ if the headmen reported names to the DC.130 Elderly women living in Domasi recall having had little conception of the purpose of taxation apart from the persecution of defaulters – ‘Yes, government was very tough on making follow-ups on non-tax payers. The tax collectors used to come right here in the village to hunt out those who did not pay tax … though it was not easy to say what men themselves felt, on our part as wives that time we didn’t like it because it caused panic. When you didn’t have money to pay it meant running away to hide in the forests or hills only to return home to eat at night. It denied those men who were unable to pay tax decent and peaceful life … Not many people knew where their money was going … some knew I think, but we ordinary people in the village didn’t. Nobody came to educate us on that. We just saw the tax collectors chasing people every year’.131

127 NA Chikowi to DC Zomba, 25/11/48, NSZ1/2/4, MNA. 128 Interview with Mr. Matereko, 27/6/06, interview in Chitenjere Village, 29/6/06, interview with Mr. G. Malemia, Village Magwira, TA Malemia, 30/6/06. 129 Interview with Mr. Kamwendo, Gardener of Thomas Thomson, Village Mbwana T/A Malemia, 29/1/07. 130 Interview with junior policeman, Village Kusalangwe, GVH Mtogolo. 131 Interview at Chitenjere Village, 29/6/06.

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One man remembers youths residing at their mother’s homes in specially constructed huts called mphala in order to avoid being listed as men eligible for tax payment.132 Another man, a young constable at the time, recalled the situation with a little black humour He remembered seeing ‘with my own eyes men hiding in the graveyard while on duty at night as a policeman. I asked them “Are you guys are you already dead?” I laughed. So yes indeed, people did resist tax payment in different ways.’133

Rumours of the tax-man’s approach were supplemented by other tales. Rapidly disseminated, these exposed the smallest chinks in the legitimising narrative. A rumour that the Native Tobacco Board supervisor in Liwonde had advised against certain restrictions led to a ‘recrudescence of matuto cultivation’ and ‘devastating erosion’.134 When rumours of Domasi’s imminent closure started spreading in 1954 ‘the people of two villages indulged in a brief saturnalia of illegal dimba cultivation’.135 Even abortive-starts and imprecise rumour could encourage Domasi’s population to reclaim administrative space for themselves. The ‘prestige’ of touring officers was under threat. It was not yet threatened by a coordinated campaign of defiance – that was to come later. In the first few years of the 1950s it was an entirely inchoate campaign by African peasant farmers against the measures that most clearly threatened their interests and livelihoods. It was not yet a coordinated campaign directed by a nationalist and educated elite, but these were nonetheless the first widespread instances of publicly declared refusals to comply with colonial demands.136

None of these rural African responses should imply that non-compliance and bloody- mindedness were a natural and easy response for Domasi’s population. There was initially little of the sense of civic-mindedness Mass Education was intended to inculcate. Local

132 Mr. Matereko – Village Sani, TA Malemia, 27/06/2006. 133 Interview with junior policeman, Village Kusalangwe, GVH Mtogolo. This strategy came up a number of times in the interviews. One ex-Kwaca teacher remembered female cunning: ‘Women are crafty and dangerous … women would prepare food and hid it in a bucket and pretend they were going to draw water at the river, yet they were delivering food to their husbands who were hiding in the forest or graveyard’. Interview with Mr. Nangupeta, Kwaca teacher and small farmer, Village Kanache, GVH Mtogolo. 134 DC Zomba to Agricultural Assistant Fort Johnston, 17/1/51, NSZ1/2/1, MNA. 135 Op. Cit. Final Report, pg.41. 136 Domasi was relatively quiescent compared with other districts in Southern Nyasaland, at least before the 1953 disturbances. In Cholo in 1952 for example, Wilfred Good started breaking down bunds on his Native Trust farm. He refused to pay the fine imposed on him and was imprisoned. His neighbours continued to break the bunds on his property. From: Southern Province Natural Resources Board Annual Report 1952, CO1015/1105, PRO.

306 DANIEL KARK lives were not easily connected with the taxes, services and rules issuing from the Boma. There was a small group of those educated enough to dispute colonial rules on something like equal terms. There were some people ‘who just appeared angry about anything as long as it came from the white men. You know it differed between the educated and those that were not educated. The educated had the advantage of knowing the motives of the white man faster than us villagers and therefore resisted the rules at the proposal stage while us villagers grumbled while it was at the implementation level- that is while we were actually undergoing the painful results of the rules’.137 Most people continued to grumble while beginning to engage in the limited resistance already described. Most people in Domasi ‘obeyed the government rules. Of course in some cases people showed disinterest in some government policies but as you put it this was in smaller ways that one would hardly take it as resistance but surely it was. You know not many of us knew politics that time. We didn’t even know that government is made up of people. For us when we looked at government we thought of it as a religion … what I am trying to say here is that for most people questioning things was not part of them except of course those people who went to school and learnt the tricks of the white man. So resistance to government rules was rare. You know when the rules came down to us we never thought that some people sat down and made those rules for us. We just thought that the rules were just there for us’.138 Local and small-scale resistance, when it came, was a self-doubting and uneven reply to unhearing power. These tentative replies included openly declared refusals to comply with colonial demands that were qualitatively different from the practical failures to comply that they accompanied. These first small acts of defiance were what Scott described as ‘straw in the wind. It portends a possible turning of the tables … that first declaration speaks for countless others, it shouts what has historically had to be whispered, controlled, choked back, stifled and suppressed’.139 Mass Education coincided with a sense of African initiative and citizenship its authors neither predicted nor expected.

137 Interview with Mr. G. Malemia, Village Magwira, 30/6/06. 138 Interview with Mr. Maosa, Village Sani, TA Malemia, 26/6/06. 139 Scott, J.C., Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1990, pgs. 202-27.

Chapter Five

‘Is this what you wanted when you came here?’: Local Government and Rebellion in Domasi, 1949-1955

I cannot hear what you are saying, for what you are is thundering in my ears. African proverb, quoted by Robert Huessler. 1

It was clear he loved Africa, but only Africa of a kind: Africa of Charles the messenger, the Africa of his garden-boy and stewardboy. He must have come originally with an ideal – to bring light to the heart of darkness … But when he arrived, Africa played him false … There was St. George horsed and caparisoned, but where was the dragon? Obi Okonkwo considering Mr. Green.2

1 African proverb quoted in: Huessler, R., Yesterday’s Rulers: The Making of the British Colonial Service, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, 1963, pg. 196. 2 Achebe, C., No Longer at Ease, Heineman, London, 1963, pg. 106.

LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND REBELLION IN DOMASI

In 1945 self-rule for British African colonies was a distant prospect. Even liberal-socialists like Creech-Jones assumed that African control of state institutions was decades away, perhaps even generations. The Colonial Office spent the immediate post-war period claiming that it would develop democratic and efficient local governments to prepare the African colonies for a gradual transition to eventual self-government. In this respect Mass Education and African local government were meant to be mutually reinforcing. The slow, steady development of modern values of initiative, self-help and citizenship among the African masses, and the emergence of a class of African leaders capable of sustaining these gradual social transformations were the common goals of both policies. Local Government, like Mass Education, required a healthy dose of official planning, gradualism and caution. The terms in which ideals of local self-government and citizenship were defined were, likewise, carefully prescribed by the state and were not framed in a manner that threatened official legitimacy. Local government and Africanisation reinforced an overburdened colonial administration, and citizenship was of a type that was predetermined by colonial officers. That Africans consented to these sanctioned concepts was assumed. So too was the clear superiority of the proposed changes. Reformed local governments would initially complement and ultimately replace inefficient and unrepresentative Native Authority structures with modern and progressive government. Merit and a common citizenship would replace heredity and tradition as the key governing principles in British Africa.

British colonial governments, the administration in Nyasaland, and the team in Domasi faced several challenges in attempting to effect fundamental changes in the way Africans governed themselves. These challenges proved fatal to the local government programme and undermined the ruling mythology buttressing colonial rule in British Africa. Many Africans doubted the sincerity of Colonial Office commitments to grassroots democracy. They were not credulous enough to believe that democratic local governments would fast replace the existing system. The African councils set up at local, provincial and state levels were never invested with enough power nor remunerated adequately to attract and train the type of educated and disinterested leader desired by British colonial administrators. Colonial administrators were, anyway, innately suspicious of educated Africans and limited their power on the councils – the Southern Province Council included twenty chiefs and five commoners, with the commoners selected by the chiefs. While there was considerable optimism regarding their place in colonial structures immediately after the War, their

310 DANIEL KARK relationships with British administrators quickly soured as the latter found fault with reforming ambitions and high expectations. Educated Africans sought other avenues to complement involvement in official structures. Increasingly militant nationalist activity and African agitation for state level constitutional change supervened and usurped plans for the development of African local government with an independent conception of citizenship. But these divergent attitudes were not always hostile to the values of modernity extolled by Mass Education. Nationalists in Nyasaland sought conciliation wherever possible, even while they called the government’s reforming claims into question.

Exogenous factors aggravated the situation and stirred deep pools of rural dissatisfaction. Plans for the creation of a settler-dominated Federation of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland presented the possibility that a competing Federal citizenship would emerge, one that privileged white settlers over black Nyasalanders. In the face of intense and coherent anti- Federation sentiment among Africans in the two northern territories the Colonial Office and territorial governments supported the creation of the Federation in 1953. The insertion of limited power for Africans on the local level was countered by the dilution of African influence at the Federal pinnacle. The anti-federal feeling that resulted was instrumental in uniting diverse interests, and merged with the rural grievances discussed in the previous chapter to create an increasingly militant countryside. Open and explosive displays of dissent during 1953 fatally disrupted the ruling narrative in many parts of Nyasaland. Domasi was a particularly dramatic flashpoint, surprising both the state and Congress. That the legitimacy of the late-colonial state was questioned from within this self-consciously liberal showcase of community development was a clear demonstration that gradual, coercive and officially-sanctioned social improvement was unworkable in the absence of genuine consent. Domasi, rather than being a model of colonial benevolence and rural satisfaction, became a source of embarrassment. The bush was ‘set on fire’, but it ignited a very different sort of African initiative. An unexpected sort of African citizenship – independent but cognisant of vying nationalist and official concepts of citizenship – fed this local scrub-fire.

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1. ‘Giving the people what they want’ – Local Government in British Africa, 1947-50

In 1947 and 1948 Creech Jones issued two seminal despatches in which he introduced the governors of the African territories to the concept of democratic and efficient local government.1 He defined his terms carefully – the new system would have to be ‘local because the system of government must be close to the common people and their problems, efficient because it must be capable of managing the local services in a way which will help to raise the standard of living, and democratic because it must not only find a place for the growing class of educated men, but at the same time command the respect and support of the mass of the people’.2 Over a period of at least a generation local government would co- opt and include the growing class of educated and increasingly vocal Africans. Government on the smallest of scales would provide a practical political education in preparation for self-rule, an eventuality comfortably distant.3 The state would also steadily entrust local governments with a greater share of responsibility for budgeting and administration. Local government was closely tied to Mass Education. Each initiative was a vital component of the other and both had similar ends in mind – just as the CO intended for Mass Education to simultaneously provide social education and inspire social change, so local government would ‘at once provide the people with their political education and the channel for the expression of their opinions’.4

The despatches were the legacy of a failed experiment. Creech Jones also stated the purpose of local government reform in negative terms. His despatches represented a move away from pre-war systems of Indirect Rule. Although the practice of Indirect Rule varied

1 The despatches were a collaborative effort, consuming the energies of Andrew Cohen, Ronald Robinson and G.B. Cartland. Robinson and Cartland were both recruited by Cohen after the latter was made head of the Africa Division in February 1947. Cartland had previously (in 1946) written a memorandum calling for the Colonial Office to make a statement on the reformation of the system of Native Authorities. He also called for a dedicated administrative journal to be established. The results were the 1947 despatches and the publication of the Journal of African Administration after 1949. 2 Despatch on African Administration from Secretary of State for the Colonies to Governors of the African Territories, 25/2/47, CO525/214/7, PRO. 3 Cohen felt that, even in the Gold Coast, ‘internal self-government is unlikely to be achieved in much less than a generation’. Ronald Robinson described the long-term purpose of local government in vivid metaphorical terms: British rulers had ‘dug out an adequate system of political irrigation channels before the rains of nationalism have burst into full flood upon them’. Both quotations taken from: Hyam, R., Africa and the Labour Government 1945-1951, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 16, 1988, pg. 151. 4 Op. Cit. 25/2/47, CO525/214/7.

312 DANIEL KARK from colony to colony, the basic underlying theory was consistent. Governors selectively fused local judicial, administrative and political power in a few trusted chiefs. These chiefs – the Native Authorities –exercised control over their advisors and their Village Headmen, a secondary tier of chiefs. Lugard in Nigeria and Cameron in Tanganyika were the early and influential exemplars of this British administrative innovation, co-opting local leadership and ensuring their complicity in African disenfranchisement. Indirect Rule in Nyasaland was the legacy of Governor Hubert Young, who announced the introduction of Indirect Rule in Nyasaland in front of a large group of surprised chiefs and DCs at the King’s birthday celebrations in 1933. Young intended Indirect Rule to fulfil a carefully balanced role. In tangible terms it gave the NAs control over their own treasuries and the power to make local rules, and it readjusted the relative powers of NAs and their Councils in favour of the Native Authorities. The Native Courts Ordinance, also passed in 1933, gave NAs the additional responsibility of setting up local courts to deal with matters deemed ‘traditional’.

The NA system was intended to extend the basic governing principles established since the initiation of colonial rule in Nyasaland – to preserve what were assumed to be African modes of government, to distance the state from the implementation of unpopular decisions and to ensure an economical system of administration. Indirect Rule in Nyasaland was, more than anything else, administration on the cheap. It maintained the pretence of representative government only in the sense that it presumed to invest power in chiefs supposedly recognised by the people. The initial optimism invested in these Native Authorities was steadily eroded after their appointment in 1933. Increasingly unable to adequately and consistently fulfil their fused functions, the NAs steadily lost both credibility among the rural population they were meant to govern and the confidence of the colonial administration that appointed and legitimised them. The Nyasaland government attempted to bolster the NA system during the late 1930s by encouraging the formation of NA councils in most districts of the Protectorate in order to encourage some consistency of administrative practice. The chiefs were also frequently reconstituted as chiefs-in council, required to consult their councils in order to ensure more representative decisions.

NAs and Village Headmen were increasingly unable to handle the sophisticated demands the colonial administration made of them. The complexities involved in administering post-

LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND REBELLION IN DOMASI 313 war colonial development required government agents capable of integrated and detailed planning. Chiefs were lambasted in district and provincial reports for incompetence, inebriation, inexperience, and a dozen other failings found irritating by colonial service officers. This was hardly a novel situation, but it was one that intensified with the arrival of colonial development as a metropolitan preoccupation. The drive towards more efficient administration and development was complemented by increasing metropolitan concern with the provision of democratic local government in the African colonies. Hailey, in his influential 1938 and 1950 studies of African conditions and administration, recommended a reformation of British policy that would place local power in the hands of councils and encourage individual NAs to open local decision-making to include educated Africans and ‘commoners’.5 This transformation of colonial policy was closely tied to the conditions described in chapter one. International scrutiny of colonial conditions and British ideological commitments to democratisation provided clear incentives to give at least the appearance of liberal government in the colonies.

Maintaining appearances was not the only motivation. Creech Jones and many of his mandarins – the most influential of them Andrew Cohen – were temperamentally and ideologically predisposed to political and administrative liberalisation. At the 1947 and 1948 colonial conferences the Secretary of State and his officers shepherded delegates as they articulated the forms and philosophies underlying local government policy.6 Democratic local government was, like Mass Education, an idea whose time had come, however ephemerally. It sprang, carefully planned, from the same reforming fountainhead that produced Mass Education. The policies were mutually dependent and faithful to the liberal and tentative gradualism that characterised Colonial Office policy in the immediate post-war period.

Creech Jones hoped that democratic local councils would prove the antithesis of the ‘decentralised despotisms’ created under Native Authorities after 1933. The selection of privileged NAs would be watered down through the inclusion of the ‘common’ and

5 Hailey visited Nyasaland in 1935, 1940 and 1947 in order to conduct research for his 1938 African Survey and 1950 Native Administration in the British African Territories, both of which proved influential in the determination of administrative policy. 6 The August, 1947 Summer School on Local Government, the November 1947 Conference of African Governors, and the 1948 Conference of delegates from the African Legislative Councils were the key meetings responsible for the formulation of local government policy in British Africa.

314 DANIEL KARK educated individuals previously excluded from public service. A ‘pyramid of councils’ (in the words of Ronald Robinson) would link these emerging representative local councils to national government. African provincial councils and African representation on the Legislative Council would provide an unbroken and elected link between citizens (and these changes ensured that they were citizens) and the national government, with local councils electing members to the provincial councils and the provincial councils electing members to the legislative council. The introduction of local government was consciously linked to contemporaneous constitutional changes. While Thomson was implementing his Mass Education scheme in Domasi, Governor Colby was simultaneously presiding over the steady expansion of the number of African leaders on the Legislative Council, Nyasaland’s primary legislative body. The introduction of African representatives onto Legislative Councils was a trend common to all British African colonies. Colby built on the initial exploratory steps taken by his predecessor, Edmund Richards, and followed Colonial Office recommendations regarding gradual constitutional change. It was very gradual. There were only two Africans on the Legislative Council, compared with the one Indian and sixteen European representatives – this in a colony of 2,350,000 Africans, 5,000 Indians and 4,000 Europeans.

Local bodies and Legislative Councils were not the only aspects of British African government subject to gradual reform – the late 1940s also witnessed the steady introduction of increasing numbers of educated Africans into the administrative services of the central African colonies. The ‘Africanisation’ of junior civil service positions complemented the local government programme by providing selected Africans with a sound grounding in administration in preparation for eventual self-government.7 The risk that limited Africanisation would ‘create a class of officer which would sooner or later become discontented by reason of their inferior status and limited prospects of advancement’ was recognised but was considered a risk worth taking in an effort to satiate appetites for more skilled work and to reduce the increased workloads of district staffs.8 The process was, like all aspects of the local government and mass education programmes,

7 Not to mention considerable savings for the government. The lower salaries demanded by and given to Africans meant they were a far cheaper workforce than imported European or settler labour. This was a considerable, if infrequently mentioned, selling-point. 8 The Work of District Staffs in relation to the development of Local Government, Summer School on African Administration, Cambridge, 1947, Report of Group V, 11685, MNA.

LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND REBELLION IN DOMASI 315 saturated with classical liberal qualifiers – ‘eventual’ and ‘gradual’ were the watchwords. Africans would not be allocated the highest positions, at least not yet.

As more educated Africans were steadily included in the Legislative Council and administrative services during the late 1940s, so it became more of a priority to ensure the reformation of local government as both a democratised base for government and a political nursery for future generations of African leaders. In 1950 both the Nyasaland government and R.S. Hudson of the Colonial Office’s African Studies Branch conducted surveys of existing Native Authority Councils in Nyasaland. Lucy Mair also visited the Protectorate, inducing criticism regarding her ‘scandalous’ behaviour and producing a report on African administration in Central Nyasaland.9 Hudson recommended that the duties of Native Authorities be gradually conferred upon district councils. Chiefs would still be an essential element within the new councils. Hudson reassured a 1950 meeting of the African Protectorate Council by describing a system whereby chiefs would form councils by complementing NAs with a mix of elected members and selected educated men. This would bolster NA power as ‘they really are governing the people much more than they are at present, and they will have much more chance of giving the people what they want and getting what they want for their people’.10 The Nyasaland government made District Councils statutory bodies in 1953, with chiefs sitting alongside other selected members. They were not elected bodies, but were nonetheless intended to assume some of the powers previously enjoyed by NAs. Although NAs maintained their powers of adjudication through the Native Courts and retained the power to issue orders, the ordinance reiterated the withdrawal of control over local finances and the power to make local rules. These were not particularly substantive changes, but legislators nonetheless intended them to amount to more than window-dressing, stating that ‘there would be little object in merely converting an existing Council of Chiefs into a new District Council by effecting a slight change in membership and by changing the titles of its officers to accord with those of the District

9 Mair’s visit produced a report: Mair, L.P., Native Administration in Central Nyasaland, Colonial Office, HMSO, London, 1952. The visit also produced a scandal. Mair was accused of consorting inappropriately with Africans and Communists. 10 Address by Mr. Hudson on African Local Government, from record of the tenth meeting of the African Protectorate Council held in the council chamber at Zomba, 10th and 11th October 1950, AA3, MNA. Hudson was clearly not an exponent of democratic councils. He was also dubious as to whether women were capable of understanding democratic practice, claiming that, in his experience, ‘women always voted for the man who had the handsomest face, irrespective of whether he was the wisest man or not’.

316 DANIEL KARK Council’.11 While the changes were not particularly dramatic, they were indicative of the intended trend, away from a system of entrenched and unrepresentative privilege.

African local government was never a clearly articulated proposition. It was plagued by the same ambiguity that dogged the formulation of metropolitan Mass Education policy. Just as metropolitan policy-makers and serving officers in the colonies were persistently torn between coercion and the desire to persuade, so they were chronically unable to resolve their very ambivalent relationships with chiefs and educated Africans. The former were regarded with a combination of paternal affection and scornful distaste. They were clearly a necessary element within the colonial apparatus, and there were still wells of nostalgic goodwill for the ‘good chief’. Particular names appear repeatedly in the district reports, exemplars of the chiefly ideal. Loyal and true, they reliably enforced state policy and demonstrated the required levels of restrained initiative, even if some took the opportunity to enrich themselves.12 Despite increasing formalisation of the administrative relationship between chiefs and officers relationships were still deeply personal. Character mattered greatly, and chiefs were judged primarily on this basis rather than on their legitimacy with their people. These personal relationships frequently soured. Constant references in district and provincial reports to alcoholism, idleness, corruption, fecklessness, wilfulness and uncooperative posturing among chiefs suggest a fatally ambiguous relationship between the state’s officers and their African agents.

The relationship, strangely, was reinforced by strains placed on a very different set of relationships. Educated Africans in Nyasaland began to exert influence in a coordinated manner and on a scale not experienced previously. Their approaches to the state and its agents were well-informed and critical. The Nyasaland African Congress was increasingly well-organised with an expanding network of branches and a group of leaders capable and articulate enough to tackle the government on more equal terms. James Sangala, a son of Domasi, provided the founding inspiration for the movement in October 1943, publishing a circular letter in the papers in which he called ‘for the Africans in this country to fight for

11 Acting Chief Secretary Graham-Jolly to Provincial Commissioners, 13/5/53, 23361, MNA. 12 GVH Balamanja remembered some of the perquisites which attached themselves – Chikowi bought cars and mills, Machinjiri bought a fleet of taxis, Kadewere had cars and several businesses. Certain NAs made sure the chieftainship was not the only leg upon which they stood. Interview with GVH Balamanja, 1/10/05.

LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND REBELLION IN DOMASI 317 their freedom, progress and development of Nyasaland from one field’.13 A coordinated and non-violent campaign to assert African political views was in the offing. The government initially met this campaign with equanimity, according the movement official recognition in December 1944. Levi Mumba, formerly of the North Nyasa Native Association, became the first President-General of the NAC and Charles Matinga was appointed his deputy. The NAC included among its membership NAs and chiefs, but maintained a posture to which Hastings Banda – the expatriate light on the hill for educated Nyasalanders – lent his support from his London surgery.14 Banda decried a system that privileged illegitimate chiefs over educated commoners. As a member of the Fabian Colonial Bureau Banda wrote to Creech Jones in early 1945 that ‘most colonial governors and other government officials act as though Africa were inhabited only by coteries of chiefs and headmen … no chief in Nyasaland can now claim to speak for his people’.15 In another letter, to Bureau founder Rita Hinden, he claimed that councils were packed with ‘ignorant chiefs’ and that, where educated Africans were included, they were inevitably pliant appointees selected by the District Commissioner.16 The threat posed by the rise of the ‘educated African’ drove the state and NAs back together, united in their resentment of the increasing volume of vocal and unsolicited advice and demands. NAs and chiefs feared the potential threat that educated Africans represented. The articulate demands made by the latter threatened traditional legitimacy.

This was certainly not the uniform opinion of NAs and the administrative services – the educated were not universally derided. Some of the less compliant NAs found educated Africans to be a ready source of sympathetic allies in the articulation of demands upon the

13 Short, P., Banda, Routledge, London, 1974, pg. 43. Something of the intended membership of the organisation was given by the original title – the ‘Nyasaland Educated African Council’. The ‘educated’ was dropped in order to make the organisation more inclusive, and the ‘council’ in order to prevent confusion with the provincial and protectorate councils. 14 Banda was very active during these years, maintaining contact with left-wing supporters and pan-Africanist leaders. Apart from Hinden and Creech Jones, Banda numbered Fenner Brockway, Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta among his correspondents and friends. Banda composed memoranda on the position of Africans in Nyasaland and proposed parliamentary questions for sympathetic MPs. He was Congress’ man in Britain, despite the occasionally cool relationship he had with Congress leadership. Banda was also a very generous contributor to the NAC coffers, as well as to various charitable causes in Nyasaland – he put around forty young people through school at his expense and funded an experimental cooperative farm in his home district, Kasungu. 15 Banda to Creech Jones, 24/3/45, 60/HKB/1/1/2A, MNA. Banda was to change his tune after independence in 1964, becoming the chief exponent of rule through the Traditional Authorities. 16 Hinden was the founder of the Fabian Colonial Bureau and a regular correspondent with Banda. Banda to Rita Hinden, 31/8/46, 60/HKB/1/1/2A, MNA.

318 DANIEL KARK state. Educated Africans understood the ‘tricks of the white man’ and could better frame demands upon and responses to state power.17 Chief Mwase, a prominent and influential NA, was head of the Council of Chiefs and was involved in the African Supreme Council, a body that included representation from both the NAs and the NAC and that was dedicated to unifying African opinion. Both bodies were anti-Federation. The state itself also recognised the potential of a constructive understanding with educated Africans. Many officers held the view that the only viable future for colonial administration was in finding some accommodation with this small new group and assimilating them into political and administrative service. The government did not expect this to be an economical process in the short term – they recognised that in order to attract the relatively small numbers of educated Africans into public service it would ‘be necessary to offer substantially higher salaries and better conditions of service than those at present obtaining in the Native Administration’.18 There was nonetheless considerable optimism, particularly in the five or so years after 1945, that the slow co-option of members of this group would reinforce efforts to modernise African society. They combined the initiative and broad social outlook that Mass Education and local government were to cultivate, and they were therefore likely potential allies.

Unfortunately for the colonial government these qualities also meant that those with a formal education were simultaneously frequently involved in nationalist politics through their involvement in the African Associations and the recently formed Nyasaland African Congress (NAC). This was not initially a problem for the government of Nyasaland. Their relations with the NAC were reasonably amicable at first. Charles Chinula advised his colleagues in the NAC to ‘discuss things with smiling faces even in hot discussions’ and to employ petitioning rather than more radical measures.19 The ever-critical Banda felt, in 1946, that ‘we have not a bad government to work against because our government is for us and is trying to help us’.20 The Governor and other government officers attended and spoke at NAC congresses. Delegations to both the Governor in Zomba and the Secretary of State

17 The idea that the educated better understood the ‘tricks of the white man’ came up repeatedly in interview. One instance, among others, was during interview at TA Malemia, 3/9/05. 18 Op. Cit. 23361, MNA. 19 Address to NAC Mzimba branch congress, 26/4/47, 20/CCC/1/1, MNA. The words quoted above were scored out in the manuscript. Chinula was instrumental in the pre-war Mombera Native Association in the Northern Province of Nyasaland. He was also a vice-president of the NAC in the early 1950s. 20 Banda to the Rev. H.M. Phiri, 21/4/46, 60/HKB/1/1B, MNA.

LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND REBELLION IN DOMASI 319 in London were politely, if disinterestedly, entertained. And the government saw Congress, somewhat optimistically, as a useful device through which reforms could be effectively transmitted to the African population. District officers expressed a constructive attitude to a perceptive visitor to Nyasaland – they felt that ‘Congress leaders, and the main Congress Chiefs represent the best kind of leadership in the country’.21

The reality was, of course, somewhat different. Mutual distrust and incomprehension resulted in the failure of this tentative relationship. The government responded to Congress petitions and questions only sporadically and always dismissively. Increasingly critical of government policy and personally and ideologically frustrated by gradualism, nationalists shifted their attention from a liberal agenda to more radical demands. No longer willing to petition for improved African education – demands that complemented government aims and preparation for eventual self-government – the NAC began, during the late 1940s, to lay the foundations of a less accommodating platform, striking out at the lack of African representation at the highest levels of administration and government and at potential involvement in Federation. They were not yet, incidentally, particularly concerned with strong rural resentment over environmental restrictions. These rural alliances were to be formed shortly. They were presently preoccupied with the most immediate blockages in a system that prevented all but the smallest group of educated Africans from participating in government. The gradual investment of authority through pedagogical local government – a type of adapted curriculum in itself – was no match for the increasing immediacy of growing African expectations. The government, for its part, lost sight of the constructive aspects of an accommodation with nationalists and the educated. The NAC presented a challenge that invigorated and confirmed all the suspicions the government previously had regarding the questionable loyalties and the opportunism of educated Africans.

At the same time that nationalists began to pose a small but growing threat to state authority, administrative officers were complaining of the continuation of a threatening trend. According to the complaints made by officers in a number of reports, administrative relationships in rural areas were suffering from a combination of the increased clerical and routine workloads imposed on district officers, decreased funding for district staff and the

21 Colin Legum, Confidential Report on Nyasaland, 1953, MSS/Afr/s/1681/237/2, RH.

320 DANIEL KARK corrosive threat posed by local agitation. Rose-tinted memories they may have been, but there was indeed a steady move away from the intimate and personal relationships between district officers and the traditional leadership established before and during the pre-war period of Indirect Rule in Nyasaland. This was a qualitative shift recognised by the Colonial Office and studied at the 1947 Summer School on local government. Some way had to be found of ‘relieving officers in the field from their present heavy burden of routine work in order to enable them to devote more time and attention to their all-important task in the development of local government’.22 This involved not only increased funding for specialised departments to assume some of the technical and judicial burden, but the further Africanisation of the civil service. The threads that bound state and subject had to be strengthened in order to patch and sustain the fabric of rural life in Nyasaland.

22 Op. Cit. Report of Group V.

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2. ‘We had our eyes opened’ – The Federal Moment, 1953

Federation intervened. Acrimonious debate over the closer association of the central African territories dominated political life in Nyasaland. A long period of spasmodic discussion regarding the merits of an amalgamation or federation of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland finally resulted in the creation of the Central African Federation in 1953. Africans in Nyasaland were supposedly protected from the discriminatory intervention of Southern Rhodesian politicians by the provision of safeguards. Colby’s opposition to the Federation was softened by these provisions. The NAC was not similarly placated. It objected not just to the Federation, but also to the complete disregard shown African opinion in the framing of the union. The clear contrast between the injection of authority through local government policy and the simultaneous dilution of African influence through involvement in the Federation was not lost on opponents of the scheme.

The Federation debate had a long pedigree. The concept of union, never clearly defined, was nonetheless one that had occupied European politicians and public servants in the Rhodesias and Nyasaland almost from the beginning of British administration in central Africa. An attempt by the British South Africa Company to unite the Rhodesias in 1916 came to naught. The initiative received earnest consideration in the late 1920s with the appointment of the Hilton Young Commission in 1928 to look into the formation of unions out of the British colonies in east and central Africa.23 In 1935 and 1936 the idea built up a serious head of steam, first after the Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia and the Governors of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland met to discuss potential administrative functions that would benefit from union, and then at the first Victoria Falls conference at which white parliamentarians and officials dealt with the finer points. It was with the appointment of the Bledisloe Commission in 1938 that the concept of closer union came of age as a serious proposal, despite the equivocal findings of the final report. The commission

23 The Hilton Young Commissioners, including the secretary of the International Missionary Council, Dr. Joseph Oldham, maintained that Federations should protect Africans against settler domination. Britain was to be the arbiter of the relationship between settlers and Africans. This principle was stated in the report conclusions – ‘our idea is that while each [race] pursues its own distinctive and natural line of development, they may be able to settle down together in a single state without fear of a struggle for domination, provided that there is available an impartial arbiter to decided issues in which there is a conflict of racial interests. It can be the destiny of the Imperial Government to fill this role’. Quoted in: Rotberg, R., The Rise of Nationalism in Central Africa: The Making of Malawi and Zambia 1873-1964, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1965, pg. 100.

322 DANIEL KARK essentially recommended against a federation having been appointed to consider union ‘with due regard to the interests of all the inhabitants irrespective of race, and to the general responsibility of the Government of the United Kingdom for the interests of the Native inhabitants’.24 This last provision was faithful to one of the key commitments made by the British government to the African inhabitants of the British African colonies, but it was also the fatal flaw in the formulation of the federation scheme.

The 1923 Devonshire Declaration and 1930 Passfield Memorandum both committed Britain to the protection of African interests in Central and East Africa, even where these conflicted with the desires of European setters. The Devonshire Declaration stated that ‘the interests of African natives must be paramount and that if and when those interests and the interests of the immigrant races should conflict, the former should prevail’.25 The concept of ‘paramountcy’ and the findings of the Bledisloe Commission were notable for their fundamental irrelevance at the second Victoria Falls Conference in 1949. African representatives were consulted rarely, if at all (although African delegates were invited to the third and final Victoria Falls Conference in 195126), and while the British government initially approached closer union cautiously, it was steadily won over by proposals for failsafe guarantees of African interests – including provision for an African Affairs Board – and by arguments that Africans stood to gain more from the Federal economic development than they would lose from political marginalisation.27 For Labour politicians, like Creech

24 ‘Amongst the natives also there was in general an imperfect appreciation of the issues involved. The proposals for amalgamation appeared to have come to them as a surprise, allowing but little time for their due consideration … the striking unanimity, in the northern Territories, of the native opposition to amalgamation, based mainly on dislike of some features of the native policy of Southern Rhodesia, and the anxiety of the natives in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland lest there should be any change in the system under which they regard themselves as enjoying the direct protection of Your Majesty, are factors which cannot in our judgement be ignored.’ From: Rhodesia-Nyasaland (Bledisloe) Royal Commission Report, HMSO, London, March 1939, MNA. 25 Shiels, D., The East Africa Report, The Political Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 1, Jan 1932. 26 The Nyasaland African delegates were Chief Mwase, Clement Kumbikano (the former administrative assistant at Domasi) and E.K. Gondwe. None of the delegates consented to Federation, but they were nonetheless accused of treachery upon return to Nyasaland. Their opponents felt they should not even have attended the conference. 27 Indeed, even Colby – generally cautious in his approach to Federation and cognisant of African objections to Southern Rhodesian discrimination – could not understand African objections to a scheme with the potential for economic advancement: ‘the African is only beginning to emerge from a state of bare economic subsistence and complete dependence on the land into participation in a modern economy, and there are very few Africans in Nyasaland who have been, or can be, brought to any sort of understanding of those economic realities which are bound to determine their material well-being in the future. In consequence, the long term economic advantages of Federation provide a very poor counter-weight to the emotional appeal of African nationalism and the glittering prospect of political power’. From: Footman to Lennox-Boyd (draft approved by Colby) 30/7/56, CO1015/1133, PRO.

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Jones, Federation offered the prospect of economic development through the expansion of settler production. For Conservatives, Federation provided a counter to the threat posed by militant Afrikaner nationalism in South Africa after 1948. This strategic compromise proved a more influential factor than African objections. Despite the gross under- representation of Africans in the Federal Assembly, and despite the fact that the scheme was approved by 25,570 voters out of a population of eight million, the Federation came into existence in September 1953.28

The Federation was deeply unpopular among Nyasaland’s Africans. They objected to the marginalised position which they were allocated within the Federal framework, and to the highhanded manner in which Federal government was negotiated and enacted. Most rural Africans in Nyasaland did not have a clear idea of its implications. Their links with the actual policy-making were often tenuous, at best. Ignorance was fertile ground for rumour and fear. One man remembered the period being ‘tough’ – ‘planes were everywhere flying close to the ground throwing letters of threat so that people should submit to their wishes. People thought that maybe the world was ending’.29 A former Kwaca school teacher recalled the use of coercion rather than reason to convince villagers of the Federation cause – ‘The whites were bad people. It was force everywhere. You see because of this that is why they faced resistance from the natives. What they felt was that first they believed that they would only succeed if they used force to advance their agenda’.30 Educated Africans were able to respond in more clearly articulated terms, and spread their message among their less literate compatriots. Orton Chirwa, recently returned from study at Fort Hare, toured villages articulating discontent. Scots missionaries were similarly antipathetic. Educated Africans told chiefs ‘the secrets behind the attitude of the British colonialists … they told us the pros and cons of the White Man’s rule and from then on it was like we had our eyes opened’.31

28 A motion at Westminster approving the Federation was passed by 304 votes to 260. The voters of Southern Rhodesia then approved it by 25,570 votes to 14,729 in April 1953. 429 Africans were eligible to vote in the referendum. Federation meant that six million Africans would be represented by a quarter of the Federal Legislature, while 250,000 Europeans would be represented by the remaining three quarters. 29 Interview with Mr. Matereko, Sani vge, Gvh Mtwiche, TA Malemia, 27/06/2006. 30 Interview with Mr. Nangupeta, Village Kanache, GVH Mtogolo, TA Malemia. 31 Interview with TA and chiefs at TA Mwambo, 10/9/05.

324 DANIEL KARK In more specific terms the leadership of the NAC were concerned that the Colonial Office had reneged on its responsibility to protect the rights of Africans and the constitution of Nyasaland. These were now under threat from federation with Southern Rhodesia. Congress and their supporters feared closer association with a colony governed by reputedly reactionary settlers. The Bledisloe report noted the powerful reputation Southern Rhodesian settlers had earned for racism among the Africans of the two northern territories.32 The steady marginalisation and disenfranchisement of Africans in the Union of South Africa after 1948 presented a similar case against domination by settler interests. When Secretary of State James Griffiths visited Nyasaland in 1951 a delegation of chiefs begged that they be ‘educated for a few more years and the Protectorate be handed over to ourselves for we will benefit nothing in the Federation’. They likened the relationship between Southern Rhodesian settlers and Africans to that between a leopard and goat.33 Statements by Federal politicians before and after 1953 did nothing to reassure Nyasaland’s Africans. The first Prime Minister of the Federation, , stated in the Federal Assembly that ‘in the distant future, Africans may earn the right to become equal partners, which means that they could have a half share in partnerships but never more than that’.34 He infamously compared the relationship between Europeans and Africans as much the same as that between a rider and horse.35 , Minister of Transport and ultimately Huggins’ successor as Prime Minister of the Federation, explained the absence of African delegates at the 1949 Victoria Falls conference by stating that they would not understand what was going on anyway. While Welensky claimed that suppression never paid, he also had a very limited definition of African advancement in the Federation – ‘I think [‘the African’] should be allowed to go as far as his natural ability will permit him and I personally feel that the sooner we break away from the ‘hot-house’ method of encouraging African advancement the better for him and for us’.36

32 Africans were consulted extensively by the Bledisloe commissioners. One African reported that white Southern Rhodesians ‘do not look upon the black man as a person, they just treat them as dogs. The only time they look after them, is when they want money from them … I am a person, not a dog’. Quoted in: Op. Cit. Rotberg, pg. 111. 33 Gondwe, I.G., The Chief’s Reaction to Closer Union Proposals in Malawi, Chancellor College History Seminar Paper, 1971-2. 34 Lord Malvern, Reuters report, 13/3/56, CO1015/1163, PRO. 35 Huggins’ scorn was not reserved for Africans. He was disappointed with Colonial Office concern for the African welfare within the Federation. At the September 1951 Victoria Falls Conference he described the proceedings as a ‘Native Benefit Society led by the Secretary of State for the Colonies’. Quoted in: Meredith, M., The First Dance of Freedom: Black Africa in the Postwar Era, Harper and Row, New York, 1984, pg. 78. 36 Welensky to Colby, 14/7/55, MSS/Afr/s/2200/1, RH.

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Congress delegates persistently stated their case. The NAC received no response to its call, at its second annual conference in Lilongwe in October 1945, for an assurance that Federation would not proceed without consultation with the African population of Nyasaland. No response would be forthcoming. Creech Jones and his successor as Secretary of State, James Griffiths, visited Central African in 1949 and 1951 respectively, but paid no heed to strong Congress warnings of African dissatisfaction with Federation. In John Darwin’s elegant phraseology, London clapped a telescope to its ear and ‘declared opposition could be neither seen nor heard’.37 Congress redoubled its efforts after recovering from the administrative and financial disarray it suffered in 1948 and 1949. Federation was the subject of a series of meetings in 1952 with the Governor and Chief Secretary in Zomba, and 1953 with the Secretary of State in London. The new President- General of Congress, Ralph Chinyama, and his deputy, Charles Chinula, were summoned to a meeting with Colby at which the latter warned them that Congress ‘was playing with fire, with things they did not understand and which were likely to go out of their control’.38 The delegation more than held their own. A sharp exchange between the Chief Secretary and Mr. Mkandawire, a former secretary for the Blantyre Branch of Congress, revealed the very different interpretations of the state’s responsibility to protect African interests from external discrimination. Mkandawire, one of the more radical members of the NAC, stated baldly that the government had absolved itself of responsibility to protect Africans, and that many of his contemporaries doubted if government assurances ‘would ever be reliable’. He reminded the Chief Secretary that ‘HM Government had agreed not to change the constitution of Nyasaland without the consent of the people’. In a reply that typified the government’s approach to the issue, and that flatly contradicted the empowering ethos of local government and mass education, the Chief Secretary replied that ‘HMG had to protect its people against their own mistakes and that it had to work for the ultimate best interests of its people’.39 The 1953 delegation to the pro-Federation Conservative Secretary of State Oliver Lyttelton in London was similarly fruitless. So too was a 1953 petition against Federation to be presented to the Queen by Hastings Banda, Orton Chirwa, Matthews Phiri and a delegation of chiefs elected to go to London by a council of over one hundred of their

37 Darwin, J., British Decolonization since 1945: A Pattern or a Puzzle?, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 12, 1984, pg. 190. 38 Colby to Chinula and Chinyama at meeting at Government House, Zomba, 29/10/52, 19/JRC/4/1, MNA. 39 Record of discussion held in Chief Secretary’s office with NAC delegation, 3/3/52, 19/JRC/4/1, MNA.

326 DANIEL KARK colleagues.40 Banda and the chiefs met Lyttelton – despite Colby’s advice to refuse the interview on the grounds that they were ‘tools of Congress’ – but the Secretary of State flatly refused to allow an audience with the Queen.41

Banda himself, in addition to running a medical practice in London’s north-east, had long been involved in the campaign for African self-government in Nyasaland and against participation in Federation. In his own representations, in his participation in visiting delegations, and in a damning 1949 memorandum on Federation drawn up at his London home with Northern Rhodesia’s Harry Nkumbula, Banda established a consistent and clear theme. In Federation he saw all the sinister intent of an attempt to withdraw with one hand what had been given with the other.42 Federation undermined the principles upon which African local government was supposedly based – ‘European settlers of Southern Rhodesia make no bones about what they think of us, the Africans. They have never pretended that they are interested in teaching us anything, let alone preparing us for self-government any time in the future. To them, we are only good for menial service and attendance on Europeans’.43 While local government and Mass Education promised only gradual change, preparation for a transfer of power nonetheless remained the basic stated purpose for both programmes. African control was still a plausible, if distant, outcome. Federation promised no such outcome. It taught African Nyasalanders to distrust both the Protectorate government and the Colonial Office, and encouraged claims and demands beyond the economic and social sphere – seeking the political kingdom was the only sure route to power.

40 A Petition to HM Queen Elizabeth II Against Federation Made by the Chiefs and Citizens of Nyasaland, Africa Bureau, 1953, PAM652, MNA. Lyttelton (1951-4) was not a politician by temperament and did not recall his years as Secretary of State with any nostalgia. He was appointed to the post by Churchill, a personal friend, who convinced him to leave business to become a politician. His term was notable for the difficulties caused by various colonial emergencies. Lyttelton pushed hard for Federation in Central Africa. 41 The Public Record Office file on the visit provides an intriguing case-study of the metropolitan-state- nationalist interface. The visit would make an interesting study on its own merits, and outside the bounds of this thesis. CO1015/159, PRO. 42 Banda’s biographer, Philip Short, feels that this memorandum was indicative of a new militancy within Banda – no longer was he a conscientious objector and pacifist. See: Banda, H., Nkumbula, H., Federation in Central Africa, 1/5/49. 43 Banda to Hinden, 26/3/49, 60/HKB/1/1/2A, MNA.

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3. Matrousers and Autocrats: Recreating Local Government in Domasi, 1949-53

The final report for the Domasi Scheme had as its very first recommendation for local government that ‘local government must be seen to be local if it is to be accepted by the people as genuine’.44 Local government was not accepted by the people in Domasi as genuine and its proponents suffered through a period of unusual social strife. The district, fresh from the disruption caused by the 1949 famine, became one of the nodes from which anti-Federal dissatisfaction spread. This was certainly far removed from what the district team under Thomson had initially hoped for – to turn Domasi into a model of what improved local governance could achieve. The result was similarly disappointing for those Africans who chose to use reformed local government as a means of accessing a greater share of administrative and political power.

Domasi was a readymade laboratory for an experiment in local government. The district’s boundaries were basically contiguous with those of Native Authority Malemia. The current Chief Malemia in 1949 was Allan Masokonesya (renamed Allan Malemia), whose history and predecessors are discussed in chapter three. Under Malemia were six hereditary Group Village Headmen, the original nduna or advisors to the chief – Chopi, Kasonga, Kuminama, Machinjili, Mtwiche, and Malemia’s son, che Kanache Malemia. These Group Headmen were responsible for anything from six to twenty-eight villages, each with its own chief. Five of the chiefs were fulltime employees of the Native Administration, and the sixth was a carpenter at the Jeanes Centre. All chiefs in the district were familiar with at least the basic elements of what was presented to them as ideal form local government. The presence of the Jeanes School in their own backyard habituated them to the idea of efficient rule, even if the democratic ideal was not always unambiguously presented. Gerald Malemia, the first chief to be appointed a Native Authority, attended an NA course at Jeanes shortly after his instalment in 1933, and his successor, Allan Malemia, attended a course after succeeding to the title in 1947. Thomson and his team therefore had both a clearly defined political and geographical laboratory, and a group of chiefs aware of the basic principles behind the experiment.

44 Thomson, Final Report on the Domasi Community Development Scheme, Nyasaland Protectorate, 1955, pg. 8.

328 DANIEL KARK

Exploiting these natural advantages, Thomson wanted to ensure, firstly, that efficient and functional local government was spread broadly to include all villages within district boundaries, and, secondly, that individuals in these villages were ultimately connected to representatives in the Legislative Council. The former would be achieved through the introduction of representative Group Councils, including in their number the more educated and informed members of each group area. It would also involve the transfer of power from hereditary village heads to elected ward leaders, with a ward based on evenly spaced geographical boundaries. The latter end Thomson hoped to achieve through the establishment of an unbroken elected chain running from the Group Councils, through the NA Council, to the Provincial Councils and the Legislative Council in Zomba. Each level would elect its representatives to the superior body. That Domasi was but a few miles distant from the LegCo in Zomba was an additional experimental.

The state of African local government in Domasi was representative of the situation in most districts in Nyasaland and British Africa. Thomson was less than impressed with the quality of African administration. Few of Malemia’s administrative staff had an adequate idea of what their jobs entailed – ‘the senior clerk, for instance, did not know how to obtain stationery, let alone how it was paid for, and everything was wrapped in the same degree of mystery’. According to Thomson, there was little specialisation of function within the fairly rudimentary local structures, and no concept of the reciprocal relations required of local officers and their public. No-one knew where NA funds came from, or where they went, ‘with the possible exception of the chief’.45 There was, conversely, a very definite view of the relationship between people and state. The average villager was a dependent subject rather than an active citizen. Thomson frequently lamented the spirit of dependency that undermined his mass education work, and that made the NA the vector through which demands were channelled to the government.

Thomson described NA Malemia as a ‘weak character’. He considered Malemia’s six Group Village Headmen not particularly representative of their constituents and felt there was an unfilled administrative and political space between these men and their villagers. The Village Headmen – the lowest level of chiefs – were supposed to populate this space,

45 Op. Cit. Final Report, pg. 23.

LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND REBELLION IN DOMASI 329 but Thomson estimated that less than a quarter of villages in the district had adequate headmen. He judged some of them ‘incompetent’. Many were illiterate. Some were simply not there, with positions disputed by rival claimants, or left vacant by men living elsewhere. Not one to miss a chance, Thomson blamed this situation on his old whipping horse, the uxorilocal system. Matrilineal marriage meant that village chiefs were sometimes strangers in villages under their care, or resided in a wife’s village away from their charges. According to Thomson the personal affiliations between village headmen and their villages had to be replaced by more formal and functional structures, perhaps based on geographical location rather than familial loyalty. Undermining the loyalties imposed by kinship would alter the supine posture that villagers adopted with respect to their leaders. The district team interpreted the respect offered to traditional leaders as prostration before unsuitable chiefs and this frustrated them. According to this view villagers did not have the initiative required to demand better of their superiors or to initiate change themselves. The African public therefore needed to take a more critical approach to their politicians, as well as taking a new role as responsible citizens rather than dependent subjects. The spirit of dependency that, according to Thomson, caused Africans to regularly approach government with the question ‘What are you going to do about it?’ had to be broken, and replaced with a self-sufficient spirit of self-help. Africans had also to be equipped to deal with the ‘agitation’ being stirred up by what Thomson feared were ‘unscrupulous nationalists’. For the government it was essential that its bond with the people be strengthened in order to render it durable against external assault.

The structure of village headmen and group village headmen built up under Malemia after 1933 was not torn away, nor were motions towards the creation of anything like genuine local democracy more than symbolic. Thomson set as his less than radical task ‘to try to build on the traditional tribal system a live local government organisation, representative, knowledgeable, and efficient, exercising increasing control over local affairs and capable of stimulating and exploiting local initiative’.46 It was efficiency and representation, then, rather than democratic practice that were the key lessons in this adapted colonial political curriculum.

46 Op. Cit. Final Report, pg. 24.

330 DANIEL KARK The lowest level of administrative reform involved the replacement of the village chiefs with ward leaders, non-hereditary and salaried representatives of groups of around 1,000 people or of areas of around ‘an hour’s walk from one end to the other’. The village headmen responsible for the 112 villages in Domasi District were appointed in the first days of colonial rule, and were clergymen, clerks and ‘others with no particular local standing’. They were frequently elderly or involved in other employment and ‘are not to be regarded as of much value except possibly in dealing with domestic social matters’.47 Even these social matters were poorly dealt with. Thomson blamed social breakdown in the villages on the absence of genuine leadership, with village chiefs frequently absent due to succession disputes or labour elsewhere – ‘the effects of this social breakdown were obvious in many ways: the “village” scattered in little family settlements, dirty homes and compounds, inferior cultivation, petty crime and litigation, and a high percentage of tax default were some of them’.48

Derisory government payments to village headmen were stopped in 1949, an indication that they had outlived their usefulness as taxmen and enforcers of government orders. Sweatman, the District Commissioner in Zomba, had already complained in 1948 that the village chiefs were not worth the money paid them – ‘there are some village headmen who fail in all their duties, others concentrate on one thing and a few, the minority in most areas, carry out their work with energy and enthusiasm’. Worse, their preoccupation with their personal emoluments – which seems perfectly reasonable given the minute amounts paid them – meant that ‘the remuneration disease has spread to all the people in their areas’.49 The headman was supposedly an inefficient relic of unsustainable and unrepresentative indirect rule, and seldom commanded consistent respect in his village. They earned next to nothing and Thomson considered the very poor living conditions of many village headmen indicative of the levels of respect they commanded among their people.50 Thomson and his team deemed only 28 out of 102 village headmen in Domasi ‘effective’.51

47 Domasi District Political Intelligence Report for January, 1950, NSG3/1/1, MNA. 48 Thomson to Secretary for African Affairs, 2/3/53, PCS1/23/4, MNA. 49 DC Sweatman to PC Southern Province, 22/10/48, NSG1/9/3, MNA. 50 Nyasaland Protectorate, Domasi Community Development Scheme, Annual Report for the year 1950, 1951, pg. 5. Lucy Mair considered ‘the material advantages of the position … negligible relatively to what could be earned in almost any form of employment’. See: Op. Cit. Mair, 1952, pg. 10. 51 This was a common perception. The fact that clerks and other commoners could earn more than the official pittance given chiefs meant that, by comparison with wage earners a chief ‘has much ado to clothe his wives and dependents decently and to send his children to school. This is pointed out by older people as a social

LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND REBELLION IN DOMASI 331

Transforming this aspect of local government had the potential to be the most thoroughgoing reform attempted in Domasi. Personal allegiances to the village headmen were to be replaced by an administrative allegiance to a public servant on a small government stipend. Thomson selected nineteen ward leaders from a list of candidates prepared by the NA and group leaders, and each was given an area including approximately 1,000 villagers to administer. These men – and men were the intended office holders – were meant to be better able to handle the growing volume of statistical, financial and regulatory work. The government could nominate educated men, rather than men being selected by villagers governed entirely by traditional requirements. The inefficiencies and favouritism of the old ‘traditional’ system would be eliminated, or at least minimised by educated men. This was not intended to be the final incarnation of local government. It was an interim solution, ‘even if the interim is as much as a generation. I have no doubt that in due course the present functions of Ward Leaders, Group Headmen, and others will have to become the province of salaried staff, so far as they relate to non-traditional functions’.52

The ward system, potentially effective in the medium term, was never fully tested, although some ward leaders proved themselves capable by efficiently collecting NA rates or approving beer brewing permits. The whole system was implemented too slowly and was fatally delayed by the 1953 disturbances, although the turbulence of the period did provide a ‘convenient opportunity to purge the rolls’ of the incompetent and politically undesirable.53 But purges could not ensure that the men still in their posts were in any way better than the village headmen who had preceded them.54 In some cases the very same men managed to have themselves nominated for the new positions. In others prominent, but unsuitable men put their names forward for appointment despite the fact that they would

scandal and one of the worst effects of European interference’. These comments are taken from Margaret Read’s study of living standards among the Ngoni. See: Read, M., Native Standards of Living and African Culture Change, Supplement to ‘Africa’ vol. XI, no. 3, OUP, London, 1938, pg. 22. 52 Thomson to Chief Secretary, Zomba, 11/8/53, PCS1/23/4, MNA. 53 Ibid. 54 Lucy Mair warned against the temptation of assuming that Village Headmen were backward, uneducated or uninformed. She correctly states that many of them were personally familiar with the outside world and were politically astute even where they were not formally educated. Many were returned migrant workers and were well-travelled. See: Op. Cit. Mair, 1952, pg. 14.

332 DANIEL KARK certainly have to ‘entrust their work to others who are better educated than themselves’.55 The ward leaders only really began effective work as the project closed at the end of 1954.

Other reforms were attempted earlier and were therefore able to sink deeper roots before 1953. In the post-1933 system group village headmen supervised the work of the village headmen. The groups they were responsible for corresponded to the territories assigned the eni dziko, the first chiefs given land after the first Malemia conquered the area. These group village headmen were targeted by Thomson and his team. Group councils had originally been formed in 1928, but these had been allowed to lapse. The district team revived them. The official expectations attached to these councils were not clearly articulated. The secret intelligence reports on the scheme make it clear that little was known about the relationships between educated Africans and traditional leaders in each of the six groups. Chopi, for instance, was administered by a group headman responsible for ‘the worst examples of poor cultivation in the district, and … more cases than any other of neglected invalids and elderly people. On the other hand it contains more of the intelligentsia than any other part of the district, and the effect of establishing a Group Council should be interesting’.56

The six new group councils set up under each group headman were supposed to be representative advisory bodies, able to assist their headmen in re-establishing contact with the 1,000 to 3,000 villagers in each of their areas.57 The bodies ranged in size from eight to twenty councillors. The methods used to select the councillors were not prescribed, but most often took place at open mass meetings. The public choices were subject to the approval of the headman in collaboration with Malemia and Thomson. The process was not always as democratic as it could have been. Commoners were not apt to stand against the decisions made by traditional leaders. The attitude was analogised in intelligence reports thus – ‘God bless the squire and his relations and keep us in our proper stations’. It was difficult ‘to judge how much of this is genuine, how much of it a wish to keep in with the chiefs, and how much is a desire to avoid responsibility’.58 The councils that emerged from

55 Nyasaland Protectorate, Domasi Community Development Scheme, Annual Report for the year 1952, 1953, pg. 6. 56 Domasi District Political Intelligence Report, 18/2-18/3/50, NSG3/1/1, MNA. 57 The group areas were under Group Village Headmen Chopi, Mtwiche, Kuminama, Machinjiri and Kasonga. 58 Domasi District Political Intelligence Report, 19/3-22/4/50, NSG3/1/1, MNA.

LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND REBELLION IN DOMASI 333 this process were nonetheless reasonably mixed, if not exactly representative. While a quarter of members were traditional leaders, a fifth were artisans, traders, or clerks. A third of the traditional leaders themselves were part of the same semi-educated cohort. The rest of the councils were composed of peasant farmers. The exact vocational makeup of the councils is recorded for Minama and Machinjili. On the former council sat four village headmen, five cultivators, two tailors, two carpenters, a blacksmith, a canteen-keeper, two labourers, one builder, one evangelist, a government employee and the head carpenter at the Jeanes Centre. On Machinjili sat two village headmen, twelve cultivators, two carpenters, a builder, a store assistant, an evangelist, and a ‘Mohammedan teacher’. Half of all the council members were literate in their vernaculars and a quarter in English.

The councils were a product of half a century of slow social and educational differentiation within the bounds allowed by restricted opportunities and limited mobility. Education, while not extremely divisive, became a predictor of opinion on the councils – the divisions between ‘conservatives’ and ‘progressives’ on the councils roughly corresponded with the age and education of the representatives. There was apparently resentment among the older council members regarding the abrasive behaviour of upstart ‘Matrousers’, young men who opted for trousers rather than the traditional khansu. While this new admixture made proceedings a little spicier it should be emphasised that the young and educated were almost exclusively young and educated men. Women were almost completely absent. Contrary to the principles of Mass Education, there was only one woman sitting on only one of the councils. Thomson was defensive, legitimising the system by using the matrilineal system opportunistically – ‘only one woman is officially a councillor, but there is often a fair attendance of women at meetings, and female influence behind the scenes is of course stronger, if possible, in a matrilineal society than elsewhere’.59 The most important functions performed by the group councils were the use of funds on such activities as the improvement of minor utilities and tracks in the area, the situation of literacy centres and the selection of group representatives to sit on the NA council. They were a useful device for the communication of village desires to government, and government demands to villagers. As the certainty of Federation became clearer the group

59 Op. Cit. Final Report, pg. 24.

334 DANIEL KARK councils allowed the district team to impart its advantages ‘at a level near the ordinary villager’.60

The government did not have everything its own way. While Minama council proved industrious and a model of the cooperative attitude the government so wanted, Chopi council used their time to make very loud noises regarding bunding and other environmental restrictions. Lucy Mair recorded group councils taking their jobs very seriously. The councils were not immediately functional, but did seem to have some sort of legitimacy. The ‘machinery creaked badly’ for want of staff, and ‘delays are common, and sometimes infuriating, but a system of government by consultation is bound to be slow, especially when it is also a means of education’.61 Of the six councils only two were functioning adequately by the end of 1954. But while councils were not models of efficiency, elderly residents of Domasi actually remember them more as the administrative tools of the district team than local beacons of democracy. The benefits were stated clearly by an elderly man, Mr. Maosa – ‘although we cannot single out their achievements, the set- up speeded up operations especially in the way rules and laws were passed downwards and not upwards because there you wouldn’t force the white men’.62 Slightly more representative Group Councils may have been, but democratic they were certainly not.

Above the Group Councils sat the NA, Malemia. He was an inconsistent and unreliable agent for his government. Reports on Malemia were largely positive, but were always tinged with a residuum of doubt. He was educated to Standard Three. He served his monarch from 1939-45 as an and driver in the King’s African Rifles, and was appointed NA in May, 1947. He impressed early – he was ‘a young man with character and shows enthusiasm for his position and work’. The Zomba DC, briefing Thomson on Domasi before he assumed command in 1949, gave his opinion that ‘with careful handling [Malemia] will grow into a useful member of the Native Administration’. Careful handling required that Malemia be encouraged to become an exemplar of the best aspects of Mass Education. That he repeatedly ‘lapsed into polygyny’ and that ‘his own compound is not a good demonstration of progressive housekeeping to his neighbours’ suggested that this

60 Nyasaland Protectorate, Domasi Community Development Scheme, Annual Report for the year 1951, 1952, pg. 3. 61 Op. Cit. Report 1950, pg. 5. 62 Interview with Mr. Maosa, Sani village, Gvh Mtwiche, TA Malemia 26/06/2006.

LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND REBELLION IN DOMASI 335 would prove a difficult task.63 More than encouragement, caution was also required. Malemia’s character revealed traces of a trait feared by many district officers – he was ambitious ‘and perhaps for this reason he is liable to over-step his authority. He has, in fact, the makings of an autocratic leader’.64 Thomson found him cooperative and compliant enough, at least before the 1953 disturbances. It was to the chief’s credit that ‘he himself takes reproof … without becoming sulky and can accept disappointments such as the refusal of his application for a rifle permit without turning sour’.65

The NA was traditionally assisted by a group of councillors. Four men surrounded Malemia. They were considered of variable quality and not made of the progressive and cooperative material required for reformed local government. Chibwana, the head councillor, was ‘an elderly man of a good type with common sense when dealing with matters of native law and custom’. Assidi Kundecha was ‘reliable’. Mwenyemasi, on the other hand, was a ‘weaker character’ and Lewis Maonga spent more time working as a carpenter than on his work as a councillor.66 According to Thomson, the NA and his councillors constituted an ‘amorphous’ council, whose failings encouraged villagers to approach the boma directly rather than waste time going through the chief.

The district team wanted to bolster what they considered an unreliable system by forming a district council of 21 members sitting under the chairmanship of NA Malemia. Three councillors were selected by each of the six group councils and three were chosen by Malemia himself. Selections on the ‘progressive side’ included the Zomba Court Clerk, a Secretariat Clerk and the senior teacher from the Jeanes Centre. But while Malemia was responsible for choosing progressives with an education ‘well above the average’, the council as a whole was necessarily only as representative as the group councils that fed it – all male, and including six group and village headmen.67 Even so, there were tensions on the council. As on the Group Councils there was a divide separating less educated loyalists and ‘those who “went to school” … these two groups cooperated in most cases, however

63 Domasi District Political Intelligence Report, 19/5-12/6/50, NSG3/1/1, MNA. Allan Malemia was a nominal Christian – he had a number of wives and apparently ‘has many sons all over his jurisdiction’. See: Funsani, H.F.G., A History of T.A. Malemia, Chancellor College History Seminar Papers, 1971-2. 64 DC Zomba to Thomson, 4/4/49, NSG1/9/3, MNA. 65 Domasi District Political Intelligence Report, January, 1950, NSG3/1/1, MNA. 66 DC Zomba to Thomson, 4/4/49, NSG1/9/3, MNA. 67 Thomson gave the following breakdown of membership – three Group Headmen, three Village Headmen, eight clerks, evangelists and pensioners, and seven ‘others’.

336 DANIEL KARK there were a few members who supported the white men, [and] these never got on well with their fellow native but educated members’.68 One chief remembered his frustration with the wiles of the new representatives – ‘these Educated Malawians tended to exaggerate and misrepresent our views on issues affecting us with a view to gaining more for themselves … the relationship was cordial when they had something to achieve and needed us to support them, but sour when they achieved what they were looking for’.69 This refrain was heard often in interviews with chiefs and headmen. The chiefs remembered clearly feelings of being used for the benefit of those more educated than them. If the council was not inclusive in some respects it was certainly now more representative of a different type of political opinion.

Longstanding schisms were also apparent between the chiefs themselves. The Group Headmen generally had an incentive to support the government that supported them. Power disputes between the Headmen were decided by a chief’s ability to access and use the power conferred on him by the state. The Headmen were also a consistent threat to the authority of the Native Authority himself. Mitchell noted that, among the Yao, ‘the difference in prestige between any chief and his most important headman is not very great’.70 Commoners and village chiefs treated both with equivalent deference, calling both mwenye. A decision made by the Native Authority was not necessarily a decision honoured by the Group Headmen. This potential for dissent opened rifts between Malemia and his Headmen during this period. Federation and the enforcement of environmental restrictions met with different responses from the Headmen on the NA’s council. The decision to remain loyal to the government and continue enforcing state measures or to adopt a critical and rebellious stance, determined the viability and relative strength of a Headman’s position during the 1953 crisis.

Attendance at council meetings was poor. There were occasions when the council failed to achieve a quorum. Thomson expressed disappointment with such poor turnouts, despite council members having no more than seven miles to travel to attend meetings. The council, when it did meet, was intended to take on much of the work previously performed

68 Interview with Mr. Maosa, Sani vge, Gvh Mtwiche, TA Malemia 26/06/2006. 69 Interview with GVH Njirima, TA Liwonde, 12/9/05. 70 Mitchell, J.C., A Study in the Social Structure of a Nyasaland Tribe, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1956, pg. 107.

LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND REBELLION IN DOMASI 337 by the NA. The two most novel aspects of the council were, firstly, its subcommittees on finance and education, and, secondly, its role as the link to higher representative bodies. The subcommittees were meant as much to educate their members as to ensure efficiency. Thomson noted with satisfaction that ‘the education committee is realizing that there is more to the solution of educational problems than grumbling about inadequate facilities and crying for the moon’.71 Composed of semi-skilled and comparatively educated men, the committees were able to cast a specialised eye on local problems, but they were ultimately still subject to the control of DC Thomson and NA Malemia.72 The subcommittees and the superior NA council were as toothless as the group councils below them – they, unlike the statutory district councils being set up in other parts of Nyasaland at around the same time, had no statutory powers. In this respect, more than any other, Domasi was a redundant experiment, behind similar initiatives in other parts of Nyasaland and able to demonstrate only a little more than its own obsolescence.

The NA council could nominate two of its number to serve on the African Provincial Council. This body elected members to the African Protectorate Council, which itself advised the governor on African appointments to the Legislative Council and elected members to the controversial Federal Assembly. Thomson claimed this as evidence that there was now a direct link between villagers and the national and federal legislatures. In reality the system was so heavily supervised and filtered that African electoral choice and administrative control was more illusory than real. Thomson kept a tight rein in most respects. He subscribed to the paternalistic ideal that Africans should be allowed to learn from their mistakes, but there were still limits to the size and number of mistakes allowed. Financial responsibility was apparently one of the more difficult lessons. Thomson put the NA treasury clerk ‘under notice – for inability to learn, not for dishonesty; a trial period of two months at the end of the year without outside supervision produced chaos’.73 Thomson also used his reserve powers as DC to force the council to pass an order on bunding in time for the 1950 rainy season – he suspected delay was deliberately obstructive. In a more general sense he lamented the council’s ‘remarkable capacity for misunderstanding

71 Op. Cit. Final Report, pg. 26. 72 The Education Committee was composed of a retired clerk, a retired hospital assistant, an evangelist, and a ‘leading local Mohammedan Shehe’. The Finance Committee was composed of a retired clerk, carpenter- farmer, the clerk of the Zomba magistrate’s court and the storeman at the Domasi Boma. 73 Op. Cit, Report 1950, pg. 5.

338 DANIEL KARK proposals put to them and to the hindrances caused by the creaking machinery of the Native Administration’s office’.74 This inefficiency meant that Thomson kept a close watch on the NA and his council, ready to intervene when necessary.

The NA and chiefs rued their ongoing lack of influence. NAs would ‘receive commands from government to communicate them to the people for implementation. But the people’s concerns never had any impact when communicated to government. So their powers were one sided. The NAs were just being dictated to. Whatever they said … the answer was no’.75 Educated Africans similarly saw DCs such as Thomson as ‘autocrats, who constantly imposed their will on their councils’. Educated Africans also suspected that ongoing European control of local government had a more sinister motive. The councils were little better than talking-shops, implicitly intended to diffuse criticism and delay self- government. In a rhetorical passage Chipembere deliberately described council operations in long-winded terms. Councillors ‘were allowed to make long speeches, and the sessions were allowed to drag on for days, while the DC patiently listened or made notes. At the end of the session, the DC would say words to the effect that he was very delighted about the frank, but loyal and mature, manner in which they had expressed themselves; he had taken full note of what they had to say and would pass their suggestions on to the government. Where he himself was empowered to act, he would give full consideration to their thoughts and answer them at the next meeting. But they had to realize that their suggestions were difficult to realize, largely because of lack of funds and because no problems could be considered in isolation. The government had to consider how each solution would affect the national interest as a whole, etc. But when he felt the members had gone too far (e.g., by criticizing the government), he would merely rebuke them like children and ignore their pleas’.76

There were, nonetheless, the beginnings of a new relationship between the administration and the African leadership. Both sides were learning to reform expectations, the NA

74 Domasi District Political Intelligence Report, 16/9-18/11/50, NSG3/1/1, MNA. 75 Interview with GVH Balamanja, 1/10/05. In interview with Mr. Nangupeta, a former Kwaca teacher and small farmer, the chiefs came across as even more powerless than in Balamanja’s description – ‘The powers of the chief were affected because they had little or no say on what government decided to do. For example the arresting of people for failing to make terraces, chiefs wouldn’t say anything. They just watched their subjects being persecuted’. Interview with Mr. Nangupeta, Village Kanache, GVH Mtogolo, TA Malemia. 76 Chipembere, H., Hero of the Nation – Chipembere of Malawi: An Autobiography, Kachere, Blantyre, 2002, pgs. 164-5.

LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND REBELLION IN DOMASI 339 committees by providing their own solutions to local development problems, the administrative officers by learning to ask ‘“what do you want?” instead of “we want you to …”’.77 This had practical effect in some of the schemes for which the NA was made responsible. Malemia was involved in the famine relief effort in 1949, and proved an effective ally for Thomson as he attempted to alleviate the effects of the famine. The Kwaca scheme was also a notable example of this partnership, with the NA involved in staffing the bush schools and encouraging students to attend. The NA was responsible for the disposal of a far greater sum derived from government grants-in aid than it had been previously. In 1951 the NA was responsible for development expenditure totalling just over two thousand pounds, over double the amount spent the previous year. Councils demonstrated a better grasp of local development issues and were able to recommend solutions unconsidered by central government. There was some small administrative benefit in the new arrangement, even if the NA Council did nothing to encourage the democratic spirit and values of citizenship required of it by Mass Education.

Very few Africans were also able to participate, in circumscribed fashion, in the administration of the district. Africanisation of part of the colonial service would allow Africans to demonstrate initiative in both the minor posts and some of the more influential positions.78 European guidance was still, nonetheless, necessary. Thirteen Africans were employed by the Domasi Scheme – four agricultural instructors, a works capitao, a Mass Education assistant, a hospital assistant, a midwife, a veterinary assistant, a sanitary assistant and three clerks. The NA had twenty-one permanent staff members. None, apart from the two community workers and three teachers at NA schools, had any training. They were expected to learn on the job. Some were less than effective – the forestry ranger was ‘thoroughly idle’ and was convicted on counts of embezzlement. Some were not worthy of note – the market masters were ‘indifferent honest’. And some were considered by Thomson to be of clear benefit. The two community workers, Mtwiche and Chinyangula, both expressed a genuine concern for the welfare of the inhabitants of Domasi District and proved dedicated civil servants. Mtwiche was particularly noteworthy. He combined his

77 Op. Cit. Final Report, pg. 7. 78 Africanisation would not become a priority in Nyasaland until the Nyasaland Localisation Commission reported in 1960. Even then the actual results produced by the government were underwhelming. Of 122 administrative officers in 1960 only four were Africans. See: Baker, C., The Administrative Service of Malawi - A Case Study in Africanisation, The Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 10, No. 4, 1972.

340 DANIEL KARK community work with his role as one of the Group Village Headmen. Known within his area for his occult powers, he was also praised by the Zomba DC as ‘the most outstanding figure in Malemia’s area’.79

Figure 15 ‘At work in the office’. Africanisation comes to Nyasaland. Nyasaland Protectorate, Notes on the Duties of Administrative Officers, Zomba, 1955.

More senior administrative positions were also opened to African candidates. An illustration in the 1955 handbook for administrative officers (figure fifteen) demonstrated the convivial and pedagogical relationships expected of the arrangements. The senior African clerk, Clement Kumbikano, was appointed personal assistant to the DC and earned accolades revising part of the tax register, conducting a population count, and conducting general administrative duties not previously considered the province of Africans. Kumbikano was destined for great things. He resigned his post in Domasi in 1953 to serve as one of two African representatives in the Federal Assembly. The cashier for the scheme was also destined for promotion and was trained to take over as office manager, but ‘disgraced himself in a matter not involving his official duties’ – further details of his disgrace were, sadly, not provided.

79 DC Zomba to Thomson, 4/4/49, NSG1/9/3, MNA.

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Africanisation – another aspect of the gradual liberalism which pervaded post-war Colonial Office reform – was partly a result of the drive to reinforce African initiative and involvement in their administration and government. But it was also partly expedience. The increasingly heavy burden placed on administrative officers made it essential to reinforce the administrative services with more cost-effective reinforcements. Vocal complaints from European administrative officers stressed the high workload they faced and the breakdown of rural relationships. These concerns gave added reason to recruit and co-opt educated Africans for the colonial service. The result was mutually beneficial. Overstretched European staff would gain much-needed assistance, and skilled Africans would rise through the administrative ranks. Clement Kumbikano was a good example of this. While he was initially treated with suspicion by the chiefs in Domasi, he turned into an intermediary trusted by both chiefs and the district team.80 Africanisation was not without its dangers for the state. Raising expectations was a foreseeable risk of the exercise, but limiting these expectations was difficult. Thomson and the colonial service, doubting the abilities and education of African public servants, were willing to share only a limited amount of their administrative power. Africans during this period were never given any role that did not require the supervision of a European. An elderly man in Domasi remembered this clearly as discrimination, and not without a little bitterness – ‘We trained each other and the most common type of clerical job there was typing. The whites handled all administrative work. Honestly the whites were very selfish. There was no way that an African would be given a management position. The highest position that an African would attain was head clerk’.81

This was not technically true. One African in particular was given a high-profile role. A new position was established equivalent to the Assistant District Commissioner post. The new District Assistant was responsible for discretionary administrative tasks not previously entrusted to Africans. The post was awarded to Henry Chipembere, shortly to become one

80 Kumbikano had a spotted career. He was a moderate and cautious supporter of Congress. In 1953 he was elected by the African Protectorate Council as one of two Nyasaland African MPs sitting in the Federal Assembly. Along with his fellow MP, Manoah Chirwa, he agreed to use the Assembly as a forum to protest Federation for a brief period and then resign. He failed to resign despite the deep unpopularity of his continued membership of the Assembly among Nyasaland’s African population. Along with Chirwa he was expelled from Congress in 1957. 81 Op. Cit. Interview with Maosa.

342 DANIEL KARK of the leading lights of the struggle against colonial rule and a key member of Congress.82 Thomson and Chipembere did not see eye to eye. After interviewing the recently graduated Chipembere for a job in the Secretariat, Thomson was given the task of supervising the new Assistant. Chipembere resented Thomson’s intrusive supervision. His memories of his time with Thomson in Domasi are by far the most scathing assessment of the DC’s character. Thomson was ‘a staunch believer in the superiority of the white race, especially the British (and even more especially the Scottish), and was a bitter critic of African nationalism and the demand for self-rule’. Chipembere was convinced that he was assigned to Thomson because the latter had a reputation for knowing ‘how to handle “difficult”, politically- minded Africans’. That he had been appointed District Assistant, rather than Assistant District Commissioner as his tertiary qualifications should have required, was a further example of entrenched institutional racism. Chipembere was also incensed that he was given an inadequate dwelling of the type given to lowly African public servants rather than the housing provided for European administrators.83 In Chipembere’s account Thomson comes across less as the mediator between African and European traditions expected within a Mass Education programme, and more as a cultural chauvinist – ‘I had seldom come across such a stubborn defender of everything his British people did; they were never wrong! He defended even the most glaring forms of racial discrimination and accused me of prejudice for daring to criticise them’.84 It was clearly a less than happy association, and throws a different light on Thomson’s responses to African subordinates. Racism coloured everyday relations between Europeans and Africans in Nyasaland. While not nearly as virulent as it was in Southern Rhodesia, petty racism was, nonetheless, ingrained in European settler and administrative culture. Small but meaningful acts reinforced the racial hierarchy - the wearing of shoes by Africans was frowned on by some Europeans in Nyasaland, Africans were expected to raise their hats to Europeans, Africans did not enter European shops and the service of Africans in bars was an extremely contentious issue.85

82 Chipembere was a pivotal figure in the struggle for Malawian independence. After leaving the public service he was elected to the Legislative Council in 1956 where he was noted for his fierce speeches and critical questioning. He was instrumental in arranging Banda’s return to the country after 1957. After independence in 1964 he fell out with the increasingly autocratic Banda, led an abortive revolt in in 1965, and fled to Tanzania and ultimately the US. He died in 1975. 83 One elderly man recalled that despite Chipembere’s ‘learnedness and the senior position he was holding in government, he was staying in a grass-thatched house just because he was a black African right there at Jeanes’. Op. Cit Interview with Maosa. 84 Op. Cit. Chipembere, pgs. 151-6. 85 GVH Balamanja remembers Africans not being allowed entry to European shops. They were also ‘not allowed to put on shoes because they [the British] said shoes made a lot of noise’. (Interview 1/10/05). The

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These numerous discriminatory gestures, personified in the relationship between Chipembere and Thomson, cast doubt on the state’s administrative commitment to some of the principles that the scheme was meant to develop. Initiative and individualism were only of a particular type, conducive to the uncritical acceptance of Thomson’s stewardship. The system could not imbibe change and absorb Africans and Africanisation.

service of alcohol became a particularly contentious issue in February 1953, after ‘educated Africans’ began frequenting bars and demanding service. J.W. Stratton of the Hotel Keepers Association wanted to ‘squash this form of unpleasantness’, but the government thought tact and discretion the better option. Africans were to be served where they held the liquor permit required to drink. Eric Barnes, the Southern Province PC thought this form of protest arose ‘from an urge for self-expression and an inferiority complex’. The matter was the subject of a parliamentary question put to Oliver Lyttelton. From: CO1015/726 and CO1015/727, PRO.

344 DANIEL KARK 4. ‘It was hot here at Malemia’ – Rebellion at Domasi, 1953

The 1953 rebellion in Domasi was emblematic of years of intensifying anger and dissatisfaction among Nyasaland’s Africans. The lack of reforming momentum and ongoing social and political exclusion spilled over into a series of minor but significant and interlinked rebellions. The disturbances were not the product of any discrete issue. Anger over environmental restrictions, protest against Federation, and resentment at the slow pace of political reform and Africanisation were not the isolated complaints of particular African interest groups. All were connected and mutually reinforcing. Nor was violent protest isolated to Domasi District. For Nyasaland, 1953 was the year in which diverse regional and class interests merged and expanded in a manner previously absent from protest in Nyasaland. For British Africa the early 1950s were years during which the great reforming hopes invested in liberal gradualism were fatally undermined by widespread and occasionally violent resistance. Mau Mau in Kenya set a clear precedent for more confrontational and forceful methods. Mau Mau loomed in the background, a warning to other colonial governments of the costs of failing rural relationships and the dangers of apparently irrational African resistance.

There was a growing realisation both among the colonial officers serving in Nyasaland, and among the increasingly politicised African population that promises of the slow development of the African capacity to govern in preparation for eventual self-rule were no substitute for the delivery of real political and constitutional change. For Colby and his officers, the principles underpinning mass education and local government reform – gradualism, communal development and the encouragement of a sense of initiative, citizenship and a thoughtful individualism – were no longer as attractive as they had once been. For educated Africans, whether involved in Africanisation, local government or Congress, gradualism was no substitute for real control on the Legislative Council and withdrawal from a racist Federation. For traditional leaders these principles not only undermined local influence and control but made more untenable a dangerous balancing-act as simultaneous agents of the state and representatives for their people. For African peasant agriculturalists a liberal commitment to African initiative was of little benefit when they were unable to control their land with a large measure of independence. The benign aspects of mass education were unable to prevent a sharp and violent outburst against colonial

LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND REBELLION IN DOMASI 345 administration. While the rebellion in Domasi has not been given the treatment received by other episodes in Nyasaland and British Africa as a whole, it is perhaps the clearest example of the failure of the most benign aspects of British colonial rule to compensate for a history of colonial discrimination, exclusion and intrusive intervention. Liberal development colonialism delivered too little and arrived too late to dissolve decades of suppressed frustration.

The 1953 rebellion in Domasi was not unheralded. At Protectorate level it was preceded by the half-hearted emergence of non-violent resistance as the political tool of choice for Congress. Congress was split and weakened by an uncertain approach to resistance – the President-General, Chinyama, was opposed to more active opposition, while a radical wing in Blantyre, led by Mkandawire and supported by Banda from London, advocated a more assertive course of action. The Reverend Michael Scott, first director of the Africa Bureau, spoke at a number of meetings after his arrival in the Protectorate on the 5th of April 1953, including a meeting of three thousand Africans in the Blantyre market square. On Banda’s behalf, Scott encouraged passive resistance, non-payment of tax and the creation of a Supreme Action Council and a Council of Chiefs to organise resistance.86 African politicians involved in the official politics of the Protectorate were similarly opposed to the Federation. The two African members of the LegCo, Mposa and Muwamba, left the legislative chamber before the vote was called.

For the government the spreading contagion of resistance and non-compliance was a growing threat to the effective administration of the Protectorate. The increasing unwillingness of local agriculturalists to comply with environmental orders noted in the previous chapter intensified and was encouraged by some of the Native Authorities. Whereas Thomson could state, in January 1951, that unusual strictness in the enforcement of bunding and government orders was met with no ‘resentment or sulkiness among those

86 Scott was an unpredictable advocate of African political and social rights. Scott was posted by the Anglican Church to India from 1935-9. He spent the years between 1943 and 1950 in South Africa, where he earned a name for his radical opposition to Apartheid after 1948. Along with the editor of the Observer, David Astor and several like-minded and notable contemporaries Scott founded the Africa Bureau in March 1952. It was formed in response to the Khama affair in Bechuanaland, as well as the growing dissatisfaction surrounding the Federation. Creech Jones, Perham and Colin Legum and Mary Benson were also involved. The Bureau was formed in order to inform the British public of opinion in Africa and to represent the views and concerns of Africans to the British government. See: Yates, A., Chester, L., The Troublemaker: Michael Scott and His Lonely Struggle Against Injustice, Aurum, London, 2006.

346 DANIEL KARK affected’, in 1953 he could make no similar claim.87 By July 1953 Thomson was recording signs of severe disruption and a breakdown in the relationships that underwrote the colonial bargain. Thomson and Kumbikano found their touring increasingly circumscribed, and were unable to visit many of the areas under their authority. Default on tax payment was reaching alarming levels – the district team and loyal chiefs managed to collect only ten percent of the estimated revenue. There was a sense that ‘something will happen which will make the payment of current tax unnecessary and a feeling that it would be a waste of money to pay now’.88

More and more African leaders were taking advantage of political reforms to ventilate grievances publicly. Federation, tax and environmental restrictions were the main irritants. They began to exercise ‘initiative’ in a manner Colby and Thomson considered unsavoury and ungrateful. From the beginning of 1953 Thomson found Malemia increasingly uncooperative. Apart from the most routine business the NA council was ‘in a state of suspended animation … an investigation of the pending basket in its office brought to light applications from Africans for agricultural credit, minutes of Group Councils, letters from me [Thomson], complaints by individuals and other papers which were all of some urgency and had received no attention’.89 All this had occurred ‘since the Chief began to dabble in politics’. The Group Councils too felt the effects of the souring atmosphere. Work slowed and, in some group areas, stopped altogether. In those areas where councils were still functional work was disrupted by splits between cooperative loyalists and less complaint members. From the government’s perspective certain of the Group Headmen were behaving in an extremely irresponsible manner. Headman Kasonga actively campaigned against bunding, and a warrant was issued for his arrest in the middle of July.

Thomson mistakenly assumed, not for the last time, that Congress ‘agitators’ and other ‘ringleaders’ were responsible for inciting resistance. While he determined Congress to be ‘weak, or moribund’ in Domasi in 1950, by 1953 he despaired of the influence it wielded in his district.90 By June 1953 he was complaining of ‘itinerant agitators’ stirring up

87 Domasi District Political Intelligence Report, 19/12/50-18/1/51, NSG3/1/1, MNA. 88 Domasi District Political Intelligence Report, July 1953, NSG3/1/1, MNA. 89 Domasi District Political Intelligence Report, 20/5-30/6/53, NSG3/1/1, MNA. 90 Domasi District Political Intelligence Report, 24/4-18/5/50, NSG3/1/1, MNA.

LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND REBELLION IN DOMASI 347 dissatisfaction in the district, particularly with regard to bunding.91 ‘Agitators’ was essentially code for the influence exercised by educated Africans and the NAC more particularly. The official assumption in Domasi, as in all areas affected by disturbances in 1953, was that the ‘average African’ was not fundamentally opposed to colonial government or to Federation. Their minds were being slowly poisoned by whispers and rumour disseminated by these ‘itinerant agitators’.

That the ‘average African’ might well have had the initiative to develop a sense of local citizenship independent of both the official and nationalist lines was inconceivable. Nationalists were certainly active in Domasi, not least through the efforts of men such as Domasi resident James Sangala.92 But the evidence suggests that the revolt was at root the result of the merger of local and regional interests and was not fomented solely by external agents. This was clearly also the case in the incidents at Cholo and Ncheu. Congress, while it was beginning to abandon its conciliatory stance by the early 1950s, was itself taken by surprise by the local passions aroused during the 1953 disturbances. The same surprise was expressed by many administrative officers. The open expression of local anger and initiative fell outside the bounds of their experience with previously compliant Nyasaland Africans. What Mass Education could never simulate and replace was the passion aroused by these local and regional issues and the genuine initiative stirred by broadly shared common interests. That dissatisfaction was more widespread and the product of much deeper pools of resentment did not occur to Thomson, at least not in his official accounts.

Domasi was not the first, nor was it the largest rebellion in Nyasaland in 1953. It was influenced and inspired by earlier and more substantial events in the southern half of Nyasaland. The disturbances began in Ncheu District north of Domasi in May 1953, and peaked with the Cholo District revolt in August. The disturbances, taken as a whole, provoked visceral reactions among European officers and settlers familiar with gruesome and sensationalised stories of widespread Mau Mau brutality in Kenya’s White Highlands. The rebellion of NA Gomani in Ncheu, just north of Zomba and Domasi, was the first serious incident in Nyasaland. Gomani’s volte face, from loyal support to active opposition,

91 Domasi District Political Intelligence Report, 20/5/53-30/6/53, NSG3/1/1, MNA. 92 Sangala was dismissed from the civil service in 1953. Civil servants were disallowed from holding political positions as well as posts in the civil service.

348 DANIEL KARK stirred the deepest European fears of good chiefs turning bad. The bedrock upon which colonial administration was still based seemed to be shifting under their feet.

Figure 16 Gomani and Colby. Debenham, F., Nyasaland: The Land of the Lake, HMSO, London, 1955.

In 1953 the government of Nyasaland considered NA Philip Gomani loyal. In the picture above Colby welcomes Gomani to the Governor’s mansion. The chief earned his reputation for fidelity. He recruited 500 of his Ngoni men to serve with the King’s African Rifles during the World War and in Malaya, including his own sons, Samson and Willard. He also, for much of his time as NA, ensured that government orders were carried out, including measures enforcing bunding and other environmental restrictions. This earned him some unpopularity among his people. Gomani nonetheless dutifully carried out the duties given him ‘because of the great faith I had in British justice and integrity’.93 But, after 1950, he became increasingly critical of the manner in which Africans in general and chiefs in particular were treated by the government. The Federation issue, in particular, raised his ire. Willard Gomani was dispatched to London by his father as a member of the

93 Life of Chief Philip Gomani between 1896 and 1921, MSS/Afr/s/1681/237/10, RH. Margaret Read, in her 1956 study of the Ngoni in Nyasaland reported Gomani’s diligence when enforcing government requirements. He made sure cattle were dipped, ridging requirements obeyed and villages maintained. See: Read, M., The Ngoni of Nyasaland, OUP, London, 1956.

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1953 chiefs’ delegation to the Queen.94 NA Gomani’s opposition to Federation was tied closely to his displeasure with the way in which environmental restrictions were enforced. These restrictions inspired persistent rumours that Europeans were planning to take land away from Africans. Gomani became involved in the African Supreme Council, an association of 83 of Nyasaland’s NAs closely aligned with Congress. Led by NA Mwase, the Council opposed Federation and committed itself to a programme that included non- cooperation and non-violent resistance in response to the Federal scheme.95 The programme was a part of the NAC’s call in April for passive non-cooperation. Defiance involved disobeying environmental restrictions and other government directives.

The issue came to a head for Gomani in May 1953 when the DC of Ncheu W.J.R. Pincott issued a statement to his NAs declaring that Federation was certain to be passed and enacted by London. Somewhat undemocratically and certainly incorrectly, the DC stated unequivocally that ‘the time for talking and arguing is therefore past. It is useless any longer to oppose Federation or to raise doubts and objections against it … Do not listen to any more arguments against Federation. Federation is definitely coming and nothing can now change this fact’. In a claim that later became the subject of parliamentary questions, Pincott also claimed that the Queen herself approved of Federation.96 Gomani, ill with Huntingdon’s, was in hospital when Pincott issued the statement. Taking Pincott at his word, Gomani responded by leaving his hospital bed and calling on his people to intensify the campaign of defiance. With the President-General of the NAC Ralph Chinyama, Mwase and the Rev. Michael Scott, Gomani arranged to hold a meeting at his headquarters at Lizulu on the 22nd and 23rd of May. The meeting involved Angoni dancing and singing, and speeches calling for non-cooperation. The police objected to the meeting and ordered his people to disperse, which they did after one of Gomani’s deputies called on them to comply. Over the next few days the district staff attempted to convince Gomani to drop his campaign of non-cooperation, but to no avail.97 Pincott, losing patience, issued a warrant,

94 Willard Gomani was to succeed his father and after 1964 was elected an MP in independent Malawi’s parliament. 95 Mwase was Hastings Banda’s cousin and was instrumental in the establishment of Congress and initiated the Council. In the government’s estimation he was a model chief, maintaining a good home and carrying out his duties faithfully. According to Colin Legum Mwase gave the impression ‘of a fairly solid bourgeois, reticent, modest and unenthusiastic person’. From: Colin Legum, Confidential Report on Nyasaland, MSS/Afr/s/1681/237/2, RH. 96 DC Pincott to Native Authorities, 10/5/53, MSS/Afr/s/1681/237/10, RH. 97 The District Commissioner tried to convince Scott to convince Gomani, but Scott flatly refused.

350 DANIEL KARK dismissed Gomani and assumed his responsibilities as an NA. The matter came to a head when police arrived to arrest Gomani. Faced by a large crowd of the chief’s supporters the police – who ‘appeared rather white’ and whose ‘voices shook with nervousness’ – were forced into protracted negotiations on the konde of Gomani’s home.98 The police, feeling threatened by the growing crowd, ordered their African to charge the crowd. When they refused to do this the European officers fired tear gas into the crowd and bundled the chief into the police car. Around ten of the chief’s men stopped the car down the road, pulled the chief from within and hid him in a nearby village.99 After the police left empty- handed, the ill chief was carried away on a man’s shoulders accompanied by his wife and a small party that included Scott. Gaining the permission of the Portuguese authorities, they crossed the border into Mozambique.

Upon his forced return to Nyasaland a few days later, Gomani was arrested and taken to Malumulo Hospital, where he was to die in 1954 without standing trial. Scott, for his part in the protest, was deported without a hearing. He later made a very damaging appearance at the UN, where, with the assistance of the Indian delegation, he publicly denounced the Federation and undermined whatever goodwill the Colonial Office felt it had earned through its collaboration with UNESCO. A petition, signed by the chiefs in the Supreme Council and highly critical of British trusteeship, was also laid before the UN. The British delegation claimed that events in Nyasaland were a domestic affair and implicitly threatened to walk out of the UN.

Gomani explained his actions in a statement dictated to Michael Scott during their journey through the bush to Mozambique. With great pathos, he declared that ‘we have carried out all the government rules loyally, but now our hearts are confused and we don’t know what to obey, we are telling to government that if they will stop Federation our cooperation will be resumed … I cannot cancel any of the orders until Federation is abandoned. I told the

98 Michael Scott, African Episode, MSS/Afr/s/1681/237/10, RH. 99 A policeman involved in the incident provided a particularly vivid account of what occurred: ‘What they did, you see, there were Nyasaland Government cars and our driver was late Bwanaisa from Naisi. Gomani was put in the car ready to be ferried to Zomba. I hardly believed my eyes. When the driver wanted to start the car, the Ngonis clad in their traditional wear emerged from their hiding places and took hold of the car. They lifted it up while others deflated the tyres. The time they brought it down it was completely deflated and the chief was nowhere to be seen. They stole him out and furtively passed him over to the crowd and escaped. The results of this were demotions when we got back home in Zomba for “permitting a prisoner to escape”. And these were white officers that were demoted. That is what happened in Ntcheu on 18th May 1953’. From: Interview with junior policeman, Village Kusalangwe, GVH Mtogolo, TA Malemia.

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DC that when I find that Federation has not yet been imposed, then I would issue orders relating to cattle dipping, forestry and agriculture’. Gomani regretted the absent- and bloody-mindedness of the British and Protectorate governments – ‘I want to appeal to the Government to stop this Federation, all our councils have said the same thing, the Government have said that “you are foolish people not to accept it, if you accept federation you will become very rich”- we have told the Government that we have our land and we can grow what we need, but if we lose our land that is the most important thing. We feel that the land is threatened by federation’.100 The statement highlighted the fundamental contradictions between compulsory environmental restrictions and Federation on the one hand and the principles of Mass Education on the other. Rural Africans feared that association with the Rhodesias would lead to alienation of land in a way and on a scale similar to the situation in Southern Rhodesia. Subjection to famously racist Rhodesian landowners was a petrifying prospect. The issue simmered on in Ncheu even with Gomani confined to his hospital bed – some of the chiefs under Gomani jostled for the leadership, involving themselves in arson and intimidation right through to September 1953.101 By then the atmosphere in Nyasaland had soured further and attention had shifted to another part of the Protectorate.

Unlike Kenya and Rhodesia, Nyasaland was not, for the most part, a European settler colony. Cholo, a district in the densely populated Southern Province, was an island of settler tea-estates on alienated land. African resentment was an amalgam of longstanding anger over European control of lands, evictions from the estates, rent increases, the abuse of African labour and the introduction of Federation. It proved a volatile combination. Congress involved itself in affairs by demanding to see European title-deeds and encouraging tenants to refuse to move when evicted. The local population went further and began occupying land not being used by the estate owners and refusing to pay increased rents on land they already occupied. The grievances provided flammable tinder.

The spark was provided by two incidents. The first involved a European farmer, Percival, who stripped an African woman and sent her home after catching her taking firewood from

100 Statement dictated by NA Gomani to Michael Scott, 1953, MSS/Afr/s/1681/237/10, RH. 101 Chief George was suspected of ambitions above his station and of plotting to take Gomani’s place. He was the chief suspect in the arson of Chief Be Harry’s home and a campaign of intimidation.

352 DANIEL KARK his land. In the second incident, on the eighteenth of August, another European farmer, Tennent, caught two men stealing oranges from his orchard. An angry crowd forced him to release them, but the rumour quickly spread that the men had been murdered and put in the boot of Tennent’s car. Police arrived at Tennent’s house after a large crowd started throwing stones and threatening to attack his family. The police fired into the crowd, killed a man, and arrested VH Mgamwane before the crowd dispersed. Roadblocks were raised by protestors throughout the district. Another crowd, almost 10,000 strong gathered outside the Cholo Boma to demand Mgamwane’s release. Fifty European and one hundred African police tried to disperse the crowd, but this only occurred after the Provincial Commissioner, Eric Barnes, spoke to the crowd and calmed the situation. Barnes was much respected by the African population, and this was a clear example of the type of relationship the district administration claimed was disappearing from Nyasaland. Protests continued, despite this intervention. Barnes was not quite as successful at dissuading a crowd gathered at the Cholo court for Mgamwane’s trial. 3,000 protestors were dispersed by police with batons and tear gas. The situation was ultimately calmed by a visit by Mwase and Chinyama – they urged cooperation and a general cooling of tempers.

By then the disquiet had spread elsewhere in the Southern Province. Further incidents on Midima Road, in Chiradzulu, Chikwawa and Chitera village resulted in five deaths and many injuries. Telephone wires were cut, roadblocks thrown up and tax collectors beaten up. The police were stretched. There were still only 794 policemen for the whole Protectorate (fewer per capita than any other colony) and the 2nd Battalion of the KAR was away fighting in Malaya. Until assistance arrived from Tanganyika and Northern and Southern Rhodesia, the police had to make do with hastily drafted, untrained and militant European ‘specials’.102 This ad hoc force dealt quickly with the trees and trenches blocking roads around the province. More challenging were the crowds. For the first time in many years the police also had to face crowds with apparently militant intent. At Chitera village they were faced with arrows, stone throwing and spears. The crowds turned on all symbols of British authority, including those chiefs not openly opposed to Federation. NAs and village headmen loyal to the Nyasaland government proved easy targets. In Chiradzulu

102 The inter-colonial force, when it arrived, consisted of 100 men from Northern Rhodesia, 50 from Tanganyika and 70 from Southern Rhodesia. There were only 30 European officers among them. Figures from: McCracken, J., Coercion and Control in Nyasaland: A Study of a Colonial Police Force, History Seminar Paper no. 6, 7/3/83.

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Chief Kadewere and his wife were tied to a tree. Chief Ngabu in Chikwawa had his house demolished. Chiefs Kunthembwe and Machinjili had to rely on police protection. Split between a government that could depose them and subjects in an angry mood the confused chiefs were faced with difficult choices.103 They were not alone in their uncomprehending dismay. Two notable impressions of the episode were recorded by Colin Legum, a South African journalist working for The Observer. He was particularly impressed by the concerned and sympathetic posture of the DC in Chikwawa. The DC was deeply concerned for the welfare of those injured by splinters from the gas canisters. But, tellingly, the District Commissioner ‘was at a loss to understand what had gone wrong to upset the normally good relations … my own impression was that the DC was unable to relate the change of atmosphere to the prevailing anti-federation sentiment’. That this sentiment was foremost in the minds of those protesting was the subject of another anecdote recorded by Legum as he was investigating the Midima Road affair – ‘while we were standing talking to the village, Southern Rhodesian planes flew low over us. The villagers looked up and exclaimed: “Southern Rhodesia. Federation is here”’.104

Reporting rebellion in Domasi was infra dig for Thomson. His normally detailed reportage is limited, in the case of the September riots, to a terse addendum to the 1953 annual report. His description of events is concise and non-descript, confining itself to a brief narrative of events. The trouble began, according to Thomson, in 1951 with anti-Federal agitation and non-cooperation with all government orders and agents, excepting those concerned with education and healthcare. Uncooperative attitudes became a serious concern for the district team in 1953. In May ‘one of the more vocal members of the Nyasaland African Congress’ visited Domasi. He was blamed for stirring up agitation in the district. Thomson reported the situation gloomily and in a way quite different from African memories of local events – ‘respect for law and order diminished steadily. Illegal meetings had to be ignored. Court process could not be enforced. Payment of taxes and local rates became negligible. Illicit brewing flourished. In soil conservation areas bunds were overturned and pegs indicating

103 GVH Balamanja remembers the dissension which existed among the chiefs. Some wanted to wait to see the benefits which might come of Federation. Others were adamantly against the scheme (Interview 1/10/05). Some chiefs openly expressed loyalty to the government, even while they opposed Federation. NAs Kawinga and Chikowi in Zomba District were among a group of chiefs who pledged their support to the government of Nyasaland in June 1953. In September the Nyasaland African Progressive Association was formed under the chairmanship of Charles Matinga, now alienated from the NAC. Tellingly, it had the support of the settler population. Chikowi joined the party, but the organization was moribund from the start. 104 Both from: Op. Cit. Colin Legum.

354 DANIEL KARK newly-marked contours were uprooted. Loyal Africans were subjected to increasingly serious threats to their persons and property … among the disaffected, anything that savoured of progress was apt to be declared anathema’.105

In July a large part of the African population in Domasi boycotted the coronation celebrations. The same month Allan Malemia resigned and the work of the District Council foundered as half of the membership resigned with their NA. Many of the chiefs and councillors remained loyal. But their fidelity was less notable than the failure of relationships upon which so much of the local reform depended. The sense of betrayal felt by Thomson and his team was multiplied by the example set by many of the government’s own agents. Thomson does not reveal bitterness in his brief account of the revolt, but his frustration with former agents may easily be imagined and inferred from his careful narrative. Group Headman Kasonga was found to be actively encouraging resistance. Charges were brought, but when a small police force was despatched to arrest Kasonga, the Headman and his supporters resisted and the police detachment was forced to withdraw. Two months passed while Thomson waited for police reinforcements from other parts of the Protectorate, and troops from the Rhodesias. The situation in other parts of Southern Province meant that the police were stretched very thinly everywhere. A colonial relationship that up until this point relied upon respect for administrative authority now required an open demonstration of force to restore control and state legitimacy.

The relationship between the district officers and the local population deteriorated. Bunds were destroyed. Tax remained unpaid. And Mass Education came to a complete standstill. When Thomson received reinforcements in mid-September he had local ‘agitators’, including Village Headmen Kapichi and Matuta, arrested and brought to the Boma for trial, although the rebellious Group Headman Kasonga remained at large. So long the buttress of colonial rule, the chiefs seemed to be deserting their sponsors. Hours after the arrested men arrived at the Boma a large crowd gathered outside the headquarters on the banks of the Domasi River, armed with stones, bows and spears. Thomson read the riot act, and the police attempted to disperse the crowd. When the police were attacked by the crowd they fired and killed two people, both ‘prominent in the local agitation’. One of the dead was a chief, Mkusa-Ngombe. The crowd dispersed quickly and the show of force was sufficient

105 Op. Cit. Domasi District Annual Report 1953, 1954, MNA.

LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND REBELLION IN DOMASI 355 to extinguish local passions. State legitimacy was reconfirmed. Over the next few days Allan Malemia expressed his renewed loyalty, and the recalcitrant Group Headman Kasonga gave himself up to stand trial alongside the other arrested ‘agitators’. In court ‘the dupes were given the opportunity of doing what they ought to have done or undoing what they ought not to have done. Life soon returned to normal and the ordinary man in the village heaved a sigh of relief’.106

This carefully created version of events – written by a man with a great professional investment in a successful outcome – is remembered differently by those supposedly sighing with relief. Two moments are still recalled with particular clarity by both participants and uncommitted observers – Malemia’s resignation in July 1953 and the shootings outside the Boma in September. Both were deeply symbolic of the changes overtaking Nyasaland, and the fundamental deficiencies of colonial development. Malemia’s resignation in July 1953 put him among a small group of NAs unwilling to compromise or cooperate with the government over Federation. Along with Gomani in Ncheu, NA Kumtumanji and NA Mlumbe in Zomba District, and a number of other NAs Malemia became a figurehead for both nationalist and peasant.107 Remembrances of the resignation realign the relative powers of DC and NA. The emotional recollections of elderly Domasi residents give Malemia the initiative and recognise his legitimacy, even after he voluntarily forfeited his official privileges and duties.108 Malemia comes across as an assertive and proud chief, fulfilling for the DC of Zomba his earlier prediction that pride was indeed the chief’s particular vice.

Although memories of the actual event do not always agree in detail, they present a consistent theme. Malemia went to see Thomson at the Boma and in his presence removed the gown (nduwila) the government awarded to NAs. The removal of the nduwila is a recurrent leitmotif in recollections of the disturbances in Domasi. For the chief’s people it

106 Ibid. 107 The government accepted the resignations of five NAs immediately. It vacillated over the resignations of another ten, unsure of whether to accept or not. GVH Balamanja remembers the punishment meted out to NA Mlumbe: ‘His court was demolished and the bricks that were used at this court were taken to Chingale where a small court was built and it was my uncle who was chosen to be in charge of that court’. This story was confirmed during an interview at TA Mlumbe. There was clearly no unanimity amongst the chiefs regarding the Federation. From interview with GVH Balamanja, 1/10/05. 108 The resignation was still approached with some emotion. One respondent asked for the recorder to be turned off before giving a response and then asked that it not be included in the transcript.

356 DANIEL KARK was symbolic of their rejection of a government that had reneged on its duty to protect its subjects from the hated Federation. ‘Federation’ should be read in its broadest possible sense – as symbolic of government abuse, ranging from inadequate education to the detested environmental restrictions. Importantly, this rejection of authority did not include a termination of what locals saw as the chief’s traditional duties to his people. One man, a policeman at the time of the resignation, recalled matters simply – ‘he just took off the gown that government gave to chiefs. This removal of the gown symbolized de-linking himself and his support to the government and not stopping doing his traditional duties as an NA to his people’.109 Another account describes events with a little more narrative licence. The chief ‘just went straight into Thomson’s office and asked him “what is the meaning of this that you have done? What do these soldiers want here?” In anger the NA took off the nduliwa and threw it in the office and left it there … this removal of the nduliwa symbolised refusal to associate himself with the government and not resigning as a NA to his people’.110 Contrary to Thomson’s claim that opinion was evenly divided between the government and Malemia, there appeared to be widespread support for the chief and his cause. Another elderly man remembered that ‘the NA returned his gown to government in disagreement with the way his people were being treated by the whites here in Domasi. The resignation was a sign to say no, enough is enough. So we agreed with what TA Malemia did. We did not support the government’.111 Another man put it in even more unequivocal terms – ‘When the TA came he banged the DC’s office door and said angrily. “How dare you, bringing war in my territory without telling me.” So because of this unhappiness and disagreement with what the DC did that is why people said he resigned. But according to what I saw he never resigned. He was still the NA.’112

Equally vivid are memories of the protest and shootings at the Boma. Where Thomson omitted detail in favour of a clinical description, local narratives of the event are detailed and emotive. The particulars are, once again, remembered in a contradictory manner. Some informants confused the resignation in July with the shootings in September, dates are sometimes confused and the numbers marching and wounded vary from account to account. But the overall picture remains convincing and coherent. The proximate cause of

109 Interview with junior policeman, Village Kusalangwe, GVH Mtogolo, TA Malemia. 110 Mr. Kamwendo, Gardener of Thomas Thomson from Village Mbwana, TA Malemia, 29/1/07. 111 Interview with Mr. Makilinesi – Village Nyamuka, TA Malemia, 28/06/2006. 112 Interview with Mr. Ngomano, a driver at Jeanes Institute of Education, Village Mlima, T/A Malemia, 17/01/07.

LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND REBELLION IN DOMASI 357 the protest was the series of arrests at the beginning of September. Village Headman Ng’ombe, angered at the arrest of some of his people, decided to march on the Boma. In some accounts Malemia accompanied him. The most detailed account was provided by a former policeman, and while his grasp of incidental detail is occasionally inaccurate, the main points correspond with alternative versions. His unbroken narrative is gripping:

I was there with soldiers that came from Southern Rhodesia and Tanganyika after being alerted that there would be problems on that date. The whites did not know that I was coming from this area. They just took me saying this guy is very clever. So they included me on their mission of that day. I was in the communications department of the police force. We arrived there at Jeanes at about 4 o’clock AM. We allocated the soldiers in the teachers’ houses that were there at Jeanes that time waiting to see what was going to happen at the expected time, and it occurred as was expected. The house that is occupied by Mr. Chitalo today at Jeanes was the one that Thomson was staying. Up the small hill near the house was a water tank that supplied water in the house. So our boys erected a mast for communication with the air force. So I went up there with my binoculars. I pointed my binoculars towards the east where we expected the protests to come from. And indeed I saw a swarm of people. Angry villagers marching militantly towards Jeanes singing in unison defiant songs. It was then that I was gripped with fear. Not that I was afraid to confront them but fear that it would be sad and indeed abominable to shed blood of my own relations. So I alleged that I was ill and they permitted me to go to clinic but they still gave me a revolver that I should use in case the situation worsened and got out of hand. When I reached there at Jeanes clinic I saw my grandfather, NA Malemia and NA Kumtumanji. The situation was now dire. The soldiers were heading towards the protests led by D.C Thomson himself. I told NA Kumtumanji and NA Malemia carrying his long walking stick that ‘you are going to be arrested.’ It did not take too long. NA Kumtumanji was arrested. They didn’t arrest my grandfather, NA Malemia despite his rudeness. It was said they personally knew each other [NA Malemia and Thomson] in a war in Sierra Leone. The soldiers made a roadblock so that none would be allowed to cross but the protestors overpowered them. In fact for your information these people were from Ng’ombe village. They were still singing defiant songs, “Amene aopa nkhondo ngati akafa azabwera” [Why

358 DANIEL KARK fear war as when you die you will come back]. Just a few minutes later after overpowering the soldiers, they set on fire one of the offices at the DC’s because it was grass thatched. Not too long after this gunfire was heard and one person was shot dead. And Chief Ng’ombe who mobilized his subjects for the protests was shot in the belly. So that is what happened on that day.

Notable in many of the accounts are two key themes – the use of inappropriate levels of force by the government, and the appearance of African troops from elsewhere in the Federation. The use of African troops from Southern Rhodesia and Tanganyika to violently suppress fellow Africans was a rude surprise for many in Domasi. Mr. Nangupeta, a teacher in a Kwaca school remembered his bewilderment – ‘it was terrible that day. The Zimbabwean soldiers were camping there at Jeanes where the water tank is near the house DC Thomson was staying. Fighter planes were flying all over here and the soldiers too with guns in their hands speaking strange language … what I hardly understood was the presence of soldiers from that came here just in time to deal with the situation’.113 Mrs. Kagaso, another Kwaca teacher, remembers a similar sense of confusion. She remembers the Rhodesian soldiers being ‘very strange’. Like the policeman, she also recalls the level of force used by the troops. She remembers the revolt taking place ‘while I was teaching at the Kwaca school. It started in the morning with the beating of a drum and some kind of ululating. I am sure this was when the people were mobilizing themselves for the war. Then later we just saw parents coming to take their children from school, saying there is war and we asked where. At Jeanes, they answered. Then we left for Jeanes to see what exactly was happening there. When we reached there we just found planes flying all over. NA Malemia himself, left to see what was happening, and he asked Thomson “Is this what you wanted when you came here?” then he rushed to Jeanes clinic to see the people that were injured … you see our people had spears, axes, pangas as their weapon while the government had guns. So there [were many injuries]. One person died in those protests’.114 Other witnesses recall there being three deaths, including Chief Ng’ombe. Some people gave more personal accounts, less clear on the finer detail of the general conflict, but more certain of their feelings confusion and fear. It was terrible. I saw chiefs run away. People in the villages also sped off and hid in the dambos of Domasi River. I too did likewise.

113 Interview with Mr. Nangupeta, Village Kanache, GVH Mtogolo, TA Malemia. 114 Interview with Mrs. Kagaso, Village Kwidyo, TA Malemia.

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Everybody around here thought that it was war when they heard the gunshots. Some wanted to runaway together with their livestock. There were goats all over. Lucky enough hyenas didn’t come out that night; there would have been a big party! [laughs]. Some remained in hiding for over two days others even three. It was hot here at Malemia’.115 For a few days, at least, the world was turning upside down.

The use of open violence by the state, and more particularly by the Federation, flatly contradicted claims that the state was committed to the development of a sense of common citizenship. It also confirmed all the worst fears that involvement in Federation was little more than an indefinite bondage to which Africans had been committed without their consent. Interestingly, those interviewed at no time suggested that Britain itself was responsible for the repression. It was perhaps implicit that Britain was responsible for committing them to Federation, but it was never openly stated as such in interview.

For peasants and the small emerging group of clerks, tradesmen and junior public servants there was common local cause for defiance and protest. For the semi-educated, attenuated career paths and limited social mobility caused growing frustration, a frustration only aggravated by involvement in a reputedly racist Federation. At an even more basic level almost all rural residents – peasant and worker, educated and uneducated – were involved in some form of subsistence agriculture. Government environmental restrictions and discrimination in favour of cash-croppers provided them with common ground. Over and over, Domasi locals gave ‘terraces’ as the primary motivation behind local protests. The deep and durable resentment caused by these interventions still resonates. But the impetus these compulsory measures provided has to be set against a confused background of ‘politics’.

Nationalism and protest against the imposition of Federation were conflated and labelled ‘politics’, beyond the purview of commoners or the semi-educated. It was not always clear to Malemia’s supporters what exactly the chief was protesting. His daughter remembers his resignation but could not distinguish the cause – Malemia resigned over ‘terraces and politics. I’m not sure which was the cause of the resignation’.116 A driver at the Jeanes

115 Op. Cit. Interview with Matereko, Village Sani, TA Malemia, 27/6/06. 116 Interview with NA Malemia’s daughter, Village Magwira, GVH Mtogolo, TA Malemia.

360 DANIEL KARK Centre recalled his confusion at the violent turn of events. He was ‘not quite sure what people were protesting about, but the result of this was the presence of soldiers from Zimbabwe’. Despite his ignorance he ‘rose up, put on my clothes and took my panga and headed to the DC’s office and indeed found fighting in progress. Women from Chopi village were singing derogatory songs and the soldiers shot three people’.117 Elderly Domasi residents remember James Sangala, a Domasi local and one of the key Congress leaders, as a ‘rude politician’, as a ‘political engineer’ and as ‘the one who introduced politics here’, without any specific recollection of what Sangala’s ‘politics’ meant.118

Conceptions of the implications of Federation were also hazy. It was popularly assumed that Federation meant the loss of land, but how exactly this was to occur was not known. Rumours regarding government environmental restrictions or the possible arrival of Southern Rhodesian settlers were inconsistent. The incomplete picture received by ordinary villagers meant that opposition to Federation was included within ‘politics’. For many local people those protesting Federation were ‘those who had political backgrounds. Believe me or not the opposition of the Federation was politics. If we did not stop or oppose the coming of the whites why oppose the Federation, which was within the British style of administration’.119 There was little of the prescribed sense of citizenship and involvement that Mass Education was meant to develop within village communities. Villagers were excluded from the decision-making of both Congress and the Boma. In the absence of any clear conception of the bigger extra-local ideas they were supposed to be protesting small farmers and the semi-educated conflated local grievances and Federation – deep dissatisfaction with bunding and terracing transmogrified easily into opposition to Federation.

Congress and government were confronted by their own misconceptions. In focusing on the elite transition and reform on the Legislative Council, Congress failed to understand the depth of feeling in the rural districts of the Southern Province. The issues that mattered on the local level, with the exception of education, were neglected by the movement. Indeed

117 Interview with Mr. Ngomano, a driver at Jeanes Institute of Education, Village Mlima, T/A Malemia, 17/1/07. 118 One man, when asked whether he could recall Sangala’s role in the nationalist movement, stated that Sangala’s job was ‘quarrelling with the white men’. Interview with Mr. Makilinesi, Village Nyamuka, TA Malemia, 28/06/2006. 119 Interview with police officer, Op. Cit.

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Kettlewell, the Director of Agriculture and the prime mover behind the environmental restrictions and individualisation, spoke to an appreciative audience at the NAC’s second annual convention in 1946. This should not be taken as evidence of support for government policy – it is perhaps more indicative of the courteous and reasonably amicable attitude Congress had towards the government in the immediate post-war period. The NAC was doubtless opposed to the tough sanctions applied by the government, and local representatives were actively involved in opposition and Congress’ non-cooperation campaign.

The movement was nonetheless caught by surprise by Cholo and appeared to have been similarly unprepared for Domasi. Congress members had certainly been active in the area, encouraging passive resistance and non-cooperation, but they did not foresee the open and violent protests of August and September. Legum reported that the outbursts of August and September occurred ‘without Congress’ knowledge or authority. In fact, Congress was opposed to the methods used. It was a spontaneous explosion’. Congress was not, in fact consistently opposed to direct action. The NAC was torn by disputes regarding involvement in the Federal Assembly and institutions as well as its response to the protests. It proved incapable of capitalising on the outpouring of popular and occasionally violent dissatisfaction. Mkandawire and the radical wing tried to take advantage of the tide of anger. Chinyama attempted conciliation, but was badly wrong-footed by the rebellion and resigned soon afterwards. His resignation did not prevent ongoing internal dissent and indecision. Banda temporarily withdrew his support for Congress. Three hundred Congress branches were reduced to fifteen within the space of a year and Congress was immobilised. By the beginning of 1954 the NAC owed creditors 146 having spent a total of only 585 in the previous year.

Severe administrative and financial difficulties did not mean Congress was discredited in Nyasaland’s villages. During the protests a number of people claimed to be Congress representatives and spoke in the movement’s name, despite the fact that they were neither representatives nor party members. Local committees, without NAC permission, signed themselves ‘Congress leaders’. Villagers described themselves as ‘Congressmen’, with little knowledge of the NAC programme. The African Supreme Council, under Mwase, reconceived Congress as ‘the child of the chiefs’, forging stronger links between

362 DANIEL KARK progressive NAs and the NAC. The NAC, with the support of these cooperative chiefs, had become a mass movement without displaying any particular initiative. Despite opposition to the violent outbursts and active support from Chinyama and his supporters for government calls for calm, Congress was inadvertently now the focus of aspirations to a new type of citizenship, founded not on gradualism but on immediate and tangible change. Legum described the situation best – ‘here is mass support, without effective organizational leadership’.120 The organisational leadership may have been retarded, but the constituency was prepared for the expeditious changes Mass Education could not offer.

The Government of Nyasaland pinned the blame for the revolt on Congress ‘agitators’ and their fellow travellers, despite their inadvertent involvement. There was an ambivalent attitude towards Congress within the government. The Party was officially recognised and the Governor had long adopted a policy of constructive engagement with Congress leaders. But this engagement was wearing thin by 1953, the product of persistent demands for a larger share of power, and government suspicions that Congress was deliberately undermining relationships with chiefs and their people. The police raided the homes of prominent Congress leaders in the days after the disturbances. Colby warned Chinyama of the consequences of violent resistance by reminding him of the fate of his father Filipo Chinyama, executed for his part in the 1915 .121 The government still refused to believe that the ‘average African’ was independently responsible for the disturbances. Colby sent a telegram to Secretary of State Lyttelton during the disturbances asking that a high level MI5 officer visit Nyasaland under guise of a social welfare fact- finding trip in order to analyse evidence of a plot to inspire African revolt. Colby discerned evidence of ‘a deeper influence at work’ – Congress was the tool ‘of some dangerous anti- British organisation inspired from outside Africa … we are up against something much more serious than nationalism or local agitation. Indians are heavily involved and possibly one European of Austrian origin: moreover, there appears to be some religious background’.122 Colby’s request was rebuffed by the Colonial Office, but his suspicions were not allayed. Until these rumours of plots directed from outside the Protectorate were confirmed it sufficed for the government and Colonial Office to place the blame on ‘itinerant agitators’ and ‘hooligans’ affiliated with and directed by Congress. Lyttelton,

120 Op. Cit. Legum. 121 Anecdote related to Short by Chipembere, in: Short, P., Banda, Routledge, London, 1974, pg. 77. 122 Colby to SoS, 7/9/53, CO1015/457, PRO.

LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND REBELLION IN DOMASI 363 responding to a parliamentary question on the disturbances, described the opposition that the Protectorate government faced. The trouble was ‘skilfully fomented and intensified by agitators, many of whom are known to be members or followers of the Nyasaland African Congress … widespread intimidation and mis-representation [were] calculated to fan the grievances of the rural African and to shake his confidence in his chief, the government and the European population’.123

Congress and the government misconceived rural initiative and resistance. For both, it was inconceivable that rural Africans could independently create their own set of demands and local priorities. The 1953 disturbances suggested this to be a dangerous misconception. The NAC neither predicted nor capitalised on the disturbances, but at least the current ran with it. While Congress could not provide a clear definition of citizenship for the uneducated and the chiefs it could at least belatedly attempt to appropriate animosity towards government. The protests were therefore clearly far more threatening for the government than they were for Congress. Prior to the disturbances the official imagination stretched only as far as gradual change through the encouragement of individualism, initiative and an expanding, if circumscribed, sense of citizenship. The state would manage and control African expectations of what the state could provide for them. African political and administrative control was only conceivable in an eventual sense. Mass Education was the tool through which control and legitimacy could be maintained and criticism of colonial rule limited. In a superficial sense this control was restored with the suppression of the 1953 protests. The firm manner in which the riot in Domasi was suppressed was a clear indication of the government’s determination to maintain control of the district and Protectorate. The administrative relationship between state and subject was quickly re- established – payment of tax resumed immediately. The day after the riot tax arrears from defaulters poured in. Thomson reported that the revenue curve ‘became almost vertical’.124 Technical officers involved in the scheme were once again able to venture into the rural areas and ensure peasants complied with orders. The District Council was reconstituted with the DC technically in charge, but under the collective control of loyal chiefs and

123 Reply by Lyttelton to question by Sir Richard Acland, 21/10/53, CO1015/459, PRO. 124 Domasi District Political Intelligence Report, September 1953, NSG3/1/1, MNA. Baker reports that tax collection in the days after the 1953 disturbances was used not just for revenues but for disciplinary purposes. Tax would restore the relationship between state and subject. See: Baker, C., Tax Collection in Malawi: an Administrative History, 1891-1972, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 8, No. 1, 1975.

364 DANIEL KARK commoners. The council was now supposedly more democratic than it had been under the stewardship of NA Malemia. For a very brief period life in Domasi District resumed the course determined by British authority.

The Domasi experiment was terminated at the end of 1954, and the district reabsorbed into Zomba after 1955. In December, 1954 the Assistant DC of Kasupe, just north of Domasi was told to take over responsibility for the area. That the ADC was expected to visit Domasi at most two or three times a week was indicative of the district’s irrelevance as either an experiment or administrative unit.125 The reduction of District staff and closure of the scheme had been under consideration for some time. As early as August 1953 the Chief Secretary had written to Thomson asking for an evaluation of the financial viability of the Domasi experiment. Of crucial importance was ‘any indication that there has been an economic return from the scheme either in increased taxation or in general economic benefits, such as increases in production’.126 The fate of the scheme was decided in February, 1954, when the Governor wrote to the Secretary of State recommending termination. He wrote that ‘the pursuit of the experiment inevitably boils down to the question of provision of funds. There is, in fact, little in the scheme itself, whether it be in the sphere of administration, local government, land usage, health or education, which is not being practised on a less concentrated scale in other districts’.127

That the experiment was closed on grounds of financial deficit and experimental redundancy was a clear indication that priorities had shifted fast away from the principles that had inspired Mass Education five years previously. Expense trumped community development. The District was, nonetheless, to maintain some link with its past. Domasi would be retained as the location for a local government training school with the dual purpose ‘of ensuring that the Training School operates in the most effective manner and that the progress which has been achieved by the Community Development Scheme will not be lost’. Thomson, disappointed by the closure, thought this a waste of time. Without the district attached as an experimental field within which local leaders could witness the effects of their training their education would be useless. Thomson argued forcefully that ‘there may be a positive danger of fostering scepticism, in teaching something which is not

125 DC Zomba to ADC Kasupe, 8/12/54, DOJ363, MNA. 126 Chief Secretary to Thomson, 13/8/53, PCS1/23/4, MNA. 127 Savingram no. 65, from Colby to SoS, 16/2/54, PCS1/23/4, MNA.

LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND REBELLION IN DOMASI 365 practised in the area surrounding such a school and which the school staff are not in a position to ensure is practised in that area’.128 This had previously been attempted at the Jeanes School in the 1930s and had failed. What Thomson proposed instead was the maintenance of Domasi as a comprehensive training field. It need not be a Community Development scheme any longer. The politicised elements of Mass Education were less attractive after 1953. In Domasi Community Development was now ‘one of the few subjects which we do not teach here’. The scheme would instead train local leaders in techniques of social development, by which was meant apolitical training in voluntary work and welfare organisation. The training was to be modelled on Kenya’s Ashridge conferences, but with a local and very revealing twist – ‘I would prefer to call them “Prehabilitation Conferences” in the hope that if we organise them in Nyasaland we may avoid the need in the future for rehabilitation camps’.129 A Nyasaland Mau Mau could be prevented with a judicious dose of apolitical education.

While Thomson’s motivation for keeping the scheme open might not have appealed to them, the DC found supporters among some of the liberal development advisors to the Colonial Office. Read – the chief proponent of Colonial Office Mass Education policy – felt that serious consideration should have been given to ongoing support for Domasi, beyond 1954. The Social Welfare Advisor to the Colonial Office, W.H. Chinn, upon delivery of a report on social welfare in Nyasaland, provoked claims on the Advisory Committee for Social Development that Colby’s reluctance was ‘defeatist’.130 Rather than focusing so sharply on economic development Colby should begin to concentrate attention on social development. This view had powerful supporters – William Gorell Barnes and Henry Hopkinson (respectively Assistant Under-Secretary of State and Minister of State for Colonial Affairs) lent their support to a more immediate concentration on welfare that would ‘go a long way to allay any suspicions which they entertain as to their future within the Federation’.131

128 Both from: Thomson to Chief Secretary, 16/11/54, DOJ363, MNA. 129 Thomson to Chief Secretary, 11/9/54, MNA. 130 Draft minutes of the 1st meeting of the Advisory Committee on Social Development, 19/10/53, CO1015/669, PRO. 131 Hopkinson to Colby, 4/2/54, CO1015/669, PRO.

366 DANIEL KARK The chiefs, clerks and village notables who did not resign their posts during the 1953 protests were also strongly in favour of the retention of Domasi as a separate development district. They clearly had much to lose by the dissolution of the District Council and the withdrawal of the heavy subsidies provided for local development. Edwin Mponda wrote plaintively to the Provincial Commissioner that ‘we have already adjusted to the new way of life. The total abolition of the Boma here will mean that all the new things which we have learnt will be lost’.132 Mponda watched as the very focused administrative supervision withered and faded. The agricultural officer reported to the Zomba District Team that people were knocking bunds over in Domasi – ‘they say that now the boma has gone they will not be punished’.133 In a far more personal sense the abandonment of the scheme meant that the public commitment that certain prominent Africans made to the local colonial structures would greatly undermine their social positions. They remained publicly committed to the Domasi administration after being placed in the most difficult position in 1953, but they were now to be abandoned. Edwin Mponda himself suffered this fate. He was chairman of the Domasi Council only until 1956, when Malemia was re-elected in his place.134

Local and metropolitan support for ongoing development interventions in Domasi was not enough to guarantee state support. The spirit in which Mass Education and democratic local government were conceived by the government of Nyasaland and received by the African population of Domasi had changed irretrievably. The uprising was the key proximate reason the Domasi scheme was not renewed beyond 1954. The disturbances were indicative of an irredeemable breakdown of the old order. The violent government response was an indication as clear as any that commitment to gradual change, citizenship, initiative and individual expression was not unconditional. After 1953 the state accumulated the power to suppress dissent directly. Police powers and funding grew by 300% between 1953 and 1959, expanding the force to over 2,300 men. A newly formed paramilitary group, the Police Mobile Force rapidly gained a reputation for great brutality.135 The days of mediated administration and suppression were past.

132 Edwin Mponda to Provincial Commissioner, Southern Province, 1/9/55, NS1/1/1, MNA. 133 Minutes of the Zomba District Team meeting, 5/11/55, DCZA2/1/2, MNA. 134 Malemia was restored as a Traditional Authority by the MCP government in 1961. 135 McCracken, J., Coercion and Control in Nyasaland: A Study of a Colonial Police Force, History Seminar Paper no. 6, 7/3/83.

LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND REBELLION IN DOMASI 367

More fundamentally, the government’s commitment to liberalism atrophied as a result not only of colonial rebellion, but a transformation of metropolitan priorities in the African colonies. While public servants in the Colonial Office maintained a residual affection for planned intervention in African welfare, the Conservative government took a far more pragmatic approach to empire. Despite Churchill’s stated reluctance to preside over anything resembling the dissolution of the British Empire, Secretaries of State Oliver Lyttelton and Alan Lennox-Boyd led the Colonial Office through an important period of reform. While the Tories cast a less critical eye on Federation than their Labour predecessors, they also presided over the transformation of African legislatures and a series of constitutional conferences in the African territories. The steady inclusion of African members on colonial Legislative Councils transferred momentum from the transformation of African society and local government to a political transition at the highest legislative level. The metropolitan momentum behind Mass Education steadily diminished. Goldsworthy summarised the situation in the clearest terms: ‘no longer was much heard of planned, orderly and gradual progress under British guidance. Now, it seemed, to be gradual was simply to court danger – the danger of massive colonial unrest which Britain could not hope to contain’.136 This danger was clearly expressed during the 1959 Nyasaland Emergency. The deaths of over fifty Africans, the commission of enquiry that followed, and the imprisonment of Banda, Chipembere and other NAC members, shocked the British government into action in Central Africa.137 It was a government determined to pursue a colonial direction reorientated by Tory PM and his radical Secretary of State .138 Banda and other NAC political prisoners were released, the replaced the proscribed NAC, and the former was invited to a constitutional conference in the summer of 1960. The tide had turned irrevocably. In 1960 the stated that secession from the Federation could not be ruled out for Nyasaland. After elections in August 1961 returned an overwhelming result in favour of the MCP, Nyasaland was indeed withdrawn from the Federation in 1963.

136 Goldsworthy, D., Colonial Issues in British Politics 1945-1961: From ‘Colonial Development’ to ‘Winds of Change’, Clarendon, Oxford, 1971, pgs. 35-6. 137 The Devlin Commission was particularly damning, finding Nyasaland under Governor Robert Armitage to be a police state which had used illegal force during the 1959 emergency. The commission also found Africans to be universally opposed to Federation. 138 Goldsworthy claims of the 1959 election that returned Macmillan and Macleod that ‘no British election ever had greater significance for colonial policy’. Ibid. pg. 35.

368 DANIEL KARK Metropolitan commitment to Community Development withered in step with the transformation of political priorities. After the Conservative victory in 1951 resources were slowly transferred away from an exclusive concentration on Community Development. The focus of the Colonial Office switched to the promotion of social welfare. A Social Welfare Advisory Committee had already been formed in 1943 and a social welfare advisor appointed in 1947 in order to deal with the training of social workers, the rehabilitation of offenders and the general amelioration of conditions in rural and urban communities. The Mass Education Committee was amalgamated with the Social Welfare Committee in 1953, to form the Advisory Committee on Social Development in the Colonies. The two Colonial Office missions that visited British Africa in 1951 mentioned adult, female and agricultural education, but made no mention of these being elements of a broader Mass Education or Community Development programme. No substantive comment or attention was given to Mass Education at the 1952 Cambridge Conference on African Education.139 Mass Education was no longer in vogue.

The Colonial Office was, anyway, steadily negotiating itself into redundancy and extinction. Technical responsibilities were transferred to the Department of Technical Cooperation in July 1960, resulting in the loss of 730 staff. Over a similar period the CO’s territorial supervisory responsibilities were gradually transferred to the Commonwealth Relations Office as colonies gained independence. It was not only Mass Education that was losing its transformative appeal and promise, but the entire approach to colonial development in preparation for eventual self-rule. As Frederick Cooper records, the Conservatives stated clearly the consequences of nationalist demands for an immediate transfer of power – ‘Great Britain was not going to hold itself responsible for maintaining the letter or the spirit of the Colonial Welfare and Development Act once Africans had claimed the right to govern themselves’.140

As the Tory government switched policy away from the prescriptive transformation of African society towards a more exclusive elite transition, the funding and political will

139 The mission sent to Central and East Africa was put under the control of A.L. Binns and included Freda Gwilliam. For more on the 1952 conference and the missions to West Africa and East and Central Africa see: African Education: A Study of Educational Policy and Practice in British Tropical Africa, Nuffield Foundation, Colonial Office, Oxford, 1953. 140 Cooper, F., Decolonisation and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa, CUP, Cambridge, 1996, pg. 393.

LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND REBELLION IN DOMASI 369 behind Mass Education dried up in Nyasaland. The always nebulous attractions of the programme for the state diminished. The experiment was, anyway, taking on the trappings of an exercise in administrative efficiency rather than transformative community development. An efficient bureaucracy and a limited understanding with the educated African elite could ultimately guarantee a seamless transition to self-rule and forestall the kind of trouble experienced in 1953. Encouraging the formation of concepts of citizenship and undercooked ideals of African agency were less than attractive propositions. They were also less easily controlled and moulded during a period when state control meant everything. For what was occurring during the period was exceptional. Opposing nationalist and state concepts of citizenship vied for the loyalties of rural Africans. But the largely uneducated and rural subjects of this competition subverted these concepts, producing a different definition that stressed local control and identification. This independent line was quickly quashed. The rising challenged control by both nationalist leaders and the state. By taking local and independent action they temporarily remained outside the different national ideas proposed by both Chipembere and Colby. The recollection of these events by elderly Domasi residents is the clearest evidence that this was so. Oral histories present a consistent narrative that stresses the confusion caused by nationalist ‘politics’, the resentment caused by state regulation, and the primacy of quotidian issues in the definition of local citizenship, solidarity and protest.

Conclusions

The Failure of Liberal Imperialism and How Britain Imagined the Modern World

Niall Ferguson argued in ‘Empire’ that British imperialism ‘made the modern world’. The British brought Africans and Asians the free market and progressive government. Ferguson subsequently wrote a history of American imperialism, which described the United States’ hegemony in terms that encourage a comparison with its British predecessor. In ‘Colossus’ he writes that American imperial power should be a force for good in the world. Liberal empires governed by hegemonic powers such as the US – and by implication, the British – should use power to spread the benefits of progress and modernity. On balance, according to Ferguson, liberal imperialism ‘was a good thing’. Indeed, ‘in many cases of economic ‘backwardness’, a liberal empire can do better than a nation-state’.1 Ferguson is not alone in his ‘moral resuscitation’ of empire. William Easterly writes of the numerous articles which have appeared in the last decade, calling for a return to invasive, imposed change.2 He also describes a residual nostalgia for colonial rule among the formerly colonised. Sadly, this was an attitude also encountered during the interviews conducted for this thesis in the area around Domasi. The uncertainty of life in contemporary Malawi increasingly tints some of the memories of life in Nyasaland. Easterly describes this academic and popular trend best – ‘It used to be that everybody agreed that colonialism was bad. Frustration with disastrous postcolonial outcomes in Africa has led many to imagine a colonial past of peace and prosperity’.3 These recent conceptions of empire have taken the edge off a label long used to excoriate and offend defenders of the ‘Imperial Achievement’. Liberal empires, in this view, should intervene to ensure the vitality and viability of Western values, progress and enlightenment, women’s rights, democracy, the international rule of law, or whatever other universal, moral imperative of a supposedly monolithic West is chosen to justify a particular intervention. Ideological empire is returned.

1 Ferguson, N., Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire, Penguin Press, New York, 2004, pg. 198. 2 Easterly, W., The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done so Much Ill and so Little Good, Penguin Press, New York, 2006, pgs. 269-305. 3 Ibid. pg. 271.

372 DANIEL KARK

The penultimate act of the British Empire in Africa has received far less specific historic attention than it deserves. It gave its cast of liberal and sympathetic characters by far the kindest lines along with a morally ambiguous plot. Aware that empire was at an end, but unaware of the precise timetable and form decolonisation would follow, the men and women of the Colonial Office and Colonial Service determined on a course that would prepare Africans for self-government, while simultaneously standing British trusteeship well in the eyes of the world. Mass Education was the last liberal scheme of the British imperial age. It was the last time that the Colonial Office gave a liberal agenda serious consideration. After the pragmatics of imminent decolonisation took over in the mid-1950s, gradual liberal transformations lost their appeal for the Colonial Office. But as long as decolonisation was considered to be a comfortable generation or more away, British colonial governments in Africa could plan – and planning was the guarantor of success – on a period during which they could mould Africans to become citizens and communities supportive of the smooth and legitimate transition Britain so wanted. The Colonial Office, led by politicians, experts and civil servants of the ilk of Arthur Creech Jones, Margaret Read and Andrew Cohen, fizzed with a post-war confidence in its ability to plan and intervene in the colonies in ways it had not before. A genuine liberal impetus drove the creation of a new colonial relationship. There was, to be sure, the classic liberal impulse towards gradualism and a faith in the perfectibility of those not quite as perfect. But the liberal faith was arguably British colonialism at its most attractive. Pragmatic and improving measures to help African individuals and communities help themselves represent possibly the most appealing aspect of British rule. It is difficult to read work by a generation of Fabians, socialists and Labour politicians – Read, Cohen, Creech Jones, Christopher Cox, and Rita Hinden among many others – without a sense of the fundamental good faith in which the various plans and programmes were conceived and written. Mass Education, despite its mixed origins and muddled ideas, represented sincerely felt metropolitan desires, even if those desires were never ultimately transformed into good deeds.

Mass Education would provide Britain with an uncommonly amicable relationship with the UN Trusteeship Council and UNESCO, the latter embarking upon a programme of similarly liberal intent. Britain’s international star would rise. Colonial relationships, too,

CONCLUSIONS 373 would improve. Democratic and efficient local governments would become training schools for a rising class of indifferent and loyal African leaders. African communities would embrace modernity by turning away from social forms and mores that retarded the growth of happy and healthy villages and homes. Initiative and self-help would stimulate African responses to problems of education, health and welfare. And the African environment would be safeguarded by an approach that relied on demonstration and clearly communicated ideas to change the ways in which African individuals approached their land and their communities. Demonstration and education were the tools. Initiative, progressive individualism and cooperative citizenship were the anticipated results. A new society would be constructed from liberal blueprints.

The Domasi Community Development Scheme in Nyasaland was a small experiment that the Colonial Office expected would demonstrate the value of individual and communal transformations. Over a period of five years, a district team – consisting of non-specialist development officers – implemented a variety of policies intended to transform village communities and individuals. Bush literacy schools, hygiene demonstrations and inspections, the formation of representative ward, group and Native Authority councils, the introduction of new forms of farming and village organisation, and the creation of a new approach to land conservation were all part of a programme that would serve a dual purpose – rural Africa would finally be made fully comprehensible to British colonial governments and Africans would conform to British rural ideals, living in happy and healthy communities.

That the experiment did not work as planned is well-demonstrated by the memories of those affected by its interventions. Far from the ‘grand-narratives’ of late-colonial decolonisation provided elsewhere, this thesis has presented the frustrated local interactions between liberal British colonialism and a dissatisfied rural population. Local memories of Mass Education in Nyasaland demonstrate that the product of gradualist liberal experimentation was mutual confusion and disappointed backtracking. It was not, in the end, a part of the apparently logical progression towards political independence presented in broader depictions of the termination of European empire in Africa. The Domasi scheme, as remembered by elderly Malawians, clearly demonstrated Cooper’s claim that possibilities opened up during the late-colonial period, only to close down again. British

374 DANIEL KARK imaginations and African aspirations encouraged by the scheme evaporated as they were drawn into existing administrative and social channels.

The Domasi Scheme faced hurdles right from its inception. Some of these hurdles were beyond the control of the district team – the 1949 famine right at the start of the experiment put everything on hold for the duration of the shortage. Most hurdles were deliberately erected by the colonial government of Nyasaland. UNESCO lost interest at an early stage after it realised there was little chance it would be able to exert influence beyond very limited supervision. Besides which, UNESCO oversight would not have yielded results likely to improve the British colonial image in the UN chamber. The Domasi scheme, rather than being a demonstration of a new colonial relationship between ruler and subject, very quickly developed into a showcase of the uses to which state administrative power could be put, given the resources. British colonial states were constantly forced to operate in a manner that precluded deep and broad interventions in African communities. The necessary instruments of surveillance and enforcement – extension workers, taxmen and administrative officers – were too thin on the ground. Domasi was different. A denser capillary administrative structure determined the daily relationships between administrative officers and rural Nyasalanders.

The creation of a new form of African citizenship as dictated by Mass Education was not necessarily a priority for the government of Nyasaland. The ways in which a modernising and progressive agenda reached into the domestic sphere implied that the stimulation of African initiative too was not a priority. The determination of domestic life was part of a new and intense focus on prescriptively changing social behaviour while shoring up the political status quo. The government of Nyasaland had no incentive to push Mass Education in its original form. The government had attempted to improve African welfare during the 1930s, but did so in a piecemeal manner that attempted to maintain the state’s position as the sole distributor of local political power and basic social services. Jeanes Centre courses, a fitful focus on African nutrition and an obsessive concern with soil erosion did not threaten this monopoly. But a sense of possessive and active citizenship, individual initiative and self-help did not offer any return to a government increasingly squeezed between a buoyant Colonial Office and assertive and articulate African nationalists. By comparison, the extension of administrative authority under cover of

CONCLUSIONS 375 benevolent social reform promised to resuscitate and re-legitimise state rule. The government mouthed the words, but the substance of Mass Education was not apparent.

Mass Education stressed citizenship, initiative and self-help, and progressive individualism. None of these principles was upheld by the government scheme at Domasi. The Colonial Office intended African citizenship to include the creation of a sense of involvement in the development process. The citizenship conferred upon residents of the district was of an inferior type. The delivery of state services was indicative of this inferiority. The education and health care interventions described in chapter three were limited, and not in any sense the equivalents of the comprehensive cover being extended to the metropolitan British population. Education at Domasi consisted of the production of a literate community, but little beyond this. Technical and secondary education was not prioritised, and there was a visceral distrust of anything resembling the agitated ‘semi-educated’ population that supposedly ‘cost’ Britain the sub-continent. Education was still being adapted for a rural African population not considered ready for the corrosive effects of a Western literary education. Health care was similarly focused on extremely limited interventions, with the stress on prevention and hygiene rather than curative medicine. The district demonstrators and their assistants showed African villagers techniques of domestic cleanliness, childcare, personal hygiene, nutrition and the dangers of infectious and parasitic disease. Above all, the health care provided at Domasi placed emphasis on the degradation caused by African social illness – ideas of uxorilocality meant that African social life was inimical to progress. Worse than malarial infection were the parasitic social relations that prevented community development. The social services provided were made ‘appropriate’ for unprepared Africans, but were, in fact, inferior interventions, designed for a lesser form of citizenship. The adaptation concept was still in circulation, transferring the blame for underdevelopment onto Africans themselves. Africans in Nyasaland were not considered in possession of the personal resources and independence required to ensure an appropriate education or adequate health. Africans were not judged ready for the revolutionary implications of transitions to Western literary education and curative health care.

The development of an African sense of initiative and self-help was intended to presage gradual progress towards self-government. No longer would Africans in Nyasaland be entirely dependent on the state to provide for their welfare, which the administration clearly

376 DANIEL KARK felt they were. This did not occur at Domasi. Nowhere were the prescriptive desires of the state more stringently imposed than through technical interventions in African agriculture. Environmental degradation preoccupied Nyasaland’s technical staff throughout the late 1930s, and remained an official obsession at Domasi. The conservation rules promulgated through the Native Authorities and enforced by the district team were anything but demonstrations of the potential productivity of African initiative. Sentenced to labour, fined and variously cajoled into ridging and bunding, small subsistence farmers in Domasi reacted to the heavy-handed prescriptive approach. Their unfavourable responses were not surprising given the vast amounts of hard labour required by the conservation rules, and the reorientation of longstanding agricultural practices. African farmers in Domasi also reacted unfavourably to an experiment in social transformation. According to Thomson and his agricultural officers the fault lay, not just in the way Africans farmed, but in the way they organised agricultural production. The reorganisation of village housing and lands, and the ‘rational’ redistribution of land would create a productive logic that would in turn transform rural society. Straight roads and square homes would make African communities comprehensible to administrative officers and progressive production comprehensible to Africans. At the same time African farmers would be given an example in the finished product – a class of ‘progressive’ yeoman farmers, specialists successfully and rationally producing goods for market. A successful demonstration of African initiative would prove infectious. The approach failed to take account, not only of the suspicion of Africans dissatisfied with heavy-handed conservation rules, but of the appropriateness of resettlement and yeoman individualised farming in Domasi. The yeoman farmers chosen for the ‘progressive farmer’ scheme at Malosa demonstrated their own exceptionalism and foreignness rather than serving as inspirational examples of initiative. The village reorganisation at Chitenjere was similarly inappropriate, dogged by the inappropriateness of a redistribution of land that took little account of the complex social organisation of the village. Social links and kinship codes counted for more than the desire to jettison parasitical relatives and produce profitable crops on a square plot for a nuclear family. Initiative, the district team discovered, could not be produced on its own terms.

Mass Education demanded the creation of individualism and a limited critical faculty within rural African communities. Africans supposedly had to be taught to approach political power critically. The Domasi Scheme operated during a period in which the threat

CONCLUSIONS 377 of Nationalist ‘subversion’ began to occupy the minds of colonial officers in Nyasaland. Nationalist politicians were purported to be ambitious self-seekers and ordinary Africans had to be taught to recognise these selfish motives. Colonial rule, on the other hand, was certainly not to be subjected to the same critical gaze – Africans could assume colonial rule to be beneficial for them. The district team at Domasi repeatedly stressed that they were teaching Africans to be self-sufficient, questioning and motivated to seek answers to problems without waiting for either the colonial government or African nationalists to provide them. The structures that would allow this to happen included not only cooperatives but a tiered structure of councils, ranging from ward leaders at the bottom, to representative Group Councils and the Native Authority Council. A range of African leaders would provide a conduit through which African initiative and progressive individualism could emerge. A legitimate and indifferent African ruling class would supposedly emerge, pulling the rug from under the feet of nationalists variously characterised as self-serving or semi-educated. The inefficiencies of moribund Indirect Rule would be replaced by an invigorating approach to African representation. The councils did not turn out to be frictionless conduits, nor were they ever accepted as the legitimate organs through which grievances and initiative would be channelled. The suspicion of ulterior motives poisoned relations between the educated and traditional members of the committees. The ability of the councils to exercise power even where the council membership proved cohesive was limited by the lack of effective control over any of the resources in the district. The district team was only prepared to relinquish the bare minimum of control that would not result in the irresponsible ‘degradation’ of the local environment or local communities. The result was a structure of hamstrung and barely functional councils, examples of the bounded and heavily supervised individualism permitted under colonial watch.

Mass Education, as implemented at Domasi, was a pale imitation of the intended product. Supervised individualism, limited initiative and attenuated citizenship were safe and unthreatening options for the government of Nyasaland, but they were also inadequate for the task at hand. The provision of inferior social services, the heavy-handed and poorly judged execution of agricultural reform, and the half-hearted approach to local government predictably resulted in a search for alternatives, both within the district and further abroad. African voices were seldom heard in 1949, the year in which Colby opened the Domasi

378 DANIEL KARK experiment. By the time the experiment closed, articulate criticism was everywhere apparent. African nationalists, recently coalesced under the banner of the NAC, made tentative forays protesting the lack of adequate education for Africans in Nyasaland and the looming threat of Federation with Southern Rhodesia. In the constitutional and gradual terms dictated by Mass Education, African politicians attempted to gain the attention of the Colonial Office and the government of Nyasaland. Petitions, delegations and meetings in Zomba and London came to naught, ignored by the Governor and successive Secretaries of State. Independent African initiative – ironically the very thing Mass Education was meant to create and promote – met with deliberate blind-siding. Mounting frustration characterised the mutual responses of both the administration and nationalists. The colonial authorities felt they were offering Africans something worthwhile and valuable, but were met only with mendacity and ingratitude. Their bequest to Africans met only with more demands. The nationalists, for their part, felt that they were being offered an inferior product after years of neglect. The British offered no more than an unsatisfactory portion of the education, welfare services and administrative power that were rightfully due Nyasaland’s African population.

On the local level, in Domasi District, the colonial government and district team ignored the gradual and steady rise of an immense tide of dissatisfaction. Educated Africans came to the realisation that institutionalised racism more than countered the promised Africanisation of the civil service. African farmers – which meant the vast majority of the population reliant on subsistence agriculture – tired of the invasive and mandated prescriptions of agricultural officers and hygiene demonstrators. The derogation of all that was African and the imposition of the British ‘progressive’ prescription ate at the relationship between the British administrative officers and ‘their’ Africans. Evasion, feigned ignorance, and deliberate obfuscation delayed and obstructed the development plans at Domasi. Deliberately apolitical technical interventions were becoming contested spaces. The pressure of dissatisfaction was building to a point where the first open declaration of dissent was inevitable.

The Nyasaland disturbances of 1953 turned the Protectorate from a quiet imperial slum into a highly visible public liability. The spotlight turned to a territory blighted by years of neglect. The spectre of Mau Mau raised its head in Kenya’s reputedly quiet and bucolic

CONCLUSIONS 379 cousin. Domasi was an epicentre of the troubles that briefly slid out of control across Nyasaland’s south. That the disturbances occurred in a district vaunted as a showcase of administrative efficiency and community development was as good a demonstration as any that even the most benevolent face of British colonialism was an unsatisfactory response to rural frustration and deprivation. While not ever close to the protracted rural resistance and brutality that characterised Mau Mau, the Nyasaland disturbances produced symbolic resistance that tarnished the legitimacy of Nyasaland’s government. The ruling narrative before 1953 was plausibly protective. After the riots and violence the state could rely only on the use of force to maintain the capacity to rule. As Malemia discarded his official robes, as Rhodesian and Tanganyikan troops suppressed riots with bullets and tear gas, and as rural Africans ridiculed the law and agents of colonial government, the narrative of social transformation, progress, conferred modernity, and liberal gradualism unravelled. A new citizenship, and a new citizen, defined by Africans themselves, increasingly competed with the prescribed ideal. Mass Education became the flagship of a failed social transition. Self- government became a more immediate prospect. Throughout its African territories the Colonial Office steadily abandoned the social and economic advancement of Africans in an effort to finalise a less disruptive political settlement.

Mass Education was simultaneously medium and message. It was the medium through which Africans would be turned into productive and compliant citizens, amenably committed to a gradual transition to self-rule and to British metropolitan economic recovery. As message, Mass Education conveyed the benevolence of British rule to both rural Africans and to a hostile international audience. The programme was meant to present colonialism at its best and most benevolent. It failed.

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