Grey Areas was only 15 years old in 1949 when he left his home in Zomba to work as a cook for a white family on a farm in Marandellas, an area in the northeast of Southern Rhodesia.1 After six years on the farm he made his way to the capital city of Salisbury. Reflecting on his life as a Malawian living in Zimbabwe in 2008, Grey Areas described the concept of machona:
The machona are people who go to other countries and forget to return home. These people when they go back to Malawi, no one remembers them or wants them there. Most of them, they spend their money in these foreign countries and then go home poor, becoming a burden on those people at home. So usually the people at home would use juju to send them back to wherever they have come from so that they can live in peace. Just like me, I think that they are going to use juju to send me back here because they will say that I am machona. I can safely say now that I am a machona.2
In the 1950s, Grey Areas had moved to Waterfalls, a low-density suburb in the south of Salisbury where he met his wife. Her father was also from Nyasaland and worked as a ‘garden boy’ for a white family in the suburb. The couple later acquired a house in Dzivarasekwa, a residential area built to accommodate the growing African population in the racially segregated city. There, they raised their thirteen children. Throughout his time in Zimbabwe, Grey Areas maintained close connections with his original home in Zomba. However, it became increasingly difficult to travel back to Malawi from the early 2000s as the Zimbabwean economy spiralled into decline and standards of living worsened.
This book traces the history of migration of people like Grey Areas from Malawi to Zimbabwe, from the early 1900s to the mid-1960s. Under British colonial rule, hundreds of thousands of African men left Nyasaland to seek employment in the settler colony of Southern Rhodesia and elsewhere in central and southern Africa.3 Women and children also went in search of better opportunities or to reunite with family members, in increasing numbers from the 1940s. Labour migrants, by definition, were only supposed to be temporary residents in Southern Rhodesia. Yet, in practice many stayed away from home for years or decades, while others never returned. ‘Nyasa’ migrants who lost contact with home became known as machona—‘the lost ones’.4 Popular beliefs about the fate of machona reinforced the expectation of return and put pressure on migrants to go back before it was too late. If one stayed away for too long, they could be marginalised by their kin in their home village. This book explores these stories and reveals the emotional costs of labour migration, as well as the relationships that were maintained across borders and the long-term legacies of colonial-era migration in the postcolonial period.
Malawi was a vital source of labour in southern Africa, providing one of the biggest and most consistent supplies of workers for the mines and settler-owned commercial farms around the region for much of the twentieth century.5 Yet surprisingly, Malawians are not so well represented in the vast historical literature on African labour migration. Few studies have explored migration between Nyasaland and Southern Rhodesia, despite both territories (along with Northern Rhodesia ) being joined within the Central African Federation between 1953 and 1963. While most studies of southern African migration assume that workers were South Africa-bound, the extent of inter-regional migration has been largely underestimated.6 By offering a new perspective on ‘Nyasa’ migration in the region, this book addresses this gap with a focus on the settler-colonial city of Salisbury, one of the most popular destinations for Nyasa migrants, from the 1920s to the mid-1960s. Furthermore, the history of Malawian migration is also relevant to wider scholarship on African and global migration history. Long-standing patterns of African continental mobility are rarely acknowledged beyond the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, and such accounts are almost always focused on forced migration and slavery . This book instead draws attention to the voluntary movement of Africans within the African continent, at the same time raising important questions about the history and formation of diaspora communities in colonial and postcolonial Africa.
A widespread culture of migration developed in Nyasaland in the first half of the twentieth century. The British colony was central to the history of labour migration in southern Africa as the place of origin for so many migrant workers across the region. It was no exaggeration when the historian Robert Boeder claimed that: ‘Virtually every Malawian who has ever lived in the twentieth century has been affected by labour migration, either as a participant or as a member of a migrant’s family’.7 Migration came to be pivotal to the experience of being a ‘Nyasa’ in the early twentieth century and migration continues to be a way of life for many Malawians in the postcolonial era.
Nyasas in Southern Africa
Migration to the mines and industrial centres of southern Africa was fundamental in shaping the wider region. Yet very few historical studies have looked beyond migration to South Africa or migration from the labour-sending countries of Lesotho, Swaziland and Mozambique, to explore the full extent of this regional history.8 Focusing on Malawian migration to Zimbabwe enhances our understanding of labour migration and draws attention to the understudied connections between two colonies in twentieth-century southern Africa—the white settler-controlled colony of Southern Rhodesia (from 1923) and the British Protectorate Colony of Nyasaland.9 While South Africa is generally situated at the heart of the regional system of migrant labour, Malawi is often seen as peripheral, despite being one of the largest suppliers of labour for the mines and large-scale commercial farms in the twentieth century.10
Yet, the characterisation of Nyasaland as ‘labour reserve’, providing cheap migrant labour for South Africa is problematic for several reasons. Firstly, it overlooks the fact that migration and mobility were already features of the region before the development of the colonial economy. As well as sending its own migrants to other parts of southern Africa, Nyasaland was an important migrant-receiving territory before and during British colonial rule. Africans moved into the territory from the south and east, escaping persecution and looking for new opportunities and land on which to settle. Other groups came from further afield, including India, and parts of Europe besides Britain, such as Italy and Greece.11 Chapter 2 discusses the wider context of pre- and early colonial migration in this area and complicates the simplistic portrayal of Nyasaland as a labour reserve. It argues that migration was already a part of life for many communities in Nyasaland before the introduction of ‘push factors’ like taxation during the era of British rule.
Moreover, Nyasaland migrants made a wider impact on the region in ways besides their economic contribution. Recent work, for example, has shown how Christians engaged in cosmopolitan and internationalist urban society in 1920s Johannesburg.12 More widely known are figures like Clements Kadalie, who founded southern Africa’s first Black trade union, the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU), in South Africa in 1919.13 During the 1920s, the ICU under Kadalie’s charismatic leadership became a highly influential mass-based movement across southern Africa, one which challenged conventional narratives of the time around race and gender.14 Through mobility, religious and associational life, migrants came together in a number of arenas, not only the workplace. Nyasas influenced the transformation and spread of cultural styles, languages, and associations around the region. This book expands our knowledge of these trends in the important urban centre of Salisbury, a major attraction for migrant workers across the region, especially during the economically vibrant years of the federation period (explored in Chapters 5 and 6). It also shows the extent to which Nyasa men and women were involved in political, cultural, and religious communities and organisations beyond the colony, and later, the nation.15 In doing so, this book challenges stereotypes about Nyasa migration. Migrants were not always the poorest members of their home societies as has been assumed. Indeed, it was often necessary to have some form of capital to begin one’s journey. Equally, more migrants were relatively well-educated and highly skilled than is currently understood. As we have seen with Grey Areas, whose experience was mentioned at the start of this introduction, migration was not always temporary. Neither were migrants always single men. Despite greater restrictions on their movement, women and children were also among those who left Nyasaland for Salisbury and other locations around the region. Nyasa women migrated both as wives accompanying their husbands and as single independent women, but until now scholarship has focused overwhelmingly on male labour migration.16 These gendered and generational experiences of migration are explored in Chapters 3 and 5.
Imperial historians have examined the lives of Europeans as migrants, settlers, and workers in all their complexity, but they...