This essay illuminates the worldwide transition to free labor from various forms of unfree labor by examining that process in the particular conditions of Southern Africa's encounter with Britain. Dr. David Livingstone's servants-whose descendants in Malawi have been called "Magololo," 1 a term used throughout this essay to distinguish them from the "Kololo" conquerors of Bulozi in contemporary Zambia and parts of Namibia-exemplify this global development. Between 1853 and 1861, over a hundred young Magololo men worked as porters, deckhands, and guides and showed Livingstone the very places in southern Africa whose "discovery" (for Britons) made Livingstone famous. Owing tribute labor to their king, Sekeletu, they initially performed these tasks as subjects. But, after Livingstone's return from England in 1858, they labored for wages; they were among the first groups of Africans in the region to make the emblematic modern move from formally unfree labor to formally free labor. This transition, which would form the core conflict of indirect rule in British Africa, radically altered Livingstone's relationship with his guides: They rebelled against him in 1861. This is one side of the story. The other side follows from the fact that one cannot sensibly speak about workers without the story of their employers. Accordingly, this essay revisits the well-known story of Livingstone's life but offers a different perspective than other biographies. It is the first study to combine the long-familiar documentary evidence with oral sources, for the specific purpose of retelling the Livingstone narrative (in its many renderings) from the viewpoint of his relations with the Magololo workers. In that way, it can shed light on the beginnings of the transition to wage labor in this region.
During the colonial era, pre-capitalist social and economic institutions in Nyasaland (now Malawi) underwent profound change as the result of the incorporation of the country's societies into the world capitalist economy. This essay explores the change in the day-to-day relationships between men and women and between the elders and the youth in the Tchiri valley of colonial Nyasaland from 1906 to 1940. The development of cotton as a cash crop was the focus of these changing relationships. This study locates the principal dynamics of the cotton economy in local adaptation to the ecosystem, a process which accounts for the success of cotton agriculture before the mid-1930s and its subsequent decline. The peasantry which developed before the mid-1930s was later reincorporated into the world system mainly as wage earners. This altered all earlier gender and intergenerational relationships.
The history of peasant (or Crown Land) cotton production in the Tchiri valley falls into three distinct periods. The first phase lasted from 1906 to 1923, when it struggled for survival vis-a-vis the state sponsored plantations. The second extended from 1924 to 1935 and represents the prosperous period when peasants triumphed and the plantations failed. The third phase, 1936-1940, was the collapse of peasant production in large parts of the Lower Tchiri valley.
The principal dynamics of the peasant cotton economy were ecological. The Tchiri valley is bounded by a range of hills on the north, west and north-east and cut in a north-south direction by the Tchiri River which has its source in Lake Malawi. It is divided into two broad ecological zones: the rain-fed or mphala and the river-fed or dimba subsystems.
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