The Nyasaland famine of 1949 was a famine that occurred in the Shire Highlands in the Southern Province of Nyasaland (now Malawi) and also in a part of the Central Province in 1949. Its effects extended into the early part of 1950. The immediate cause was severe droughts in December 1948 to January 1949 and in March 1949 that destroyed much of the maize crop on which the people of the affected areas relied during its main growing season. This followed two years of erratic rainfall and poor harvests which had depleted the reserves in farmers’ granaries. The effect of crop failure was intensified by the failure of the colonial government to maintain a suitably large emergency grain reserve, delays in importing sufficient relief supplies and its requirement that most of the relief provided was paid for by its recipients. The official death toll from starvation was some 200 people, which may be an underestimate, and it excludes those dying of diseases exacerbated by malnutrition.Vaughan (1987).
There is significant disagreement on the underlying causes of the famine. At first, it was blamed on over-intensive cultivation causing soil erosion and on growing tobacco rather than food crops.Kettlewell (1965). Later, colonial underdevelopment through land expropriation, levying rents and taxes on African farmers and underpaying them for their labour and produce was suggested.Vail (1975). More recently, attention has been focussed to the uneven economic and social development of the protectorate in the 1930s and 1940s. This created, firstly, an increased number of employees and tradesmen, who needed to buy their food but who were dependent on the uncertain surpluses arising the system of subsistence agricultural because few farmers produced food primarily for the market rather than their own consumption, and governmental marketing organisations that, far from providing incentives for the production of maize, underpaid those farmers that did grow it commercially. In addition, a range of social changes created an underclass of those without adequate access to farmland or secure employment, vulnerable in times of food shortage: this included many women.Vaughan (1987).
Agriculture and climate
Rain-fed agriculture Throughout the colonial period, the main subsistence crop of the upland areas that formed much of Nyasaland was maize, which had been introduced from Mozambique, probably starting from the 18th century, and which largely supplanted the previous staple cereals sorghum and millet in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.McCracken (2012), p. 13. By the end of the colonial era, maize accounted for 60% of the areas planted with food crops, providing Nyasaland's inhabitants with over half their calories.McCann (2005), p. 8. Very few cattle were kept in the Shire Highlands, although many smallholders kept a few sheep or goats and most had at least some chickens.McCracken (2012), p. 14.
The traditional maize grown in 1949 was late-maturing variety, requiring at least five to eight centimetres of rainfall in each of the first three months of growth, and a further month to ripen.McCann (2005), p. 8. The Shire Highlands generally meets these conditions throughout the normal five-month growing season but, as maize cultivation was mostly rain-fed, variations in the annual rainfall led to substantial fluctuation in crop productionMiller (1964), pp. 124, 134-5.
Most of Nyasaland's rain was generated when the Intertropical Convergence Zone passed over the country, usually between November one year and March the next year, but the amount of rainfall varied under the influence of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation and other climate anomalies.McCann (2005), pp. 15-16. Regional climatic studies have identified an intense episode of drought throughout Southern Africa between 1946 and 1949. This caused widespread famine in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia in 1947 and less severe droughts in Nyasaland in 1947 and 1948 that led to poor harvests in those years. The severe famine in southern Malawi in 1949 was probably the last phase of this episode of drought.Hulme (1996), p.9Rasmusson (1987), p. 10.
Access to land In the 1940s, Nyasaland smallholders relied on hand hoeing, and a farming family which included two able-bodied adults whose main crop was maize could cultivate 4.5 to 5 acres of land (2.0 hectares) a year; single women were barely able to farm one hectare without assistance. Around 1949, average maize yields were 0.4 ton to an acre (equivalent to 0.9 tonne a hectare).Nyasaland Protectorate (1955) p. 6. Pressure on access to land increased from the 1940s: even those with access to sufficient arable land might suffer seasonal hunger before harvests, and occasionally endure more serious food shortages in years of inadequate rainfall. Other family units with less land or labour available were frequently at risk of hunger.Mwakasungura (1986), p. 43.
About 70% of African smallholders in the Shire Highlands occupied Native Trust Land, for which they paid no rent. This amounted to around 50% of the land in that area and, as the local population increased, Native Trust Land became congested, and much of it was used for almost continuous maize monocropping without crop rotation or fallow.Bishop (1995), pp. 59-61. Only those with larger holdings could grow significant amounts of cash crops, and tobacco, the one cash crop widely grown with government encouragement in the Central Province, was less suited to the wetter Shire Highlands, so its cultivation was not encouraged there.McCracken (2012), p. 14.Woods (1993), pp. 141-3.
The other 30% of African farmers were tenants on European-owned estates. These estates occupied almost 700,000 acres (280,000 hectares) in the Shire Highlands or about 50% of the available land, including much of the most fertile land in this area.Pike (1969), pp. 196-9.Vaughan (1987), p. 71. Estate tenants owed rent, originally satisfied by a form of labour service called thangata, but by 1949 it was normally paid either in cash or by delivering specified quantities of tobacco or other cash crops to the landowner.Kandaŵire (1977), p. 188. Although there was a significant amount of available land on these estates and rural landlessness was rare, the obligation to produce cash crops to pay rent reduced the areas of land and amount of labour that could be devoted to growing the tenants' own food crops.Iliffe, (1985) p. 276.
Agricultural marketing Before the Second World War, little was done in Nyasaland to encourage the commercial production and distribution of food. Although town dwellers needed to purchase their food, little was grown for sale rather than subsistence, as towns were few and small and transport was expensive. It was left to African smallholders and tenants sell their surpluses on local markets and for small-scale African entrepreneurs to distribute food over limited areas. In normal years, most farmers had only small surpluses to sell in local markets. In addition, government policies that paid artificially low prices for the maize which it bought acted as a disincentive to its production for sale.McCracken (1985), pp. 43-4.
The Nyasaland government made a number of wartime emergency regulations to control agricultural production, and it made some of these permanent in the post-war period. In 1947, it set up a Maize Control Board, aiming to ensure supplies of maize were maintained for over 67,000 workers and town dwellers in the Southern Province and the others elsewhere who were unable to grow their own food. However, it was underfunded, it paid very low prices for the maize it bought and it was reluctant to promote higher maize production for the home market or for export on the grounds of the cost of purchasing and storing it.Vaughan (1987), pp. 92-3, 95.
The Maize Control Board aimed to handle only around 5% of the national crop and to set up a small grain reserve. However, as its first two years of operation coincided with the poor harvests of1947 and 1948, it only managed to buy around 2% of the crop in those two years, and was unable to establish any reserve.Jayne, Jones and others (1987), p. 217.Vaughan (1987), pp. 96-7. After the famine, the Board more than doubled the price it paid for maize and handled from 7% of the maize crop in 1951, rising to over 10% of an increased crop in 1952.Jayne, Jones and others (1987), p. 217.Thompson and Woodfall (1956), p. 138.
Narrative
Although seasonal hunger before crops were ready to harvest was common in Nyasaland, famine was relatively infrequent in the Shire Highlands during the century after 1850, and the area was sometimes a refuge for those fleeing famine from nearby areas of Mozambique.Morris (2016), pp. 92, 95, 130-1. One drought recorded by early missionaries was in the years 1861 to 1863, which coincided with a time of acute political upheaval that dislocated agriculture, and another occurred in 1922.Morris (2016), p. 217.
The 1949 famine occurred in an area of Nyasaland undergoing rapid economic change in the period after the Second World War. Blantyre District was not simply an area of subsistence farming but one of growing employment in the adjacent towns of Blantyre and Limbe, on European-owned tobacco or tea estates or as migrant labour in the Rhodesias and South Africa. Many local African smallholders grew cash crops, mainly tobacco, and farm land was becoming congested and under pressure to produce enough food crops for a growing urban and rural population. The population of Blantyre District was becoming differentiated and much of it, urban and rural, relied on cash earnings to purchase some or all of their food needs.Vaughan (1992), pp. 81-3.
The 1949 famine was most severe in the Lunzu and Lirangwe areas of Blantyre District, north of Blantyre city, and was an experience beyond the memory of all except the oldest inhabitants who remembered the 1922 famine. Serious food shortages also occurred in Dedza and Port Herald (Nsanje) districts in that year.Vaughan (1992), p. 72.
Failing rains The rainfall in 1947 and 1948 had been erratic,Rasmusson (1987), p. 10. and in 1947 swarms of locusts had destroyed crops. These events forced farmers to use their stored maize, emptying the reserves in their granaries in advance of the 1949 harvest.Morris (2016), p. 276.
The rainy season of 1948-9 began well in Blantyre District, but the rains lessened in November and December 1948, and six rainless weeks followed in late December and January 1949, normally the wettest part of the season, when no rain clouds were seen. There were considerable local variations, but the worst affected areas had only half their average annual rainfall and lost up to a third of their expected crop.Morris (2016), p. 276.Vaughan (1987), pp. 27-9. Some of the earliest-planted maize survived but much of the main crop died, and some farmers were unable to replant their maize for lack of rain and because few had any saved seed to plant after the poor harvests of the previous two years. Those with land near riverbanks that retained moisture could harvest some crops, others had relatives in less severely affected areas or received food rations from their employers, but the majority were dependent on what their own land could grow.Vaughan (1992), pp. 73-4.
Initial reaction