State Power, Dilemmas and African Agency: Peasant Food Production and the Making of the Colonial State in Malawi, 1883–1961

Since the 1970s, it has become conventional among scholars to associate the colonial state in Malawi with the disruptions of African economies through its labour, land, taxation, marketing, agricultural and conservation policies. This paper goes beyond the analysis of colonial disruptions that has dominated Malawian scholarship to understand the complex interactions, practices and relationships that shaped the colonial state in its efforts to promote conservation and sustainably increase the levels of peasants’ food production between 1883 and 1961. Despite possessing political and economic power, the colonial state faced challenges in executing its functions among the peasants. Oral and archival evidence from southern Malawi suggests that peasant–state relations in food production throughout the colonial period were complex, dynamic and contested. In large measure, the colonial state struggled with debilitating moral, economic, social, ecological and political dilemmas while supporting different players with variant interests, including settler farmers and other colonial officials, who expressed reservations over some of its conservation policies. Complex colonial interactions informed by global metropolitan forces, inadequate resources, new scientific movements and desires to provide Africans with alternative trade and meet increasing food demands, coupled with internal differentiations of the colonial state and colonial society, shaped the colonial state and gave peasants leverage to effectively challenge the state to reverse its approach and policies, albeit with limited success. Moreover, while scholars consider African negotiation as an important feature of the post-war period, the paper observes that peasants’ ability to negotiate the terms of their participation in the capitalist economy started years before the country’s colonisation, with primary focus on equitable production relations rather than development per se.