The State and the Legacies of British Colonial Development in Malawi: Confronting Poverty, 1939–1983

Rural history in Africa has largely been synonymous with social history. That is not to say the field is somehow limited. Social history is itself expansive, and when it comes to the study of rural life, it often incorporates the concerns of other fields, such as environmental history in recent years. Gift Wasambo Kayira's excellent book, The State and the Legacies of British Colonial Development in Malawi: Confronting Poverty, 1939–1983, bears the mark of that influence. Kayira takes the reader to the villages of Lilongwe to listen in on what small farmers thought about a large-scale development project. He also delves into the research on tung oil and pulpwood production in the Viphya Plateau to explain why projects backed by two generations of officials were never fully realized. But Kayira set out to write a different kind of book—one that trades the village for the boardroom. It is a change in perspective on the problem of rural development that historians of the Global South should welcome.Kayira focuses on how colonial and postcolonial governments have tried to lift rural Malawians out of poverty in collaboration with country donors and international institutions. He argues that historians who see this as an unbroken story of colonial domination or capitalist exploitation have missed the “kaleidoscopic ways” that power operated during the height of the international development drive (10). Neither Malawi's life president, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, nor the many presidents of the World Bank the reader encounters in the book were able to dictate the terms of development. On occasion, they tried outmaneuvering each other. Chapters 4 and 6 recount Banda's pursuit of investors for projects that donors judged to be uneconomical, such as the Viphya pulpwood project, and how the British government and the World Bank attempted to thwart those ambitions. But more often, they worked together to address rural poverty, as Kayira shows in chapter 5. That chapter examines the Lilongwe Land Development Program, which both the Malawian government and the World Bank celebrated as a model for poverty alleviation until it all came undone during the global downturn of the mid-1970s.The argument running through the book is that Malawian officials and outside experts had reason to collaborate. Kayira contends that the experts driving the development debate were genuinely interested in African welfare. Chapter 1 describes the origins of this concern in the colonial era, looking particularly at the Fabian Society and its ideas about trusteeship. Chapters 2 and 3 explore how this concern played out in conflicts around land alienation and the design of development projects. These two chapters show that colonial officials were comfortable siding with Africans over local settler lobbies. This interest in African welfare continued after independence in 1964. Malawi's major donors, the British government and the World Bank, both backed the new government's efforts to address rural poverty, as Kayira reveals in chapter 4. He goes on to explain why the real story ended up being the unexpected revival of estate agriculture in the 1970s, this time with Banda and the clique around him in charge, as settlers had mostly sold out by then. Kayira's argument, which challenges the conventional interpretation then and since, is that the estates won out because they were seen as reliable earners in a time of crisis, and not because a policy favoring estate agriculture had been quietly decided on ahead of time.Kayira's book will be of particular interest to historians of rural development in modern Africa. Those looking for the history of agricultural change will find that the book is mainly about the development side, however. Although Kayira does include the voices of ordinary Malawians, he is ultimately more concerned with ideas and policy. As such, those voices understandably do not feature as prominently as those of senior officials. Given that focus, some might want to hear more about how other intellectual traditions, in addition to Fabianism, shaped poverty knowledge in Malawi and Africa—neoliberalism, for example. But Kayira's attention to the complicated colonial inheritance is crucial to his argument about an enduring concern for African welfare in development circles. He shows that when faced with economic constraints, policy makers could also convince themselves to stray from that concern or contort it to advance policies that left rural people worse off. It is a story familiar to historians of the rural Global South, but told in a unique way, as Kayira demonstrates that it was not just farmers trying to make the best of a difficult situation, but experts, politicians, and bureaucrats as well.