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Fishing and the Colonial Economy: the Case of Malawi

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

John McCracken
John McCracken
Affiliation:
University of Stirling
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Despite the evident importance of fishing in Malawi, its role in the territorial colonial economy has been largely ignored. This paper focuses on the evolution of fishing and fish-trading at the south end of Lake Nyasa (Lake Malawi), emphasising the interaction between ecological change and changes in market opportunity. During the late nineteenth century, fishing played an important role in the economy of the Mang'anja people alongside agricultural production. Communual tasks such as the setting of nets or building of canoes were conducted by male members of an mbumba or matrilineage group who traded fish with the agriculturally productive highland regions nearby in exchange for maize and beans. Little changed initially with the estalishment of colonial rule, though some labour previously employed in fishing may have been diverted into cotton-growing which the Government encouraged in the Upper Shire Valley. The establishment of military camps during the First World War, combined with the sudden drying up of Lake Chilwa, the major source of fish in the Shire Highlands, created the opportunity for enterprising fishermen to start a regular trade in dried fish to Blantyre and Zomba from about 1917. This was stimulated in the 1920s by the steady rise of water levels on the Shire River which brought cotton production virtually to a halt making fishing an attractive alternative.

The advent in the 1930s of non-African commercial fishermen who used lorries to transport fresh fish to Blantyre and dried fish to Salisbury did not prevent a further expansion of African fishing and fish-trading, many of the traders using bicycles to extend their sales into the southern Malawian hinterland. Officials tended to side with African fishermen when their interests clashed with those of incomers, notably the Greek Yiannakis brothers. But they had little success in introducing new techniques to improve productivity and fell back in the 1950s On the prohibition of exports to the Rhodesias, a policy aimed at ensuring a regular supply of fish to workers on European estates within Malawi.

By the 1950s, European companies were recorded as being responsible for over half the fish caught in Malawi. African fishing had been affected by the emergence of a small group of capitalist entrepreneurs, most of them former labour migrants, who had invested their savings in imported nets and boats and employed labour on a regular basis. Mang'anja fishermen now faced competition from Tonga migrants using new technical and organisational methods. In contrast to under-development sterotypes, the indigenous industry continued to expand, with migrant workers playing an important role in the development of fishing.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , November 1987 , pp. 413 - 429
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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References

1 This article was originally presented to the Colloquium on the Exploitation of Animals in Africa, held at the University of Aberdeen on 23–24 March 1987. I am grateful to my wife, Juliet Clough, for her assistance; her articles on Lake Malawi and on canoe-building in Malawi International, Focus on Malawi, etc. are not only more readable but also more accurate and informative than many academic papers.Google Scholar

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68 Evidence of Amos Charles, Ibid.

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70 Kapeleta, ‘The coming of the Tonga and the commercialisation of fishing’. For related developments on Lake Chilwa see Pauline E. Phipps, ‘The “Big” fishermen of lake Chilwa: a preliminary survey of entrepreneurs in a rural economy’, in Page, M. E. (ed.), ‘Land and labor in rural Malawi’, Rural Africana, XXI (1973).Google Scholar

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