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‘We Won't Die for Fourpence’: Malawian Labour and the Kariba Dam

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Robert B. Boeder
Robert B. Boeder
Affiliation:
African Studies Center, Michigan State University, East Lansing
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Extract

Recent events in Southern Africa have focused attention on the hundreds of thousands of migrant workers in that region, and this short article recalls the role of those from Malawi – before that country became independent – in the strike which held up the construction of the Kariba dam in 1959. As is well known, there had been previous strikes in this area,1 but the Kariba walk-out coincided with an outbreak of opposition to colonial rule in Nyasaland, and prompted the declaration of a state of emergency, perhaps the first unmistakeable sign that the Central African Federation was doomed.

Type
Africana
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , June 1977 , pp. 310 - 315
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1977

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References

Page 310 note 1 See, for example, van Onselen, Charles, ‘Worker Consciousness in Black Miners: Southern Rhodesia, 1900–1920’, in The Journal of African History (Cambridge), xiv, 2, 1973, pp. 237–55Google Scholar, and ‘The 1912 Wankie Colliery Strike’, in ibid. xv, 2, 1974, pp. 275–89; as well as Phimister, I. R., ‘The Shamva Mine Strike of 1927: an emergrng African proletariat’, University of Rhodesia, Salisbury, Seminar Paper, November 1972.Google Scholar

Page 312 note 1 Report by a Party of Nyasaland African Members of Legislative Council and Chiefs on Their Visit to Kariba on 23 July 1956 – dated 25 September 1956, Malawi Archives, Zomba.

Page 313 note 1 Record of the Northern Provincial Council Meeting of October 1956-Malawi Archives, Zomba.

Page 313 note 2 The Rhodesia Herald (Salisbury), 23 02 1959.Google Scholar

Page 314 note 1 Ibid. 25 February 1959.

Page 314 note 2 Ibid. 26 February 1959.

Page 314 note 3 Annual Report of the Rhodesian Native Labour Supply Commission for 1959 (Salisbury, 1960).Google Scholar The ‘Portuguese Nyasas’, ‘Tetes’, and Shangaans were undoubtedly all from Mozambique.

Page 315 note 1 The Nyasaland Times (Blantyre), 27 02, 1959.Google Scholar