Historic opportunities

There are two questions about Malawi I have often been asked, to which I have not been able to give a satisfactory response: Why is it that Malawi is one of the poorest countries in the world, while it has not, like most countries in that category, been through unrest, war or any natural catastrophe to speak of? And why is it, people ask, that Malawi is so densely populated, while there are vast, almost unpopulated areas across the borders in neighbouring countries?

The works of the doyen of historical research on Malawi, the Scottish Professor John McCracken, provides credible answers to these as well as other fundamental questions on how and why Malawi has become what it is today. A History of Malawi 1859-1966 is a well-documented and analytical presentation of developments in the territory that is now Malawi, from when David Livingstone first saw the Lake of Stars until Hastings Kamuzu Banda became president and declared the country a republic.

While Scottish churches saved Nyasaland from Portuguese rule in the 1880s, the territory’s geographical isolation, cut off from access to coastal ports by lengthy stretches of Portuguese and German territories, proved disastrous for the country to prosper economically.The European settlers in the Shire Highlands were struggling, year after year, trying in vain to make money from cotton, tea or maize. This was so despite their access to free labour through the Thangata tenant system, or cheap labour as a result of the hut tax, introduced to force Africans into paid employment.

And it is interesting to read about how the great missionary-explorer himself dreamt of the Shire-Zambezi waterway becoming an “artery for international trade”, not unlike a Malawian president 150 years later, who dreamt of the benefits of the “World Inland Port”. History proved the first dream to be just that—a dream. Whether the second will become a reality is still too early to say.

It was these geographical constraints, as I read McCracken, more than the climate or the quality of the soil, that prevented the Shire Highlands from becoming the flourishing Garden of Eden for European immigrants which Livingstone had hoped for. And it is these same constraints that have hampered Malawi’s development up to this day.

The second question, then, the density of Malawi’s population? In the middle of the 19th century, the area around Lake Nyasa was in turmoil, with the invasion of Swazi-speaking Ngunis who had fled the great Shaka of Zululand a couple of decades earlier, and with raids from marauding Arab and Portuguese slave traders from Zanzibar and the Zambezi Valley. As things quietened down, people seemed to pour into the fertile and water-rich lands around and south of the lake, in particular from what is now Mozambique.

Later, however, as the population of Nyasaland grew, they could no longer just move across the borders to settle. Therefore, despite massive emigration to Rhodesia, South Africa and Tanganyika for work, the population in Malawi grew quickly.

It should not be lost to the reader of McCracken, however, that if the main explanation for Malawi’s relative economic backwardness has been its politico-geographic isolation, it is also true that the coming years offer opportunities that may turn out to be a “game changer” for the country. When the new and upgraded railway from Tête to Nacala on the coast of the Indian Ocean through Southern Malawi becomes a reality, and when Malawi’s power grid is linked to that of the Southern African region, the relative isolation in geography and economy may soon be history.

Add to that the huge investment in hydro power by the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and Malawi’s economic opportunities may change dramatically. British development specialist Paul Collier, who visited Malawi recently, listed “connectiveness” as one of the most important factors in the country’s development. With these prospects in mind, the future of Malawi’s economy may look brighter than in the somewhat pessimistic scenarios we are so often met with. We may actually be in a deciding decade of opportunities for this country.

These are only a couple of examples of why Professor McCracken’s book, which is available in some bookshops in Lilongwe and Blantyre, is arguably the best read in trying to understand Malawi’s history.

—The author is Norwegian Ambassador.