Malawi: Longstanding cheap labour for South Africa ends

by LUKE ZUNGA 
Special Contributor
JOHANNESBURG, (CAJ News) – NYASALAND was the Maravi Empire of the Chewa, Yao, Lomwe, Ngoni and Tumbuka people.

It came into European view through the visits of British explorer and missionary David Livingstone, who explored the Zambezi River from 1858 to 1864.

He produced a number of writings which attracted the interest of Europeans.

At the 1884 Berlin Conference, which apportioned Africa among European colonisers, Nyasaland (now Malawi) was allocated to the British, excluding the Portuguese, who were also vying for it.

Between 1885 and 1886, Portuguese explorer Alexandre de Pinto made an expedition from the Mozambique side, which reached the Shire Highlands.

The British responded by establishing a consul at Blantyre in 1886, blocking the Portuguese from the Shire River Valley. In 1887, the British appointed Henry Hamilton Johnston to head the consulate.

The British Central Africa Protectorate was formed in 1889, as part of the British Empire, to protect the region from Portuguese incursions into Nyasaland. In 1907, Nyasaland was named the British Protectorate of Nyasaland.

Nyasaland was a predominantly agricultural society. In 1900, the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WNLA), also known as Wenela or Teba, was given a charter to recruit from Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique), Nyasaland (Malawi), Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), Bechuanaland (Botswana) and Basutoland (Kingdom of Lesotho) to provide cheap labour to the South African economy.

An abstract, A Century of Migrant Labour in Gold Mines of South Africa, by J.S. Harington, N.D. McGlashan and E.Z. Chelkowska, gives figures ranging up to 500,000 migrants a year.

Malawian people provided menial labour in mines, white homes, restaurants and farms in South Africa as heavily exploited cheap migrant labour.

Migrant labour was stopped from 1907 to 1936 due to high sickness and mortality rates but resumed in 1937. Malawi was a longstanding source of cheap labour for both black and white South Africans.

Nyasaland was renamed Malawi in 1964 when it gained independence from Britain. Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda, the President of Malawi from 1964 to 1992, had a bilateral agreement with South Africa covering economic, political and cultural activities.

Malawians were allowed to work in South Africa without enforcing permits or regulations. In return, Malawi did not support liberation movements in Namibia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and South Africa, such as the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan African National Congress (PAC). Dr Banda deserted the struggle for freedom.

In 2015, the South African Development Foundation, a research body in South Africa, understood that there would be problems with migrant workers as South Africans were taking on these menial jobs due to slow economic growth.

They had researched a method of growing economies and presented it to the Ambassador of Malawi in Pretoria.

The ambassador understood the presentation well but responded that the Malawi Government would not accept it because South Africa, the source of the idea, was not doing it. Malawi shut the door.

What would Malawi say now? There is nothing for free. The Afrikaners used to bring Malawians in trainloads, but now the same Malawians are the group mostly affected.

South Africans have turned against them. What appeared to be a free road for Malawians into the South African economy worked until now.

Migrant workers were not officially recorded. As a result, a large number integrated into South African communities.

In particular, people from Matabeleland in Zimbabwe, precisely the Ndebeles are offspring of Zulus in South Africa.

They always found residence in South Africa through relationships. But from 1994 they were supposed to carry passports, obtain permits and commit to specific timelines of entry and exit back to their countries.

The disappointment is that South Africa failed to grow the economy, resulting in the same issues in Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Zambia, Malawi, Lesotho, Namibia and Eswatini.

When Zimbabweans rose up against their government, as South Africans are doing now, the South African Government supported fraudulent elections to frustrate any political change.

That forced the migration of people into South Africa, hoping for a safer and brighter future, which did not prevail.

These frustrations have resulted in the June 30 focus on African migrants. Yet merely expelling desperate African migrants, although correct in law, is a dead-end strategy.

The message is to grow economies. The June 30 expulsions also stopped the massive exploitation of poor, stranded migrants.

How this will affect the South African and other African economies is yet to be seen.

NB: Luke Zunga is an economist, entrepreneur, researcher, historian and political scientist.

– CAJ News