No Maize, No Life: Conservation, Maize Production, and African Responses in Colonial Southern Malawi, 1920–1960

Abstract

This study explores the history of maize production to demonstrate the extent to which colonial conservation interspersed with economic expediency stifled African production from 1920 to 1960. Drawing on archival and oral evidence from southern Malawi, it argues that colonial restriction on maize production to conserve the country’s soil fertility was an excuse by the state to achieve various economic interests. What the colonial state in Malawi wanted was to divert the Africans from the production of maize to other crops whose global market demand and value was high. This was critical during the post-depression era when settler agriculture collapsed, and even worse in the post-war period when Britain desperately required African agriculture for its economic recovery. But since maize had become their life-blood, African producers, with the support of some colonial officials who shared similar fears, could not submit to this restrictive policy. By forefronting maize production, the study sheds new light on the socio-environmental historiography which has generically attributed the implementation of colonial conservation policies in Africa to economic depression, drought, demography, the American dust bowl, colonial land policies, and local farming practices.