Nyasaland

Abstract

T? the air-traveller, shooting out of the cloud-cover that may have 1 obscured much of the earth on a long journey from the nort4 there comes a breath-taking alld entrancing view. Below is outspread the piercing kingfisher-blue of the Lake stretching 360 miles down the provinces of Nyasaland. T}le whole country is revealed, lit up with brilliant sunlight and colour: its mounts, so individual in character, their fantastic shapes of green and lion-tawny gold, chased with deep blue shadows, as if some cosmic artist had painted them fresh and exquisite that very morning; the ribbon of the Shire River, trailing from the Lake among rocky passages to the western plain beneath the escarpment of the highlands, a flashing milTor of sky and cloud alld land; the earth roads streaking from the paSm-fnnged Lakeshore, between yellow hyparhenia grasses, towards the townships of 2;omba and Blatyre; the clusters of native huts and hamlets with their haphazard gardens of rustling maize-stalks and dark green fruit trees: the whole a teeming panorama of gay, carefree, local African life. Here are the welcoming diversity and charm of Nyasaland in the breezier season which follows the harvest in Capricorn May. Here is a land that seldom fails to endear itself to any inhabitant, or visitor, a country like the lalldscape backgrounds of Italian Renaissance pictures transposed to a tropical cle. At the beginning of the century much of southern Nyasaland was still dense with primeval forest, full of running water and wild anals, with a few scattered tnbal units hunting the gaune alld making short-tenn clearings for pulses and grains, and occasionally warriIlg with their neighbours on the border-lands and riverwrossings. Then, irl the wake of Dr. Livingstone and the missionaries, came the traders and planters. Land was cleared for commercial crops, tobacco and rubber, tea and coffee. Native labour throtlged towards these ventures, or was cajoled thither, tribesfolk swarming like locusts over the hills, hewing, burning and reburning the forest-cover for mnize and millet, and then for sale-crops that exhausted the soil. Europeans and Afncans between them skinned the succulent vegetation-cover from the thin soil-caxpet of Nyasaland, baring it to the effects of sudden downpour and torrid drought. The process is still going on year by year. In the place of the natural lardscape there sprawled a disasTay of cc)mmercial clearings and native squatting, a landscape of arbitrary extraction, shockingly wasteful as well as untidy and ugly. Soil-erosion and desiccation were inevitable consequences. Exhaustion was due to the higgledy-piggledy habits of African settlement, to the rapidity