‘We Are What We Eat’: Nutrition, African Diets and the State in Colonial Malawi, 1920s–1960

Abstract

This article explores the history of colonial state nutrition interventions in Malawi from the 1920s to 1960. Paying particular attention to the underlying motivations, the processes by which the interventions were undertaken and peasants’ responses, the study demonstrates the extent to which colonial projects driven by external forces achieved the desired transformations among the local inhabitants. Pressed by the growth of nutrition science in the 1920s and the need to supply nutritious foods to the military in the 1940s, the colonial state in Malawi found itself addressing problems of malnutrition that never actually existed, or which, if present, affected only a small proportion of the population during the period of study. Rather than improving the welfare of the peasants, these state nutritional interventions succeeded only in adding to peasants’ agricultural and financial burdens and widening the existing disparities between them. By making this argument, the article draws attention to the limitations of the new nutrition science, implemented without due respect to local context, in dealing with malnutrition in southern Africa.