British Central Africa Research Articles

Political Power and Colonial Development in British Central Africa 1938–1960s, by Alan H. Cousins

Political Power and Colonial Development in British Central Africa 1938–1960s, by Alan H. Cousins

The Political Economy of American Businesses in British Central Africa, 1953–1963

This article details how and why officials in the United States and the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland developed policies and initiatives to promote US capital investments. It analyzes these policies in the context of decolonization, white minority rule, and the Cold War in Africa. It further shows how US business interests, especially in the mining industry, increased their investments and influenced policy. Drawing from Zimbabwean archives, it argues that these competing priorities produced inconsistent results that tended to support US imperialism and hinder nationalist movements in British Central Africa.

Independence and Pan-African Diplomatic Contestation: Anti-colonial Nationalism and the Eclipse of White Legitimacy in ‘British Central Africa’, 1957–64

ABSTRACT The rapid collapse of European empires in Africa transformed the politics of the white settler dominated states at the south of the continent. In what briefly remained ‘British Central Africa’, the rise of sovereign states created a new sphere of political competition between white officials and their anti-colonial nationalist opponents. White authorities, while perturbed by imperial retreat and committed to racial discrimination at home, nonetheless attempted to cultivate the emerging African nations. After some initial diplomatic success in west Africa, increasingly assertive African leaders became more overtly aligned with the cause of African nationalism in Southern Rhodesia, the pre-eminent British settler colony in the region. The presence of white settler officials at African independence celebrations generally became unacceptable. Conversely, the colony’s anti-colonial nationalists, initially excluded from independence ceremonies, quickly became the preferred diplomatic interlocutor at these events. This transformation forestalled settler attempts to establish diplomatic footholds in majority-ruled African states, but also spurred intra-nationalist factionalism. This analysis adds new insights on the rise of white unilateralism, the process by which the ‘wind of change’ reached southern Africa, and underscores the swift radicalisation of pan-African diplomacy.

Reading Rostow in a Rhodesian Prison: Anticolonialism and the Reinvention of Modernization in British Central Africa

AbstractThis article examines how and why anti-colonial activists in Nyasaland, now Malawi, seized on modernization theory to make their case for national independence in the early 1960s. As far as British officials were concerned, Nyasaland’s small size, large population, and agrarian character meant that it stood little chance of joining the modern, industrialized world. The Malawi Congress Party, however, saw their country differently, as a future “Central African Denmark.” This article argues that Congress’s Danish vision was part of an anti-colonial challenge to the industry-first development strategies that dominated early international development thinking. Congress thinkers, far from rejecting the modernization idea, flipped the framework from industry to agriculture, helping to open new possibilities for small, agrarian territories on the empire’s margins. The article concludes by showing how this agrarian counter-current in development thinking subsequently shaped the international community’s turn to market-friendly, agriculture-centered policies in the 1970s, though in ways that eclipsed the original anti-colonial vision.

Stabilising Lymph: British East and Central Africa, ‘Tropical’ Climates, and the Search for Effective Smallpox Vaccine Lymph, 1890s–1903

ABSTRACT At the end of the nineteenth century, British imperial doctors found that the glycerinated lymph they received from British-based pharmaceutical companies became inert, failing to protect colonial populations against smallpox. Colonial doctors and their British suppliers thus took a fresh look at the preservation media used for lymph as they discovered how different kinds of lymph reacted to ‘tropical’ climates. British lymph distributors like the Society of Apothecaries sought to maintain their economic hold and influence on the colonies, which provided them with significant commercial outlets to sell lymph, through exploring new modes of preserving lymph. Colonial doctors, however, used the issue to argue for the ability to locally produce vaccine, creating a more economical and dependable production line for the colonies. Building on scholarship on imperial climates, public health, and pharmaceutical manufacturing, I argue that together, colonial climates and local preferences forced calf vaccine lymph producers and users in Britain to redefine their ideas about what constituted smallpox vaccination. These issues affected where colonial lymph was produced and who benefited from lymph’s economic power and scientific authority across international borders, exposing how the tropical colonial climate shifted how long-standing medical technologies were produced and distributed across international borders.

The Case of Claud Cardew's Violin: Race, Anxiety, and the British Empire Mail

AbstractIn the summer of 1894, Claud Cardew, then at British Central Africa, asked his brother in England to send him a violin. In tracing the violin's trajectory from metropole to colony, this article combines two inquiries. It probes, firstly, the emotional vocabulary surrounding Claud's request, and secondly, the technology underpinning the British Empire mail. Closely reading the Cardew family letters alongside postal documents, the author argues that for Claud, the violin's delayed arrival triggered a tangled nexus of anxieties, stemming from both the colonial racial hierarchy and the changing expectations surrounding modern technology. Much like the cultural connotations carried by the violin itself, efficient mail delivery denoted racial superiority. Furthermore, the empire mail gained significance in the minds of British users for its racially loaded function as potentially mitigating colonizers’ anxiety in the face of outnumbering locals. Yet the violin's failure to arrive when expected led to mounting anxiety, as claims for colonizers’ dominance cracked in the face of unstable postal communications. The story of Claud Cardew's violin thus offers a framework that may be used to unravel similar emotional entanglements surrounding Western technologies set to work within empire.

Outside the Economy: Women’s Work and Feminist Economics in the Construction and Critique of National Income Accounting

ABSTRACTConcerns about women’s work were present at the advent of the modern method of national income accounting, and they have featured prominently in the most radical critiques of this method. During and after the Second World War, Phyllis Deane, a young researcher working under the supervision of Richard Stone, Austin Robinson and Arthur Lewis, grappled with the conceptual difficulties involved in measuring the ‘national’ incomes of mostly rural subsistence colonies in British central Africa. In constructing her estimates, Deane relied heavily on a multidisciplinary survey of nutrition conducted in interwar Nyasaland. Deane’s work was essentially an exercise in reductionism and bounding; she sought to extract from these data a single monetary estimate of production. Yet Deane also proved unwilling to exclude too much. She broke with her advisors’ favoured convention that activities not involved in market exchange should be excluded from the national income. Successive national income accountants around the world would reach disparate conclusions on method, particularly on the question of the ‘production boundary’—that is, the dividing line between those productive activities that would be included in the national income and those that would not. This issue became most contentious in the sphere of ‘non-monetary’ or ‘subsistence’ production performed mostly by female producers. While some statisticians included firewood collection, beer brewing and cooking, many others thought such activities beyond the bounds of ‘the economy’. Early decisions about the status of non-monetary production influenced the international standards enshrined in the United Nations System of National Accounts, first published in 1953. Beginning in the 1970s, second-wave feminists criticised the invisibility of women’s work in national income estimates. These critiques helped spur the inclusion of non-monetary activities in the accounts of many nations. Yet by the 1990s, many feminist critics—most notably New Zealand-born political economist Marilyn Waring—sought to move beyond GDP as a measure of welfare. These feminists called instead for greater reliance on measures such as the Human Development Index and time-use surveys. These measures may have appeared new, but they required the same multidisciplinary and intensive methods as Nyasaland’s interwar nutrition survey, which had served as the substrate for the earliest calculation of a ‘colonial national’ income. Drawing upon archives in the United Kingdom, Malawi and the United States, this paper argues that feminist economists and women’s work were central to both the post-war construction and the late-twentieth century critique of national income.

Notas documentais sobre o Cabo Delgado e Niassa no Século XIX

O presente artigo documenta os fatos históricos ocorridos na segunda metade do século XIX em Cabo Delgado e Niassa no norte de Moçambique. A pesquisa realizada entre os anos de 2010 e 2011 incidiu sobre a documentação dos fundos do governo-geral de Moçambique e do governo do Distrito de Cabo Delgado do Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique (AHM). Constam no artigo os expedientes portugueses referentes a disputa entre Zanzibar e Portugal sobre a fronteira norte de Moçambique em Cabo Delgado e ao Tratado de Comércio e Amizade celebrado entre os dois governos. Constam também expedientes sobre a “Expedição ao Niassa”, os diferendos que se desenvolveram entre autoridades portuguesas de Moçambique e autoridades inglesas da África Central Britânica (Niassalândia, hoje Malawi) e sobre as lutas de resistência em Niassa.

“Lacking in Respect for Whitemen”: “Tropical Africans” on the Witwatersrand Gold Mines, 1903–1904

AbstractIn May 1903, 380 Africans were recruited from British Central Africa (modern Malawi) by the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association on one-year contracts to work in the gold mines. It was an experiment designed to test the potential for recruiting cheap black labor for the mines from the region north of the Zambesi. By the end of the contract period, more than a quarter of the men were either dead or permanently disabled. Their struggles to adapt to the harsh working conditions in the mines fueled a racist discourse among white South Africans about “Tropical Africans,” which focused on their supposed susceptibility to disease on the one hand, and their supposed “natural indolence” on the other. Notwithstanding these issues, the mine owners considered the experiment a success and moved rapidly to expand recruitment from the region in the years that followed. This article tells the story of this pioneering group of migrant workers, detailing their grim encounter with modernity and the power of capital in South Africa. It also suggests ways in which their experiences helped to determine the conditions of employment for the generations of migrant mineworkers that followed them.

Prosodic phrasing of Chichewa relative clauses

Earlier studies of Chichewa phrasal prosody – Kanerva (Focus and phrasing in Chichewa phonology, Garland, 1990) and Truckenbrodt (Phonological phrases: Their relation to syntax, focus and prominence, MIT, 1995, Linguistic Inquiry 30: 219–255, 1999, Linguistische Berichte 203: 273–296, 2005) – claim that Phonological Phrases in this language can potentially be quite large, as an entire maximal syntactic constituent – for example, a verb and all its complements – is parsed into a single Phonological Phrase in their analysis. This proposal predicts that even long and internally complex syntactic constituents will be parsed into a single Phonological Phrase. Relative clause constructions provide the ideal context for testing the proposal. However, neither Kanerva's (Focus and phrasing in Chichewa phonology, Garland, 1990) study of Chichewa prosodic phrasing nor Watkins's (A grammar of Chichewa: A Bantu language of British Central Africa, University of Chicago, 1937) and Mchombo's (The syntax of Chichewa, Cambridge University Press, 2004) grammars include sufficient examples to get a complete picture of their prosodic properties. Our study first presents a survey of prosodic phrasing in four relative clause constructions, then it provides an optimality theory (OT) analysis of the data. We show that Truckenbrodt's (Phonological phrases: Their relation to syntax, focus and prominence, MIT, 1995) OT analysis must be revised to account for the correlation we find in this data between syntactic phase edges and prosodic phrasing. Following work like Chen (Phonology Yearbook 4: 109–149, 1987), we show that the complement/adjunct distinction is an additional factor conditioning prosodic phrasing.

The Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment and the Struggle for Hegemony in British East and Central Africa, 1935–1937

Many scholars studying interwar film propaganda have rightly concentrated on the crucial role of images, especially motion pictures, in refining the tools of the trade. Much of this research has pr...

Elizabeth Colson: An Appreciation - Chet Lancaster and Kenneth P. Vickery, eds. The Tonga-Speaking Peoples of Zambia and Zimbabwe: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth Colson. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2007. viii + 392 pp. Maps. Tables. Figures. Notes. References. Index. $45.00. Paper.

ELIZABETH COLSON: AN APPRECIATION Chet Lancaster and Kenneth P. Vickery, eds. The Tonga-Speaking Peoples of Zambia and Zimbabwe: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth Colson. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2007. viii + 392 pp. Maps. Tables. Figures. Notes. References. Index. $45.00, Paper. In March 1955, after more than a decade of economic and engineering feasibility studies, the international bidding was opened for the construction of a dam at Kariba Gorge on the Zambezi River. At 384 feet high and 1737 feet long, the Kariba project remains one of the most massive hydroelectric dams ever built, creating the largest artificial lake in the world at the time of its construction. This unique engineering feat was a bold expression of postwar European confidence in science and the human capacity to tame and transform nature in the name of modernization: in fact, to command nature's acquiescence in grandiose colonial dreams of limitless industrial expansion. The Kariba project was also a surprising expression of confidence in the stability of the colonial order of things. Through the hindsight of history, we know that the British Empire in West Africa was already crumbling at that time. Indeed, the former Gold Coast had already achieved some measure of internal self-rule and would receive full independence in less than two years. Much of British Central Africa would follow suit in less than a decade. Yet Kariba Dam was conceived not as a parting gift, a farewell gesture of thanks to colonial peoples for decades of human and material contributions to European development. Instead, Kariba moved forward as if the African clamor for independence were inconsequential-as if African people themselves were irrelevant. The project would flood 20,000 square miles of potentially productive African farmland, and it forced the removal of 57,000 African people to higher ground. No input was sought from those who would be most affected, and no resistance was tolerated. The immensity of Kariba Dam's impact on the landscape was perhaps exceeded only by the immensity of its impact on the human imagination. Industrialists worldwide intensified plans for utilizing the heretofore inconceivable amount of electrical energy that would be up for grabs in both Northern and Southern Rhodesia. International environmental organizations vied to be the first to study the dramatically changed downstream ecology that would result from the containment of roughly 40 percent of the total runoff of the Zambezi River. Conservationists from all over the globe flocked to the Zambezi Valley to participate in Operation Noah, a multiyear effort to rescue animals, large and small, from the rising floodwaters. Members of the hospitality industry jostled one another to acquire the best sites for new hotels, game lodges, sport fishing resorts, and boating marinas along the shoreline of the newly forming lake. One small group of scholars, however, recognized the potential the Kariba project held for studying social change. A group of people with a richly varied riverine-focused subsistence system was about to be forced to begin life anew on the bleak, wind-swept, wild-animal infested plateaus that hovered over 3000 feet above their old village sites. How would these people adapt? What would be the impact of the move on their social, political, and economic systems? How might notions of land tenure, reciprocal rights and duties, traditional leveling mechanisms, and gender dynamics fare in the new dispensation? Might the change affect such basic parameters as morbidity and mortality rates? And what of the ancestors and spirits of the forest and river below? Would they move up to the new location as well? This satchel of weighty questions was foisted on the shoulders of a young anthropologist named Elizabeth Colson. And the rest is history. Colson was raised in a small farming community in Central Minnesota, conscious from a young age of the continuing presence of Ojibwas who had been dispossessed of their land by Euro-American settlers. …

Lynette A Jackson, Surfacing up: psychiatry and social order in colonial Zimbabwe, 1908–1968, Cornell Studies in the History of Psychiatry Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 2006, pp. xxi, 230, £31.50, $55.00 (hardback 0-8014-4310-5); £14.50, $24.95 (paperback 0-8014-8940-7).

The institutions and practice of psychiatry in colonial Africa have a justifiably poor reputation. In Surfacing up: psychiatry and social order in colonial Zimbabwe, 1908–1968, Lynette A Jackson does more than trace the history of Ingutsheni, British Central Africa's first and largest mental institution, which was founded on the outskirts of Bulawayo in 1908, arguing that, even though there was no “Great Confinement”, psychiatry served the ideological needs of the settler state. It did so by “domesticating” space and people, and by labelling as insane or mentally deficient men and women who were found to be out of place, either physically or socially. Consciously deploying the language of Frantz Fanon and Michel Foucault, Jackson regards “the colonial project” as broadcasting a “monologue of reason about madness”, one which was intentionally deaf to the inner logic of African concepts of the origins of mental disturbance and to indigenous methods of treatment. Through a combination of overt racism and pecuniary neglect, Ingutsheni became a warehouse for those certified as mentally ill. Inside the hospital, social hierarchies and distances were maintained: African patients had inadequate facilities, were exploited as labour, and were subjected to dehumanizing and dubious methods of treatment including electro-convulsive therapy and leucotomies. White patients had better accommodation and facilities; and, in a painful and yet poignant signifier of how race, class and sanity were perceived in Southern Rhodesia (and elsewhere) at this time, “European” women patients at Ingutsheni were catered for at the hospital's “Fair Lady Salon”. Jackson devotes considerable attention to how the “routes” to the asylum or hospital were influenced by the colonial order. How, she asks, did people who might indeed have been mentally disturbed “surface up” and come to the attention of colonial authorities and be labelled crazy as opposed to criminal? Such surfacings occurred, for instance, when whites transgressed the “civilized” image that the society sought to present, both of itself and to itself. Any “European” who went around barefoot in the centre of town or who had a love relationship with an African person, for instance, could be regarded as insane. African men were brought within the ambit of the colonial economy via migrant labour and could be driven to insanity by dislocation and diseases of employment. Colonial and indigenous concepts of the appropriate “place of women” were influential in identifying “stray” and “undomesticated” women as insane or mentally inadequate and therefore fit for restraint at Ingutsheni. Jackson also draws on Fanon to argue that colonial psychiatry pathologized the “indocile native”. She, on the other hand, reinterprets the actions and words of some “madmen” and “madwomen” as being acts of rebellion or resistance and therefore ultimately of “reason”. In the Epilogue, Jackson describes how after political independence in 1980 Ingutsheni became a target of health reform, and indigenous treatment methods were rehabilitated, contributing to a healed nation. This moment was, however, short-lived and under the constraints of structural adjustment programmes in the 1990s—and, one might add, a morally corrupt and oppressive regime under Robert Mugabe—Zimbabwe's psychiatric services are now once again woefully inadequate. Of course, HIV/AIDS is adding further to the incidence of mental illness in Zimbabwe and to the state's inability to provide decent mental health care. Surfacing up is a damning indictment of the practice of psychiatry in colonial Zimbabwe. It is forcefully written. This contributes to the book's strength, but on occasion Jackson overplays the power of both western psychiatry and of colonialism in Southern Africa. It is certain that the majority of the mentally ill never came to the attention of the colonial authorities and that indigenous African therapies remained the most frequently utilized forms of treatment throughout the colonial era. Colonial “surveillance” and “the medical gaze” were patchy at most. Colonial psychiatry enjoyed little prestige and its practitioners were seldom influential. Moreover, and as Jackson shows, indigenous therapy management groups and techniques were sometimes powerless in the face of violent madness and, on occasion, families initiated the committal procedures. By the mid-twentieth century, then, psychiatric institutions were one option amongst several for the management of insanity both of and by Africans. Yes, psychiatry could be and often was a form of cultural imperialism, but whether it was always and only so remains a matter for debate.

Feeding and Fleecing the Native: How the Nyasaland Transport System Distorted a New Food Market, 1890s–1920s*

Failed states in Africa are not a uniquely postcolonial phenomenon: The colonial government in Nyasaland started and ended as a failed state. Although effective in guarding Britain's global interests against her imperial rivals, the Nyasaland government could not be relied upon as a trustworthy ally of any social class within the country. The government failed to provide essential services, particularly roads, with dire consequences for both the peasant economy and European enterprises. Without a reliable road network, transport companies came to depend on the vagaries of the weather and the availability of villagers to carry goods on their heads. Transporters competed with planters and other European enterprises for cheap labour, instituting a costly freight regime that discouraged planters from raising bulky, low-value food crops. Thus, to feed their workers, all European enterprises – farmers, missionaries, traders, transport companies and the government – turned to peasant-grown food. Responding to these demands without the benefit of new agricultural technologies that could have raised productivity, peasants sold the food that their families needed and began to experience new forms of hunger. The food deficits forced the same European planters who assaulted the peasant economy as a system of labour usage to realise the need to preserve it as a system of food supply. Such was the nature of the colonial regime in Nyasaland that stimulating and undermining the peasant option did not form two separate processes, occupying two distinct phases. In Nyasaland, the inefficient transport system, like the estate sector, simultaneously both strengthened and weakened peasant production. The mere feeding of all these [workers] is a problem in itself. (Life and Work in British Central Africa, September 1905) The road question seems to be among the thorny problems which beset this country. (The Central African Times, 6 October 1900)

John Wayne on the Zambezi: Cinema, Empire, and the American Western in British Central Africa

Introduit dans les possessions coloniales britanniques d'Afrique centrale des les annees 1920, le cinema est rapidement devenu une activite de loisir tres populaire parmi la population noire, avec un attrait particulier pour les Westerns - les films de cowboys americains. L'A. montre comment dans les annees 1940-1950, en raison du contexte de crise sociale et economique induit par l'immigration massive d'Europeens et la migration urbaine, les films de cowboys sont devenus l'enjeu de critiques exprimees aussi bien par les officiels coloniaux que par les Africains eduques. Mettant en avant une soi-disante credulite du public populaire noir, les premiers voyaient dans les Westerns une incitation a des activites antisociales et un danger pour l'ordre public, les seconds craignaient une victimisation de leurs communautes par des actes criminels inspires par ces films. Malgre les critiques et les tentatives de censure, les Westerns ont conserve, jusqu'a aujourd'hui, leur attrait populaire, les spectateurs resistant aux tentatives de transformation et de manipulation de leurs habitudes et de leurs gouts par le haut.

The Postwar Conservation Boom in British Colonial Africa

As World War II came to a close, there was neither any national park legislation nor any national department in British East and Central Africa (comprising Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika, Northern and Southern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland). Not all of colonial territories in region even had a game department. The existing departments were minute in relation to size of their territories and none possessed any sort of research agenda or scientifically trained staff member. Fifteen years later, situation had shifted 18o degrees. Colonial development funds poured into improvement of new national across region, airplanes crisscrossed skies overhead to count wildlife herds, and scores of biologists and ecologists moved over landscape to analyze habits and histories of parks faunal residents. The shift represented a veritable conservation boom and dozens of new appeared as bright green patches on previously monochrome maps. What had happened in immediate postwar years to change status of national and wildlife conservation so dramatically? Some historians have traced origins of twentieth-century wildlife conservation to psychological and emotional importance of African environment for European colonizers. Accordingly roots of British colonial national park and wildlife laws have been traced to culturally constructed ideas of nature in Africa. Historians have offered concepts such as the Eden complex or the cult of Hunt' to explain European, particularly British, fascination with African wildlife and anxieties over its disappearance. The core of their argument is that idea of Africa as symbolic Eden has stimulated western interests in African conservation through colonial period and into present. Without dismissing their importance in shaping British attitudes toward nature in Africa, elite European cultural values do not fully explain explosion in conservation initiatives in final years of colonialism. There had been many proposals for national in first half of century and an international wildlife treaty as early as 1900, but territorial governments in Africa largely ignored these until 1940s.

A Woman Passing Through: Helen Caddick and the Maturation of the Empire in British Central Africa

A Woman Passing Through: Helen Caddick and the Maturation of the Empire in British Central Africa

Indians, India, and Race and Nationalism in British Central Africa

Indians, India, and Race and Nationalism in British Central Africa

The Myth of the Capitalist Class: Unofficial Sources and Political Economy in Colonial Malawi, 1895-1924

One of the prevalent theories in Malawian historiography is that primitive accumulation created a unified capitalist class which worked in concert with the colonial state and sowed the seeds of poverty by viciously exploiting the indigenous community. This proposition relies almost exclusively on official sources, and scholars have rarely looked for unofficial material to corroborate it. Such a lacuna is regrettable because unofficial data indicate that Malawi's colonial capitalists were often a badly fragmented class antagonistic to the colonial administration. Moreover, the capitalists' divisions paralyzed them politically and thus allowed the state to enact legislation which was often antithetical to capitalists' ambitions and prerequisites. As a result, the capitalists often found themselves economically imperiled. Few documents demonstrate this trend better than the colony's most important expatriate newspaper, The Nyasaland Times.The Nyasaland Times first appeared in 1895. Published by R.S. Hynde at the Blantyre Mission press, it immediately declared that “we are devoted to the planting interests of the community—the interest, we venture to state, on which the commercial prosperity of B.C.A. [British Central Africa] depends.” That the planters needed a voice devoted to them can scarcely be denied. By 1895 both the administration and the missions had established papers which were often hostile to the planters. In particular, Sir Harry Johnston's British Central African Gazette reflected the Commissioner's almost feral antipathy towards the planters in its editorials.

Working Conditions and Worker Responses on Nyasaland Tea Estates, 1930–1953

The tea industry of southern Nyasaland employed intermittently a heterogeneous labour force of some twenty to thirty thousand and paid workers minimum wages of 7s. in 1930, rising to between 17s. 6d. and 20s. in 1953. A complex wage structure offered different rates to hoers, pluckers, factory workers and clerks. Thousands of children, butvirtually no women, were employed. Wages and working conditions were acknowledged to be unattractive, even by the industry itself, and compared favourably only with those offered in Portuguese East Africa. The initial viability of the plantation sector in the Shire Highlands was made possible by the immigration of hundreds of thousands of Lomwe from Portuguese East Africa. Lomwe workers, who sought assimilation and upward mobility, have been depicted as virtual slaves of the planters, but there is evidence of effective local, day-to-day and passive resistance on their part which left planters feeling impotent, unable to turn labour out on Sundays or in the rains or enforce unpopular thangata (labour rent) agreements, and obliged to reduce the daily tasks demanded of the worker. Confronted with an increasingly severe shortage of labour, which caused millions of pounds of tea to remain unpicked, planters began to improve working conditions on their estates, but this failed to resolve their labour problem or to dampen post-war militancy. Irresponsible actions by the British Central Africa Company increased tensions in Cholo which culminated in the serious riots of 1953 in which eleven people were killed. Government responded to this growing rural radicalism by repurchasing half of the million acres of freehold estate land which had initially been ‘bought’ from chiefs prior to the colonial occupation.