Anusa Daimon. Journal of Southern African Studies, Volume 44, Issue 6, December 2018.
Due to their state of unbelonging, many immigrants across Africa have, in times of turmoil, been stereotyped or constructed as unpatriotic outsiders, with adverse consequences on their welfare in foreign spaces. Such has been the case of migrant descendants (aliens) in Zimbabwe, who were victimised during the country’s agrarian reform and electoral processes in the new millennium. While literature on the discrimination of immigrants in post-2000 Zimbabwe is rich, there is little work on its historical roots. Therefore, using life histories, archival data and secondary literature, this article seeks to provide historical insights into the emergence and evolution of hostility in Zimbabwe towards African immigrants from the north from the 1920s to 1979. It historicises the antecedents of the anti-migrant sentiments, focusing mainly on people of Malawian ancestry in Zimbabwe who, because of various historical configurations and dynamics, became associated with the unpatriotic tag. Central to this characterisation was the immigrants’ alleged collusion with settler ‘domestic’ regimes, capital and power; their hegemonic influence over urban space, trade unionism and proto-nationalism during a period when they demographically dominated the Rhodesian African labour force; and their alleged disruption of local gender dynamics. All this became part of an anti-Malawian discourse that could be drawn upon in independent Zimbabwe to legitimise their economic and political exclusion.
Introduction
During the countdown to the 2000 Zimbabwean general elections, President Robert Mugabe categorically told a Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front) (ZANU[PF]) rally at Bindura, in Mashonaland, Central province, that people from Mbare township in Harare, who were predominantly descendants of migrants from the north of the River Zambezi, were ‘undisciplined, totem-less elements of alien origin’ and mocked them for supporting the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Mugabe was lamenting that, unlike the autochthons who have totems that attach them to Zimbabwe as ‘children of the soil’ (vana vevhu), migrants or the so-called ‘aliens’ did not have a sense of identity and belonging to Zimbabwe. They were therefore unpatriotic elements who were ‘selling-out’ to the western-sponsored puppet oppositional forces. Mugabe’s sentiments echoed the general conviction among ZANU(PF)’s rank and file: a belief that would come to characterise and haunt the descendants of migrants from Zambia, Mozambique and, particularly, Malawi, in a bifurcated, toxic and radically partisan post-2000 Zimbabwean political landscape.
The anti-migrant/Malawian discourse became overtly rhetorical and detrimental during the Zimbabwean crisis, with descendants of migrants from the north being excessively marginalised and victimised during the agrarian reform, citizenship and electoral exercises. There was general victimisation of immigrants during the post-2000 Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP), the 2005 urban clean-up exercise (Operation Murambatsvina), the subsequent denial of citizenship rights with amendments of the Citizenship Act in 2001 and 2003, and during the volatile 2000, 2005 and 2008 political elections. However, Mugabe’s accusation did not come out of the blue. Such labelling of outsiders was not a new millennium phenomenon. Using migrants’ life histories, archival and secondary literature, this article historicises the emergence and evolution of hostility towards African immigrants from former British Central Africa colonies north of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) from the 1920s to 1979. It specifically focuses on people of Malawian ancestry in Zimbabwe, who, because of unique historical circumstances, experienced incessant socio-political animosity in independent Zimbabwe.
The article suggests that the prevalent post-colonial characterisation and stereotyping of Malawian migrants is historical and has its antecedents in the era of white rule. Early causes of the uneasy relationship between indigenous Zimbabweans and migrants, however, lay in the pre-colonial period, particularly the Mutapa era, when, for example, the Maravi people contributed to the demise of the Mutapa state through the Maravi invasions in the 16th century. These tensions were concretised after white settler occupation, with the perceived collusion of northern labour migrants with settler ‘domestic’ regimes and capital that climaxed in their alleged support of the white regime during the Zimbabwe’s second Chimurenga. Added to this was the immigrants’ hegemonic influence over urban affairs, trade unionism and proto-nationalism during a phase when they demographically dominated the Rhodesian African labour force; their foreign citizenship and belonging; and their alleged disruption to local gender dynamics, which gradually sowed seeds of disharmony and mistrust. The resulting animosity changed shape between the 1920s and 1970s and provided a ready, fertile platform on which Mugabe’s assertions of alien-ness could thrive after independence. The article therefore projects the history of Malawians in Zimbabwe as a discourse about the past that was drawn upon in the present to legitimate the political rhetoric and arguments that packaged people of Malawian ancestry as part of the regime change agenda.
From the 1890s all the way through to the mid 1970s, Malawians (Nyasas) had trekked to Rhodesia as cheap migrant labourers, becoming proletarianised as farm workers, miners and urban dwellers across the colony, living under rigid white settler ‘domestic’ regimes as ‘alien natives’. Workers within these ‘domestic government’ spaces were subject to stiffer control and monitoring by their white employers than were other African labourers. This was perceived by many as close association and connivance. In addition to this spatial association with white settlers, other colonial dynamics further created suspicion about the loyalties of northern migrants. These included how immigrants were perceived to dominate the Rhodesian African labour force and urban space, to have commandeered trade unionism and proto-nationalism, to have interfered with Rhodesian gender dynamics (usurping local men’s access to local women), and, cardinally, to have sided with the white enemy during the Zimbabwean liberation struggle. This provided fodder for ZANU(PF) and became part of a portfolio of anti-Malawian discourse that could be drawn upon in independent Zimbabwe to legitimise economic and political discrimination against them, particularly in term of access to land and suffrage.
Who Were ‘Malawians’?
Malawian migrants in Rhodesia were not homogeneous, in terms of either ethnicity or generation. Though they were bunched together as Nyasas, alien ‘natives’, or Rhodesian aliens, they had cosmopolitan sub-ethnic identities, including the Chewa, Yao, Ngoni, Tonga, Tumbuka, Manganja and other smaller groups. These migrants came to Rhodesia either as groups/kin or individuals at different times, initially as contract workers, before gradually settling permanently. From about 1895, the Rhodesian state had embarked on an extensive quest for a supply of cheap African migrant labour in the region, under the infamous ‘Chibaro‘ or ‘Mthandizi‘ labour migration system, to work on commercial farms, mines and urban industries. This saw an influx of Malawians, Zambians and Mozambicans such that by 1936 there were a total of 74,266 migrant labourers working in the territory, rising to 150,150 in 1948 and 246,772 in 1951. With the further opening of the transnational boundaries at the inception of the Central African Federation in 1953, the figures grew steadily, with many migrant workers involuntarily and voluntarily flocking to Rhodesia to seek employment in the colonial capitalist economy. At the peak of the labour migration system in 1956, there were close to 300,000 migrant labourers from the region toiling in the territory. While some remained genuine migrant labourers, maintaining strong continuous connections with their homeland, others settled permanently across the territory, culminating in the emergence of second- and third- generation immigrants who became naturalised in the host state at birth. These became de facto locals in all but official documentation, where they remained in the ‘alien’ category, with serious repercussions on their welfare both during settler rule and after independence.
Mamdani’s ‘citizen and subject’ dichotomy casts light on both the white settlers’ and local Africans’ conception of these people of foreign descent. The Rhodesian state officially designated migrants as ‘aliens’, implying residents of Rhodesia who were originally from outside the colony. Rhodesia consisted of citizens (white Rhodesians) and subjects (Africans). Among the African subjects, the indigenous (Shona and Ndebele) were considered ‘natives’, and migrants were ‘alien natives, native aliens or foreign natives’. However, this labelling was a colonial construct meant to classify and stereotype the nature of African labour for the benefit of the Rhodesian economy. Such categorisation was also largely premised on belonging, which Peter Geschiere views as a dormant but re-emerging concept that focuses on the return of the indigenous person or ‘child of the soil’ in a globalising world. The politics of belonging have created fertile grounds for inclusion and exclusion within nation-states in post-colonial Africa, between the so-called autochthons and allogenes or what Francis Nyamnjoh terms ‘insiders and outsiders’ or Igor Kopytoff’s ‘first comers versus late comers’. Questions of belonging and citizenship have thus left many migrants, including Malawian immigrants, at the mercy of autochthonous hegemonic power and living on the margins in states of unbelonging.
Likewise, Mugabe’s ‘totemless aliens’ sentiment reflected the dominant prejudices that fed into the post-2004 ‘patriotic history’ discourse. For Miles Tendi, ‘patriotic history’ was a bastardised form of nationalistic politics, tapping into some of the enduring legacies of colonialism in Zimbabwe while also shoring up ZANU(PF)’s claim to be the ordained guardian of Zimbabwe’s political past, present and future. Patriotic history was thus intended to proclaim the continuity of the Zimbabwean revolutionary tradition, ‘an attempt to reach out to the youth over the heads of their parents and teachers all of whom are said to have forgotten or betrayed revolutionary values’. The general anti-migrant rhetoric became part of this discourse, with Malawians being viewed as unpatriotic puppets of the west, alongside supporters of the opposition movement in Zimbabwe. These ‘puppets’ had forgotten the values of the liberation struggle and were thus not the real vana vevhu or authentic patriots fitted for the ‘patriotic history’ that ZANU(PF) was inculcating into its youth and the Zimbabwean education curricula.
ZANU(PF)’s authoritarian vision of patriotism became radically partisan and binary, with ‘authentic’ and ‘patriotic’ Zimbabweans being those whose ancestors were born in Zimbabwe, lived in a rural area or at least were entitled to land in the rural areas, with liberation struggle credentials and who voted for ZANU(PF). Malawians and other subject minorities were thus left in an anomalous position, where they were regarded, depending on the context, as either not indigenous at all or not the right kind of indigenous. Therefore the post-colonial state largely drew upon the historical hostilities towards northern migrants to construct people of Malawian descent as part of the opposition elements that had forgotten the revolutionary agenda. This, in the process, saw many migrant descendants being victimised during the FTLRP, for instance, on the pretext that, in the politics of the nation, they ‘belonged to the white farmer’ and were under the ‘domestic government’ of commercial farmers.
Pre-Colonial Inferences: The 1597 Great Maravi Invasions
The mistrust of northerners in Zimbabwe had its subtle roots in traditions about the pre-colonial interactions and confrontational politics between the powerful Mutapa kingdom and the Maravi empire in the late 16th and 17th centuries. Following Great Zimbabwe’s decline in the 16th century and the subsequent rise of the Mutapa kingdom, the Maravi invaded the lower Zambezi area. In time, they gradually expanded their domain and exported institutions of kingship into the region. Such agency turned the lower Zambezi into a scene of confrontation between the Mutapa and Maravi states south and north of the river. The Maravi (who lived within the territory now called Malawi) were originally Bantu and settled as various ethnicities, including the Yao, Ngoni, Chewa, Nyanja, Lomwe, Tumbuka and Tonga, among others. They competed with the Mutapa state as well as with the Portuguese for influence on the Zimbabwean plateau.
David Beach has detailed the importance of Maravi invasions in the decline of the Mutapa state. He attributed Mutapa’s breakdown to three factors: Portuguese influence, protracted civil wars within the Mutapa dynasty and the 1597 Maravi invasions from the north of the Zambezi. Malyn Newitt pointed to the military reputation of the ‘well-organized Maravi invaders in the greater Zambezi territory who destroyed ineffective Karanga (Mutapa) armies in 16-17th centuries’. Gerald Mazarire adds that Mutapa Gatsi Rusere, who succeeded to the throne in 1586, suffered many setbacks, among them the Maravi invasions led by Kapambo and Chikanda. They fuelled divisions in the Mutapa army and subsequently led to the Matuzianhe revolt, which marked a turning point in Mutapa-Portuguese relations. The invasions not only deposed Gatsi Rusere but also forced him to enlist the support of the Portuguese. In addition, the Maravi were involved in Mutapa politics to the extent of offering one of the Mutapa rulers, Mutapa Kapararidze, exile during the civil war with Mutapa Mavura in 1631. Stanley Mudenge, summing up, says that there were a number of rivals in the lower Zambezi, namely Maravi, Portuguese prazo-holders and the kingdom of Uteve and Guruuswa, all of which were partly to blame for the collapse of the state.
So the Maravi invasions left historical traces on the Zimbabwean plateau. The fact that the Maravi indirectly and coincidentally assisted a European force (Portuguese) in its fight to usurp a fellow African state was bound to strain relations between the two pre-colonial states. The Maravi invasions sowed seeds of antagonism with the Mutapa and earned them a notorious reputation for being mercenaries. Newitt told how Maravi mercenaries were regularly recruited for the Karanga wars and the Portuguese in turn aided Kalonga Muzura in establishing his hegemony. Such Maravi actions contributed to the broader construction of Maravi identities in pre-colonial Zimbabwe, where indigenous communities and contemporary historians described these migrants as militarily astute, cannibalistic, aggressive and brave. These identities were also based on other socially interactive activities within the Mutapa state. Mudenge noted that some Maravi people permeated the Mutapa fabric, becoming influential, acting as guides, translators, carriers, bodyguards and soldiers. Despite this, it can be inferred that Maravi history created a discourse about the past that provided a resource in more recent times to represent people of Malawian origin, despite their deep integration into the community, as being associated with mercenary work, external intervention and regime change agendas.
Malawian Migrants in Rhodesian Society
The colonial labour migration system that began in 1895 and ended in the 1970s saw an influx of labour migrants from the region (Malawi, Zambia and Mozambique) into the towns and industrial centres of Rhodesia such that, by the 1940s, they outnumbered the local urban Africans. Malawians had found themselves involuntarily trekking en masse, either on foot, by road or by rail, to the labour magnets south of the Zambezi as part of a regional labour pool. Until the late 1950s, the so-called ‘alien natives’ dominated many aspects of the Rhodesian socio-economic, cultural, demographic and political fabric, often at the expense of the locals. The resulting structural imbalance brewed mistrust and subtle xenophobic tensions. Migrants, particularly Malawians (Nyasas), pioneered and led kindred societies, independent churches, early labour consciousness/trade unionism and nationalism. Many were better educated, being products of early missionary education in Nyasaland. They commandeered better-paying jobs, with greater responsibilities, across Rhodesia. Some migrants took advantage of the white state’s housing policies to acquire properties in Rhodesian urban areas. Others, owing to their perceived non-frugality, were also accused of taking away local women, all of which added to growing hostilities towards northern migrants.
The 1945 Nyasaland census estimated that 133,306 persons were outside the territory, including 9,446 women. By 1966, about 229,000 Malawians were working elsewhere, to which could be added 22,000 women and 33,000 men over 50 who had settled permanently outside Malawi. Of these, 139,000 were in Rhodesia and 68,000 in South Africa. Ian Phimister and Brian Raftopoulos note that, throughout the 1940s and well into the 1950s, ‘alien natives’ comprised between 40 and 60 per cent of Rhodesia’s urban African population. The turnover of labour migrants was extremely high: an analysis of 348,000 Africans employed in Salisbury between 1953 and 1957 revealed that 70 per cent of the migrants worked an average of 5.3 months for one employer before leaving the city. Over the next decade, the number of migrant labourers from Portuguese East Africa grew at the expense of those from Nyasaland, but otherwise the proportion of foreign to local workers stayed much the same. Migrants thus largely dominated regional labour spaces in terms of workforce and urban population.
The continuous migrant influx, urban dominance and mounting indigenous African unemployment increased animosity towards diasporic communities. In the period 1953-57, the region experienced economic boom years. Rhodesia’s manufacturing industries expanded from 700 in 1953 to 1,300 in 1957. Industrial growth enhanced migrant influx and extended migrants’ dominance of Rhodesia’s urban African population. In 1956, 60 per cent of workers were foreign Africans from Nyasaland, Portuguese East Africa and Northern Rhodesia. This was partly because many locals still had access to land and were not willing to become full-time workers. However, Rhodesian discriminatory land policies, particularly the 1930 Land Apportionment Act (LAA) and the 1951 Native Land Husbandry Act (NLHA), inadvertently ‘increase[d] the flow of indigenous Africans into cities like Salisbury, although the extent of migration from rural areas differed, according to the varying effects of land legislation in each area’. By 1958, the Federation’s economic bubble had burst, following the drastic fall in copper prices in 1956, leading to the scaling down of corporate companies and rising African unemployment in Rhodesia. By the late 1960s, urban areas were predominantly populated by locals rather than migrants from other territories.
Malawian labour migrants were highly competitive and attractive for colonial capital because many were products of missionary education, which had spread its tentacles of evangelical empire across Nyasaland from the 1870s. The resulting African elite was ambitious and vibrant, and spread its influence throughout Nyasaland and across the borders into neighbouring territories. Mission education equipped the marginalised Nyasaland Africans with valuable skills to go in search of waged labour further afield, to the white-settler economies of Rhodesia and South Africa. Graduates from the Scottish Presbyterian Mission at Livingstonia, for example, were much in demand by European employers, both in Nyasaland and beyond. Others, including the future trade union leader Clements Kadalie and the Watchtower evangelist Elliot Kenan Kamwana, obtained employment and spread their ‘northern influence’ in such administrative and commercial centres as Bulawayo, Salisbury and Cape Town. The future leader of the Nyasaland African Congress, later the Malawi Congress Party and President of Malawi from 1964 to 1994, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, also joined this great trek south. Banda migrated with his uncle, Revd Hannock Phiri, from the central region in the 1910s. The missionaries produced an educated African elite that fared favourably in the region. Missionary education thus gave Nyasas an early advantage in the regional colonial labour system, an advantage that, in many instances, did not sit well with the locals.
Dubbed ‘proto-intellectuals’ of Nyasaland by George Shepperson and Thomas Price, these migrants thrived within what Charles van Onselen called a ‘regional economic system’ that heavily relied on cheap migrant labour. The 1922 Handbook of Nyasaland reported that, ‘natives whose aspirations soar to a higher level are not content with the wages obtainable in Nyasaland; they emigrate to Rhodesia and South Africa for employment in the mines and other industries in which they can obtain far higher rates of pay than they receive at home’. Van Onselen elucidates by saying that, with the advantage that an early mission education gave them, many of the Nyasa workers sought the better-paid semi-skilled jobs. Such jobs included supervisors, clerks, telegraph operators, teachers, hospital assistants (orderlies), interpreters, messengers and police irregulars and shopkeepers. With an advantage of mission education, many Nyasa workers shunned underground work and were more prominent in roles such as compound police (especially the Yao and Gomani Ngoni), clerks, hospital orderlies and stores assistants. Ranger adds that some became waiters, cooks/chefs, messengers and teachers. The competitive labour migrants, unfortunately, were thought to have taken better-paying jobs from local Rhodesian Africans, which, in the process, fuelled salient xenophobic tensions against the immigrants.
The dominance created a structural imbalance between migrants and the growing local urban African population, leading to xenophobic attacks against non-indigenous Africans in the 1950s and 1960s. Tensions were fuelled not only by the corporate job cuts of the late 1950s, but by severe economic downturn in the post-Federation period. Consequently, local urban dwellers increasingly clamoured for Nyasas, in particular, to go back home. For example, on 23 March 1964, local Africans in Salisbury turned on migrants from Nyasaland and Tanganyika, intimidating, stoning and kicking them on the streets. One Nyasa victim reported that he had been walking past a group of locals when he was attacked. He claimed that the only reason for the attack was that he was a foreigner looking for work in Rhodesia. Posta Chitimbe, a former Malawian migrant labourer, was attacked in 1967 in the Southerton industrial area in Salisbury. He reported:
one day I was beaten in a bus by three local men whilst going for work. I requested the bus driver to help but to no avail. I just held on to the bus rails as they kicked me. The driver was brave enough to drive to the police station and the three people were arrested and jailed. Locals would hunt for us Mabhurandaya (people from Blantyre, Malawi) singing ‘tsuro tsurowe uyo wapera basa’ (Hey you foreigner your time is up). They accused us of taking over their country and usurping their jobs and stealing their women.
The wife-stealer trope, which has been typical of contemporary South African xenophobic violence, was also central in informing gender dynamics and xenophobic attitudes towards labour migrants in Rhodesia. Many single and married Nyasa males became entangled in the economic and social comforts of Rhodesia. They entered into relationships with indigenous Shona and Ndebele women, who offered the ‘comforts of home’ to migrant labourers, to the chagrin of local men. The Nyasaland labour officer, Captain Burden, had reported as early as 1935 that ‘labourers who have been in Rhodesia for more than five years have contracted alliances with local women and thousands of children of these alliances are growing up in the mines and towns without ever experiencing village and “tribal” life’. Because some had left spouses in Nyasaland, a number of Nyasa men preferred informal conjugal alliances or temporary marriages commonly known as ‘mapoto‘. This was ‘widely recognized and practised but was roundly condemned by practically every segment of Rhodesian society’.
Under mapoto, no lobola and family consultations were made. The union eluded the authority of clan, lineage, family and the state. A mapoto woman would become a de facto wife, who cooked, cleaned and washed clothes for her male counterpart without outright payment. State policy and traditional patriarchy maintained an uneasy relationship with mapoto, sometimes denigrating female partners as ‘concubines’. However, the Rhodesian state tolerated mapoto marriages because mapoto women sustained migrant labour morale, taking care of their temporary husbands without the regulation and bureaucracy of the formal marriage systems. Diana Jeater illuminated these mapoto alliances, detailing the notoriety of Nyasaland men’s adultery with local women, which, in the process, soured relations with local Rhodesian men.
Many local African women preferred northerners partly because these migrants lacked relatives in Rhodesia and partly owing to their inability to go frequently back home to Nyasaland. Elizabeth Schmidt observed that ‘migrant labourers from other territories, who by forces of Rhodesian law had left their own wives at home and having entered wage employment earlier and earning much higher wages than their local counterparts, were particularly attractive to local women’. Nyasa men were viewed as morally upright and not as thrifty or parsimonious as indigenous men were. Denisani Iliyasa (née Sango), who married Malawian Elliot Iliyasa in 1968, seemed to support these sentiments, stating that ‘unlike the locals, migrants were more loving; took extra care of us; seldom beat us, spoiled us with clothes and generally treated us like queens’. Gavaza Maluleke has argued that the claim ‘they steal our women’, which has been prevalent during post-apartheid South African xenophobic violence, points towards patriarchal undertones of anxiety about men’s ability to provide for their families, with women being seen as betraying their ‘nation’ by not conforming to their roles, since their marriages with foreign men cross unacceptable national/societal boundaries.
The interface between migration, masculinity and gender saw many indigenous men feeling emasculated by their male migrant counterparts, as some local women lost respect for their Rhodesian men. The resulting inter-marriages complicated relations between migrant Nyasas and indigenous Rhodesian communities, leading to xenophobic hostilities. Local men felt that the non-frugal Nyasas and other immigrants were a ‘nuisance’. Tensions rose as numerous local women left their spouses for migrant workers. Various letters in the African Daily News testified that jealous indigenous men complained about Nyasas. On 14 October 1957, Carl Chilunga of Highfield, Salisbury, moaned that ‘Nyasas use their wages to lure local women … they give these ladies all their wages and only remain with their IDs in their wallets’. He advised women to think twice before courting Nyasas because ‘migrants have bad spirits and are difficult to control when angry’. Marital disputes between local men and women were common. Native Commissioner dockets of civil cases reported women escaping unhappy marriages and poverty, aiming ‘at lives of sloth and luxury under the protection of foreign natives at the mines or elsewhere’. Local men sarcastically viewed Nyasa males as unwise. Chilunga alleged that, during divorce, Nyasas clamoured for household furniture, particularly chairs and clothes, instead of seeking custody of their children: ‘[u]nongonzwa vongorwira fenicha nenhumbi dzemumba chete. Zvevana zvinonzi mukadzi ndezvako‘ (they fight for furniture and clothes, and not child custodianship). Therefore the relative inability of local men to provide financially for their women implied lost dignity and respect in the eyes of those women, with much of the blame lying on Nyasas.
Another source of hostility was urban housing, where a significant number of labour migrants had established themselves as landlords (house owners) in Rhodesia’s major towns and cities at the expense of the locals. Most of these landlords were found in the old high-density suburbs such as Mbare, Kambuzuma, Dzivarasekwa, Mufakose, Rugare and Highfield in Harare. During the period of white rule and the first decade of independence, most house owners in these suburbs were migrants from the north. This urban property hegemony by non-indigenous Africans can be explained historically. Migrant labourers exploited municipality and company housing schemes within urban areas during white rule to acquire urban accommodation. Although various Salisbury workers were housed in the Matapi hostels in present-day Mbare, less crowded suburbs, such as Lonchivar, Rugare, Kambuzuma and Dzivarasekwa, emerged in the 1950s-1970s. Government and city councils offered African workers houses on a rent-to-buy basis. In 1957, for example, the Rhodesian government offered two-roomed houses in Highfield township, Salisbury, at £90 cash or through monthly instalments, three-roomed houses at about £150 and four-roomed houses at £250. Companies such as Rhodesia Railways had rent-to-buy housing schemes for their workers, a number of whom were Malawian and Mozambican migrants. Migrant tenants and house owners turned these African townships into melting pots for various nationalities from Mozambique, Zambia and Malawi as well as local Ndebele- and Shona-speakers. Migrant identities prevailed then and now. Kambuzuma suburb, for example, established in 1964, was christened by that name by Malawian and Mozambican migrant workers to mean ‘truth telling’.
The dominance of migrant landlords was cemented after independence. According to Seda, ‘after 1980, the government/municipalities and companies initiated a program allowing urban tenants, the migrants included, to purchase houses they were living in’. Prior to this, retiring workers for companies such as the National Railways of Zimbabwe (NRZ) were obliged to move out of company houses and, in some instances, forced to return to Malawi or Mozambique or look for alternative accommodation elsewhere. On the other hand, many locals resisted investing in and owning urban houses until the late 1980s. Instead, they preferred devoting their income to developing their rural property, which was, for many, the ideal home. Locals often relinquished such accommodation whenever they returned to the ‘reserves’, because owning urban housing was regarded as a ‘loss of their African ubuntu‘. Raftopoulos shows that many indigenous workers straddled their rural and urban lives, using wages earned in Harare to strengthen their rural base and to fight off permanent dependence on waged labour. As a result, northern migrants, whose rural homes were far away, across the Zambezi, wittingly or unwittingly took advantage and began occupying and acquiring urban properties.
Being a landlord became an identity assumed by migrant descendants. It was an identity that, over time, commanded respect, but also generated ‘xenophobic’ animosity. Wiseman Chirwa noted that Malawian domination of urban housing in Zimbabwe was a source of tension and conflict. The general domination on the part of Malawians in African suburbs earned them an urban-dweller identity, commonly caricatured as mabwidi by Zimbabweans. Mbiba and Chiwanga observe that, since most migrant descendants had no rural homestead in Zimbabwe, they were viewed as societal failures who had lost their rural inheritance in favour of a European mode of life. Indirectly, such caricaturing by the locals was a form of showing their ire towards the migrants’ dominance over urban housing. Nevertheless, being landlords cultivated a sense of belonging among migrants, as they could now point to a place they could call their own home. ‘Regardless of what locals said, owning a house in town ensured that I now had a home in Zimbabwe and that I belonged here’, said Abraham Kampira of Glen View, Harare. Locals also envied and respected these landlords. Wisdom Tugwete pointed out that ‘Malawians were clever enough to acquire houses in towns, becoming our bosses, our landlords, and we cannot take that away from them; they own us tenants and belong here’.
The Rhodesian state tried to address the structural imbalances and change its African urban demography. In order to redirect migrant labour to mines and farms, the settler state passed legislation from the late 1950s onwards designed to ‘keep alien Africans out of the towns so that industrial jobs would be open to local Africans only’. In 1958, the Foreign Migratory Workers Act (FMWA) was introduced to force foreign migrant workers out of urban spaces and reserve access to urban employment to indigenous Africans. It was effected in 1960 in Salisbury, 1962 in Umtali and 1963 in Bulawayo, remaining in place until 1979. In a 1961 labour survey, the Rhodesian National Farmers’ Union (RNFU) reported that farm employment of Nyasaland Africans had increased to about 22.9 per cent, with a preponderance of alien Africans going towards the eastern side of the colony and in the Karoi, Sinoia, Lomagundi and Umvukwes areas. Josiah Brownell indicates that this move to re-organise African labour had long been called for by right-wing politicians. Initially it was seen as a way to slow the African growth rate by limiting what are, in the USA, pejoratively referred to as ‘anchor babies’: the offspring of alien males and indigenous females; secondly, it was seen as a strategy to lower indigenous African unemployment in urban areas by forcing alien Africans to take up jobs in the countryside. This and other state efforts indeed reduced migrant labour and demographic hegemony in the urban areas such that, by 1975, migrants formed about 34 per cent of the workforce. Despite such state efforts, other dimensions further fuelled and buttressed the anti-Malawian sentiment.
Malawian Influence on Rhodesian Labour Politics
Tension and friction also arose because of the migrants’ dominance of early Rhodesian trade unionism and proto-nationalism, mainly from the 1920s and 1950s. From the onset, Malawian ‘proto-intellectuals’ efficiently used their mission education to mobilise against white dominance and colonial rule. Such protagonists used their privileged status to commandeer transnational social movements, mainly millenarianism, trade unionism and proto-nationalism south of the Zambezi, to the chagrin of the colonial state and indigenous Africans. Nyasas instigated and led various volatile episodes of resistance in Rhodesia, such as the millenarian agency of the Watchtower movement and the transformative politics of the Industrial Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU), and numerous historical labour protests, including the 1927 Shamva mine strike, the 1945 railway strike, the 1948 general strike and the 1959 Kariba strike in Rhodesia. Elliot Kamwana’s Watchtower movement inspired followers, mainly Nyasas, in Rhodesia through religious teachings in mining compounds and urban areas in the 1920s, with members castigating pass laws and taxes. As elsewhere in the region, the movement became a serious torment to capital and labour, leading to numerous arrests and deportation of the leaders, who were seen as harbingers of unrest.
The millenarian annoyance was supplemented simultaneously by Nyasa-led labour consciousness emerging from the shadows and pioneering activities of the remarkable Clements Kadalie and his ICU in South Africa. After much success in South Africa, Kadalie spread his influence beyond the Limpopo river, where he deployed a fellow Nyasa, Robert Sambo, in 1927, to establish a sister branch. Operating from his base in Bulawayo, Sambo, with the assistance of another Nyasa, John Mphamba, managed to irritate the establishment for five months and, by mid 1927, the movement had been effective enough for him to get deported back to Nyasaland. Added to this was the 1927 Shamva mine strike, which became an epitome of early Nyasa co-ordination that threatened the mining industry and jeopardised production. Eshmael Mlambo dubbed it ‘the first industrial action ever seen in the country’. Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni described it as ‘the first serious instance of African workers’ strike action in Rhodesia’. According to Phimister, about 3,500 African mine workers, mostly long-service migrants from Nyasaland, struck for higher wages carrying sticks, knobkerries, registration certificates, placards and tickets on the end of sticks during the September 1927 Shamva mine strike, culminating in the arrest, trial and deportation of 28 suspected Nyasa ring-leaders. The 1940s saw increased worker agitation, as revealed by the 1945 and 1948 Rhodesian general strikes, with Nyasas still at the centre of the unrests. These represented a ‘big landmark in the history of the Zimbabwean labour movement’.
Sporadic disturbances involving Nyasas continued to occur throughout the 1950s. In February 1954, another strike for better wages occurred at Wankie colliery, with about 60 Nyasas accused of collaborating with the employers, to the exasperation of their African workmates. More Nyasa notoriety was exuded during the 1959 Kariba Dam strike. Tensions erupted on 20 February 1959, following one of the worst accidents in the Kariba project’s history, which killed 14 Africans and 3 Europeans. An entire 6,000-strong labour force went on strike on 24 February demanding wage increases. Of these, 1,300 were from Nyasaland. This activism had unintended consequences and gained Malawian migrants a notorious identity, in the eyes of the Rhodesian regime, of being ringleaders and troublemakers who spread discontent among the passive, ‘happy’ Rhodesian ‘natives’. Such a reputation culminated largely in their persecution and deportation.
The dominance also fuelled tensions with the local trade union and nationalist elite, who saw migrant workers as a threat to their interests. Raftopoulos indicated that the local African elite disliked continued Nyasa hegemony, and this, over time, created tensions and animosity towards the immigrants. Such friction was worsened by migrant ethnic self-betterment associations (stokvels, kindred, homeboy burial societies). These ‘posed a problem for [labour and political] organisations trying to mobilise at a national level, and even those with the more modest aim of uniting Salisbury or Bulawayo’s residents’. Indigenous African elites felt that migrant societies were highly exclusionary. For instance, the president of the Bantu National Congress lamented that ‘the Nyasaland Africans in this colony wish to divide themselves from the rest by forming their own Congress … The reason … is difficult to understand, save to guess that it is the old enemy of the African, “Tribalism”‘. Charles Mzingeli of the Reformed Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (RICU) was more aggressive. He grumbled about ‘children playing with mud’, ‘Africans who are called kings’, but do nothing about low African wages; such ‘societies did not represent African workers, but were only there to play’. According to Murray, Mzingeli and other elite Rhodesian labour organisation and black leaders, such as Samkange and Nkomo, were strongly opposed to the Federation partly because the influx of foreign workers, particularly from Nyasaland, depressed wages and increased local African unemployment. These leaders treated foreign workers with suspicion, as they regarded them as a threat to their interests. Instead of trying to protect them, locals urged the government to repatriate them so that indigenous workers could replace them. The 1958 Urban Areas Commission report noted that ‘complaints over the unrestricted entry of these foreigners … have the effect of depressing wages and slowing up the advancement of the indigenous African’. As a result, when the liberation war came after 1966, hostilities towards people from the north had become conspicuously toxic and entrenched within the Rhodesian society, which readily fed into nationalists’ and guerrillas’ treatment and suspicion of migrant subjects as traitors.
The Second Chimurenga and the Exacerbation of Anti-Malawian Animosity
The anti-migrant hostility that had been brewing for years finally exploded during the Zimbabwean liberation struggle, dubbed the second Chimurenga/Umvukela. Labour migrants were overtly stereotyped as sell-outs throughout the war (1966-79), thereby setting the basis for their characterisation after independence. Timothy Scarnecchia and Jocelyn Alexander have each chronicled, in different contexts, how the term was adopted by the Zimbabwean nationalist movement, particularly ZANU(PF), to describe people perceived as betraying the nationalist struggle and guerrilla fighters to the Rhodesian forces. ‘Selling-out’ involved disclosing plans, strategies or ideas, not necessarily to the enemy but to an opposite camp. According to Heike Schmidt, ‘sell-outs’ were also called ‘bad-people’ or traitors, because they were seen as dangerous to their neighbours and to the struggle. People described as ‘sell-outs’ were thus in danger of being punished by the fighters. Migrants became prime sell-out suspects in the eyes of guerrilla fighters owing to the aforementioned long-standing tensions, but more precisely because of their perceived support for the colonial establishment during the war. The war further pushed the migrants to the peripheries as their characterisation became more detrimental and life-threatening.
Malawian migrants, just like the local peasants, entered into complex, contradictory, ambiguous relationships with the warring parties in order to survive a potentially dangerous period. Many were in a dilemma. The Rhodesian authorities often accused persons or their descendants from Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia of collaborating with the ‘terrorists’. On the other hand, nationalists and guerrillas frequently perceived migrants as sell-outs by virtue of their association with settler regimes and pre-war labour and nationalist tensions. Thus migrant experiences were complicated by rigid localised white domestic regimes and their citizenship/belonging, which conflicted with nationalist and guerrilla interests. Norma Kriger argues that, in a colonial society where the state is very important as an employer of the Africans and as a provider of services and infrastructure, but becomes an enemy, those Africans associated with the state become symbols of state collaboration. Those with weak rural links but strong links to white employers and the state were particularly vulnerable to being accused of being ‘sell-outs’.
As early as 1972, immigrants from Malawi, in particular, came into direct confrontation with the nationalists and guerrillas when a number of them supported the Pearce Commission. The 1972 Pearce Commission had been set up to measure the acceptability of the 1971 Anglo-Rhodesian Agreement, which buttressed the continuation of white rule with gradual concessions to the concept of majority rule. As explained by Robert Boeder, Malawians feared that ‘if majority rule comes to Rhodesia many of them would be forced to leave the country and for this reason some in 1972 supported the Pearce Commission settlement terms’. Gerald Chiocha from Chakari stated that ‘due to repatriation anxieties a number of us Malawians voted in favour of the Pearce Commission and this further antagonised our relationship with the nationalists and locals’. Posta Chitimbe noted that ‘Malawian migrants who supported the commission were trying to secure their stay in the country bearing in mind that insecurities over their residence had increased after 1965’.
Indeed, non-indigenous Africans had good reason to be concerned about their security of tenure in Rhodesia since the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) and its intended population control policies. The Ian Smith papers and studies by Brownell reveal that, in a bid to slow the African growth rate and to reduce indigenous African unemployment, Smith had threatened to deport African foreign labour. Such intentions were shown through the 1966 Closed Labour Areas Order, and the 1967 Rhodesian government’s ‘administrative action’ against alien Africans with less than 10 years’ service. All Malawians in Rhodesia were also required to be in possession of Malawian passports. This was followed by the amendment of the Africans Registration and Identification Act in 1972, making it possible for the administration to refuse to register or re-register any foreign African. No reasons were to be given for the refusal, and the alien had no recourse but to pack up and go home. Although the Pearce Commission was rejected, Malawians’ support exacerbated an already tumultuous relationship with the nationalist elite and guerrillas.
Malawian President Hastings Kamuzu Banda’s foreign policy in southern Africa also aggravated feelings towards Malawian diasporic communities. From the onset of Malawian independence in 1964, Kamuzu worked at a tangent to regional liberation movements, adopting a ‘neutral foreign policy’ towards his settler neighbours, primarily for diplomatic and economic benefits. He isolated Malawi by dragging the country to fraternise more with the detested Ian Smith regime in Rhodesia, apartheid South Africa and the Portuguese in Mozambique. Labour migration remained central in his foreign policy, which increasingly leaned towards South Africa, culminating in various agreements in 1965 and 1967 with the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association. This led to the removal of recruitment quotas and the regularisation of illegal Malawian workers in South Africa. Kamuzu’s double standards promoted white supremacy at the expense of the ideals of pan-Africanism and liberation of the southern African region. Unlike Kaunda in Zambia, Kamuzu’s Malawi literally turned its back on the liberation movements in Mozambique, Rhodesia and South Africa. Banda even shunned the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) meetings but almost every year patronised Commonwealth meetings convened by the UK. Kamuzu’s antithetical actions epitomised the sell-out identity condemned by Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) and Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) forces. As a result, Malawi and, by association, her migrant alien citizens became pariahs in the eyes of Zimbabwean nationalists and guerrillas who were fighting white rule in Rhodesia.
Meanwhile, the majority of these ‘alien natives’ worked on farms and mines, falling under a rigid localised white employer regime which Rutherford termed ‘domestic government’. Rutherford defines ‘domestic government’ as domestic in two senses, by officially promoting the ‘private’ over the ‘public’ domain: the rule of the farmer over that of state officials; and by administratively bestowing value upon paternalistic relations between male workers and their families and between farmers and ‘their’ workers. Most farm workers, therefore, ‘belonged to the white farmer’, operated under his ‘domestic government’ and were almost completely reliant on the white farm owner. Hartnack calls such form of rule a ‘welfarist’ governmental system, under which farm workers were provided with, essentially, everything including housing, education and health services, while the state funded (in part or whole) the salaries of teachers and health personnel. These systems of ‘domestic government’ came to be seen as a challenge to the local African population, who perceived the close, dependent relationship between migrant workers and their white employers as suspicious and traitorous. By virtue of association, migrant workers were thus seen as proxies of the Rhodesian government’s war effort.
For many, the war pitted their white Rhodesian masters against fellow oppressed black Zimbabwean kinsmen. Malawian migrants walked a tightrope: some became directly involved; others remained neutral, indifferent or passive. Since most migrants lived in compounds, it was difficult for them to engage with nationalists out of sight of white and/or state authorities. Speaking of this complex association between migrant workers and white settlers, informant James Asidi from Stratford farm in Trelawney pointed out that ‘it was a curse, a tragedy on our part because guerrillas were very suspicious of us and often victimised us’. Henry Banda Matekenya noted that ‘because we were working for the mzungu (white man), many locals and guerrillas treated us with suspicion and frequently accused us of selling out the struggle to our employers and the Rhodesian forces’. Ironically, Malawian migrants, who, prior to the war, were seen by the Rhodesian regime as labour agitators or ‘ring-leaders and trouble-makers’, became ‘men in the middle’, who had to grapple with the everyday risks of the conflict. In a way and as shall be shown below, the second Chimurenga saw many Malawians shifting identities, as exemplified by Jacob Dlamini’s Comrade September, from being pre-war insurgents (troublemakers) to traitors who supported the oppressive white regime after 1966.
‘Malawians’ in the Rhodesian Forces
One of the myths about Rhodesian bush war was that it was a white man’s war. Ideologically, it was, but the Rhodesian forces enlisted thousands of Africans to fight as soldiers in the Rhodesian African Rifles (RAR). Writing in his memoirs in 1978, Rhodesian soldier Nick Downie pointed this out.
In fact, 80% of the police and regular army is composed of black volunteers; of the 25,000 men on the ground at any one time, about half are Africans, excluding about 10,000 African auxiliary forces or voluntary trainees who owe their allegiance to one or other of the internal black leaders and are deployed in TTLs [Tribal Trust Land].
Of the 35,000 Africans actively engaged in military operations inside Rhodesia, two thirds were fighting for and were loyal to the Rhodesian government.
Migrants who, in the words of Edward Inga, a Malawian migrant and former Rhodesian forces soldier, ‘were predominantly Malawians and the Tsenga from Zambia and a few Mozambicans’, were among those who enlisted into the Rhodesian forces. Migrant Malawian association with the Rhodesian security sector goes back to the British South Africa Police era, when, for instance in 1938, at least 150 ‘alien natives’, mainly Angonis from Nyasaland, were in the police force. After the demobilisation of the Askaris at the end of the Second World War, migrants from Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia and Portuguese East Africa constituted 60-70 per cent of the Rhodesian police and army in the 1940s, dropping to about 25 per cent by the 1960s. It was common for colonial police and army forces in Africa to enlist migrant African men, as it was believed that lack of kinship and cultural ties would make them more willing to enforce colonial laws and payment of tax. Labour migrants joined because they were proletarians often already engaged in the colonial economy. When the ‘bush war’ came in the 1970s, Malawians and other migrants easily continued with the tradition of enlisting in the Rhodesian forces. Due to the lack of Rhodesian army records, actual figures of Malawians in the Rhodesian forces are difficult to ascertain and obtain.
Malawian migrants in the Rhodesian forces fought for varying reasons. However, due to the sensitivity of their role in the war, many have not always been willing to share their war experiences. Edward Inga enrolled as a soldier for the Rhodesian forces in 1974 after migrating to Rhodesia from Mangochi, Malawi, in 1960 as a youngster and worked as a farm cook for years. He trained at Bindura and was initially deployed to the Mhangura area. He then operated in the Kariba and Bumi areas for the whole of 1978 before going back to Mhangura until the end of the war. Like most of his migrant colleagues, he justified his choice and role in the war as a deed done in pursuit of economic survival:
I went to join the Rhodesian forces to get more money since, during the war … the army was paying much more … I am not ashamed of the choice because I came to Zimbabwe to look for money and the army at that moment provided what I was looking for. We were given many incentives, including food rations to feed our families that would last for months. Even though the task was dangerous, the Rhodesian army experience made life easier for many of us aliens, including indigenous African soldiers in the force.
Indeed, the main incentive for enlistment into RAR was the reasonable pay and the benefits: free accommodation, education and medical treatment. Having migrated to Rhodesia in 1957 and worked as a shopkeeper in Shamva, then as a messenger in Mvurwi and miner in Mtorashanga and Penhalonga mines, Square Kazembe was attracted by the Rhodesian forces’ incentives, enlisting in 1975 until end of the war. ‘We were looking for money and survival; the Rhodesian army paid better than the mines, so I went to Chinhoyi in June 1975 and joined the army. I was given a house in Chinhoyi as pension after demobilisation’, he said. Such material incentives led nationalists and guerrillas to label and accuse black Rhodesian forces’ soldiers as ‘mercenaries’, a term that resonated with the aforementioned pre-colonial encounters and Mugabe’s post-2000 rhetoric.
While material reasons for enlisting in the Rhodesian army were consistently important, they were hardly ever the only factor. According to Tim Stapleton, the distinctive appearance of uniformed African police and soldiers seemed to hold out to young people the promise of a bright future, full of excitement, prestige, adventure and purpose. Family traditions of service, associations of masculinity and patriotic ideals of wartime encouraged many to volunteer. Others joined out of fear of black rule. As was the case with the ‘yes’ vote during the Pearce Commission, people like Mkango (pseudonym), served in the RAR platoon because ‘our stay and safety as migrants was not guaranteed under black rule, considering the uncordial relationship many of us had with the nationalists’. Another Rhodesian army migrant ex-serviceman, Bottoman (pseudonym), was worried about ‘what a black government would do to their existence as foreigners considering all the investments (houses and families) we had made as ‘machona‘ [lost ones] in Zimbabwe’.
In the end, the nationalists and guerrillas viewed these black Rhodesian security personnel as rogue elements and traitors. ZANLA, in particular, sent out leaflets appealing to ‘all her prodigal sons’, the stray brothers or enemy puppet troops who were serving the white minority regime and were ‘victims of malicious propaganda’ to join the People’s war. Chimurenga songs warned those serving in the army, police and as other state functionaries ‘to watch out because they were sell-outs or mercenaries’. Mkango pointed out:
I was proud to serve in the Rhodesian army, but, because we were Africans in Rhodesian camouflage, guerrillas always labelled us as ‘enemies of the people’, such that, after independence, most of us former black Rhodesian army were ashamed and anxious to come out in the open about our status and role during the war.
This demonisation would be replayed during the post-2000 Zimbabwe crisis when ZANU(PF)’s partisan politics took precedence, leaving the so-called ‘totemless aliens’ at the margins of the Zimbabwean state.
Conclusion
Malawian migrant historical encounters with the pre-colonial Zimbabwean plateau, with Rhodesian settler capital, with trade unionism, urban demographics, gender and, finally, with the Zimbabwean armed struggle help to explain the prevalence of an anti-Malawian discourse in independent Zimbabwe. These antecedents provided a historical context through which we can digest and understand Mugabe’s ‘totemless aliens’ rhetoric and the subsequent victimisation of people of Malawian ancestry during the FTLRP and post-2000 elections. This discourse became more prevalent, especially with the convergence of belonging/citizenship politics and elections in the new millennium, when ZANU(PF)’s vision of citizenship became radically partisan and partial, dividing Zimbabweans into patriots, sell-outs, traitors or puppets of the west. This essay has demonstrated that earlier factors influenced this exclusionary ideology. In fact, the migrants’ deep involvement in Zimbabwe’s history, their early labour consciousness, proto-nationalism and the second Chimurenga all contributed to the emergence and sustenance of animosity towards them. As has been shown here, Malawians were largely on the wrong side of Zimbabwean history, as they infuriated or clashed with indigenous Zimbabweans for socio-economic reasons and on numerous political occasions. The resulting hostilities provided fodder in the present, as people of Malawian origin were portrayed as part of the regime-change agenda, who had diverted from the revolutionary ethos as espoused by ZANU(PF)’s understanding of ‘patriotic history’. Such deviation was, in the end, generally used to legitimate the marginalisation and victimisation of people from the north through displacement and denial of access to FTRLP land and participation in elections in the new millennium.