Child and youth labour on the Nyasaland plantations, 1890–1953

Abstract

Evidence from labour censuses and from the reports of the Labour Branch of the Native Administration Department suggest that ‘young persons’ constituted a large section of the plantation labour force in Nyasaland from the mid‐1920s. This paper argues that the employment of children, youth and women in casual wage labour stemmed from the wider problem of labour mobilisation and was compounded by seasonal variability in the flow of adult male labour and the volatile environment in which the country's agricultural economy operated. From the 1930s, right up to the early 1950s, the Nyasaland planters could not afford a large and regular wage‐labour force. The tendency was therefore to rely on cheap categories of casual labour, predominantly that of children, women and immigrants from Mozambique. What was particular about child labour during the colonial period is that it was easily accessible. The majority of the children who worked on the European plantations in the Shire Highlands were drawn from the tenant families already resident on the plantations, and from the villages surrounding them. Those from the tenant families were born, brought up and cultured into plantation life and constituted a reserve from which future adult workers could be drawn. To day, child wage labour is still prevalent on most tea estates in the Shire Highlands.