Situated in Southern Malawi, to the east of the Great Rift Valley and the river Shire, the Shire Highlands form a ‘plateau’ region, as the missionary-explorer David Livingstone described it, mainly at an elevation of between 2000 and 3500 feet (610–1067 m). Hailed as a well-watered and ‘delightful country’ by his compatriot John Buchanan (1885: 41), the plateau is surrounded by a range of hills and high mountains that form a crescent to the west and south of the Lake Chilwa basin, which itself lies on the plateau of 2000 ft.

Although archaeological evidence has indicated that the Shire Highlands has been inhabited by humans from the very earliest times, when Buchanan and other Europeans settled in the highlands towards the end of the nineteenth century—for it was deemed to be a healthy landscape for Europeans—it was described as ‘well-wooded’ and as largely ‘unoccupied’.

This book aims to provide a history of the people of the Shire Highlands—both Africans and Europeans—from the late nineteenth century until the end of the colonial period. Written from an anthropological perspective, the study is offered as a contribution to environmental history, in that it seeks to explore the inter-relationship between the people of the Shire Highlands and the natural world.

When in 1980 I gave a talk on ‘Changing Views of Nature’ to the Wildlife Society of Malawi (Morris 1996b [1982]: 25–36) the number of books then available that dealt specifically with people’s conceptions of nature (or wildlife) could almost be counted on the fingers of one hand, and environmental history had hardly emerged as a field of study (but see Collingwood 1945; Glacken 1967; Nash 1967; Barbour 1973). The famous introduction to history by Edward Carr, What is History? (1964) hardly mentions the natural world, and the same could be said for many introductions to social anthropology available when I was a student. As far as most philosophers, anthropologists and historians were concerned, nature was simply the existential backcloth that could be safely ignored in studies of the human life. There were, of course, notable and important exceptions. The geographer Clarence Glacken (1967), for example, wrote a superb historical account of changing attitudes towards nature—specifically the earth as the ‘abode’ of humans—within Western culture from the ancient Greeks to the end of the eighteenth century. The Annales school of French historiography, associated with such pioneer scholars as Lucien Febvre, Fernand Braudel and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, stressed the crucial importance of the natural environment—particularly with respect to landscapes, climate and disease epidemics—in understanding the vicissitudes of human life (Braudel 1980; Worster 1988: 291; Burke 1990). Likewise, in the United States, what has been described as the frontier and Western school of American historiography—scholars such as Frederick Jackson Turner, Walter Prescott Webb and James Malin—explored the impact of human settlement on the Great Plains of North America. They thereby initiated an ecological approach to history (Worster 1988: 291; Hughes 2006: 35).

Within anthropology, the pioneer figure is Julian Steward—whose work often tends to be ignored by environmental historians. Steward’s cultural ecology sought to explore the adaptation of human cultures to their natural environments and to advance a theory of multilinear cultural evolution (Steward 1955; Kerns 2003). Nor must we forget the illuminating studies of urban life by Patrick Geddes and Lewis Mumford which came to encapsulate an ecological approach to human life. As Mumford famously expressed it: ‘All thinking worthy of the name must be ecological.’ Their approach came to be known as social ecology; an approach further developed by the eco-socialist Murray Bookchin and the microbiologist René Dubos. Although both these scholars were seminal figures in the development of the environmental movement in the 1970s, they also tend to be by-passed by environmental historians (Mumford 1970: 393; Morris 2012; cf. Hughes 2006; Radkau 2014).

During the 1970s a growing awareness of an impending ecological crisis—deforestation, the adverse impact of industrial farming, global warming, the pollution of rivers, oceans and the atmosphere, the wanton destruction of wildlife and the loss of biodiversity—led to the emergence of a world-wide and diverse ‘environmental movement’ (Radkau 2014). Significantly, it was also during this period that environmental history emerged and blossomed as a field of academic study, and the writings of the following scholars (among many others) are particularly noteworthy: Carl Sauer, Donald Worster, Alfred Crosby, William Cronan, Roderick Nash, William Beinart, Carolyn Merchant and Richard Grove (Worster 1988; Hughes 2006).

It is common for such environmental historians to take a global perspective, and to specifically focus on such important environmental factors (or issues) as climate change, deforestation, famines, fire, or the impact of infectious diseases on human social life. In this study, however, I shall adopt a much more modest approach. Although we shall touch upon or explore several of the above topics, the study will be concerned only with one particular region—the Shire Highlands—and will focus specifically on people’s relationship to the land—its soils, its vegetation and its wildlife. We shall thus be centrally concerned with the nature and changing dynamics of the region’s agrarian economy, and especially the complex and changing relationships between the colonial state, European planters and African subsistence farmers with respect to land issues in the Shire Highlands. Throughout the study I try not to lose sight of the fact that people in the Shire Highlands, along with their societies and culture, are an integral part of a wider ecological system—a natural world that is complex, diverse and continually undergoing change.

As with my other studies, this book, and my researches, is based upon and informed by a philosophy of evolutionary (or historical) naturalism. I thus reject the nihilistic ethos of postmodernism and the neo-Kantian idealism that pervades much of contemporary scholarship, and affirm a realist metaphysics—an understanding that the natural world exists independently of human cognition; an ontology that can be described either as emergent materialism (Bunge 2001: 73) or dialectical naturalism (Bookchin 1990: 29–30); and an epistemology that expresses both an ecological sensibility and the salience of human agency. I fully endorse, then, the ‘dual heritage’ of anthropology in combining hermeneutics—the interpretive understanding (verstehen) of cultural phenomena, and empirical science in seeking to explain socio-cultural life through causal (historical) analysis. I therefore reject the two extremes—‘textualism’ (postmodernism) that denies any empirical science and tends to completely by-pass the integrity and agency of the natural world, and ‘positivism’ or reductive materialism which tends to oblate or downplay cultural meanings and human values. Thus, like Franz Boas, I conceive of anthropology as a historical science, concerned not only with understanding the meaning of social–cultural phenomena—past and present—but also seeking to know, through causal analysis, ‘how it came into being’ (Boas 1940: 305; Morris 2000: 2–13, 2014 [1997]: 26–56).

In his seminal studies of the agrarian history of the Lower Shire Valley in Malawi, which the present study complements, Elias Mandala (1990, 2005) suggests, following the palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould, a dialectic between two district conceptions of time. These are: ‘cyclical time’, which is reflected in recurring seasonal events and the agricultural cycle, which Mandala felt was the dominant conception in the lives of the peasants of the Lower Shire Valley; and linear time, ‘time’s arrow’, reflected in conceptions of time as an irreversible sequence of unique events—such as a particular famine (2005: 15). Both conceptions of time, of course, are expressed in all human communities, as well as in the present study. Time, as many scholars have stressed, is a relative concept, and only has meaning in relation to specific material entities or events—whether natural or social (Bunge 2001: 10).

In this book I focus neither on cyclic nor on linear time, but rather on ‘time as history’, on socio-cultural evolution as envisaged by Steward and Bruce Trigger (1998) and on time as involving historical processes. I thus explore the development of specific social institutions—the origins and evolution of the colonial state and the plantation economy, particularly the development of the thangata system, tobacco farming and the tea industry, and thus the subsequent decline of the ivory and slave trade and the power of the Yao chiefdoms. I also discuss the Chilembwe rising of 1915, and offer reflections on the various causes of the rebellion—psychological, social and economic. Finally, I explore the emergence of a conservation ethic in colonial Malawi—relating to wildlife, forests (Brachystegia woodland) and soil conservation—and the eventual eruption in the 1950s of a peasant resistance movement against both the thangata system (of labour rent) and the state-imposed conservation projects.

The Shire Highlands has always been of key significance in the history of Malawi. Highlighted by David Livingstone during the era of the slave trade, Zomba in the highlands was selected by Harry Johnston to be the capital of the colonial state—initially known as British Central Africa, then, in 1907, as the Nyasaland protectorate. During the nineteenth and early twentieth century there was a large influx of Yao and Lomwe people from Mozambique into the highlands and, as we explore below, it was in the Shire Highlands that a plantation economy developed. This involved the alienation of large tracts of land to European companies and settlers, the imposition of the thangata system and the cultivation of coffee, cotton, tobacco and tea, mainly employing tenant labour. Significant, too, was the fact that the Church of Scotland mission was established in Blantyre in 1876, and that the township that formed subsequently became the commercial capital of the protectorate. The Shire Highlands was thus always at the centre of events—whether economic or political—involving the colonial state and the complex relationships between colonial officials, the European planting community and African subsistence farmers throughout the colonial period.

It is worth making a note here on the geographical coverage and the naming of the Shire Highlands.

Although professional biologists, ever eager to find endemic species, often describe Mulanje Mountain or the Lake Chilwa basin as if they were not a part of the Shire Highlands, it is worth emphasizing that geologically, ecologically—in respect to flora and fauna—and in terms of social history, the districts (and mountains) of Zomba, Blantyre, Thyolo and Mulanje as well as the Lake Chilwa basin and the Phalombe plain all form a part of the Shire Highlands as a plateau region. This was certainly how the early writers Buchanan (1885) and Harry Johnston (see map 1897: 188) envisaged the Shire Highlands—as a unique highland landscape. This accords with my own conception.

For some reason, perhaps to affirm his political radical...