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Labour in Nyasaland: an assessment of the 1960 railway workers’ strike

1988; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 14; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/03057078808708174

1465-3893

John McCracken,

South African History and Culture

No period in the modern history of Nyasaland (present day Malawi) has received such intensive study as the half dozen years from the late 1950s to the early 1960s, marked by the break-up of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Yet while the rise of nationalism, the growth of the Nyasaland African Congress, the activities of an embittered peasantry and the Byzantine manoeuverings of territorial and metropolitan politicians have been charted in obsessive detail, one significant area remains untouched. I Unlike in Southern and Northern Rhodesia, where illuminating studies have been made of the history of African labour, the role of workers in Nyasaland remains almost totally neglected.2 Robert Rotberg refers fleetingly to the activities of Aleke Banda in 1959 as a member of the Nyasaland Trades' Union Congress.3 Philip Short has an interesting paragraph chronicling the destruction of the left-wing National Council of Labour by the Malawi Congress Party in 1962.4 But in no published account that I have read is even one sentence devoted to the outbreak of worker militancy in Blantyre-Limbe from the late 1940s, culminating in the railway