The Nyasaland famine of 1949 was a famine that occurred in the Shire Highlands in the Southern Province of Nyasaland (now Malawi) and also in a part of the Central Province in 1949. Its effects extended into the early part of 1950. The immediate cause was severe droughts in December 1948 to January 1949 and in March 1949 that destroyed much of the maize crop on which the people of the affected areas relied during its main growing season. This followed two years of erratic rainfall and poor harvests which had depleted the reserves in farmers’ granaries. The effect of crop failure was intensified by the failure of the colonial government to maintain a suitably large emergency grain reserve, delays in importing sufficient relief supplies and its requirement that most of the relief provided was paid for by its recipients. The official death toll from starvation was some 200 people, which may be an underestimate, and it excludes those dying of diseases exacerbated by malnutrition. There is significant disagreement on the underlying causes of the famine. At first, it was blamed on over-intensive cultivation causing soil erosion and on growing tobacco rather than food crops. Later, colonial underdevelopment through land expropriation, levying rents and taxes on African farmers and underpaying them for their labour and produce was suggested. More recently, attention has been focussed to the uneven economic and social development of the protectorate in the 1930s and 1940s. This created, firstly, an increased number of employees and tradesmen, who needed to buy their food but who were dependent on the uncertain surpluses arising the system of subsistence agricultural because few farmers produced food primarily for the market rather than their own consumption, and governmental marketing organisations that, far from providing incentives for the production of maize, underpaid those farmers that did grow it commercially. In addition, a range of social changes created an underclass of those without adequate access to farmland or secure employment, vulnerable in times of food shortage: this included many women.
Agriculture and climate
Rain-fed agriculture Throughout the colonial period, the main subsistence crop of the upland areas that formed much of Nyasaland was maize, which had been introduced from Mozambique, probably starting from the 18th century, and which largely supplanted the previous staple cereals sorghum and millet in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By the end of the colonial era, maize accounted for 60% of the areas planted with food crops, providing Nyasaland's inhabitants with over half their calories. Very few cattle were kept in the Shire Highlands, although many smallholders kept a few sheep or goats and most had at least some chickens. The traditional maize grown in 1949 was late-maturing variety, requiring at least five to eight centimetres of rainfall in each of the first three months of growth, and a further month to ripen. The Shire Highlands generally meets these conditions throughout the normal five-month growing season but, as maize cultivation was mostly rain-fed, variations in the annual rainfall led to substantial fluctuation in crop production Most of Nyasaland's rain was generated when the Intertropical Convergence Zone passed over the country, usually between November one year and March the next year, but the amount of rainfall varied under the influence of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation and other climate anomalies. Regional climatic studies have identified an intense episode of drought throughout Southern Africa between 1946 and 1949. This caused widespread famine in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia in 1947 and less severe droughts in Nyasaland in 1947 and 1948 that led to poor harvests in those years. The severe famine in southern Malawi in 1949 was probably the last phase of this episode of drought.
Access to land In the 1940s, Nyasaland smallholders relied on hand hoeing, and a farming family which included two able-bodied adults whose main crop was maize could cultivate 4.5 to 5 acres of land (2.0 hectares) a year; single women were barely able to farm one hectare without assistance. Around 1949, average maize yields were 0.4 ton to an acre (equivalent to 0.9 tonne a hectare). Pressure on access to land increased from the 1940s: even those with access to sufficient arable land might suffer seasonal hunger before harvests, and occasionally endure more serious food shortages in years of inadequate rainfall. Other family units with less land or labour available were frequently at risk of hunger. About 70% of African smallholders in the Shire Highlands occupied Native Trust Land, for which they paid no rent. This amounted to around 50% of the land in that area and, as the local population increased, Native Trust Land became congested, and much of it was used for almost continuous maize monocropping without crop rotation or fallow. Only those with larger holdings could grow significant amounts of cash crops, and tobacco, the one cash crop widely grown with government encouragement in the Central Province, was less suited to the wetter Shire Highlands, so its cultivation was not encouraged there. The other 30% of African farmers were tenants on European-owned estates. These estates occupied almost 700,000 acres (280,000 hectares) in the Shire Highlands or about 50% of the available land, including much of the most fertile land in this area. Estate tenants owed rent, originally satisfied by a form of labour service called thangata, but by 1949 it was normally paid either in cash or by delivering specified quantities of tobacco or other cash crops to the landowner. Although there was a significant amount of available land on these estates and rural landlessness was rare, the obligation to produce cash crops to pay rent reduced the areas of land and amount of labour that could be devoted to growing the tenants' own food crops.
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