Thangata

Origins

The term “thangata” has had several meanings in Malawi in the last 120 years, and its traditional or pre-colonial use was very different from its uses in colonial and modern times. The word exists in the Chewa and the related Mang'anja languages, and its first pre-colonial meaning was “help” or “to assist”, in the sense of freely-given reciprocal help such as neighbours might give each other building huts or clearing fields.^[1] It also had the meaning of the agricultural work that a member of the village community did for his chief. The ownership of land in much of Malawi was vested in the community, not individuals. Traditional leaders acted as trustees over communal land, and granted the right to use it to individuals in their communities. By custom, these leaders received in gifts in kind or labour from those in their community who had benefitted. This was also called thangata.^[2] When communal land was plentiful, community leaders could not demand thangata, but once it became scarcer in the colonial period, and particularly after the introduction of Indirect rule on 1933, the chiefs could impose a condition of thangata work on any grant. In the last two or three decades, chiefs have begun to require cash sums or rents to allow the use of communal land, but these cash payments are not called thangata.^[3]

In early colonial Nyasaland

Modern-day view of a tea plantation near Mulanje

The 1870s and 1880s in Malawi were unsettled, and local chiefs sought to gain European protection from their enemies by granting settlers what they probably considered was only a right to cultivate vacant land. Soon after the British Central Africa Protectorate was proclaimed in 1891, these Europeans secured legal ownership of this land from the protectorate administration. The new owners also claimed all rights that the traditional leaders had or were thought to possess, asserting that thangata work was an obligation that the landlord could impose on tenants. In the early colonial period, thangata took on a new meaning of performing labour in lieu of rent.^[4] In the early years of the protectorate, the estates established in under-populated areas needed workers to establish plantations. Few Africans were resident on estate lands, and some of those who remained left when labour rents were introduced. New workers, who were often migrants from Mozambique, were encouraged to move onto estates and grow their own crops, but were required to pay rent and Hut tax, usually satisfied by two months’ labour a year at this time.^[5] Before 1905, relatively little land on the estates was planted, as the owners were experimenting with a variety of crops. However, from 1905, cotton was successfully grown in commercial quantities. Cotton has a 5 or 6 month growing season, throughout which it needed much labour for a successful result. Between 1910 and 1925, tobacco was also grown in plantations and, like cotton it required a great deal of labour to grow successfully. As tenancies were based on verbal contracts, tenants had little or no chance to dispute the owners’ interpretations of them. On several estates, the obligations of labour tenants were extended, sometimes to a total of four or five months a year for thangata and Hut tax, much of this in the growing season leaving tenants with little time to grow food. As the Crown lands near the estates were already crowded, and as most of estate tenants were migrants from Mozambique with no claim to communal land, they had little option but to stay. In this situation thangata came to mean forced labour.^[6]

Attempted reform and opposition

The Nyasaland High Court in 1903 exempted the original inhabitants of estates from thangata and gave them some security. Legislation allowing other tenants to pay rent rather than thangata, and for cash payment if they performed more than the required thangata was enacted in 1908, but not implemented. The harshness of thangata was at least one of the reasons underlying the 1915 uprising led by John Chilembwe. Following this revolt, a new attempt to abolish thangata in favour of cash rent was made, but it failed because of the political influence of the estate owners. The thangata system was a bar to progress and impoverished people by limiting the amount of time they could work for themselves. There was no place for crafts or skills in thangata: reduced all tenants to unskilled manual labour, and was likened to a form of serfdom.^[7][8] Even after Chilembwe’s revolt, the labour obligation on many estates was little modified, sometimes amounting to six months for thangata and rent. Although some abuses were curtailed, others such as equating a month of thangata to 30 days (or five weeks of six days’ work), and requiring the wives of absent migrant workers, widows and single women to work in breach of custom, persisted. However, by 1918 most cotton, and by 1925 most tobacco, was not grown on estates by direct labour, but by smallholders on Crown lands. As the demand for estate labour declined in the 1920s, the owners claimed that, as they had insufficient work for their tenants to meet their thangata obligations, they had become rent-free squatters.^[9][10]

In later colonial Nyasaland

Some smaller estates failed, but others were saved from collapse by a scheme first adopted by one large owner, The British Central Africa Company Ltd. Instead using of direct labour, it issued seeds to tenants so they could grow cotton and tobacco under supervision, and sell their crops to the planters at low prices. This system was formalised in legislation, the 1928 Natives on Private Estates Ordinance, which modified thangata by allowing rents to be paid in cash, in a fixed quantity of acceptable crops or by direct labour. The true value of the crop, usually tobacco, given in lieu of rent greatly exceeded the cash rent. Estate landlords also benefited from restrictions on smallholders growing tobacco. Although the estates now largely acted as brokers for their tenants’ produce, and the name thangata, sometimes “tobacco thangata” after its commonest form was applied to rent in kind, the older form of labour thangata persisted on tea estates, and elsewhere if the owner wished to grow crops through direct labour.^[11][12]

It was estimated that about 9% of Malawi’s Africans lived on estates in 1911: in 1945, it was about 10%. In the latter year, the number of residents on estates was about 173,000 in 49,000 families.^[13] In the 1940s and early 1950s, there were tensions between estate owners and tenants over evictions and the tenants’ wish to sell produce of their choice in local markets, not through the owner. The expansion of tea-planting led to a shortage of African labour, which became acute after 1945. The British Central Africa Company Ltd had formerly relied on labour tenants for most of its workforce, but in 1946 its local Manager complained that it was unable to enforce unpopular thangata agreements or Sunday working although it threatened many tenants with eviction.^[14] There was a further crisis in 1952-3 when the British Central Africa Company tried to increase tenants’ rents substantially, against the advice of the Nyasaland government. A number of tenants resisted the increase, and the company issued eviction notices. The tenants' resistance included clearing land for cultivation on the undeveloped parts of the company's estates and refusing to pay taxes or attend courts. Riots broke out in Cholo in August 1953, leading to eleven dead and seventy-two injured.^[15] The tensions were lessened by government land purchases of former estates, so by 1962, the number of estate residents had been reduced to 9,000 families. In 1962, the 1928 Ordinance was replaced by a 1962 Africans on Private Estates Ordinance that granted tenants security of tenure and abolished all forms of thangata requiring labour or the production of designated crops, replacing them with cash rents.^[16]

Although tenants produced tobacco on many estates, by 1935, 70% of the national tobacco crop was grown in the Central Region, at first by Africans on Crown land, later by sharecroppers under contract to the holders of leased land for one crop at a time, the “visiting tenant” system. The “visiting tenant” system had some similarities to estate tenancies in the Shire Highlands (called thangata, whether the rent was satisfied in labour or produce), but it was distinct as visiting tenants had permanent homes away from the places where they grew their crop. Like estate tenants, visiting tenants were underpaid for their crop because they were forced to sell it to the landowner.^[17] Although it was originally distinct from thangata, in 1963 shortly before independence, Hastings Banda, as Minister of Agriculture fiercely attacked the visiting tenant system and equated it to the hated thangata. Despite this rhetoric, when thangata was abolished in 1962, a temporary exemption was given for visiting tenants in the Central Region. However, this use represented a further extension of the term thangata.^[18]

In post-colonial Malawi

By the late 1960s, politicians of the ruling Malawi Congress Party were involved in tobacco growing on the former European estates that the colonial government had bought, and which were sold or leased to the party elite after independence. Further elite-run estates were later created on previously communal lands. By 1990, there were 675,000 registered estate tenants with little security, and another 580,000 “squatters” lived on surplus land with no security, forming a pool of casual labour. Few tenants or squatters grew all their own food and most relied on casual paid labour or food-for-work arrangements on the estates to supplement what they could grow.^[19] The preferred term for short-term rural casual work paid for in cash or in kind (usually food) is ganyu. The term "Ganyu" is said to derive from the Portuguese "ganho" (sometimes spelled "ganyao") meaning something gained or a bonus.^[20][21] It originally denoted food or beer given as appreciation for neighbours when they worked on another’s fields, then the work a poor person did for food or cash for more prosperous neighbour. Today tobacco estates are the largest employers of ganyu workers. These may stay for the growing season like visiting tenants, or travel in daily. Larger estates may pay the minimum wage; smaller estates usually only give food. These arrangements are sometimes called thangata, as in the 2007 documentary “Thangata: social bondage and big tobacco in Malawi”.^[22][23]