The Politics of the Migrant Labor Remittance System in British Central Africa, 1930s–1960s

Abstract

Guided mainly by archival data and using the Nyasaland-Southern Rhodesia nexus, the article gives insights into the interface between imperial social engineering schemes and African worker consciousnesses by examining the politics of the migrant labor remittance system in British Central Africa from the 1930s to the 1960s. Essentially the article looks at two issues: the nature of the remittance system and the resultant trans-Zambezian African labor encounters/reactions to the scheme. Legitimated and framed around the quest to regulate labor recruitment and the so-called need to provide economic safety nets for the remaining vulnerable African families and returning laborers, Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland instituted an intricate remittance scheme driven by other ulterior motives; with the former seeking to monopolize the cheap inter-territorial labor against fierce South African competition, and the latter pursuing revenue generation from its only major lucrative export (labor). I argue herein that the remittance system was one of the numerous exploitative grand utopian state social engineering schemes that threatened and eroded African financial autonomy, and control of their meagre hard-earned colonial wages. Consequently, many migrants, particularly, Malawian African laborers (the Nyasas), detested this paternalistic and dogmatic system which was formalized and designed around labor alliances, and rigid colonial infrastructural schematics and paraphernalia, involving native labor officers, the postal system, registration certificates (passes), workbooks, and white employers. Inundated by perennial challenges and glitches, Nyasas, either resisted the system or devised ways of circumventing the process by informally remitting money home, much to the chagrin of the colonial state. The article underscores that these reactions to the colonial remittance system were part of the broader African worker consciousness done in pursuit of African economic self-interests/emancipation; an element that, however, remains largely undocumented and contextualized within the African economic and labor historiography.