For over a decade African economies have been plagued by recurrent food shortages, economic decline and growing disparities between the living standards of rich and poor. To a large extent food shortages and rural impoverishment may be attributed to external shocks—world recession, oil price shocks, deteriorating terms of trade and mounting debt service obligations—compounded in the 1970s and early 1980s by drought and war. In addition government policies have exacerbated the effects of adverse environmental and world market trends, aggravating rather than alleviating food shortages and depressing rural output and incomes.

Social Institutions, and Access to Resources

Designing Agricultural Technology for African Women Farmers: Lessons from 25 Years of Experience

This article seeks to revise and re-apply the factor endowments perspective on African history. The propositions that sub-Saharan Africa was characterized historically by land abundance and labour scarcity, and that the natural environment posed severe constraints on the exploitation of the land surplus, are broadly upheld. Important alterations are suggested, however, centred on the seasonality of labour supply, Ruf's concept of 'forest rent', and, for precolonial economies, the role of fixed capital. This revised endowments framework is then applied in order to explore the long-term dynamics of economic development in Africa, focusing on how the economic strategies of producers and political authorities created specific paths of change which shifted the production possibility frontiers of the economies concerned, and ultimately altered the very factor ratios to which the strategies had been responses.

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Resources, techniques, and strategies south of the Sahara: revising the factor endowments perspective on African economic development, 1500–2000

The debate over land reform in Africa is embedded in evolutionary models, in which it is assumed landholding systems are evolving into individualized systems of ownership with greater market integration. This process is seen to be occurring even without state protection of private land rights through titling. Gender as an analytical category is excluded in evolutionary models. Women are accommodated only in their dependent position as the wives of landholders in idealized 'households'. This paper argues that gender relations are central to the organization and transformation of landholding systems. Women have faced different forms of tenure insecurity, both as wives and in their relations with wider kin, as landholding systems have been integrated into wider markets. These cannot be addressed while evolutionary models dominate the policy debate. The paper draws out these arguments from experience of tenure reform in Tanzania and asks how policy-makers might address these issues differently.

Women, Wives and Land Rights in Africa: Situating Gender Beyond the Household in the Debate Over Land Policy and Changing Tenure Systems

The Roots of Rural Poverty in Central and Southern Africa

This paper explores some of the major methodological problems associated with the study of the history of the family in Africa. It sets out to explore the problem of the unit of analysis, concluding that the historian must be careful to distinguish between idealized family forms and the reality of family structures. Using both historical and contemporary examples from southern Malawi the paper explores this problem further by analysing the role of the matrilineage vis-a-vis the household over time.Both oral and written sources specifically concerned with the history of the family tend to emphasize the formal structure of kinship relations and it is difficult to know how these relate to the facts of social and economic organization. Even using present-day evidence it is difficult to integrate cultural perceptions of kinship and family relations with realities – in particular with the economic realities, which may change much faster than cultural norms. In the final section of the paper it is suggested that the nearest we can get to a knowledge of the history of the family, avoiding the problems of ideology and the drawbacks of structural and evolutionary models, is to approach the subject ‘sideways’. By studying other institutions and relationships which impinge on family structures, we may get closer to defining the boundaries of these structures. This approach is illustrated using the example of chinjira - a non-kin-based relationship between women which exists in parts of southern Malawi. A study of chinjira indirectly demonstrates both the strength and the limits of kinship relations.

Which Family? Problems in the Reconstruction of the History of the Family as an Economic and Cultural Unit

'I have seen a spirit of unchaste love which causes many to do things which they regret afterwards; in shape it was like a dolphin and absorbs the intelligence of its victims, also creates unlawful passions. Certain spirit power, I will not say that of Mbona, has been so strong at Chikwawa as to move my feet across the ground against my will, it also twisted my legs and took them away from under the table while at meals on several occasions. To me it appears that the stronger and purer in essential quality the individual is, so in proportion will he have influence, not only amongst the native and climatic conditions here, but also the world over. . .' R. R. Racey, Chikwawa, 19041

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03057078308708058

Idioms of madness: Zomba Lunatic Asylum, Nyasaland, in the colonial period.

This article sets out to describe the various food-producing and income generating patterns found in rural households in the Zomba district of Malawi. The study focuses on women but it necessarily links women closely to their own households and the wider family groupings, characterised by matrilineal inheritance and matrilocal marriage, of which they are part. ' Over 90 per cent of Malawians live in the rural areas and the country's people are overwhelmingly dependent on smallholder agriculture for food. Wage employment and exports are also provided very largely by the agricultural sector. People in Zomba, one of the twenty four districts in the country, have perhaps greater access to urban wages and markets as the former colonial and post-colonial capital is situated at the centre of the district and remains a relatively busy market, commercial, administrative and educational centre. But much of the district is rural and it includes a wide range of agricultural environments and cropping patterns. Zomba is not one of the Malawian districts in which smallholders produce a very considerable surplus for export, but local farmers, working intensively on small plots of land, still mainly with hoes, manage to produce and sometimes sell a wide range of crops. As a recent study by Kydd and Christiansen has shown, the economy of Malawi has undergone important structural changes since independence.2 Not least as a result of government policy in the spheres of pricing, loans, land expropriation and protection, marketed output from the estate sector has overtaken that from the

Food production and income generation in a matrilineal society: rural women in Zomba, Malawi

The mechanics of food production by peasant cultivators have received relatively little attention from historians of colonial Africa, and yet a knowledge of food production systems and the labour they require is crucial to any understanding of rural change and stratification in the colonial period. On the Shire Highlands of Southern Malawi, ecological disturbance and the alienation of land in the early years of the twentieth century meant that an intensification of labour on food production was needed if hunger was to be avoided. The differential success of various groups in holding on to their family labour was a major factor making for economic differentiation in this period. Full-scale famine was avoided by the ability of some groups to adopt new cropping patterns, intensify labour, and thus continue to produce a food surplus. A degree of land shortage could be accommodated as long as labour could be intensified on the available land. In the Upper Shire valley at the same time, there was little shortage of land, but the concern for food security there was important in determining the outcome of the introduction of cotton as a cash-crop. The attainment of food security in this area, which was prone to drought, involved the deployment of family labour on food production over much of the year, including the planting of second crops and back-up crops in the dry season. The introduction of cotton was largely a failure because the returns did not compensate for the loss of labour on food production.

Megan Vaughan

Papers

Which Family? Problems in the Reconstruction of the History of the Family as an Economic and Cultural Unit

Idioms of madness: Zomba Lunatic Asylum, Nyasaland, in the colonial period.

Food production and income generation in a matrilineal society: rural women in Zomba, Malawi

Food Production and Family Labour in Southern Malawi: the Shire Highlands and Upper Shire Valley in the Early Colonial Period*