Thangata
From the 1920s, the name thangata was extended to situations where tenants were given seeds to grow set quotas of designated crops instead of providing cash or labour.
Both forms of thangata were abolished in 1962, but both before and after independence and up to the present, the term has been used for short-term rural casual work, often on tobacco estates, which is considered by workers to be exploitative.
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.
[3] The 1870s and 1880s in Malawi were unsettled, and local chiefs sought to gain European protection from their enemies by granting the settlers what they probably considered was only a right to cultivate vacant land.
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.
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.
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 that opposed the measure.
There was no place for crafts or skills in thangata: it reduced all tenants to unskilled manual labour, and was likened to a form of serfdom.
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.
[12][13] Some smaller estates failed, but others were saved from collapse by a scheme that was first adopted by one large owner, The British Central Africa Company Ltd.
Instead of using direct labour, it issued seeds to tenants, who 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 tenants' resistance included clearing land for cultivation on the undeveloped parts of the company's estates and refusing to pay taxes or attend courts.
The leaseholders engaged African sharecroppers under contract to grow one annual tobacco crop at a time, the "visiting tenant" system.
Ithad 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 the visiting tenants had permanent homes away from the places where they grew their crop.
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.
Tobacco estates are now the largest employers of ganyu workers, who may stay for the growing season or be visiting tenants, or they may travel daily.
Labour tenancy and sharecropping continued to exist in other less developed parts of Southern and Central Africa in the 20th century but without the same social and political impact as in Nyasaland.
[30] In the Congo Free State, forced labour amounting to virtual slavery was widely used by the government on public works and to compel Africans to gather ivory or wild rubber.
