UNDERDEVELOPMENT IN MALAWI: THE MISSIONARY CONTRIBUTION

Two GENERALIZATIONS which have rarely been challenged by historians of Central Africa concern the particular character of Malawi's economy and the special influence of Scottish missionaries.' The particular character of the economy can be demonstrated by a few simple figures. Not only was Malawi in 1972 the third poorest country in the world in terms of gross national product per capita; she was still acting as a labour reserve for the farms and mines of Southern Africa, as she had done for at least sixty years. Over 300,000 Malawians out of a total population of 4,500,000 were working in South Africa and Rhodesia-nearly 124,000 of them in mines in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Migrant labour remittances were estimated at nearly ?30 million, making this form of capital inflow second in importance to tobacco and ahead of tea, the two most successful cash crops. Though African-grown produce had expanded sufficiently in the inter-war years to rival export crops grown on European estates, the central function of Malawi and particularly of the Northern Province remained unaltered. Malawi was underdeveloped in the sense that her economy had been restructured to meet the demands of the Southern African metropole and, in consequence, the control of her economy was no longer in any meaningful sense in the hands of her own inhabitants. Labour from Malawi contributed to the expansion of commercial farming and mining in Rhodesia and South Africa at the expense of developments within Malawi itself.2 As for the influence of Scottish Missions (the Livingstonia Mission of the Free Church of Scotland, founded in 1874 and the Blantyre Mission of the Church of Scotland established a year later), opinion is somewhat divided. In opposition to those who have stressed the political and economic 'progress' resulting from the activities of the Presbyterians, Chanock and Linden have argued that the extent of the change they introduced was limited and that other,