This book aims to reconstruct the history of a famine which took place in Malawi (then Nyasaland) in 1949–50. When I began the research I thought that I had set myself a well-defined and limited task, and believed that by carefully piecing together the jigsaw of historical evidence I would end up with a picture which would not only be complete in itself, but might also make some contribution towards the more general analysis of the problem of famine in Africa. As with many such tasks, however, this one turned out to be more complex than I had initially thought. Having assembled what archival evidence I could find, I then conducted interviews with people who had lived through the famine. Their representations of the event were sometimes difficult to accommodate. What weight, for instance, should one give to the information that the goats sold by famine victims changed into snakes when taken home by their new owners? I decided, however, that such representations were an integral part of the history of the famine, and so deserved to be centrally incorporated alongside the crop statistics. This made the task of writing the book a challenging one. To reconstruct the event I have had to move constantly between levels of analysis – from the household hearth to the global grain markets, and back. If famine were simply the result of the failure of a maize crop, then this would not be necessary, but famines are never as simple as that.