Introduction

Three features distinguish the colonial power structure that emerged in Nyasaland in the inter-war years and which continued to influence patterns of rural government up to the coming of independence. The first was the creation of a ‘prefectural administration’, as Berman describes it, ‘staffed by an elite cadre of political officers acting as direct agents for the central government, and exercising diffuse and wide-ranging powers’. The central element was the secretariat in Zomba which engaged both with the Colonial Office in London and with the provincial and district administration spread across the Protectorate. This basic structure came into force as late as 1921,with a Chief Secretary as the main administrative officer directly below the Governor, linked with three Provincial Commissioners (reduced to two between1931–1946). These gave instructions to district officers, each of whom had a specified area of territory directly under his control.

The second feature was the network of official chiefs, 105 in 1949, designated as Native Authorities from 1933, and working in tandem with the district officers. The role and character of official chieftaincies is one of the issues most disputed among Central African historians. One view, widely held until recently, is that by incorporating chiefs within the colonial structure of authority, the British condemned them to a lingering decline resulting in the collapse of chiefly authority and the emergence in their place of ‘new men’ more ‘modern’, better educated, and less ‘tribal’ than the chiefs, and better placed to exploit weapons of constitutional change when these eventually became available.