Introduction

In May 1949 Col. Laurens van der Post visited Malawi on behalf of the Colonial Development Corporation to investigate the economic potential of the two main mountainous areas in the country, Mulanje and the Nyika Plateau. In Venture to the Interior, the immensely popular account of his expedition – still in print and with sales of over a million – van der Post recorded his impressions of a territory on the cusp of economic and political change. Blantyre was a disappointment, its buildings ‘drab and insignificant… dumped by the side of a road full of dust’. But of even greater concern was the attitude of the colonial officials he met, several of them individually charming, but many ‘with set, sallow, lifeless, disillusioned faces under wide-brimmed hats’, killing time before their retirement to Britain. In passage after passage, colonialism is depicted as an inoffensive but superficial phenomenon, as deeply alien to Africa as the English sweet peas and roses that its representatives cultivated in their gardens, and as doomed, ultimately, to fail.

It is ironic that van der Post's depiction of a colonial state still to recover from the lethargy into which it had sunk during the Second World War should have been written at a time when the transformation of Britain's relationship with her African colonies was already well underway. All over colonial Africa, the post-war decade witnessed a ‘second colonial occupation’ designed to restructure African economies in the interests of the British consumer and involving the large-scale investment of men and money. In Malawi, however, the form it took had a number of distinctive features.