The Chiwaya War: Malawians and the First World War (review)

The Chiwaya War: Malawians and the First World War. By Melvin E. Page (Boulder, Westview Press, 2000) 276 pp. $65.00

The historiography of colonial Malawi is one of the richest in Africa; scholars need to tread carefully in order to take cognizance of the good work that has already been done. Page has not only incorporated the existing literature into his work--generations of scholars will be grateful for his bibliography and his essay on archival sources--but he has enhanced existing sources with his own carefully transcribed interviews. The product is a dense narrative of the painful lives of Malawi soldiers and porters during World War I, which Page describes as "Malawi's first national experience" (203).

Page makes his case in six substantive chapters that describe the outbreak of the war, the recruitment of soldiers, the drafting of porters, the conditions of military life, the conditions on the home front, and the war's end. No one can fault his account of military actions, which cost the lives of 1,741 soldiers and 4,400 porters (106,114). One can, however, question Page's interpretation of the significance of the war to civilians.

Was the war really the Malawians' first national experience? The prevailing historical consensus privileges a single political episode during the war, John Chilembwe's uprising against the British, described more than forty years ago by Shepperson and Price.¹ Page challenges their assessment as retrospectively distorted by the struggle for independence, characterizing the revolt as "not widely known outside the areas actually affected by the rebels" (202). Nonetheless, Page provides no fewer than twenty citations to Chilembwe in his text, demonstrating that he had passed into the consciousness of the European community and of the African dance associations.

One might even argue that Malawians had undergone a series of national experiences before the outbreak of the war. These included European conquest, missionary evangelization, and the imposition of colonial taxes that obliged Malawians to work for European plantation owners on confiscated lands in the southern part of the country or to migrate to the mines of southern and central Africa in search of wages.² From this perspective, the experience of Malawian soldiers and porters can be seen as only one more in a series of colonial economic exactions and forced migrations.

Citizens and future historians alike, however, will have ample reason to be grateful for Page's massive effort. He has plowed through cubic acres of archival and printed materials, incorporating the voice a heroic generation of soldiers and porters into a national narrative.

Bruce Fetter
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Notes

1 George Shepperson and Thomas Price, Independent African: John Chilembwe and the Origins, Setting and Significance of the Nyasaland Native Rising of 1915 (Edinburgh, 1958).

2 Fetter, Colonial Rule and Regional Imbalance in Central Africa (Boulder, 1983).

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