Abstract
The last five decades have witnessed an increasing number of peasants encroaching onto idle tea estate land in Thyolo district, in southern Malawi. In drawing upon a study of this district, this chapter argues that state responses to land occupations remain contradictory. Malawi’s 2002 land policy advocates for redistributive land reform. At the same time, however, the state has actively promoted the Malawi Investment Policy, which encourages land expropriation for foreign capital. Repressive measures that include policing, punitive fines and arrests of peasants, stirred the land occupations further, rather than inhibiting them. The state remains in a dilemma, whether to optimise local votes from the peasants or side with white agrarian bourgeois interests for capital accumulation via a rent scheme. The chapter points to the tension-riddled character of neoliberealism, as shown through accumulation at one pole and impoverishment of the majority at the other pole.
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Notes
- 1.
Local Malawians at times have also been termed ‘Natives’ in this chapter.
- 2.
In this chapter, ‘southern Malawi’ and ‘Thyolo and Mulanje districts’ have been used simultaneously because many of the tea estates in southern Malawi are found in these two districts. The living conditions among the peasantries in these two districts are similar.
- 3.
In Malawi, the term ‘tea estate’ is used synonymously with ‘tea plantations’.
- 4.
The most recent clash between peasants and tea estate owners was on 23 July 2020. Security guards killed a peasant in a standoff in Mbeluko Village close to Thyolo Sports area in Thyolo.
- 5.
Many studies on land related conflicts have centred on the green-belt initiative (GBI) in Salima, Malawi. Here, the Government of Malawi has appropriated land to foreign capitals for sugar and mango production. The Green-Belt initiative has forced hundreds of peasants into landlessness, qualifying it as a ‘modern-day land grabbing’ venture orchestrated by the state.
- 6.
This is in fact only one of the tea estates studied by the researchers.
- 7.
Mk20,000,000 was equivalent to USD 27,200 at the time of the field work.
- 8.
Interview with Makande Estate land beneficiary household, Chibwana Village, Thyolo. 20 August, 2020.
- 9.
Interview with former arrestee and land occupant in Chaona Village, Thyolo District, Malawi 02 April, 2018.
- 10.
Interview with Thyolo District Police Officer, Thyolo Malawi. 5 April, 2018.
- 11.
Interview with Peasant Farmer, Chibwana Village, 28 July 2018.
- 12.
Interview with Peasant Farmer, Chaona Village, Thyolo, Malawi. 03 August 2018.
- 13.
The President for PLO during the time of the field study was Vincent Wandale, who was a senior government worker in the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Water Development.
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Mangulama, J.A., Wu, J. (2022). Land Reform or Continued Social Exclusion? Land Occupations, State Responses and Neoliberal Policies in Southern Malawi. In: Mazwi, F., Mudimu, G.T., Helliker, K. (eds) Capital Penetration and the Peasantry in Southern and Eastern Africa. Advances in African Economic, Social and Political Development. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89824-3_5
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