Coping with the Double Crisis: Lake Chilwa Recession and the Great Depression on Chisi Island in Colonial Malawi, 1930–1935

Environmental history is to a large extent framed by the neoclassical principle of generalized scarcity that recognizes that nature changes, both independently and in response to human actions, and thus changes the context in which human history unfolds (McNeill 2003). At the same time, political ecology puts more emphasis on power and inequalities as direct drivers of scarcity (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987; Peet and Watts 2004; Robbins 2012). However, both approaches can enhance our understanding of the influences acting upon coping strategies during resource scarcity. During the 1930s, people in the Lake Chilwa Basin in Malawi had to cope with both the drying up of Lake Chilwa and the global economic depression. We chose to describe this confluence on Chisi Island as the ‘double crisis,’ and it may at first glance seem obvious, but on examination becomes quite complex. In the case of the Lake Chilwa, the colonial administration introduced cotton production on the dry lake bed to boost the economy of Nyasaland in the face of the economic depression. However, the people of Chisi Island successfully resisted cotton farming. The ‘double crisis’ illustrates how power-relations shape scarcity and vice versa. Environmental scarcity is understood as the decrease in quantity and quality of renewable resources caused by three main processes: i) environmental changes; ii) population increase; and iii) unequal social distribution of resources, also termed ‘structural scarcity’ (de Sherbinin and Dompka 1998). Scarcity therefore becomes a naturally recurring limitation on the availability of resources or goods within an ecological system affecting the organization and functioning of societies. Economic historians, for example, argue that land-labor ratios have had a lasting impact on inequality and power relations because the use of slavery and/or bonded labor has historically been more common in geographical areas of land abundance and labor scarcity (Austin 2008; Green 2014). Environmental historians address degradation associated with non-renewable resources, environmental change associated with human transformation of renewable resources and environmental rehabilitation, conservation, and preservation (Hughes 2001; Worsted 1993). Similarly, a key feature of African environmental historiography is its emphasis on the conservationist paradigm of managing scarcity of natural resources (Kwashirai 2012; Mulwafu 2010). Political ecologists have criticized the environmental scarcity framework for neglecting inequality and power relations. Political ecologists emphasize that power and politics determine access to and distribution of specific resources and thus have the potential to create scarcity for the society at large * Joseph Nagoli [email protected]