Nets, dynamite and fishing

In the lakeshore areas around Lake Malawi, Lake Malombe and Lake Chilwa, the dominant industries from the 1900s were fishing and fish trading. Complementing rather than undermining the local economy, high levels of migration were typically motivated by the desire to invest capital in these two industries. As "far as the lakeshore districts were concerned, labour migration formed a highroad to rural accumulation." As noted by Chirwa, for "the Mtonga man, owning a fishing unit was more than owning or controlling a means of subsistence. It was a status symbol that every man looked forward to. This social and political aspiration was among the major factors propelling young men into labour migration." Fishing required a large capital outlay, and for the majority this was only possible through migration. Investing capital in canoes and nets on their return, from at least the 1920s, the competitive advantages of chiefs and village headmen on the lakes were challenged by migrants by the 1940s.

Crowds of bicycles lined up alongside canoes on the edge of Lake Chilwa in 1961. Both items were capital investments for returning migrants

Commercial fishing grew throughout the 1930s, 40s and 50s due to expanding markets in the centre and south of Malawi. The structure of the industry however changed from the late 1930s as returning migrants in the central and northern sections of the lake, who often had the same missionary education as those in the north, came to dominate. By the 1950s migrants, who were importing new fishing technology (mosquito mesh nets, nylon gill-nets, trawling nets, and narrow-meshed beach seine nets) represented an "emerging class of entrepreneurs in the fishing industry." At Nkhota-kota, fishermen with big nets made £20 to £30 a year- though the average did not exceed £10.46

These technologies were complemented with less conventional approaches. In 1942, two Malawians were arrested in Limbe for importing gelignite, fuses and gunpowder from the Rand. Explosives were "found frequently in luggage of Natives returning to their homes after service in the mines" usually for "the of making medicine or the dynamiting of fish..."

In the south, African fishermen faced competition from well-capitalised European fishermen who entered industry from 1920s, but fishermen here still enjoyed good access to southern markets, in particular after the opening of the Shire Highlands railway in the 1930s. By the mid-1950s the fishing industry's centre, and numerous fishermen and traders, had gravitated south towards the rich fishing grounds of Salima and Fort Johnston.

Enjoying considerable success, fishing was the main means of generating tax revenue for the Nyasaland Government in the lakeshore area, and though Europeans presented strong competition for African fishermen during the 1940s and 50s, Nyasaland officials rejected the applications of most Europeans applying for fishing permits - "like in cash-cropping, the colonial administration adopted a policy of balancing African interests with a small European sector."