Migration across of Southern Africa was monitored by every colonial state. The official stock of Malawians abroad however has only ever been given by figures which were biased by the conflicting interests of various committees over the politics of loabour quotas and self-confessedly inaccurate. The 1935 Travers-Lacey Committee kick-started heightened interest in Malawian migration after it stated 120,000 migrants were abroad and claimined “uncontrolled migration brought misery and poverty to hundreds and thousands of families...” J.A. Calder of the Colonial Office however saw the Travers-Lacey Report as “sensational and unbalanced...whether the Committee’s remedies are the right ones is very doubtful.” A second report published in 1936 put the total number of migrants abroad at a more conservative 90,087. In 1950, officials noted “full reliance cannot be placed upon emigration figures since many leave the Colony without reporting; either to avoid tax or to enter the Union clandestinely.”

Whilst plantation owners, missionaries and many chiefs looked to control the 'evils of  emigration', looking to keep wages low and protect an ideal of the Nyasa family, colonial officials had eyes on the tax returns from migrants and had encouragement from the British Colonial Office which wanted a buoyant, labour-abundant South African economy to send British exports to. The Governor was personally pressured by a number of influential figures such as John Martin, a director of the Bank of England, who was the Director of General Mining Investment Ltd and sat on the boards of numerous Rand mines. The Nyasaland Government allowed labour recruitment by Wenela from 1937, but Wenela's quotas were disputed throughout the 1940s and 1950s, in the context of wartime recruitment and concern over the level of clandestine migration, not least by Mr Huggins of the Rhodesian Native Labour Supply Commission - known within Malawi as Mthandizi.