Wenela

MIgrants disembarking from a Dakota DC-3, modified to increase capacity from 29 to 39 in Francistown, 1964.

Despite the relative lack of mineral resources in Malawi, the country draws on a legacy of decades of migrant miners. Wenela - Malawian shorthand for the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association - was in charge of recruiting for the federated Chamber of Mines, based around Johannesburg, who looked to centralise recruiting and therefore drive down labour costs. Despite being banned in 1913, Malawians retained a presence on the mines throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Recruitment in Malawi increased markedly at the end of the 1940s and throughout the 1950s as the Chamber of Mines looked to undercut South African wages and trade unions. By the 1970s, Malawi was the third largest supplier of migrant labour to the South African mines, behind Mozambique and Lesotho.

With the lifting of the ban on tropical labour in South Africa in 1937, recruitment for the Rand mines opened up again in Malawi. The initial decade of recruitment was not expansionist, with Wenela instead looking to establish itself within Malawi as a reliable employer with an adequate infrastructure to expand in the future. This infrastructure involved considerable capital investment - in roads throughout northern Botswana, recruiting offices in Malawi, and from the early 1950s a fleet of aircraft specially modified to maximise thier carrying capacity.

Transport routes operated by Wenela in 1952, adapted from Scott, ‘Migrant Labour in Southern Rhodesia’, Geographical Review, Vol. 44, No. 1, (January 1954).

By the 1950s considerable numbers of Malawians were being transported by Wenela. The Nyasaland Transport Company in Malawi operated buses for the association bringing migrants from rural areas to the railways. From the railhead in Salima migrants were then transported south, through Blantyre and Port Herald, before heading to Beira and Francistown. Rail networks ferried the majority of migrants at the start of the decade, in 6 day journey from Blantyre to Francistown, but from 1952 Malawian migrants were flown directly from Lilongwe and Blantyre airports. From Francistown, which operated as the regional hub for migrant miners travelling south, miners were then transported by train to Johannesburg.

Migration facilitated by Wenela was in direct competition with Southern Rhodesia's labour recruitment association, Mthandizi - the South African manager William Gemill often threatening to set up recruiting depots across the borders of Malawi and Zimbabwe in Mozambique and Botswana. Routes set up the WNLA outflanked Southern Rhodesia, with 800 miles of roads built up along the border in northern Botswana. and Francistown operating as the hub of the associations northern operations. The higher wages offered by Wenela meant that it was typically the more popular employer - those going to Mthandazi would often only head to Zimbabwe after failing the Wenela medical test. Considerable numbers of Malawians were also conveyed through Mozambique - not least those who posed as Mozambicans at recruiting bases within the Portuguese territory.

Returning migrants waiting at Johannesburg Station in the 1960s

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