This study looks at multiracial boys and girls, often referred to as “half castes,” in Nyasaland. It reconstructs the status and agency of these children by assessing the ways in which they maneuvered local African and European communities to explore opportunities that would improve their individual situations. At times they took initiative by writing letters to the Nyasaland administration for financial support. Furthermore, state responses to these letters provide evidence of how the state perceived these children, particularly the moral responsibility felt given that their fathers were often white settlers and at times colonial officials. This article also discusses the general challenges and opportunities that childhood experiences raise, with specific attention to the kind of subaltern social knowledge that such evidence presents—knowledge that challenges conventional visions of what constitutes history and who makes it.
Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Knopf, 1962), 15.
2.
On children and youth as a source of labor and value, see, for example, Megan Vaughan, "Food Production and Family Labour in Southern Malawi: The Shire Highlands and Upper Shire Valley in the Early Colonial Period," Journal of African History 23, no. 3 (1982): 351-64; Kings M. Phiri, "Some Changes in the Matrilineal Family System among the Chewa of Malawi since the Nineteenth Century," Journal of African History 24, no. 2 (1983): 257-74; Martin A. Klein and Richard Roberts, "The Resurgence of Pawning in French West Africa during the Depression of the 1930s," African Economic History 16 (1987): 23-37; Toyin Falola and Paul Lovejoy, eds., Pawnship in Africa: Debt Bondage in Historical Perspective (Boulder, CO: Lynn Reiner, 1994); Jane I. Guyer and Samuel M. Eno Belinga, "Wealth in People as Wealth in Knowledge: Accumulation and Composition in Equatorial Africa," Journal of African History 36, no. 1 (1995): 91-120; Neil Price, "The Changing Value of Children among the Kikuyu of Central Province, Kenya," Africa 66, no. 3 (1996): 411-36; Elizabeth Schmidt, Peasants, Traders, and Wives: Shona Women in the History of Zimbabwe, 1870-1939 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1992); T. O. Beidelman, The Cool Knife: Imagery of Gender, Sexuality, and Moral Education in Kaguru Initiation Ritual (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997); Alma Gottlieb, The Afterlife Is Where We Come From: The Culture of Infancy in West Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Beverly Carolease Grier, Invisible Hands: Child Labor and the State in Colonial Zimbabwe (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2005); Brett L. Shadle, "Girl Cases": Marriage and Colonialism in Gusiiland, Kenya, 1890-1970 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2006).
3.
Malawi National Archives (MNA) Native Secretariat (NS) 1/35/3, October 26, 1917.
4.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 6, March 16, 1918.
5.
Ibid.
6.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folios 6b and 6e; MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 6c, April 21, 1919.
7.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 6e.
8.
The literature on moral economy is extensive, although typically with a focus on local communities, not states. See, for example, E. P. Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," Past and Present 50 (1971): 76-136; James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976); Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa, Book Two: Violence and Ethnicity (Oxford, UK: James Currey, 1992), chaps. 11, 12; Thomas T. Spear, Mountain Farmers: Moral Economies of Land and Agricultural Development in Arusha and Meru (Oxford, UK: James Currey, 1997). For a recent study of the "civilizing mission" in Africa, see Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). For different examples of how scholars have negotiated the distance between the interpersonal and the imperial, see P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, "Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Expansion Overseas II: New Imperialism, 1850-1945," Economic History Review 40, no. 1 (1987): 1-26; Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003).
9.
Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988).
10.
E. P. Thompson, "The Crime of Anonymity," in Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-century England, ed. Douglas Hay et al. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975). On the expression "weapon of the weak," see James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).
11.
Nancy Rose Hunt, "Letter-writing, Nursing Men and Bicycles in the Belgian Congo: Notes towards the Social Identity of a Colonial Category," in Paths toward the Past: African Historical Essays in Honor of Jan Vansina, ed. Robert W. Harms et al. (Atlanta, GA: African Studies Association Press, 1994), 192.
12.
On this expression, see Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994).
13.
The expression "coming of age" is, of course, drawn from Margaret Mead’s popular use of the expression, referring to the psychosexual development of youth. See Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization (New York: Morrow, [1928] 1961).
14.
I should note here that I use the terms "child," "childhood," and "youth" somewhat interchangeably. My purpose is not to define or fix these categories in chronological fashion. Rather, I use them to signal a social and familial position that speaks to relations of power, not age per se. For a study on this issue, see Ariès, Centuries of Childhood.
15.
For a fascinating example of solving this problem, if situated in the recent past, see Reinhild Kauenhoven Janzen and John M. Janzen, "‘Ayiwewe’: War-traumatized Children Draw Their Memories," Canadian Journal of African Studies 33, no. 2/3 (1999): 593-609.
16.
For work that has interrogated archival knowledge, see, for example, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives," History and Theory 24, no. 3 (1985): 247-73; Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Carolyn Hamilton et al., eds., Refiguring the Archive (Cape Town, South Africa: David Philip, 2002); Nicholas B. Dirks, "Annals of the Archive: Ethnographic Notes on the Sources of History," in From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its Futures, ed. Brian Keith Axel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Tony Ballantyne, "Rereading the Archive and Opening Up the Nation-state: Colonial Knowledge in South Asia (and Beyond)," in After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Antoinette Burton, ed., Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Francis X. Blouin and William G. Rosenberg, eds., Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006); Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). On the dimensions of oral history practice in Africa, compare Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985) with Luise White, Stephan F. Miescher, and David William Cohen, eds., African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).
17.
Mary F. Smith, Baba of Karo: A Woman of the Muslim Hausa (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, [1954] 1981); Sarah Mirza and Margaret Strobel, eds., Three Swahili Women: Life Histories from Mombasa, Kenya (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Charles van Onselen, The Seed Is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper, 1894-1985 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996); Stephan Miescher, Making Men in Ghana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).
18.
It should be noted that Miller discusses state traditions rather than life histories as such. See Joseph Miller, "Introduction," in The African Past Speaks: Essays on Oral Tradition and History, ed. Joseph Miller (Hamden, CT: Dawson & Sons, 1980), 37.
19.
William Beinart , "Transkeian Migrant Workers and Youth Labour on the Natal Sugar Estates, 1918-1948," Journal of African History32, no. 1 ( 1991): 57.
20.
Jane Guyer, "Household and Community in African Studies," African Studies Review 24, no. 2/3 (1981): 87-137; Megan Vaughan, "Which Family? Problems in the Reconstruction of the History of the Family as an Economic and Cultural Unit," Journal of African History 24, no. 2 (1983): 275-83.
21.
David William Cohen, Womunafu’s Bunafu: A Study of Authority in a Nineteenth-century African Community (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977).
22.
Marcia Wright, Strategies of Slaves and Women: Life-Stories from East/Central Africa (London: James Currey, 1993).
23.
Shula Marks, ed., Not Either an Experimental Doll: The Separate Worlds of Three South African Women (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of Natal Press, 1987), 1.
24.
Hunt, "Letter-writing, Nursing Men and Bicycles," 192.
25.
Karin Barber, "Introduction: Hidden Innovators in Africa," in Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self, ed. Karin Barber (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 1-24. For chapters that focus specifically on epistolary evidence, see Catherine Burns, "The Letters of Louisa Mvemve," in Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self, ed. Karin Barber (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 78-112; Vukile Khumalo, "Ekukhanyeni Letter-writers: A Historical Inquiry into Epistolary Network(s) and Political Imagination in Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa," in Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self, ed. Karin Barber (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 113-42; Keith Breckenridge, "Reasons for Writing: African Working-class Letter-writing in Early Twentieth-century South Africa," in Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self, ed. Karin Barber (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 143-54; Lynn Thomas, "Schoolgirl Pregnancies, Letter-writing, and ‘Modern’ Persons in Late Colonial East Africa," in Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self, ed. Karin Barber (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 180-207.
26.
Breckenridge, "Reasons for Writing," 143. Breckenridge cites Isaac Schapera as an early proponent of this resource. See Isaac Schapera, "The Native as Letter Writer," The Critic: A South African Quarterly Journal 2 (September 1933): 20-28; Isaac Schapera, Married Life in an African Tribe (New York: Sheridan House, 1941). See also Keith Breckenridge, "Love Letters and Amanuenses: Beginning the Cultural History of the Working Class Private Sphere in Southern Africa, 1900-1933," Journal of Southern African Studies 26, no. 2 (2000): 337-48.
27.
Thompson, "The Crime of Anonymity," 304.
28.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 2, January 1, 1917.
29.
Ian Linden with Jane Linden, Catholics, Peasants, and Chewa Resistance in Nyasaland, 1889-1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 67, 70, 82n.
30.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 2, January 1, 1917.
31.
Ibid.
32.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 2a, January 5, 1917.
33.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 2b.
34.
Ibid.
35.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 2c, September 3, 1917.
36.
Ibid.
37.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 2d, October 31, 1917.
38.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 2c, September 3, 1917.
39.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 2e, March 16, 1918; MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 6a, April 10, 1918; MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 6f, October 29, 1919; MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 6g, December 13, 1919; MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 6h, January 28, 1920.
40.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 3, March 5, 1917.
41.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 3a, March 7, 1917.
42.
Ibid.
43.
MNA NS 1/35/3, no folio number given, March 21, 1918; MNA NS 1/35/3, folios 8 and 8a.
44.
It should be noted that the circular was directed toward government officials, not settlers as a whole. Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1990), 169, 170. For a study specific to the region, see Jock McCulloch, Black Peril, White Virtue: Sexual Crime in Southern Rhodesia, 1902-1935 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).
45.
On the size of the Anglo-African community see MNA s1/705I/30, folio 27, January 4, 1934. On population figures for the European, Indian, and African communities, see the Nyasaland Protectorate Census (Zomba, Malawi: Government Printer, 1931).
46.
The full title of the report is Report of the Committee Appointed by the Government of Southern Rhodesia to Enquire into Questions Concerning the Education of Coloured and Half-caste Children in the Colony (Salisbury, Rhodesia: Government Printer, 1934). See MNA s26/2/4/5, folio 14.
47.
On the topic of "Coloured" communities in British Central Africa generally, see Ibbo Mandaza, Race, Colour and Class in Southern Africa (Harare, Zimbabwe: SAPES Books, 1997); James Muzondidya, Walking a Tightrope: Towards a Social History of the Coloured People of Zimbabwe (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2005).
48.
Norman R. Bennett, "Introduction" in Fighting the Slave-hunters in Central Africa: A Record of Twenty-six Years of Travel and Adventure Round the Great Lakes, 2nd ed., ed. Robert I. Rotberg (London: Frank Cass, 1969), vii, xlv, xlvi.
49.
It should be noted that the English translation is based on an 1889 Portuguese original, with the years 1888 through 1891 added to the English version.
50.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 4a, July 20, 1917: 1-2; Harry W. Langworthy, "Introduction: Carl Wiese and Zambezia," in Expedition in East-Central Africa, 1888-1891, A Report, by Carl Wiese (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983), 4, 10. Carlos Wiese later became involved with the Anglo-African Association during the 1930s. See MNA s1/309/33, folios 2, 3, 4, July 30, 1933.
51.
See, for example, Clay Gish, "Rescuing the ‘Waifs and Strays’ of the City: The Western Emigration Program of the Children’s Aid Society," Journal of Social History 33, no. 1 (1999): 121-41; Anna Davin, "Waif Stories in Late Nineteenth-century England," History Workshop Journal 52 (2001): 67-98; Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, chaps. 3-5.
52.
Melvin E.Page, The Chiwaya War: Malawians and the First World War ( Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000), 144-47.
53.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 4, July 17, 1917; MNA NS 1/35/3, folios 4b and 5b.
54.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 4a, July 20, 1917: 1-2.
55.
Ibid.
56.
Ibid.
57.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folios 5 and 5a, July 17, 1917. Another case is also mentioned within these files, with Costley-White’s attempting to obtain funds from the estate of Lt. A. D. Knapp for his child, although without success. See MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 5b.
58.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 3a.
59.
Owen White, Children of the French Empire: Miscegenation and Colonial Society in French West Africa, 1895-1960 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1999), chap. 2.
60.
On Southern Rhodesia, see Mandaza, Race, Colour and Class, chap. 4.
61.
Page, The Chiwaya War, 135, 136, 142.
62.
Megan Vaughan, The Story of an African Famine: Gender and Famine in Twentieth-century Malawi (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 36, 117. For a separate study of hunger in Malawi, see G. T. Nurse, "Seasonal Hunger among the Ngoni and Ntumba of Central Malawi," Africa 45, no. 1 (1975).
63.
On birth spacing, see Megan Vaughan and Henrietta L. Moore, Cutting Down Trees: Gender, Nutrition, and Agricultural Change in the Northern Province of Zambia, 1890-1990 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1994), 201; Nancy Rose Hunt, "‘Le Bebe en Brousse’: European Women, African Birth Spacing and Colonial Intervention in Breast Feeding in the Belgian Congo," International Journal of African Historical Studies 21, no. 3 (1988): 401-32.
64.
See, for example, Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, "Introduction: African ‘Slavery’ as an Institution of Marginality," in Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives, eds. Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977); Igor Kopytoff, "The Cultural Context of African Abolition," in The End of Slavery in Africa, eds. Suzanne Miers and Richard Roberts (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Justin Willis and Suzanne Miers, "Becoming a Child of the House: Incorporation, Authority and Resistance in Giryama Society," Journal of African History, Vol. 38, No. 3 (1997): 480; Frederick Cooper, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), chap. 6.
65.
Elias Mandala , Work and Control in a Peasant Economy: A History of the Lower Tchiri Valley in Malawi, 1859-1960 (Madison : University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 32-36.
66.
On gender statistics and mission education, see, for example, Bruce Fetter, "Colonial Microenvironments and the Mortality of Educated Young Men in Northern Malawi, 1897-1927," Canadian Journal of African Studies 23, no. 3 (1989): 399-415; John McCracken, Politics and Christianity in Malawi, 1875-1940: The Impact of the Livingstonia Mission in the Northern Province (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
67.
On marriage patterns in Malawi, see Phiri, "Some Changes in the Matrilineal Family."
68.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 1f.f.
69.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folios 1f, 1g, 1h, 1l.
70.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folios 1f and 1h, November 13, 1917.
71.
The term "boma" refers to a government office. MNA NS 1/35/3, folios 1h and 1l.
72.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 1m, December 21, 1917: 1-2.
73.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 1n, January 1, 1918.
74.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 1p, January 8, 1918; MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 1q, January 10, 1918.
75.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 1q, January 10, 1918.
76.
Ibid.
77.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 1s, January 19, 1918.
78.
Ibid.; MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 1z.
79.
Wiseman Chijere Chirwa, "Child and Youth Labour on the Nyasaland Plantations, 1890-1953," Journal of Southern African Studies 19, no. 4 (1993): 672-76. For separate studies of child labor elsewhere in Africa during this period, see Kwabena O. Akurang-Parry, "‘The Loads Are Heavier than Usual’: Forced Labor by Women and Children in the Central Province, Gold Coast (Colonial Ghana), ca. 1900-1940," African Economic History 30 (2002): 31-51; Grier, Invisible Hands.
80.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio number unknown, July 22, 1931.
81.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 11, August 13, 1931.
82.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 11a, August 18, 1931; MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 12, May 6, 1932.
83.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 12, May 6, 1932.
84.
Ibid.
85.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 13/12, May 9, 1932.
86.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 15/14, May 21, 1932.
87.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folios 16 and 17; MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 16, August 29, 1934.
88.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 16, August 29, 1934.
89.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 18, September 17, 1934.
90.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folios 36/18, 35, and 38a, July 2, 1935. The last file is noted as a government "paraphrase" translation of the letter sent.
91.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 37, July 12, 1935.
92.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 38, January 14, 1936.
93.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 40/39, September 8, 1936; MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 41/40, September 14, 1936.
94.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 19, February 9, 1935. See also MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 31, which is a copy.
95.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 30, February 11, 1935; MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 30, February 15, 1935.
96.
The term "bwana" is equivalent to "sir," expressing respect or seniority. MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 23, February 28, 1935.
97.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 25, March 13, 1935; MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 25, March 16, 1935; MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 28/5; MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 27/6, April 16, 1935.
98.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 32/19, May 2, 1935; MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 34/32, May 18, 1935; MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 39/19; MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 42, September 19, 1936.
99.
The Nyasaland Times, January 12, 1922, 3.
100.
MNA s1/129/32, folio 2, March 16, 1932.
101.
MNA s1/129/32, folio 3, March 31, 1932; MNA s1/129/32, folio 4, April 2, 1932.
102.
MNA s1/129/32, folio 6, April 30, 1932.
103.
Ibid.
104.
MNA s1/129/32, folio 7; MNA s1/129/32, folio 8.
105.
MNA s1/129/32, folio 11, August 1, 1932; MNA s1/129/32, folio 12, October 11, 1932.
106.
MNA s1/129/32, folio 15.
107.
MNA s1/129/32, folio 16, March 28, 1933.
108.
MNA s1/129/32, folio 17, August 2, 1933; MNA s1/129/32, folios 18 and 19.
109.
MNA s1/129/32, folio 20, March 6, 1933.
110.
MNA s1/129/32, folio 21, April 16, 1933.
111.
MNA s1/129/32, folio 22.
112.
MNA s1/129/32, folio 23, October 16, 1933.
113.
MNA s1/129/32, folio 24, November 4, 1933.
114.
Ibid.
115.
MNA s1/129/32, folio 25, November 25, 1933.
116.
MNA s1/129/32, folio 26, December 5, 1933.
117.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 10, July 23, 1931.
118.
Ibid.
119.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 2.
120.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 3a. Note that there are two forms of spelling in the documents: "Allimahomed Abba" and "Ali Mahomed Aba." I have chosen the former for consistency.
121.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 3, July 8, 1931.
122.
Ibid.
123.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 10, July 23, 1931.
124.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio number unlisted, July 28, 1931.
125.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folio 10b, August 8, 1931.
126.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folios 10c and 10d.
127.
MNA NS 1/35/3, folios 10e, 10f.
128.
MNA s1/705I/30, folio 23, September 13, 1933.
129.
MNA s1/705I/30, folio 24: 1-2.
130.
Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, chap. 5; Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, chaps. 3-5.
131.
Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, chap. 5.
132.
On rethinking the dimensions of agency, see, for example, Frederick Cooper, "Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History," American Historical Review 99, no. 5 (1994): 1516-45; Sherry B. Ortner, "Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal," Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 1 (1995): 173-93; Walter Johnson, "On Agency," Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (2003): 113-24.
133.
John McCracken, "‘Marginal Men’: The Colonial Experience in Malawi," Journal of Southern African Studies 15, no. 4 (1989): 537-64; Megan Vaughan, "Mr. Mdala Writes to the Governor: Negotiating Colonial Rule in Nyasaland," History Workshop Journal 60 (2005): 170-88.
