Village segmentation and class formation in southern Malaŵi

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Abstract
This paper is about a problem which arises from James Clyde Mitchell's study of the Yao village in southern Malaŵi. When writing about the Yao, Mitchell drew our attention to their system of group segmentation which he portrayed as though it were perpetual in character (Mitchell 1952: 18-20). Here I analyse the implication of this process of group segmentation in a situation which is governed by administrative regulations that make it difficult for segmenting groups to spread as freely as they used to do before Britain colonised the country in 1891. What I want to argue is that owing to changes in population, against the background of fixed administrative or even political boundaries, group segmentation in southern Malaŵi is bound to throw into the open the old scars of structural inequality. Two types of facts are, therefore, required to carry out this demonstration: demographic and historical. Consequently, I divide this paper into three major sections: one in which I present figures showing population densities in Malaŵi in general, and in southern Malaŵi in particular; one in which I give a brief historical outline of Malaŵi; and one in which I attempt to show that from the available historical information we can discern processes that led to the formation of classes in Malaŵi and how these classes were simplified by the formation of the colonial situation which reduced, at one stroke, all Africans into a dependent classvis-à-visthe European colonisers. But despite this over-simplified picture of the two classes in the colonial situation, there is evidence at the local level which shows that as land is increasingly becoming scarce, relative to population growth, village disputes over land illuminate the traditional structure of inequalities. I hold the view that the inevitable result of the contradiction between population growth and land shortage is class formation.