About Matchona

From the late nineteenth century to the present, hundreds of thousands of Malawians have left their homes to find work across colonial and later, national borders. The premier migrant workers of southern and central Africa, Malawians could be found throughout the twentieth century in the mines, farms, private homes, and hotels of South Africa, Tanganyika/Tanzania, Northern Rhodesia/Zambia, and Southern Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, among other places. While women migrated through all of these routes, men comprised the overwhelming majority of those who moved. Their wives and relatives would call them “matchona”–the “lost ones” who disconnected from their families, for years or forever, through the migration experience. The term can sometimes be used as an insult. Yet it has also been re-appropriated by migrant workers themselves to describe their predicaments, caught between their families’ expectations and their own aspirations. The term, in various spellings, has become a part of popular culture throughout southern Africa, from the “Amtchona” comic strip in the Nation newspaper to the “New Machona Social Club” in Kitwe, Zambia.

This website is the first digital collection of oral history interviews and written testimonies of these workers. While the bulk of the collection explores late-twentieth-century migrations, some archival testimonies come from the early twentieth century. If you have materials you wish to share with the public, please contact us to explore the possibility of adding to this collection.

Historical background

Migration from Nyasaland (later Malawi) began slowly in the late nineteenth century when the region was under British colonial control. As British missionaries established schools in what would become the British Central Africa Protectorate and then Nyasaland, they also encouraged small numbers of the men they educated to seek wage work. These men, who knew how to read and write, traveled to jobs throughout southern and central Africa, including Transvaal and Cape provinces of what would later be South Africa, as well as Tanganyika and Southern Rhodesia. While most lived in rural villages that depended on subsistence agriculture, the “hut taxes” implemented by British colonial authorities created a need for cash to pay them. When migrants also returned with consumer goods, interest in migration increased. As early as 1899, a missionary newspaper in Livingstonia reported on a new scene: returned migrants sporting newly acquired European apparel, spending relaxed days living off the money they had earned abroad as they watched their non-migrant counterparts exhaust themselves fishing for a living in Lake Nyasa.

Between 1903 and 1913, as many as 25,000 Malawians were recruited to work on the Transvaal mines, only to be banned as “tropical” workers due to the horrifically high rates of death and the hostility of white labour. Yet labour needs remained intense, in 1936, the South African government authorized the Chamber of Mines’ recruitment agency, WNLA (sometimes spelled Wenela, the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association), to reach an agreement with the Nyasaland government to rationalize the recruitment, selection, screening, vaccination, transportation, and supervision of these migrants. Over the following decades, the number of Malawians contracted to work on the South African mines to grew from a few thousand annually to nearly 30,000 on the eve of Malawi’s independence in 1964; perhaps a similar number were also in South Africa then, having migrated own their own. That year, Nyasaland became the first of South Africa’s migrant-sending colonies to establish independence; the newly established Malawi was the only independent African nation to maintain relations with the apartheid government, principally due to the need to continue labour migration. Numbers continued to increase following independence.

Migration from Malawi to Southern Rhodesia tended to occur through less formal channels and was even more numerically significant through the 1950s. There, the matchona worked in mines, construction, and urban jobs, and dominated many aspects of the socio-economic, cultural, demographic and political fabric. By 1966, about 229,000 Malawians were working abroad. Of these, 139,000 were in Rhodesia and 68,000 in South Africa with about 22,000 being women and 33,000 being men aged over 50.

Malawian migration to Northern Rhodesia (later Zambia) and Congo was less numerous, yet still strongly felt. In Northern Rhodesia, Malawians had a relative monopoly on clerical work in urban areas of Livingstone and Broken Hill and were key in establishing the local Watch Tower church in the early 20th century; later, on the copper mines, Malawians (including experienced workers from the Rand) dominated congregations of the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian, imported the malipenga dance and were prominent in the early Mineworkers’ Union of Zambia. Thousands of Malawians also found employment on the Congo copper mines or in an urban centres such as Elizabethville, where they worked as printers, carpenters, builders and store assistants.

In April 1974, a plane carrying Malawian mineworkers home from South Africa crashed due to gross negligence, killing 74 men. Mine labour had always been deadly for dozens or more Malawians each year, yet the shock of the crash created a moment of opportunity. President-for-life Hastings Kamuzu Banda, who had allowed colonial-era labour recruitment practices to continue during the decade since his country’s independence, declared that recruitment would now end. Hundreds of Malawian miners hearing the news demanded to return home immediately on chartered planes, and the following year, Malawian labour recruitment to South Africa was “permanently” suspended. Yet under intense pressure from returned and aspiring migrants, Banda restarted recruitment to South Africa just three years later. At the same time, Zimbabwe’s liberation war in the 1970s made those traditional migration routes treacherous, forcing some to detour through Zambia and eventually stop moving to Zimbabwe by the end of the decade.

Yet Malawian migration through southern Africa has hardly ceased; it has taken an informal turn and now includes more women. Malawians have been actors in so many of the region’s major developments: displaced from Zimbabwean farms when Black nationalists evicted their white landowners in the early 2000s; cleared from the slums of Harare during Operation Murambatsvina in 2005; burned to death in a headline-grabbing apartment fire in Johannesburg in 2023. At the same time, returned Malawian migrants continue to fight for compensation for illness and injury suffered on the mines. This website chronicles Malawians’ twentieth century on the move in the hopes of preserving its memory and highlighting its multifaceted implications for the present.