Work and Control in a Peasant Economy

Description

A History of the Lower Tchiri Valley in Malawi, 1859-1960

By Elias C. Mandala
University of Wisconsin Press

Peasants in southern Africa have too often been portrayed as technologically backward, chronically underemployed, and politically passive. Such views, says Elias Mandala in this finely particularized study of the lower Tchiri Valley in Malawi, partake more of myth than reality. Peasants are first and foremost laborers, he points out, who spend most of their lives working with their hands to meet basic human needs. In making labor the center of his analysis, Mandala refocuses our perspectives on peasants as workers, actively engaged in the effort to control their own destinies by achieving a complex and tenuous balance of resistance and accomodation.