The Chiwaya War: Malawians and the First World War by Melvin E. PageReview by: Joey PowerCanadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, Vol. 35, No. 1(2001), pp. 210-212Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Canadian Association of African StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/486375 .

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2IO CJAS / RCEA 35:I 2001

and summarizes much of what Mortimore has been investigating and writ- ing about for several decades. As a geographer, Mortimore's emphasis on human-environment interactions is both laudable and highly apropos to the topic at hand. Inasmuch as I would have structured and written this book quite differently, I still recommend it because it raises scores of significant questions about the way in which the West continues to conceptualize "problems" in the developing world.

Martin S. Kenzer Florida Atlantic University

Melvin E. Page, The Chiwaya War: Malawians and the First World War. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2000. 276 pp.

Better late than never, or so the saying goes. This is certainly the case with The Chiwaya War, a book in which Mel Page narrates the disparate expe- riences of Nyasaland's askaris (soldiers), tenga-tenga (non-combatant porters), their families, and wider communities during World War I. This is the much anticipated elaboration of his 1977 doctoral dissertation, writ- ten in light of further research in the 1990s. The book uses much of the thesis material but also attempts to situate the Malawian war experience in a wider global context.

The book is divided into eight chapters with a useful annotated bibli- ography and methodological discussion. Page begins by discussing people's previous knowledge of armed conflict in the region and how this knowl- edge informed and shaped their experience of World War I. He examines the war from the point of view of combatants and non-combatants, begin- ning with methods of recruitment of askaris and tenga-tenga within Nyasaland and responses to these efforts. He explains how Malawians abroad were drawn into the conflict and argues that this process recon- nected them to their homeland. In a chapter aptly titled "The Hungry War," Page provides a competent discussion of war-time conditions of service for askaris and tenga-tenga, which complements and concurs with historical work dealing with the same subject for other parts of the conti- nent.

When Page starts to examine the meaning of the war for the civilian population, the book becomes most interesting. He argues that the war created a general unease which provided the context for the 1915 Chilembwe Rebellion, but sees the Rebellion as merely one "event" in the history of the war (rather than the war being one element in the history of the Rebellion and its aftermath). The war, he maintains, was a more impor-

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Book Reviews / Comptes rendus 211

tant "event" for Malawians in that its impact was felt across a broader range of the population, albeit in different ways.

The war, according to Page, led to increased state-sponsored labour demands and food requisitioning, which placed a larger burden on those left at home (especially women) to produce for the war effort. This, coupled with bad weather, led to serious disruption in agricultural production. He further argues that the war eroded the power of the chiefs by placing them in an ambivalent position over recruitment and presumably requisition- ing. There were exceptions, however. Some chiefs, such as Chimtunga Jere, resisted colonial demands, an action winning him some local popu- larity.

The war, then, made heroes of some and demonised others and also shaped the "social fabric" of various communities - most interestingly, by altering the balance of economic power. Page cites the excellent exam- ple of northern Malawi, where cattle were routinely requisitioned (at low prices) for wartime consumption. After the war, the gerontocrats who had lost their cattle found it ever more difficult to replenish herds at inflated postwar prices. Indeed, the only people who could afford to buy cattle were the returning military personnel, typically the younger men. This reversal of the economic dominance of the elder over the young men was later intensified, of course, by labour migration.

While Page successfully demonstrates differences in the war experi- ence across peoples and places, he does note one important levelling expe- rience. The postwar influenza pandemic, which spread along the lines of communication during demobilisation, he argues, provided a legacy of shared suffering among civilians, former combatants, and non-combat- ants, and their families alike, as well as across regions. It was this that made World War I a truly "national" experience - more so, Page contends, than the Chilembwe Rebellion (202). What that meant for territorial iden- tity, however, he does not say.

Page's discussion of the impact of the war on race relations is not always clear. At one point, for example, he maintains that after the war "Europeans were no longer feared" (206), yet a scant twenty pages later, he states that "fear, rather than respect seemed to dominate [Africans'] atti- tudes toward Europeans, at least those with whom they dealt in the imme- diate post-war years" (226). This might have been a useful point to make better use of the extensive oral data available to highlight the ambiguities of race relations in the postwar period and how different folk from differ- ent regions and occupations experienced them.

A final remark needs to be made of the actual typescript. Westview Press should take greater pains in copy editing. The book is full of typo- graphical and spelling errors. For example, the first error is found in the

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212 CJAS / RCEA 35:I 200o

dedication (!), and on page three, there are no less than four mistakes, not to mention inconsistent spelling of an informant's name on pages three and one.

All these quibbles aside, Mel Page's The Chiwaya War makes a valu- able contribution to Malawian historiography and African histories of the period in general, as well as augments our understanding of how World War I was genuinely an international event.

Joey Power Ryerson Polytechnic University Toronto, Ontario

Charles Piot. Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. 220 pp.

In 1909, German geographer Leo Frobenius spent two weeks among the Kabre of northern Togoland, observing ceremonies and eventually writing about their customs in Und Afrika Sprach (1913). As with most anthro- pologists, Frobenius regarded the Kabre as tightly bounded and largely untouched. He wrote of them as if they had lived in the same place, with the same customs, ceremonies, rituals, and regard for life, death, and them- selves, into the distant past. Charles Piot, in Remotely Global, identifies Frobenius's "othering gaze of the orientalist (we have history, they have quaint customs)" (39) and shows how artificial have been such portrayals, how useful to exploiters, and how damaging to the persons portrayed. With a much wider temporal and spatial focus than a long line of twentieth- century ethnologists, Piot examines the Kabre and determines they were never "remote" and that "traditional" is hardly an appropriate term for any part of their culture. He extends this into a main argument - that the Kabre have long been tied into "modernity," that their very existence as a group with a separate identity as well as their regularly changing ways are functions of their being buffeted by, and buffeters of, a much wider, "modernizing" world.

Kabre history may be typical of many groups living today in the hinter- land of Africa's Atlantic Coast. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when raiders from more centralized states around the Volta basin sought captives for sale into the intercontinental slave trade, less centralized peoples sought refuge in less accessible regions. Those who found relative safety in the mountainous areas of what is today northern Togo came to develop a common identity: Kabre. Ironically, their having to live "piled on top of one another amidst challenging terrain" (35) led to

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