A. L. Bruce Estates
A. L. Bruce Estates was one of three largest owners of agricultural estates in colonial Nyasaland. Alexander Low Bruce, the son-in-law of David Livingstone, acquired a large estate at Magomero in the Shire Highlands of Nyasaland in 1893, together with two smaller ones. On his death, these estates were to operate as a trust to bring Christianity and Commerce to Central Africa. However his two sons later formed a commercial company which bought the estates from the trust. The company gained a reputation for the harsh exploitation and ill-treatment of its tenants under a labour system known by the African term "thangata", which operated in the plantation cultivation of cotton and tobacco. This exploitation was one of the causes of the 1915 uprising led by John Chilembwe, which resulted in the deaths of three of the company's European employees. After the failure of its own cotton and tobacco plantations, the company forced its tenants to grow tobacco rather than food on their own land and significantly underpaid them. Following almost three decades of losses, the Magomero estate was in poor condition, but the company was able to sell it at a profit between 1949 and 1952 because the government needed land for resettlement of African former tenants evicted from private estates. The company was liquidated in 1959.
Origins
Alexander Low Bruce
Alexander Low Bruce was born in Edinburgh in 1839, the son of Robert Bruce and Ann Low, and he attended the Royal High School there. After leaving school, he went to work for the brewing firm of William Younger and Company at the age of 19. In his 20s, Bruce worked in the firm's London office and in promoting its activities in North America. In 1876, he became a partner and joint manager of the main Edinburgh brewery. In 1887, Alexander Low Bruce became Deputy Chairman of Younger's, and he had other significant financial interests. Bruce was an active member of the Liberal Party until the Irish Home Rule crisis of 1886 split the party and he became a leading Scottish member of the Liberal Unionist Party.Bruce married twice; by his first wife he had three children, Agnes, Robert and Daniel, all born when he was living in Islington, Middlesex. In 1875, Alexander Low Bruce's second marriage was to Agnes, the daughter of David Livingstone and his wife Mary. The Bruces had four children, David Livingstone Bruce, Mary Livingstone Bruce, Alexander Livingstone Bruce and Annie Livingstone Bruce who married Thomas Russell in 1909. Alexander Low Bruce shared Livingstone's views on the role of legitimate trade in combating the East African slave trade and, after his marriage to Agnes Livingstone, Bruce's interests turned towards the support of commercial and missionary organisations in East and Central Africa, and in 1888 he visited Kuruman, where Robert Moffat established his mission, and where his wife had been born. He was a founding member of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and became a director of the African Lakes Company, which had interests in what is now Malawi, and of the Imperial British East Africa Company, with interests in Kenya.
Magomero
Bruce never visited Nyasaland, but obtained title to some 170,000 acres of land, most of it in a single block south of Zomba through his association with the African Lakes Company and the agency of John Buchanan, a planter who brokered sales of land by local chiefs. He named this estate Magomero after an earlier, unsuccessful, missionary venture there which Livingstone had promoted. On his death in 1893, aged 54, title to his African assets passed under his will to the A. L. Bruce Trust, whose main beneficiaries were his two sons.Shortly before his death in November 1893, Bruce had appointed two managers for his principal estates in Nyasaland. These were William Jervis Livingstone, who took control of the main estate of Magomero and D. B. Ritchie in charge of the Likulezi Estate at Mlanje. Initially, Agnes assumed oversight of the A. L. Bruce Trust until Bruce's heirs, David and Alexander, came of age, when they were able take it over its management, and she remained a trustee until her death. The provisions of their father's will expressed his wish about how his sons, as trustees, should manage the estates:
"...in the hope and expectation that they will take an interest in the opening up of Africa to Christianity and Commerce on the lines laid down by their grandfather the late David Livingstone."
However, after their mother's death in 1912, and as the Magomero estate showed potential, David Livingstone Bruce and Alexander Livingstone Bruce purchased the assets of the A. L. Bruce Trust in 1913, paying just over £41,000 for the estates. They then incorporated A. L. Bruce Estates Ltd in 1913 with a share capital of £54,000, largely held by themselves and their surviving sister Annie Russell.
Early Developments
At the time Magomero was acquired, it was largely unoccupied and uncultivated, and it was necessary to find a suitable crop and workers. Between 1895 and 1925, the company had tried growing coffee, cotton and Flue-cured tobacco: they all failed. Instead of local people, workers at Magomero were generally "Anguru", a term employed by Europeans to describe as a number of different Lomwe speaking migrants from the parts of Mozambique to the east of the Shire Highlands. These Lomwe were welcomed at Magomero as tenants, and initially the men had no obligation to work in lieu of rent for their first two years. After this initial period, they were required to work for only one month a year: by custom, single women including widows, were exempt from this. By 1915, Lomwe migrants made up almost half the 4,926 hut owners at Magomero.Arabica coffee was the first estate crop grown in much of the Shire Highlands, and was quite widely planted in the 1890s, until a worldwide collapse in coffee prices in 1903. About 200 to 300 acres of coffee bushes were planted at Magomero from 1895, but after poor crops in 1898 and 1899, the estate's management looked for a more suitable crop. Following the collapse of coffee prices, the Shire Highlands estates next turned to cotton from 1903. Growing Egyptian cotton, the first variety attempted, was unsuccessful in the Shire Highlands, because it was more suitable for the hotter Shire Valley. However, from 1906, W. J. Livingstone developed a hardier variety of Upland cotton called Nyasaland Upland, and by 1908 had planted 1,000 acres at Magomero, increased to 5,000 acres by 1914. Cotton required intensive labour over a long growing period, and this resulted in increasing labour demands being made on the tenants.
On Lukulesi estate of 7,449 acres, the A. L. Bruce Trust first experimented with cotton, coffee, rubber and sisal and chillies. Coffee was as unsuitable for the cool, wet uplands of Mulanje, but tea was planted and from 1904 its tea bushes were producing tea for export. The quality was generally poor, as the estate had no expertise in preparing the tea.
Thangata
In order to ensure that 3,000 to 5,000 workers were available throughout the five or six month long growing season of cotton, the obligations of labour tenants were exploited, wages were withheld, not paid in full or only in kind, and violent coercion was used. The term "thangata" was used to describe these labour obligations. The word originally meant help, as in the reciprocal help that neighbours might give each other, but came to mean the amount of labour that a tenant on a European-owned estate has to give in return for their tenancy. Additional labour services were also required in lieu of Hut tax which the estate owner paid on behalf of tenants.Alexander Livingstone Bruce was said to have pioneered the thangata system, and even if others had led the way, his manager, W. J. Livingstone, exploited it rigorously once the Magomero estate started to grow cotton. Although W. J. Livingstone was manager, Alexander Livingstone Bruce lived in Nyasaland and had control of the estate operations. On the Bruce estates, the total obligations could amount to four or five months a year, much of this in the growing season, leaving tenants with little time to grow their own food. Unmarried women and widows who were tenants were now required to provide labour, although previously they had been exempted. Tenancies were based on verbal contracts, and tenants had little or no chance to dispute the owners’ interpretations of them.
W. J. Livingstone was killed in the 1915 uprising led by John Chilembwe, largely because of the severity of his management. Following the uprising, the protectorate government passed an Ordinance in 1917, which sought to displace thangata by prohibiting labour in place of cash rents. However, Alexander Livingstone Bruce, who was a member of the Governor's Executive Council, led estate owners in threatening massive evictions if this were implemented, and thangata remained It was Bruce rather than the murdered Livingstone who had banned schools from the estate and prevented Chilembwe from building any churches there, and he stated his opposition to all schools for African workers. Even after Livingstone's killing, the labour obligation on the A. L. Bruce Estates remained at up to six months for thangata and Hut tax. However, as the Crown lands nearest to the estates were already crowded, and as most of the estate tenants had no claim to settle on them because they had migrated from Mozambique, they had little option but to stay. When the demand for estate labour declined in the later 1920s, the owners claimed they had insufficient work for tenants to meet their labour obligations or to pay rent. They claimed that such tenants had become rent-free squatters, and wanted to use the threat of eviction to compel them to grow saleable economic crops. Although after 1925 the company chose to take tobacco or cash instead of labour, the potential thangata obligation only ended when A. L. Bruce Estates Ltd. sold Magamero and the tenants were released from what seemed to them to be a form of serfdom