Imagining the Nyika Plateau: Laurens van der Post, the Phoka and the Making of a National Park

The Nyika National Park, which spreads across northern Malawi into Zambia, is conventionally depicted as a ‘natural museum’, one of the last remaining untouched natural habitats in Africa. As this article demonstrates, however, from the late nineteenth century onwards the Nyika has been represented in a variety of different and often clashing forms involving local inhabitants (the Phoka) and European missionaries, explorers and administrators. From the late 1940s, a major influence shaping representations of the Nyika was Laurens van der Post, whose best-selling book, Venture to the Interior, provided a powerful image of the uncontaminated character of both the plateau and the Phoka people. At the same time, in his hitherto unpublished report on the Nyika, van der Post emphasised the potential of the plateau for European stock breeders and the inherently destructive nature of Phoka herders, gatherers and agriculturalists. The last section of the article focuses on the working out of van der Post's contradictory vision between the 1950s and the 1990s – the eventual rejection of the commercial model exemplified by the Colonial Development Corporation's ambitious schemes for a huge forestry plantation, the creation of a national park, yet also the expulsion of thousands of Phoka people from the plateau and the surrounding valleys.