Petitioning the State: Group Councils and the Development of Political Consciousness in Malawi, 1940s–1950s

From the late 1940s to early 1950s, group councils in Malawi’s Southern province wrote several petitions to the colonial state, which seemingly questioned the colonial justice system and what councillors perceived to be abusive socio-economic state policies. The state established group councils as advisory bodies to native authorities to further decentralise state power in line with Britain’s post-war imperial reforms. Why did group councils resort to the use of petitions, and how do the petitions broaden our understanding of political consciousness in colonial societies? This article uses archival sources to address these questions. It discusses how Africans used group councils to contest and place demands on the reformist post-war colonial state. Through these petitions, Africans expressed their grievances against the colonial state, with which they enjoyed a symbiotic relationship as a provider of public services and a defender of their rights. Africans petitioned the state to remind it of its responsibility from which they considered it had strayed. The petitions illustrate the local people’s knowledge regarding how the colonial state repositioned itself to perform its trusteeship role after the war and the contradictions of that commitment. Although overlooked in previous scholarship, the concerns these petitions raised, the article argues, point to how group councils, the very institutions the state created, became local spaces where African political consciousness was nurtured before it entered the broader politics of mass nationalism in the 1950s.