Paper short abstract:

This article historicizes the colonial migrant labour remittance and deferred pay system between Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland from 1936 to the end of the Federation period in 1963.

Paper long abstract:

Through a series of labour agreements between the 1930s and 1960s, pushed through by the late British Labour government, Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland established a complex cash remittance system for migrant labourers aimed at ensuring and monopolising a steady inflow of northern labour for the former, and protecting and maximise benefit from labour exports for the latter state and the families of the migrants. Remittances and deferred pay were thus at the centre of a Central African financial and cash economy, falling under the Sterling area, that was intertwined and functioned mainly for the benefit of the colonial state. Therefore, using mainly archival data from repositories in Harare, Zomba, London and Oxford, this article historicizes the colonial migrant labour remittance and deferred pay system between Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland from 1936 to the end of the Federation period in 1963. It investigates the rationale behind the system, the drivers, the logic, processes, reception and its impact on Africans in particular. In this vein the article explores the system's vacillating or ambiguous popularity and function between the migrant workers in Rhodesia and family recipients in Nyasaland. An analysis of these dynamics casts light and insights into the technicalities and functionalities of the post-colonial forms of diasporic remittances, with the article underlining that the more famous contemporary diaspora remittance system has its antecedents in its colonial predecessor which, unfortunately, has remained largely invisible in the historiography of the economic and financial histories of Southern and Central Africa.