Central African Immigrants, Imperial Citizenship and the Politics of Free Movement in Interwar South Africa

Between the 1910s and 1930s, male migrants from colonial Nyasaland (present-day Malawi) contested South Africa’s internal and external barriers to free movement by asserting their rights as British subjects. On the principle that ‘fair play’ and ‘justice’ extended throughout the British empire, these men claimed an entitlement to migrate, work and live ‘unmolested’ across South Africa. This article foregrounds the early political agendas of these men, demanding a ‘liberal’ empire that sanctioned the intra-imperial migration of its black subjects. By examining a number of crises, it demonstrates how ‘loyalty’ to ‘Britishness’ was differentiated and particularist, being publicly deployed when the ostensibly ‘British’ principle of ‘free labour’ was undermined by the process of South African state formation. While radical Nyasa internationalists used British-informed lexicons of freedom to demand a more universal approach to free movement, early Nyasa nationalists invoked British colonial borders to justify a particular, restricted vision of intra-imperial migration that excluded non-British black immigrants. By exploring these differences, the article questions what we mean by ‘free movement’ and shows that ideas of imperial citizenship were not only reclaimed ‘from the bottom up’ by Nyasas but also deconstructed and instrumentalised.