Thangata " Thangata " is a word deriving from the Chewa language of Malawi which has changed its meaning several times , although all meanings relate to agriculture . Its original , pre - colonial usage related to reciprocal help given in neighbours ' fields or freely - given agricultural labour as thanks for a benefit . In colonial times , between 1891 and 1962 , it generally meant agricultural labour given without pay , by a tenant on an estate owned by a European , in lieu of a cash rent . Thangata was exploited , and tenants could be forced to work on the owners ' crops for four to six months when they could have cultivated their own crops . From the 1920s , the name thangata was extended to situations where tenants were given seeds to grow set quotas of designated crops instead of providing cash or labour . Both forms of thangata were abolished in 1962 , but both before and after independence and up to the present , the term has been used for short - term rural casual work , often on tobacco estates , which is considered by workers to be exploitative . Thangata in Malawi . The term “ thangata ” has had several meanings in Malawi in the last 120 years , and its traditional or pre - colonial use was very different from its uses in colonial and modern times . The word exists in the Chewa and the related Mang ' anja languages , and its first pre - colonial meaning was “ help ” or “ to assist ” , in the sense of freely - given reciprocal help such as neighbours might give each other building huts or clearing fields . It also had the meaning of the agricultural work that a member of the village community did for his chief . The ownership of land in much of Malawi was vested in the community , not individuals . Traditional leaders acted as trustees over communal land , and granted the right to use it to individuals in their communities . By custom , these leaders received in gifts in kind or labour from those in their community who had benefitted . This was also called thangata . When communal land was plentiful , community leaders could not demand thangata , but once it became scarcer in the colonial period , and particularly after the introduction of Indirect rule on 1933 , the chiefs could impose a condition of thangata work on any grant . In the last two or three decades , chiefs have begun to require cash sums or rents to allow the use of communal land , but these cash payments are not called thangata . The 1870s and 1880s in Malawi were unsettled , and local chiefs sought to gain European protection from their enemies by granting settler s what they probably considered was only a right to cultivate vacant land . Soon after the British Central Africa Protectorate was proclaimed in 1891 , these Europeans secured legal ownership of this land from the protectorate administration . The new owners also claimed all rights that the traditional leaders had or were thought to possess , asserting that thangata work was an obligation that the landlord could impose on tenants . In the early colonial period , thangata took on a new meaning of performing labour in lieu of rent . In the early years of the protectorate , the estates established in under - populated areas needed workers to establish plantations . Few Africans were resident on estate lands , and some of those who remained left when labour rents were introduced . New workers , who were often migrants from Mozambique , were encouraged to move onto estates and grow their own crops , but were required to pay rent and Hut tax , usually satisfied by two months ’ labour a year at this time . Before 1905 , relatively little land on the estates was planted , as the owners were experimenting with a variety of crops . However , from 1905 , cotton was successfully grown in commercial quantities . Cotton has a 5 or 6 month growing season , throughout which it needed much labour for a successful result . Between 1910 and 1925 , tobacco was also grown in plantations and , like cotton it required a great deal of labour to grow successfully . As tenancies were based on verbal contracts , tenants had little or no chance to dispute the owners ’ interpretations of them . On several estates , the obligations of labour tenants were extended , sometimes to a total of four or five months a year for thangata and Hut tax , much of this in the growing season leaving tenants with little time to grow food . As the Crown lands near the estates were already crowded , and as most of estate tenants were migrants from Mozambique with no claim to communal land , they had little option but to stay . In this situation thangata came to mean forced labour . The Nyasaland High Court in 1903 exempted the original inhabitants of estates from thangata and gave them some security . Legislation allowing other tenants to pay rent rather than thangata , and for cash payment if they performed more than the required thangata was enacted in 1908 , but not implemented . The harshness of thangata was at least one of the reasons underlying the 1915 uprising led by John Chilembwe . Following this revolt , a new attempt to abolish thangata in favour of cash rent was made , but it failed because of the political influence of the estate owners . The thangata system was a bar to progress and impoverished people by limiting the amount of time they could work for themselves . There was no place for crafts or skills in thangata : reduced all tenants to unskilled manual labour , and was likened to a form of serfdom . Even after Chilembwe ’ s revolt , the labour obligation on many estates was little modified , sometimes amounting to six months for thangata and rent . Although some abuses were curtailed , others such as equating a month of thangata to 30 days ( or five weeks of six days ’ work ) , and requiring the wives of absent migrant workers , widows and single women to work in breach of custom , persisted . However , by 1918 most cotton , and by 1925 most tobacco , was not grown on estates by direct labour , but by smallholders on Crown lands . As the demand for estate labour declined in the 1920s , the owners claimed that , as they had insufficient work for their tenants to meet their thangata obligations , they had become rent - free squatters . Some smaller estates failed , but others were saved from collapse by a scheme first adopted by one large owner , The British Central Africa Company Ltd . Instead using of direct labour , it issued seeds to tenants so they could grow cotton and tobacco under supervision , and sell their crops to the planters at low prices . This system was formalised in legislation , the 1928 Natives on Private Estates Ordinance , which modified thangata by allowing rents to be paid in cash , in a fixed quantity of acceptable crops or by direct labour . The true value of the crop , usually tobacco , given in lieu of rent greatly exceeded the cash rent . Estate landlords also benefited from restrictions on smallholders growing tobacco . Although the estates now largely acted as brokers for their tenants ’ produce , and the name thangata , sometimes “ tobacco thangata ” after its commonest form was applied to rent in kind , the older form of labour thangata persisted on tea estates , and elsewhere if the owner wished to grow crops through direct labour . It was estimated that about 9 % of Malawi ’ s Africans lived on estates in 1911 : in 1945 , it was about 10 % . In the latter year , the number of residents on estates was about 173 , 000 in 49 , 000 families . In the 1940s and early 1950s , there were tensions between estate owners and tenants over evictions and the tenants ’ wish to sell produce of their choice in local markets , not through the owner . The expansion of tea - planting led to a shortage of African labour , which became acute after 1945 . The British Central Africa Company Ltd had formerly relied on labour tenants for most of its workforce , but in 1946 its local Manager complained that it was unable to enforce unpopular thangata agreements or Sunday working although it threatened many tenants with eviction . There was a further crisis in 1952 - 3 when the British Central Africa Company tried to increase tenants ’ rents substantially , against tne advice of the Nyasaland government . A number of tenants resisted the increase , and the company issued eviction notices . The tenants ' resistance included clearing land for cultivation on the undeveloped parts of the company ' s estates and refusing to pay taxes or attend courts . Riots broke out in Cholo in August 1953 , leading to eleven dead and seventy - two injured . The tensions were lessened by government land purchases of former estates , so by 1962 , the number of estate residents had been reduced to 9 , 000 families . In 1962 , the 1928 Ordinance was replaced by a 1962 Africans on Private Estates Ordinance that granted tenants security of tenure and abolished all forms of thangata requiring labour or the production of designated crops , replacing them with cash rents . Although tenants produced tobacco on many estates , by 1935 , 70 % of the national tobacco crop was grown in the Central Region , at first by Africans on Crown land , later by sharecroppers under contract to the holders of leased land for one crop at a time , the “ visiting tenant ” system . The “ visiting tenant ” system had some similarities to estate tenancies in the Shire Highlands ( called thangata , whether the rent was satisfied in labour or produce ) , but it was distinct as visiting tenants had permanent homes away from the places where they grew their crop . Like estate tenants , visiting tenants were underpaid for their crop because they were forced to sell it to the landowner . Although it was originally distinct from thangata , in 1963 shortly before independence , Hastings Banda , as Minister of Agriculture fiercely attacked the visiting tenant system and equated it to the hated thangata . Despite this rhetoric , when thangata was abolished in 1962 , a temporary exemption was given for visiting tenants in the Central Region . However , this use represented a further extension of the term thangata . By the late 1960s , politicians of the ruling Malawi Congress Party were involved in tobacco growing on the former European estates that the colonial government had bought , and which were sold or leased to the party elite after independence . Further elite - run estates were later created on previously communal lands . By 1990 , there were 675 , 000 registered estate tenants with little security , and another 580 , 000 “ squatters ” lived on surplus land with no security , forming a pool of casual labour . Few tenants or squatters grew all their own food and most relied on casual paid labour or food - for - work arrangements on the estates to supplement what they could grow . The preferred term for short - term rural casual work paid for in cash or in kind ( usually food ) is ganyu . The term " Ganyu " is said to derive from the Portuguese " ganho " ( sometimes spelled " ganyao " ) meaning something gained or a bonus . It originally denoted food or beer given as appreciation for neighbours when they worked on another ’ s fields , then the work a poor person did for food or cash for more prosperous neighbour . Today tobacco estates are the largest employers of ganyu workers . These may stay for the growing season like visiting tenants , or travel in daily . Larger estates may pay the minimum wage ; smaller estates usually only give food . These arrangements are sometimes called thangata , as in the 2007 documentary “ Thangata : social bondage and big tobacco in Malawi ” . Similar Systems . Of all the countries in Southern and Central Africa , Nyasaland was notorious for the duration of thangata and its importance to the colonial economy . Labour tenancy and sharecropping continued to exist in other less developed parts of Southern and Central Africa in the 20th century , but without the same social and political impact as in Nyasaland . In much of South Africa and Southern and North - Western Rhodesia , the growth of the money economy led rapidly to waged employment rather than labour in lieu of rent , and in North - Eastern Rhodesia estate agriculture was less dominant and land reasonably plentiful . In early Natal , the shortage of capital caused landowners to extract rent from African tenants in the forms of produce or labour , and this applied in Zululand until the early 20th century . However , in central Natal , employment for wages took over in the last third of the 19th century . African tenant farmers on European - owned estates in Matabeleland in the early colonial period could either pay rent or provide labour in lieu of rent , but after 1910 , it was more usual to employ Africans for wages . V C Kwashirai , ( 2009 ) . The system that is probably closest to thangata is the institution in Rwanda called ubureetwa . Although there were few European landowners , the traditional leaders who controlled access land were from the dominant Tutsi group . After the Europeans occupation , they were able to manipulate freely - given labour into an unpaid agricultural obligation . As Rwanda had a mobile population , chiefs could allocate land to clients outside the community that had a traditional claim to use the land , in clear parallel to Mozambique migrants on Malawi estates . These incomers were prepared to agree to a heavy burden of labour for access to land . The colonial administration gave a legal status to ubureetwa and up to the 1950s resisted abolishing it or commuting it to cash . In the Congo Free State , forced labour , amounting to virtual slavery , was widely used on public works and to compel Africans to gather ivory or wild rubber . Although forced labour in the Belgian Congo was abolished in theory in 1908 , from 1917 a system of forced cultivation of cotton , coffee and rice was introduced for the peasant population , using their own land . On Belgian - owned estates , a Labour Code introduced in 1922 allowed employers to physically discipline their workers , so supposedly free labour was turned into a system of forced labour . However , neither the peasants nor estate workers were tenants , so the system was rather different to thangata .