Annual report on Nyasaland / Colonial Office.

  • Colonial Office
Date:
[1946]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Annual report on Nyasaland / Colonial Office. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    44/68 page 40
    Housing of employees is a matter which receives considerable attention both from employers and from the Medical and Labour Departments. War conditions and shortages of labour and materials have prevented progress in this respect from being as great as could be desired, but labour quarters are steadily improving, to the benefit of all concerned. There are so many varieties of these quarters, ranging from the grass shack which serves as temporary shelter for the labourer on the roads, to the trim and comfortable little brick cottage of the senior clerk or foreman, that it is not practicable to describe them in a short report. SOCIAL WELFARE Social welfare activities have long been engaged in by the missions and by both non-official and official Europeans, but they ^ have not yet reached any great volume, nor has their need yet been greatly felt outside those parts of the country most closely in touch with twentieth-century civilisation. The African village has a strong traditional community life of its own, and it is only when tribal and family ties are weakened or broken by residence in a town that artificial stimulus is needed in this respect, although Women’s Guilds in connection with various churches are to be found flourishing in quite remote districts. In the towns Welfare Societies and associations of people from specific parts of the country have been formed from time to time, but most of these appear to be dormant at the moment. Football leagues flourish, however, the Boys’ Brigade has companies in the Southern Province, there are Guides at Livingstonia, and the Boy Scouts’ Association has undergone a revival. Social centres and clubrooms are projected or have actually been completed in some of the larger settlements, but so far there is little sign of any great interest being taken in these by the people for whose benefit they exist; this, however, is no cause for depression, since it is better that interest should grow naturally, albeit with a little fostering, than that it should flare up and die away again. The African community still takes care of the great majority of its disabled and aged, and destitution is no great problem; the occasional blind beggar to be seen in the towns probably regards himself in much the same light as “the Bishop’s Beggar” in the Spanish story, and does equally well. When necessary, blind persons are sent to a training school in Northern Rhodesia, run by the Dutch Reformed Church Mission, and subsidised by Government. Little has therefore been necessary in this department of welfare work, and the only institutions solely concerned with it are the hostel at Blantyre for sick repatriates from the southern territories, and the King’s African Rifles Memorial Home, founded in 1919 as an African Chelsea Hospital and now in process of being re-endowed and rebuilt. Juvenile delinquency was the subject of legislation during the yeai and provision now exists for juvenile courts, approved schools, and 2 system of probation; corporal punishment for juveniles remained in the Penal Code, but proposals for its abolition are to be placed before the Legislature early in 1947. It is too early yet to report on the operation* of the new machinery.
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