Nyasaland Emergency 1959 sources, including Special Branch reports, and the recollections of expatriates, and the reduction of African leaders to stereotypes. Nyasaland Emergency 1959 The Nyasaland Emergency 1959 was a state of emergency in the protectorate of Nyasaland (now Malawi), which was declared by its governor, Sir Robert Armitage on 3 March 1959 and which ended on 16 June 1960. Under the emergency powers that operated during the Emergency, over 1,300 members or supporters of the Nyasaland African Congress (Congress) were detained without trial, and most of the party's leaders including its president, Dr. Hastings Banda, were imprisoned in Southern Rhodesia after being
Nyasaland Emergency 1959 to eleven deaths and seventy-two people injured. The Abrahams Commission (also known the 1946 Land Commission) was appointed by the Nyasaland government in 1946 to inquire into land issues in Nyasaland following riots and disturbances by tenants on European-owned estates in Blantyre districts in 1943 and 1945. Abrahams proposed that the Nyasaland government should purchase all unused or under-used freehold land on the estates, which would become Crown land allocated to African smallholders as Native Trust Land. Africans on the estates were to be offered the choice of remaining there as workers or tenants, or of moving to Crown land.