Nyasaland Emergency 1959 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 arrested on 3 March. Many other Africans were jailed for offences related to the Emergency, including rioting and
Operation Sunrise (Nyasaland) not only those members of Congress initially arrested, but others arrested and detained without trial in the course of the emergency. The operation was described in some detail in the Devlin Commission report (Colonial Office Report of the Nyasaland Commission of Inquiry, HMSO, London, 1959) and that account has been amplified by Colonial Office documents not made available to the Devlin Commission. There had been some sporadic unrest in Nyasaland in the early 1950s, most recently in 1953 when unrest among African tenants of the British Central Africa Company led to the "Cholo riots", and after Nyasaland was forced into