Annual report on Nyasaland / Colonial Office.

  • Great Britain. Colonial Office.
Date:
[1947]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

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

    62/78 (page 56)
    Fish, and Tsetse Control Branch of the Administration, responsible for all operations in these connections and also charged with locust reporting and control. The fisheries and tsetse fly staff were brought under this Branch, which is also concerned with the activities of the Cultivation Protectors. These, comprising four European temporary officers each with : a team of African hunters, are engaged in operations against game doing damage to crops, due regard being shown to Nyasaland’s obligations respecting the preservation of fauna. These operations, financed from the Native Development and Welfare Fund, did not begin until the closing months of the year and material results are therefore not yet available, but there is reason to believe that the mere introduction of the scheme has had a beneficial psychological effect upon the cultivators in some of the areas which it affects. Another new and important development was in connection with the proper handling and preservation of-the country’s archives, following t the enactment in 1946 of an Archives Ordinance. A depot of the Royal ; Central African Archives (a service common to the three Central African j territories) was opened in Zomba in July 1947, and work was begun on the ; Secretariat records which, from 1919 to 1933 (the earlier ones were lost i in the fire of 1919) have been transferred to the custody of the Archives. The sorting and scheduling of these was in progress at the end of the year, and all other Departments had been requested to schedule their non- current records, as a preliminary to destroying those of no value and transferring the remainder to the Archives. Much of the early archive material of the Protectorate has already been lost, but the new arrange- 3 ments should enable everything still extant which has any permanent administrative, legal, or historical value to be preserved. A library of official and other publications relating to East and Central Africa is being formed as a reference and research aid to the records themselves, a collec¬ tion which will be assisted by the Printed Publications Ordinance to which reference was made in Part II, Chapter 8. The production of vernacular literature, which was described at some length in the 1946 Report, continued during the year. Total sales under this scheme during the )^ear amounted to 17,000 volumes. The best-seller continued to be Banja Lathu, a volume on family ethics and general civics ; following, but far behind, was a book of traditional Chewa history, published during the year.