The road is rugged and slow from Rumphi Boma to Hewe, a rural trade centre perched on the boundary of Malawi’s oldest and largest national park.
Vast patches on the gravel road are strewn with large stones and small gullies, such that a car journey which should take 1.5 hours takes four.
In a way, the state of the road reflects the experience of communities living around Nyika national park.
“Life is hard here,” group village head Chikulupati tells Dialogue Earth. “Things are not moving.” The traditional chief says that apart from lack of basic amenities such as passable roads, potable water and good schools, Hewe communities also face an acute shortage of land. He describes their life as a result, a grim struggle for survival.
“Yet, that vast land the national park occupies was once ours,” Chikulupati recalls. “We never lacked the time we lived in Nyika; we had land that sustained our livelihood in many aspects.”
Franscina Mfune, a 51-year-old farmer, concurs.
She says the land problem in Hewe has escalated to unprecedented levels due to population growth.
Farming is the main source of livelihood in the area, the widow says, but currently the majority of people do not have adequate land to grow crops for both subsistence and commercial endeavours.
“We lost land to the national park, and we were pushed to settle in an area that was already occupied by other people,” Mfune tells Dialogue Earth. And even when some lucky farmers happen to have surplus produce to sell, the rugged roads frustrate their efforts to access better markets, she says. Thus they are forced to trade at lower prices offered by unscrupulous vendors who follow them to Hewe.
A series of evictions
According to Chikulupati, Hewe communities were moved out of Nyika to make way for the park without consultations or any form of compensation.
The first eviction was in the 1950s, he says, and there was another in 1964. The park was established in 1965, the year after Nyasaland gained independence from Britain as Malawi. At that point it was 950 sq km in size, states the Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD). Chikulupati says the final eviction took place in 1975. That was the year the park was expanded to 3,200 sq km. About 5,000 people were evicted to the lowlands as part of the expansion, states historian John McCracken.
“In all these evictions, there was no compensation for loss of land and disruption of life in general,” says the traditional chief.
The government tells Dialogue Earth that some compensation was provided.
The Nyika plateau, spanning northern Malawi and north-eastern Zambia, is Central Africa’s highest and largest plateau. Human occupation dates back some 3,000 years to Stone Age hunter-gatherers. The Tumbuka-speaking ancestors of today’s Phoka people may have settled the foothills as early as the 14th century. They later spread along ridges in small, dispersed settlements – some at high altitude, most in fertile valleys where they farmed maize, peas, millet and beans.
The Phoka’s use of the plateau’s higher reaches included ritual sites tied to earth-snake spirits – at Lake Kaulime and Manchewe Falls – and spirit-associated hills, with these guardians believed to regulate hunting and the environment. Hunting and honey-gathering were major economic activities, using traps, nets and spears, targeting antelope like eland and roan. Iron smelting, practised into the 1930s, was central to Phoka economic and political life, underpinning trade with neighbouring groups.
Main source: “Imagining the Nyika Plateau” (2006)
The plight of Hewe communities is not unique. Elsewhere in Rumphi district, communities living in Mphangala, an area close to Vwaza marsh wildlife reserve, face a similar predicament.
According to principal chief Walutundu, the government evicted people from Vwaza in 1969 to make way for the establishment of the Vwaza game reserve (which was later called a wildlife reserve). Malawi Nation puts the date at 1968. A second and final eviction occurred in 1977, Walutundu says.
“On both occasions, it was too swift,” he says. “There was neither consultation nor any resettlement plan; and no compensation whatsoever for the evicted families.”
The government again demurs, stating that some compensation was provided.
Walutundu says the abrupt declaration of Vwaza as a protected area disturbed the cultural life and general wellbeing of the affected people. In the long run, the traditional leader notes, the declaration has led to scarcity of land, triggering a surge of land wrangles among his subjects.
“And now the land problem has become quite unmanageable,” Walutundu tells Dialogue Earth. “In trying to avoid land conflicts, some people have attempted migrating to neighbouring Zambia in search of land to settle, only to return after facing hostility there.”
A push for resettlement
Realising that the communities of Hewe and Mphangala face a common problem, in May 2025 they joined forces to launch the Nyika-Vwaza Land Victims Association (NVLVA). The group of 14,250 families from Rumphi district are fighting for their land rights and improved livelihoods.
Chikulupati leads it, with Walutundu as his deputy.
In December last year, NVLVA mobilised the masses to deliver a letter to the Rumphi district commissioner. The letter, which Dialogue Earth has seen, notified the commissioner of their intention to “resettle” part of the land in Nyika and Vwaza.
“More than 1,000 people joined the march … led by 176 traditional chiefs,” Chikulupati says. The letter explains that affected communities have been calling on the government to resolve the situation since 1986 without success.
The reasons given in the letter for the resettlement plan include abject poverty and lack of adequate land for farming. Also cited is the absence of an official agreement or compensation for loss of land when evictions were enacted.
“We were forced to leave and become squatters on already occupied land. As it stands now, it appears that the government minds more about the welfare of wildlife than that of the people,” reads the letter.
It further states that the people of Hewe and Mphangala largely do not benefit from the national park or the wildlife reserve.
For instance, the letter highlights that the surrounding communities are denied employment opportunities for such basic jobs as game rangers and office labourers, arguing that “at least a reasonable quota for such positions should be deliberately reserved for our sons and daughters.”
On 30 June, Chikulupati said that the communities’ plea had not been heard and they would begin settling in the protected areas, Zodiak Online reported via Facebook.
Legally established?
The Ministry of Natural Resources says the dispossession of what the Hewe and Mphangala communities claim to be their land had been legal at the time.
The ministry’s spokesperson, Joseph Nkosi, says there was no compensation for the loss of land because the Land Act had held all Malawian territory to belong to the president.
“There was no customary land, hence no community could claim to have owned land in those days,” Nkosi tells Dialogue Earth.
He says the communities were, nevertheless, compensated for loss of property such as houses, fruit trees, and any other personal possessions affected by the evictions. As for Nyika, Nkosi says there was a series of evictions aimed at expanding the park following the realisation that the water catchment area it protected was a crucial support for the country’s larger ecosystem.
“Both Nyika and Vwaza are now public land duly gazetted by the Malawi government through parliament; nobody has the right to resettle there,” he says.
However, Gibson Gondwe, executive director of Citizens Concerned, a local rights NGO, says the government has the obligation to ensure its citizens have basic necessities, including land, to sustain their livelihoods.
Gondwe says the Hewe and Mphangala communities have valid demands in fighting for part of the land that belongs to the two protected areas. He adds that some of them are now cultivating in hills which, in a way, contributes to environmental degradation. Regardless of what the law once stipulated, “the communities should be assisted,” he says. “Conserving wildlife is important, but it should not be done at the expense of people’s livelihoods.”
Gondwe says the matter is further complicated by the fact that the bigger portions of both Nyika and Vwaza are in Rumphi alone, causing critical shortage of land in the district.
The district covers 4,769 sq km, he says, with Nyika and Vwaza occupying 4,280 sq km of that, leaving only 489 sq km of residential area.
Conservation versus community needs
Though the communities’ claim to resettle in Nyika and Vwaza is not entirely justified from a legal-ownership sense, “it still has merit from the perspective of resource scarcity and livelihood security,” says Robert Khataza, a lecturer at Malawi’s Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources.
Khataza says emerging research suggests that poverty levels are high near protected areas and biodiversity conservation zones in Malawi and elsewhere, hence the Nyika-Vwaza communities’ demands should not be dismissed outright.
He suggests the need to pursue poverty-reduction interventions such as social protection programmes to improve community welfare and conserve wildlife simultaneously.
Khataza says communities should lobby the government to implement such programmes “as compensation for their endured loss associated with living in the peripherals of protected areas.”
“Community empowerment programmes” should be implemented alongside conservation activities, he notes, to allay the negative perceptions among communities that they do not benefit from nature conservation and that the existence of the protected areas is impoverishing them.
“Conservation objectives can only be achieved optimally if community welfare is safeguarded,” he says.
But Nkosi says the Department of National Parks and Wildlife (DNPW), under the natural resources ministry, ensures that the communities living around the country’s protected areas, including Nyika and Vwaza, benefit. This is done through various conservation and economic empowerment initiatives which the department implements with its partners.
He says DNPW has, for instance, been working with community beekeeping clubs in Hewe and Mphangala since 1986, and that the beehives are mounted inside Nyika and Vwaza, respectively.
Apart from beekeeping, there is also a co-management programme that involves Nyika-Vwaza communities in reducing deforestation and degradation, as well as improving livelihoods through managing natural resources to attain long-term benefits.
“Importantly, 30% of the revenue generated from Nyika or Vwaza through tourism or concessions goes to the communities for various development projects determined by chiefs in consultation with their subjects,” Nkosi says.
He says the communities are accorded some limited access to the protected areas to collect fruits, grass, mushrooms and bamboo, among other provisions. They are also allowed to visit their ancestors’ graves to conduct cultural rites.
However, Walutundu says that despite claims that part of the revenue generated from Nyika and Vwaza gets channeled to the communities for development, there is nothing to show for it on the ground.
“As you can see for yourself, the area is highly underdeveloped: bad roads, poor infrastructure for schools, and lack of sufficient health services, among others,” he observes.
And the traditional chief insists that the Hewe and Mphangala communities’ immediate problem is shortage of land.
“What are mushrooms, bamboo or grass for when one does not have land?” Walutundu asks.
This story was supported through a Human-Centred Conservation Storytelling Grant from Jamma Conservation & Communities. The views and opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Jamma Conservation & Communities.
