One man has been killed and several others injured in violent clashes between landless peasants and security guards at a tea estate in the southern Malawian district of Mulanje, police said on Thursday.
Police representative George Chikowi said a group of 40 landless peasants from a village bordering Lauderdale Tea Estate invaded the estate on Tuesday and started parcelling up land among themselves.
When security guards tried to evict them the irate peasants besieged the estate’s chief security officer’s house where fighting broke out.
”A free-for-all fight erupted as the security guards tried to chase the intruders out of the estate,” he said.
The body of the slain peasant, whom police identified as 50-year-old Lewis Thunga, was found in a forest on the edge of the estate. He had multiple stab wounds.
At least 10 people were injured — four of them seriously, according to Mulanje District Hospital officials.
The four, who were hacked with panga knives, are still receiving treatment at the hospital.
The police representative said no arrests had been made in connection with Thunga’s death but armed police officers had been sent to the estate to investigate the incident and to prevent any possible retaliatory attacks by angry villagers.
He said the land dispute arose because the villagers misunderstand the concept of land lease as the estate in under lease from the government.
”The estate is properly leased but the villagers don’t seem to understand,” he said.
Makaula village residents say that as indigenous residents in the area they cannot allow estates to get all the good land while they do not have any.
Lauderdale Tea Estate General Manager Rick Illingworth said that neighbouring Makaula villagers have been causing a lot of problems to the estate for the past two
years.
”We have been trying legal means to end the problem but we have so far been getting no cooperation from either government or the police,” he said.
A spokesman for the villagers, who declined to be name for fear of police reprisals, said the village has patchy rocky land where no meaningful agricultural practices can be carried out.
He said government’s promises on land have come to nothing.
”We have to survive,” he said.
Lands minister Thengo Maloya is on record as having promised that government would repossess all idle land from big estates and redistribute among the landless using the controversial new land policy.
The new land policy bars any foreigner from owning land in Malawi. – Sapa-AFP