BritishCentral Africa Protectorate

The British Central Africa Protectorate (BCA) was a British protectorate proclaimedin 1889 and ratified in 1891 that occupied the same area as present-day Malawi: it was renamed Nyasaland in1907. British interest in the area arose from visits made by David Livingstone from1858 onward during his exploration of the Zambezi area. This encouraged missionaryactivity that started in the 1860s, undertaken by the Universities' Mission to Central Africa, the Church of Scotland and the Free Church of Scotland, and which wasfollowed by a small number of settlers. The Portuguese government attempted toclaim much of the area in which the missionaries and settlers operated, butthis was disputed by the British government. To forestall a Portugueseexpedition claiming effective occupation, a protectorate was proclaimed, firstover the south of this area, then over the whole of it in 1889. Afternegotiations with the Portuguese and German governments on its boundaries, theprotectorate was formally ratified by the British government in May 1891.

The Shire Highlands southof Lake Nyasa (now LakeMalawi) and the lands west of the lake were explored by DavidLivingstone between the 1858 and 1864 as part of his Zambezi expeditions.Livingstone suggested that what he claimed was the area's benign climate andfertility would make it ideal for the promotion of Christianity and commerce.^[2] Asa result of Livingstone's writings, several Anglican and Presbyterian missionswere established in the area in the 1860s and 1870s. In 1878 The African LakesCompany Limited, predecessor to the African Lakes Corporation Limited, wasestablished in Glasgow bya group of local businessmen with links to the Presbyterian missions. Their aimwas to set up a trade and transport concern that would work in closecooperation with the missions to combat the slave trade by introducinglegitimate trade, to make a commercial profit, and to develop Europeaninfluence in the area. A mission and small trading settlement was establishedat Blantyre in1876 and a British consul took up residence there in 1883.^[3]

Concessionaires holding prazo estates from the Portuguese crownwere active in the lower valley of the Shire River fromthe 1830s and the Portuguese government claimed suzerainty overmuch of Central Africa, without maintaining effective occupation over more thana small part of it. In 1879, the Portuguese government formally claimed thearea south and east of the Ruo River (whichcurrently forms the southeastern border of Malawi), and in 1882 occupied thelower ShireRiver valley as far north as the Ruo River. The Portuguese thenattempted to negotiate British acceptance of their territorial claims, but theconvening of the Berlin Conference (1884) ended thesebilateral discussions. Meanwhile, the African Lakes Company was attempting toobtain the status of a Chartered company fromthe British government, but it had not managed to do so by 1886.^[4] In1885-86 Alexandre de Serpa Pinto undertook aPortuguese expedition which reached the Shire Highlands, but it failed make anytreaties of protection with the Yao chiefs in territories west of LakeMalawi.^[5]

As late as 1888, the British Foreign Office declinedto accept responsibility for protecting the rudimentary British settlements inthe Shire Highlands, despite unsubstantiated claims by the African LakesCompany of Portuguese interference with their trading activities. However, italso declined to negotiate with the Portuguese government on their claim thatthe Shire Highlands should be considered part of Portuguese East Africa, as it was not regardedby the Foreign Office as under effective Portuguese occupation.^[6] Inorder to prevent Portuguese occupation, the British government sent Henry Hamilton Johnston as British consulto Mozambique and the Interior, with instructions to report on the extent ofPortuguese rule in the Zambezi andShire valleys and the vicinity, and to make conditional treaties with localrulers beyond Portuguese jurisdiction. These conditional treaties of friendshipdid not amount to the establishment of a British protectorate but preventedthose rulers from accepting protection from another state.^[7] Onhis way to take up his appointment, Johnston spent six weeks in Lisbon in early 1889 attempting tonegotiate an acceptable agreement on Portuguese and British spheres of influence in Central Africa.The draft agreement reached in March 1889 would have created a British sphereincluding all the area west of Lake Nyasa andalso Mashonaland butnot including the Shire Highlands and Lower Shire valley,which were to be part of the Portuguese sphere. This went beyond what theForeign Office was prepared to accept, and the proposal was later rejected.^[8][9]

In 1888, the Portuguese governmentinstructed its representatives in Portuguese East Africa to attempt to maketreaties of protection with the Yao chiefs southeast of Lake Malawi andin the Shire Highlands, and an expedition organised under Antonio Cardoso, aformer governor of Quelimane,set off in November 1888 for the lake. Rather later, in early 1889, a secondexpedition led by Alexandre de Serpa Pinto moved up theShire valley. Between them, these two expeditions made over twenty treatieswith chiefs in what is now Malawi.^[10] SerpaPinto met Johnston in August 1889 east of the Ruo River, when Johnston advisedhim not to cross the river into the Shire Highlands.^[11][12] Previously,Serpa Pinto had acted with caution, but in September, following minor clashesbetween Serpa Pinto's advancing force and Kololo whohad been left behind by Livingstone at the end of his Zambezi expedition in1864 and had formed minor chieftainships, he crossed the Ruo to Chiromo, now in Malawi.^[13] Inresponse to this incursion, Johnston's deputy John Buchanan declared a ShireHighlands Protectorate in Johnston's absence, despite the contraryForeign Office instructions.^[14] Itseems probable that Buchanan's action, made without reference to the ForeignOffice, but following instructions that Johnston had left before he departedfor the north, was to prevent any further advance by Serpa Pinto rather than toestablish British rule in the area. However, in October 1889 Serpa Pinto'ssoldiers attacked one of the Kololo chiefs, killing around 70 of his followersand, with two armed river boats, pushed up the Shire River through the areaover which Buchanan had established a protectorate. After Serpa Pinto'sdeparture owing to serious illness in November 1889, his second-in-command,João Coutinho, pushed on as far as Katunga, the nearest river port to Blantyre,and some Kololo chiefs fled to Blantyre for safety.^[15]

Johnston's proclamation of a furtherprotectorate, the Nyasaland Districts Protectorate, west of LakeMalawi was also contrary to Foreign Office instructions. However, it wasendorsed by the Foreign Office in May 1891. This was because the discovery ofthe Chinde channelin the Zambezi delta,which was deep enough to allow sea-going ships to enter the Zambezi, which wasan international waterway, without having to enter Portuguese territory,whereas previously such ships had to use the port of Quelimane. Salisbury wasalso influenced by the offer by the British South Africa Company to fund theadministration of the protectorate, which convinced him to bow to popularpressure.^[16][17] Therefollowed an Anglo-Portuguese Crisis in which a British refusal of arbitration wasfollowed by the 1890 British Ultimatum of 11 January1890. This demanded that the Portuguese give up all claims to territoriesbeyond the Ruo River and west of Lake Malawi. The Portuguese governmentaccepted under duress and ordered their troops in the Shire valley to withdrawto the south bank of the Ruo. This order was received by the commander atKatunga on 8 March 1890 and all Portuguese forces had evacuated Katunga andChiromo by 12 March.^[18]

An 1891 Anglo-Portuguese treaty fixed thesouthern borders of what had been renamed the British Central AfricaProtectorate.^[19][20] Althoughthe Ruo River had been the provisional boundary between Portuguese and Britishspheres of influence since 1879, as part of the 1891 treaty and under strongBritish pressure, an area west of the Shire and south of its confluence withthe Ruo which had been controlled by an Afro-Portuguese family, was allocatedto Britain and now forms the Nsanje District.The treaty also granted Britain a 99-year lease over Chinde, a port at one of the Zambezi deltamouths where sea-going ships could transfer goods and passengers to river boats.^[21] Thenorthern border of the protectorate was agreed at the Songwe River aspart of the Anglo-German Convention in 1890. Itswestern border with Northern Rhodesia wasfixed in 1891 at the drainage divide betweenLake Malawi and the Luangwa River by agreement with the British South Africa Company, which governedwhat is today Zambia under Royal Charter until1924.^[22]

In 1891, Johnston only controlled afraction of the Shire Highlands, itself a small part of the whole protectorate,and initially had a force of only 70 Indian troops to impose British rule.These troops, later reinforced by Indian and African recruits, were used up to1895 to fight several small wars against those unwilling to give up theirindependence. After this, until 1898, troops were used to assist the locallyrecruited police force to suppress the slave trade. The three main groupsresisting British occupation were Yao chiefs in the south of theprotectorate and Swahili groups around the centre andnorth of Lake Nyasa, both involved in the slave trade, and Ngoni people whohad formed two aggressively expansionists kingdoms in the west and north.^[23]

The Yao chiefdoms were closest to theEuropean settlements in the Shire Highlands and, as early as August 1891,Johnston used his small force against three minor chiefs before attacking themost important Yao chief, who was based on the eastern shore of Lake Nyasa.After initial success, Johnston's forces were ambushed and forced to retreatand, during 1892, undertook no further action against the several Yao chiefthat rejected British control. However, in 1893, Cecil Rhodes madea special grant to allow Johnston to recruit a further 200 Indian troops andalso African mercenaries to take action to counter armed resistance and, by theend of 1895, the only Yao resistance was from small armed bands without fixedbases that were able to cross into Mozambique when challenged.^[24]

Next, Johnston prepared to attack Mlozi binKazbadema, the leader of the so-called "north end Arabs", althoughmost of those that contemporary Europeans in East Africa described as Arabswere either Muslim Swahili from the east coast of Africa or Nyamwezi people,who imitated Arab dress and customs but were rarely Muslims.^[25] Mlozihad defeated two attempts which the African Lakes Company Limited in the Karonga War hadmade between 1887 and 1889, with some unofficial British government support, todislodge him and his followers and end the slave trade. Johnston had signed atruce with him in October 1889 and left him in peace until late 1895, despiteMlozi often breaking the terms of that truce.^[26] Johnstonfirst secured the neutrality of the Swahili ruler of Nkhotakota bypaying him a subsidy and, in November 1895, he embarked a force of over 400Sikh and African riflemen with artillery and machine guns on steamers at Fort Johnston and set out for Karonga.Without any prior warning, Johnston assaulted two of Mlozi's smaller stockadeson 2 December and, on the same day, surrounded Mlozi's large, double-fencedfortified town, bombarding it for two days and finally assaulting it on 4 December,facing stiff resistance. Mlozi was captured, given a cursory trial and hangedon 5 December: between 200 and 300 of his fighters were killed, many whileattempting to surrender, as well as several hundred non-combatants, who werekilled in the bombardment. The other Swahili stockades did not resist and weredestroyed after their surrender.^[27]

The Maseko Ngoni kingdom in the west of theprotectorate had been the most powerful state in the region in the 1880s butwas weakened by internal disputes and a civil war. Initially, Gomani, thevictor in the civil war that ended in 1891, was on good terms with Britishofficials and missionaries, but he became concerned at the number of his youngmen going to work on European-owned estates in the Shire Highlands and byJohnston's forceful reaction to Yao resistance.^[28] InNovember 1895, he forbade his subjects either to pay taxes to, or work for, theBritish, and he was also accused of harassing nearby missions which had toldtheir members not to obey Gomani's instructions.^[29] Johnston'sdeputy Alfred Sharpe attacked and defeated Gomani's forces on23 October 1896. Gomani was sentenced to death by a court martial andshot on 27 October. Within a year, 5,000 of his former subjects were working inthe Blantyre area.^[30]

As the northern Ngoni kingdom did notthreaten European trading interests, as it was far from European-owned estates,and as the Scottish mission at Livingstonia was influential within thekingdom, Johnston did not use force against it. It accepted British rule in1904 on condition of retaining its own traditions. Its king was recognised as aparamount chief, the only one in the protectorate at that time, and received agovernment salary, whereas Gomani's son only received comparable recognition inthe 1930s.^[31][32]

The offer by the British South Africa Company to fund theadministration of the newly-formed protectorate was part of an attempt by CecilRhodes to take over the administration of all the territory claimed by Britainnorth of the Zambezi. This was resisted, particularly by the Scottishmissionaries and, in February 1891, Salisbury agreed to a compromise underwhich what later became Northern Rhodesia wouldbe under company administration and what later became Nyasaland would beadministered by the Foreign Office. However Henry Hamilton Johnston would be both theAdministrator of the British South Africa Company's territory and Commissionerand Consul-General of the protectorate, and would receive a payment of £10,000a year from Rhodes towards the expenses of administering both territories. Thisarrangement lapsed in 1900, when North-Eastern Rhodesia was formed as aseparate protectorate with its own Administrator^[33]

Harry Johnston, who became Sir Henry at theend of his term, was Commissioner and Consul-General from 1 February 1891 to 16April 1896. Alfred Sharpe, Sir Alfred from 1903, who had been Johnston's deputyfrom 1891, took over as Commissioner and Consul-General in 1896, serving until1 April 1910 (first as Commissioner and Consul-General and then as Governor ofthe Nyasaland Protectorate from 1907), with Francis Barrow Pearce as actingCommissioner from 1 April 1907 to 30 September 1907 and William Henry Manning as actingCommissioner from 1 October 1907 to 1 May 1908. Although the first Consulappointed in 1883 had used Blantyre ashis base, the second moved to Zomba because it was closer to the slave routerunning from Lake Malawi to the coast. Johnston also preferred Zomba because ofits relative isolation, healthiness and superb scenery, and it became thegovernor's residence and administrative capital throughout the colonial periodalthough Blantyre remained the commercial centre.^[34]

In 1896, Johnston set up a small government Secretariat in Zomba which, with theaddition of a few technical advisers appointed soon after, formed the nucleusof his central administration.^[35] In1892, Johnston received powers to set up courts and divide the protectorateinto districts and, until 1904 when the Colonial Office assumed thisresponsibility, he selected district officials with the title of Collectors ofRevenue, Their official title later became Residents, and they were thepredecessors of District Commissioners. Their main duties wereto collect taxes, to ensure a supply of labour to European-owned estates andgovernment projects and ensure government instructions and regulations werecarried out. Johnston's Collectors included ex-soldiers, ex-missionaries and ex-employeesof the African Lakes Company: the main consideration was that they had Africanexperience. A few Collectors in strategically important locations hadcontingents of troops attached to their district, but most had no more than oneor two assistants. By 1905 there were 12 Collectors and 26 Assistant Collectors^[36]

The power of existing chiefs were minimisedin favour of direct rule by the Residents, as Johnston did not consider thechiefs should play any part in the administration of the protectorate. Theexception was the Northern Ngoni Kingdom, which retained a significant degreeof autonomy. In practice, however, the relatively few district officersrequired the cooperation of local chiefs it administer their districts andallowed chiefs to continue in their traditional roles.^[37]

One of the major legal problems facingJohnston was that of land claims. For up to 25 years before the protectoratewas formed, a number of European traders, missionaries and others had claimedto have acquired often large areas of land through contracts signed with localchiefs, usually for derisory payment. Although Johnston had a duty to look intothe validity of these land deals, and although he accepted that the landbelonged to its tribes and that their chiefs had no right to alienate it, heput forward the legal fiction that each chief's people had tacitly accepted hecould assume such a right. As a result, Johnston accepted the validity of thoseclaims where the signatory was the chief of the tribe occupying the land,provided that the terms of the contract were not inconsistent with British sovereignty.Where claims were accepted, Johnston issued Certificates of Claim (in effect thegrant of freehold, or feesimple, title). Out of 61 claims made, only two were rejectedoutright and a handful reduced in size. These Certificate of Claim were issuedat a time when no professional judges had been appointed to the protectorate,and the work of Johnston and his assistants was subsequently criticised byjudges and later administrators.^[38][39]

In total, 59 Certificates of Claim to landrights were registered, mostly between 1892 and 1894, covering an area of1,499,463 hectares (3,705,255 acres), or 15% of the total land area of theProtectorate. This included 1,093,614 hectares (2,702,379 acres) in the NorthNyasa District that the British South Africa Company had acquiredfor its mineral potential and which was never turned into plantation estates.Except for this large grant in the Northern Region, much of the remaining land,some 351,000 hectares (867,000 acres) of estates, included much of the bestarable land in the Shire Highlands, which was the most densely populated partof the country.^[40][41]

In the first years of the protectorate,very little of the alienated land was planted. Settlerswanted labour and encouraged existing Africans to stay on the undeveloped land,and new workers (often migrants from Mozambique) to move onto it, and growtheir own crops. From the late 1890s, when the estates started to producecoffee, the owners began to charge these tenants a rent, usually satisfied bytwo months’ labour a year, of which one month was to meet the worker's taxobligation; however, some owners demanded longer periods of labour.^[42]

In order to raise revenue, and also toincrease the supply of labour, a Hut tax was imposed from 1895 in theShire Highlands. This was gradually extended to the rest of the protectorate,becoming universal in 1906. It was nominally three shillings a year, but could be satisfiedby one month's labour a year spent on a settler estate or working for thegovernment.^[43][44]

The name of the protectorate was changed tothe Nyasaland Protectorate on 6 July 1907.

There was only one, rather limited,official census in this period, in 1901, which returned a population of736,724. However, the African population was estimated on the basis of hut taxrecords with a multiplier for the average inhabitants per hut. As no taxes werecollected in some areas in the north of the protectorate in 1901, theirinhabitants were estimated on the basis of occasional official visits.^[45] Itis believed that much of the country was reasonably well populated in themid-19th century, but by the 1880s large areas had become underpopulatedthrough devastating raids by the Ngoni people andthe famines which they caused or as the result of slave raiding. There may wellhave been large areas in the Shire Highlands that had been virtuallydepopulated.^[46]

Some of the shortfall in population mayhave been made good by the inward migration of families groups of so-called"Anguru", Lomwe speaking migrants from the parts of Mozambique eastof the Shire Highlands estates, who became estate tenants.^[47] Theybegan to arrive from 1899, and the 1921 census counted 108,204"Anguru". Neither the 1901 nor the 1911 censuses recorded tribalaffiliation, but the very substantial population increases in districtsadjacent to Mozambique, especially Blantyre and Zomba districts, whose recordedpopulations more than doubled in this decade, suggest substantial immigration.In this period, relatively few Africans left the protectorate as migrantworkers, but outward labour migration became more common later.^[48]

British occupation did not significantlychange African society within the protectorate until the First World War,with most people continuing to live under the social and political systems thatexisted before 1891. No attempt was made to remove or limit the powers of theYao, Ngoni or Makololo chiefs (who had first entered the area in the 19thcentury) over the original inhabitants they had displaced, subjugated orassimilated, although the Swahili slave traders had been killed in the warfareof the 1890s or had left.^[49] Onearea in which early efforts to change the system manifestly failed was that ofdomestic slavery. Although slave-trading had been eliminated, and Johnstonissued instructions that domestic slaves were to be emancipated, thisparticular form of slavery endured, particularly in the Central Region, wellinto the first quarter of the 20th century^[50]

Throughout the period of the protectorate,most of its people were subsistence farmers growing maize, millet and other food crops for their ownconsumption. As the protectorate had no economic mineral resources, itscolonial economy had to be based on agriculture, but before 1907 this hadhardly started to develop. In pre-colonial times trade was limited to theexport of ivory and forest products such as natural rubber inexchange for cloth and metals and, for the first few years of the protectorate,ivory and rubber collected from indigenous vines were the principal elements ofa tiny export trade. The first estate crop was coffee, grown commercially inquantity from around 1895, but competition from Brazil, which had flooded theworld markets with coffee by 1905, and droughts led to its decline in favour oftobacco and cotton. Both these crops had previously been grown in smallquantities, but the decline of coffee prompted planters to turn to tobacco in theShire Highlands and cotton in the Shire Valley. Tea was also first plantedcommercially in 1905 in the Shire Highlands, but significant development oftobacco and tea growing only took place after the opening of the ShireHighlands Railway in 1908.^[51]

Before the railway opened, water was themost efficient means of transport. From the time of Livingstone's 1859expedition, small steamers navigated the Zambezi-Lower Shire river system, andthey were later introduced on the Upper Shire and Lake Malawi. The Upper andLower Shire were separated by about 100 kilometres (60 mi) of the MiddleShire, where rapids and shallows made navigation impractical, and both theUpper and Lower Shire were often too shallow for larger vessels, particularlyin the dry season. In addition, the main areas of economic activity in theearly protectorate were in the Shire Highlands, mainly near Blantyre, which was40 km (25 mi) from Chikwawa, a small Shire River port. Transportof goods to river ports was by inefficient and costly head porterage, as theShire valley was unsuitable for draught animals.^[52][53]

Shallow draught steamers carrying 100 tonsor less had to negotiate Lower Shire marshes and low-water hazards in theZambezi and its delta to reach the small, poorly equipped coastal port of Chinde in Mozambique. Low water levels inLake Nyasa reduced the Shire River's flow from 1896 to 1934, so the main riverport was moved, first to Chiromo,further from the main settlements below a steep escarpment and from 1908 toPort Herald (now Nsanje).^[54]

As early as 1895, Johnston suggested a linefrom the protectorate's main commercial town, Blantyre, to Quelimane in Mozambique.However, most of its proposed route was in Portuguese territory and Quelimanewas only suitable for small ships.^[55] Alsoin 1895, Eugene Sharrer proposed building arailway from Blantyre to Chiromo, and he formed the Shire Highlands Railway Company Limitedin December 1895 to achieve this.^[56] AlthoughJohnston urged the Foreign Office to finance this railway,it declined to do so, but in 1901 it agreed in principle to the company buildingthe proposed railway, and granted the company 146,300 hectares (361,600 acres)of land adjacent to the railway route. Because of delays over raising the fundsneeded for construction, and disputes over its route, it was not until early1903 that construction began. The line was opened from Blantyre to Chiromo in1907.^[57]

Modern communications began to beestablished in 1891, with the opening of the territory's first post office atChiromo.^[58] Thisremained the main sorting office until after the railwaywas opened, when Limbe became the postal hub. A telegraph connectionfrom Blantyre to CapeTown via Umtali wasestablished in April 1898.^[58]