Annual report on Nyasaland / Colonial Office.

  • Colonial Office
Date:
[1946]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

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

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    expedition under Major Serpa Pinto and one of the Makololo chiefs, in consequence of which the Acting Consul, a pioneer planter named Buchanan, proclaimed a British Protectorate over the Shire country on 21st September, 1889, almost exactly thirty years after Livingstone first set foot on the shores of Lake Nyasa. In 1891 an Anglo-Portuguese Convention ratified the work of Mr. H. H. (later Sir Harry) Johnson, Mr. (later Sir) Alfred Sharpe, and others, and a Protectorate was proclaimed over the countries adjoining Lake Nyasa; in 1893 the name of the territory was changed to “The British Central Africa Protectorate”, but in 1907 a further Order-in- Council revived the old name of “The Nyasaland Protectorate”. It must here be emphasised that Nyasaland did not fall under British influence by conquest or annexation; it was led under the protection of the Crown by British missionaries and traders with, as the first Proclamation put it, “the consent and desire of the Chiefs and people”; the note thus struck rings to-day in the degree of harmony which still persists in its more modern life. By 1896 the slave-trade had been extinguished and the countries of the Yao and the Southern Angoni pacified, although the Northern Angoni did not come fully within the sphere of British Administration until 1904. They had, however, long given up raiding their neighbours, partly because of an unpleasant military surprise inflicted upon them by the Achewa to their south, but undoubtedly mainly because of the immense influence acquired over their Paramount Chief by Dr. Laws, to whom, with his colleagues, was due the peaceful entry into the British Common¬ wealth of 100,000 people with their 5,000 square miles of territory. Since then the life of the country has on the whole been peaceful, though, of course, affected like every other land by the two World Wars. Nyasaland’s position in 1914 with her long common border with German East Africa was dangerous, but prompt action on both land and water scotched the immediate danger, and she was able to contribute greatly to the British forces which waged the long and costly East African cam¬ paign. It was during this war that the country suffered the only armed rising in its modern history, when one John Chilembwe, a native pastor half-educated, in the United States, and encouraged by the German authorities, rose with his followers in the Blantyre neighbourhood and murdered several Europeans against whom the rebels had personal grudges; rapid counter-measures were taken and the rising fizzled out with the death of its leader in a scuffle in the bush on the Portuguese border. To the credit of these misguided men, it must be recorded that such European women and children as fell into their hands were treated with the utmost consideration. The year 1939 found the Protectorate far from any front, but never¬ theless in a position to aid the war effort very considerably, in relation to her size, in both men and materials. In peacetime Nyasaland raises the two senior regular battalions of the King’s African Rifles, and the First Battalion maintained its pride of place by being the first African colonial unit to be in action, in 1940 against the Italians on the Abyssinian border, and the last out of action in 1945, in the neighbourhood of Ran¬ goon, after adding Abyssinia, Madagascar and Burma to a list of cam-
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