After accompanying an expedition to Angola in 1882-3, where he served as artist, naturalist and Portuguese interpreter, Harry Johnston parted ways with the group after they made slow progress from the coast up the Kunene river. Venturing into the Congo, Johnston met Henry Morton Stanley who was in the country helping to establish a new colonial state under the personal rule of Leopold II, King of the Belgians. Stanley was commanded to negotiate treaties with Bantu groups and purchase enslaved people to grant them their freedom. Johnston and Stanley became friends and Johnston took part in one of these expeditions along the River Congo, where he collected natural history specimens and spent time learning various Bantu languages. The treaties that Stanley had negotiated with Bantu groups resulted in thousands of people being put to work in Congo as indentured labourers, constructing roads and other infrastructure and working on rubber plantations, where they regularly received inhumane treatment by Belgian officials.

On Johnston’s return to Britain, he published an account of his travels in Angola and the Congo, which soon brought him to the attention of the Royal Society, who appointed him to lead a scientific expedition to Mount Kilimanjaro in 1884. While his new expedition was ostensibly to study the natural history of the volcano, the plans brought Johnston into contact with the Foreign Office. After arriving at the foothills of Kilimanjaro and negotiating treaties with Chaga groups living in the area, Johnston approached the Foreign Office with a proposal to turn his naturalist’s camp near Moshi into a colony, with the agricultural settlers chosen by himself. He claimed that the colony would not require any government assistance and the idea proved tempting to the colonial committee of the cabinet, which was increasingly worried at German colonial ambitions in East Africa. The committee approved the proposal but it was soon struck down by the Prime Minister, William Gladstone. Germany then laid claim to Kilimanjaro as part of German East Africa and controlled the area until it was given to Britain (as part of Tanganyika) at the Treaty of Versailles following the First World War.

On his return to Britain, Johnston published this account of the expedition. He soon became known as an important authority on African matters. Despite his failure to persuade Gladstone, he was celebrated in the British press as ‘Kilimanjaro Johnston’ and was commissioned to return to Africa as vice-consul of the Oil Rivers Protectorate (south-eastern Nigeria) and the German colony of the Cameroons. By the end of the decade, Johnston’s influence and his work in negotiating treaties with African nations helped to define government policy. He originated the slogan ‘From the Cape to Cairo’ which epitomised British colonial ambitions on the continent during the ‘Scramble for Africa’ in the final years of the nineteenth century.