From 1889, the British explorer and colonial officer Harry Johnston worked in central Africa under Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Country. Johnston travelled along the Zambezi making treaties with communities up to Lake Nyasa and Lake Tanganyika in order to counter Portuguese claims to the area. Leaving Africa in the summer of 1890, he returned in February 1891 as consul-general for a new British protectorate north of the Zambezi.
Granted a subsidy from the British South Africa Company, Johnston hired a small expeditionary force consisting of 70 Sikhs and 80 Zanzibaris and travelled to his new commission in order to consolidate British control over the territory. Faced with resistance from Yao, Ngoni and Swahili groups, the money quickly dried up through military campaigns and in 1894, he received assistance from the new Liberal government in Westminster. Johnston quickly used the aid to recruit more Indian soldiers in 1895 and personally led a large campaign against Swahili settlements that refused British rule. Once fully under his control, Johnston renamed his commission ‘British Central Africa’ (later called Nyasaland and now known as Malawi), used the government funds to split the lands from those of the Company and planned a policy markedly different to that of Rhodes. He argued that education, rather than exploitation, would benefit both Britain and Africa. His philosophy centred on popular thought around the ‘civilising’ mission of empire, an idea based on racial hierarchies that invested Britain’s imperial power with a ‘duty of care’ towards different ethnic groups. Johnston argued that the protectorate would improve not through economic exploitation but through the education of ‘progressive’ Africans who would move to modern settlements based around colonial centres at Zomba and Blantyre, while traditional societies were to be left alone as much as possible.
Ill health and ongoing legal difficulties surrounding settler claims to African lands prevented Johnston from carrying out his policies and he returned to Britain in 1896. He was knighted for his work in Malawi and took up a post at Tunis in 1897 which he used to focus on literary and scientific pursuits, publishing this account of his travels and career in central Africa. He was sent to Uganda in 1899 to take up the post of special commissioner, tasked with establishing a civilian government in the protectorate.