British Central Africa Protectorate - Administration and The Land Issue

Administration and The Land Issue

Sir Henry Hamilton Johnston was Commissioner and Consul-General from 1 February 1891 to 16 April 1896. Sir Alfred Sharpe, who had been Johnston's deputy from 1891, took over as Commissioner and Consul-General in 1896, serving until 1 April 1910 (as Governor of the Nyasaland Protectorate from 1907), with Francis Barrow Pearce and William Henry Manning as acting commissioner for a period in 1907 and 1908.

In 1891, Johnston only controlled a fraction of the Shire Highlands, itself a small part of the whole protectorate and between then and 1895 he used a small force of Indian troops to fight several small wars to impose British rule. The troops, assisting the locally-recruited police force, were then used until 1898 to suppress the slave trade. Although the first Consul appointed in 1883 had used Blantyre as his base, the second moved to Zomba because it was closer to the slave route running from Lake Malawi to the coast. Johnston also preferred Zomba because of its relative isolation, healthiness and superb scenery, and it became the governor's residence and administrative centre; Blanyre remained the commercial centre. In 1896, Johnston set up a small government Secretariat (administrative office) there which, with a few technical advisors appointed soon after, formed the nucleus of his central administration. In 1892, Johnston received powers to set-up courts and divide the protectorate into districts, appointing Residents (whose title later became District Commissioner) to these. The power of existing chiefs were minimised in favour of direct rule by the Residents .

One of the major legal problems facing Johnston was that of land claims. For up to 25 years before the protectorate was formed, a number of European traders, missionaries and others had claimed to have acquired often large areas of land through contracts signed with local chiefs, usually for derisory payment. Although Johnston had a duty look into the validity of these land deals, and although he accepted that the land belonged to its tribes, so their chiefs had no right to alienate it, he put forward the legal fiction that each chief’s people had tacitly accepted he could assume such a right. As a result, Johnston accepted those claims where the signatory was the chief of the tribe occupying the land if the terms of the contract were not inconsistent with British sovereignty. Where a claim was accepted, Johnston issued a Certificate of Claim (in effect the grant of freehold, or fee simple, title). Out of 61 claims made, only two were rejected outright and a handful reduced in size. These Certificate of Claim were issued at a time when no professional judges had been appointed to the protectorate, and the work of Johnston and his assistants was subsequently criticised by judges and later administrators.

In total, 59 Certificates of Claim to land rights were registered, mostly between 1892 and 1894, covering an area of 3,705,255 acres,almost 1.5 million hectares or 15% of the total land area of the Protectorate. This included 2,702,379 million acres, over 1 million hectares, in the North Nyasa District that the British South Africa Company acquired for its mineral potential and which was never turned into plantation estates. Except for the grant in the northern region, much of the remaining land, some 867,000 acres, or over 350,000 hectares of estates included much of the best arable lands in the Shire Highlands, the most densely populated part of the country.

In the first years of the protectorate, very little of the alienated land was planted. Settlers wanted labour and encouraged existing Africans to stay on the undeveloped land, and new workers (often migrants from Mozambique) to move onto it, and grow their own crops. From the late 1890s, when the estates started to produce coffee, the owners started to charge these tenants a rent, to be satisfied by two months’ labour a year. Coffee was first grown commercially in quantity from around 1895, but competition from Brazil which flooded the world markets by 1905 and droughts led to its decline in favour of tobacco.

In order to raise revenue, and also to increase the supply of labour, a Hut Tax was imposed from 1895 in the Shire Highlands. This was gradually extended to the rest of the protectorate, becoming universal in 1906. It was nominally three shillings a year (15 pence), but could be satisfied by one month’s labour a year on an settler estate or working for the government.

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