Page 48 - SoMJ Vol 74 - No 1, 2021

38 The Society of Malaŵi Journal

three sepoys (Indian soldiers) killed during a punitive raid launched with the
objective of destroying beached Arab slave dhows. Fort Maguire was
subsequently built close to that site and named in Maguire’s honour.
Command of the Mwasi expedition was entrusted to Lieutenant Edward
Alston, late Coldstream Guards, supported by Alfred Swann whom Alston refers
to in correspondence as his Political Officer. It was Swann who was responsible
for conscripting over two thousand armed ‘native levies’, as they were called, to
support the main assault on Mwasi’s boma as well as supplying Alston with vital
local knowledge regarding terrain, the locations of settlements and local
affiliations.
Lieutenant Edward Gardiner Alston was the fourth of the six sons of Sir
Francis Alston, KCMG, JP, former Chief Clerk at the Foreign Office. Alston had
resigned his commission with the Coldstream Guards to join Harry Johnston in
British Central Africa [BCA], now Malawi, following a lecture by Johnston that
Alston had attended at the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), London. Alston
soon developed a somewhat jaundiced view of Johnston, not least in confiding in
an early letter home from BCA that the trophies Johnston had displayed at the
RGS lecture and presented as his own had, in truth, been caught in game traps in
the gardens of The Residency, Zomba or purchased from hunters. Hardly, Alston
thought, the actions of a gentleman!

Lt. Edward Alston, Coldstream Guards

Lieutenant Edward Gardiner Alston was gazetted to receive the Order of
St Michael and St George (CMG) in Queen Victoria’s 1897 Jubilee Honours list
in recognition of his leading role in defeating the forces of the intractable slaver
chief Mwasi. However, before his investiture he died of Blackwater Fever
(malaria haemoglobinuria) at Blantyre, British Central Africa, on 14th April 1897
and was buried at St Michael and All Angels, Blantyre. He was 26 years old.