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The Society of Malaŵi Journal

GEORGE ‘SAM’ SHEPPERSON, MANDALA, AND ME.

Hugh Macmillan

I write as one of George ‘Sam’ Shepperson’s postgraduate students. I first met
him in Edinburgh in the first half of 1967 and moved up from London to work with
him in October of that year. This essay is not an obituary, but an account of my
relationship with ‘Sam’, focusing on my work with him on a dissertation on the
history of the African Lakes Company/Corporation (ALC), always known after one of
its founders as Mandala. After a first degree in Modern History at Oxford, I had
moved in 1966 to the School of Oriental and African Studies, then part of the
University of London, where I was one of the first students to do the MA in Area
Studies (Africa). I did a major in African history and a minor in Social Anthropology.
My teachers in African history were Professor Roland Oliver and Dr Shula Marks,
then at the beginning of a distinguished academic career. Normally, I would have
stayed at SOAS and done a Ph.D. there in South African history, but I had signed up
to the academic boycott of South Africa, which seemed to preclude a South African
topic. I had been brought up in Scotland and my brother, Duncan, a lecturer in Art
History in Edinburgh, encouraged me to move back there. I had visited Malawi (then
Nyasaland) in 1963 and it occurred to me that I could do a Malawian topic. I was
drawn to the history of Mandala, which was founded in 1878 by backers of the Free
Church of Scotland’s Livingstonia Mission, as the Livingstonia Central Africa
Company. My grandfather had been a Free Church of Scotland missionary in India
and this topic brought together four historical themes in which I was interested:
Africa, Scotland, Christianity and commerce. I began work on the topic by writing a
short - 10,000 word - thesis for the SOAS MA.
Professor Oliver agreed that if I was to do a Malawian topic for my Ph.D., I
should move to Edinburgh and work with George Shepperson, the author, with Tom
Price, of Independent African: John Chilembwe and the Origins, Setting and
Significance of the Nyasaland Native Rebellion of 1915 (Edinburgh: 1958). This epic
work was, and remains, the most remarkable, and pioneering, work on the
protohistory of African nationalism. It is really, for about half its length, a double
biography of John Chilembwe and Joseph ‘Africa for the African’ Booth, the radical
Baptist missionary, who worked with the Zambesi Industrial Mission in British
Central Africa from 1892 and was a major influence on Chilembwe. The book also
combines African history with Professor Shepperson’s other great interest, the history
of the United States, to which Chilembwe travelled with Booth in 1897, and where he
studied for three years before his return to Africa in 1900. The book is remarkable in
that it was written before the opening of the colonial records on the rebellion, held at
the Public Record Office in London, which were still subject to a 50-year rule. This
rule also applied in Nyasaland, but it was rendered almost redundant there by the fire
in the Zomba Secretariat in 1919, which destroyed most of the protectorate’s records
up to that date. The book would not have been written at all if it had not been for
‘Sam’s accidental discovery of Joseph Booth’s papers in the records of the Anti-
Slavery Society in London, which are now in the Bodleian library in Oxford. He was
then doing research on the anti-slavery movement and Black American history. It was
the discovery in that collection of Booth’s manuscript account of his relationship with
Chilembwe that prompted ‘Sam’ to write the book (with the help, of course, of Tom
Price). They cited a handful of interviews with Malawians, including one with Orton

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