Page 49 - C:\Users\Owner\Documents\Flip PDF Professional\SHEPPERSON MEMORIAL SoMJ working copy\

The Society of Malaŵi Journal

Chirwa, and one with Dr H.K. Banda, then a doctor in England. He is described as
having been a student teacher at Livingstonia at the time of the uprising in 1915.
Equally remarkable is the fact that, while Price had worked as an educational
missionary in Nyasaland and had collected material relating to John Chilembwe in the
country, ‘Sam’ had never set foot in Nyasaland before writing the book. As is well
known, and as he never tired of telling his visitors, he first heard of John Chilembwe
while censoring letters written home to Nyasaland, in chiNyanja, by King’s African
Rifles (KAR) troops in Burma. After graduating from Cambridge and recruitment to
the army in 1942, he had been seconded in 1943 to the KAR and passed through
Kenya and Tanganyika, but not Nyasaland, on his way to Burma. He learned army
chiNyanja, or chilegimenti (the language of the regiment), as he liked to call it, from
the men of the Nyasaland battalions of the KAR in Burma.
Independent African remains a great achievement and is, after more than sixty
years, a classic. I know from correspondence with ‘Sam’ that he continued to gather
material on the life of Joseph Booth and that he contemplated a biography of him, but,
sadly, there was to be no second magnum opus. He did, however, contribute to the
biography of Joseph Booth, which was written by his student, Harry Langworthy,
1
who was Booth’s great-grandson.
‘Sam’ had one great virtue as a doctoral supervisor and that was enthusiasm.
He was unfailingly encouraging. I needed encouragement as there turned out to be
quite a few obstacles in the way of my research. There was no longer any problem
about access to the Colonial Office records at the Public Record Office, then in
Chancery Lane, and I had no difficulty in getting access to the Free Church of
Scotland records in the National Library of Scotland. ‘Sam’ also gave me access to
some papers of Dr Robert Laws, which he had acquired. But it was hard work getting
access to the records of the African Lakes Corporation at 200 St Vincent Street,
Glasgow. The company had recently been taken over by some Scots lawyers who had
no interest in its history. They had bought the company’s preference shares at a heavy
discount, and they were using their control of the company to pay off the shares at
great profit to themselves. They only allowed me access to the company’s minute-
books. It was about forty years later, when the ALC’s Glasgow archive had come into
the hands of Don Mackenzie, formerly manager of the company, that I discovered that
I had been denied access to its staff record books, which would have been immensely
helpful. I had not been told in 1967 that they existed. They are now, with the minute-
books, in the Business Records Centre at the University of Glasgow.
‘Sam’ introduced me to Miss L. Maitland Moir, daughter of John Moir,
‘Mandala’ himself, who lived in Edinburgh in a flat in Randolph Cliff with a
spectacular view of the Water of Leith. She had been born in Blantyre in 1891, and
was very lucid, but she warned me that her brother, Henry, another Edinburgh
resident, who was born in Blantyre in 1887, would not be helpful and she was right.
Unfortunately, Miss Moir had donated the hugely important Moir letter-books, dating
from the late 1870s to the 1880s, to the University of the Witwatersrand in
Johannesburg, and I had to go there to read them.
I found a few other people to interview in Britain. The most formidable of
them was Sir John Buchanan, the posthumous son of John Buchanan of Zomba. His
father died at Chinde on his way home in 1896 and he was born in Scotland later in
the same year. He captained Scotland at rugby in 1925, a year in which they won the
grand slam in the Five Nations Championship, and he had the jersey of England’s

1 Harry Langworthy, “Africa for the African”: The Life of Joseph Booth. Blantyre. Kachere
Monograph No.2. Christian Literature Association in Malawi (CLAIM). 1996.
41