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Shepperson Memorial

captain, Lord Wakefield, to prove it. He went on to become head of the Colonial
Medical Service. After a bit of a struggle, I persuaded him to let me see his father’s
diaries. I later learned that after his death in 1976, and the later death of his widow,
they were thrown out, so my photocopy of the 1876 Zomba Mission diary, which I
gave to Edinburgh University library, and my notes from his diaries from the late
1880s are all that remain.
I also managed to trace a nephew of Low Monteith Fotheringham, of Karonga
fame, and I visited him and his wife on the Island of Cumbrae off the west coast of
Scotland. They were charming and I came away with a few of Fotheringham’s letters,
which had been torn from a letter-book. It was only later that I realised that they
probably had the whole letter-book in their possession. I also went to Macduff, in
Banffshire, to meet the oldest surviving Mandala employee, H.P. Mantell, who was at
Karonga in 1907. He was about ninety and had retired in 1951 after long service with
Mandala at Abercorn (Mbala) in northern Zambia. He died in 1971. His daughter,
Elizabeth, was then a missionary in Malawi.
I spent 1967-8 working on documents in Edinburgh, Glasgow and London,
and then travelled to Malawi for most of a year’s archival and field work. There I
found more problems. Although I was in touch with the Reverend Andrew Ross in
Edinburgh, I was not fully aware of what a shadow the Cabinet Crisis of 1964 had
cast over the country and how tense it remained. I also discovered that the ALC
archives at Mandala had been destroyed in 1953. A new manager had decided that he
wanted the archives room in old Mandala house for his office. The invaluable letter-
books and the agents’ diaries, all copies on tissue, were thrown out into the garden
and it rained – that was the end of that story. I got some help from J.V. Raynes, the
manager of the company, and from Don Mackenzie, then an assistant manager, but
they were able to produce no more than a few letter-books from the pre-World War I
history of the company, which was the focus of my research.
I also discovered that the National Archives were closed by presidential edict.
I had a forty-five-minute audience with President Banda in November 1968, through
the influence of my father who had a sparring friendship with him on the issue of
Federation. The audience that took place at State Lodge, New Mandala, Blantyre, was
both scary and enjoyable. I was the last interviewee, a place of honour, and went in
after the chief justice. I recall that I was ushered into a darkened room where I sat for
several minutes. Doors suddenly flew open, and an ADC announced: ‘His Excellency
the President!’ A short man in a dark suit and dark glasses walked in. I leapt up and
offered him my hand. He was friendly, expressed interest in my project, and asked
after my father and various Edinburgh acquaintances. He had vivid memories of John
and Frederick Moir, founding mangers of Mandala, whom he had met when studying
medicine in Edinburgh in the 1930s. It was only this year (2021) that I was amazed to
discover from an article by John Mackenzie that, as a result of my telling Banda that
another of his acquaintances, David Livingstone’s grandson, Dr Hubert F. Wilson,
was still alive, he had written to him on the same day, 5 November 1968, in an
2
attempt to make contact.
My appeal to the top did not, however, open the archives. The archivist of the
day, Mr. Drew, kindly let me see some non-official documents, including a few
Mandala letter-books, but archival pickings were slim indeed. I found some relevant

2 John Mackenzie, ‘David Livingstone, the Scottish cultural and political revival and the end of empire
in Africa’, in Bryan S. Glass and John M. Mackenzie (eds.) Scotland, Empire and Decolonisation in
the Twentieth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 193. The letter is in the HK
Banda archive at Indiana University, Bloomington.
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