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The Society of Malaŵi Journal

documents at Livingstonia, in the Zambian archives, the Rhodesian archives, and in
the papers of Dr. James Stewart at the University of Cape Town. President Banda did,
I think, issue instructions to district commissioners that they should assist me, and I
was able to interview a number of informants in Malawi, as well as along the
Stevenson Road in Zambia, travelling as far as the south end of Lake Tanganyika,
where as was I able to touch the wreck of the first steamer placed on Lake
Tanganyika, the London Missionary Society and, later, ALC steamer, the SS Good
News, under water at Kituta. I had missed the opportunity to see the last surviving
ALC steamer, the SS Princess, which was moored at Chiromo, but sunk in a flood in
1968 while I was in the country.
I interviewed some very interesting old men including Lewis Bandawe,
M.B.E., in Blantyre, born 1887; the Reverend Charles Chinula, near Mzimba, born
circa 1885, who was reading the New Testament in the original Greek as I approached
his home; Hanock Ng’oma at Bandawe, a contemporary at Livingstonia of President
Banda, who had a shrewd idea of the president’s real age – not 1906 as he claimed,
but 1896 - and the Reverend Amon Mwakasangula at Karonga, born circa 1890, a
great authority on the history of the Ngonde. I also interviewed Chiefs Malenga
Chanzi at Nkota Khota, Mwase at Kasungu, and the ancient Ngoni Chief Mtwalo II
near Mzimba. Born circa 1875, a grandson of Zwangendaba, he had succeeded his
father in 1896 and had celebrated his diamond jubilee in 1956. He had clearly
outlived all his contemporaries. My interpreter spoke chiTumbuka and he
occasionally shrugged his shoulders and said: ‘He’s speaking Zulu now – I don’t
understand that.’ Interesting, and helpful in providing background material though
interviews such as these were, my dissertation, as finally written, was almost entirely
based on archival sources and included only a handful of references to oral sources.
I returned to the UK after about nine months in central and southern Africa
and wrote up a lengthy dissertation – 467 pages and about 180,000 words – which I
submitted in June 1970 under the title, ‘The Origins and Development of the African
3
Lakes Company, 1878-1908’. It was examined in August by Professor Shepperson
and Professor Roger Anstey (1927-79), from the University of Kent, an expert on the
Atlantic slave-trade and on colonial rule in the Congo. I am glad to say that the
dissertation was passed with minor corrections, and I graduated in October.
Was ‘Sam’ a good supervisor? Yes and no. He was always cheerful and
encouraging, which is vital in a supervisor, but he was not very critical or demanding.
I wrote a long dissertation within three years, but I realise now that he should have
insisted on its being both shorter in words and longer in chronology. I ended my
narrative in 1908 when the Shire Highlands Railway reached Blantyre and the
company’s steamers on the lower Shire and Zambesi rivers began to become
redundant.
He should have insisted that I continue at least as far as 1918 so as to cover the
company’s role as a target of the Chilembwe Uprising, and in the First World War,
when its steamers on Lakes Malawi and Tanganyika played a significant part in the
East African Campaign, and it made exceptional profits.
After leaving Edinburgh in 1970, I spent six years from 1971-7 in Swaziland
(now Eswatini) and eighteen years from 1978-95 in Zambia. I always met ‘Sam’ on
my biennial visits to Edinburgh. In 1977 he visited what was then the University
College of Swaziland (part of the University of Botswana and Swaziland) as external
examiner. I was his main host during his four-day visit, but I had some help from

3 The dissertation has now been digitized and is available online from the University of Edinburgh
library: https://www. https://era.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/24105.
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