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Notes on the Death of Anna Marie Hlawaczek 45

Collectors started and completed the building of the new Fort Anderson which is
now known as Mulanje.
Hector Croad was the Assistant Collector in Mulanje District having
been appointed to that post on 1 January 1893. Croad was known by the locals
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as ‘Nyalugwe’ (Leopard). He left for Luapula, Northern Rhodesia in March 1894.
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He had a very successful subsequent career and on 14 November 1918 while at
Kasama he informed the German General von Lettow Vorbeck of the signing of
the Armistice.
Dr George Robertson, LRCP, SE was a medical doctor who had
arrived in the country in 1891 to join the Mission Church of Central Africa
(Church of Scotland Mission) and who had been posted to the newly established
Mulanje Mission. He did not share the views of the founders of the Blantyre
mission that the African was capable of doing the same things as the white man.
In spite of Edward’s jaundiced views of him, the newspaper of the day ‘the Central
African Planter’ welcomed his new appointment and stated that ‘wherever he has
gone, he has won golden opinions not only on account of his skill as a doctor but
also for his qualities as a man’. He was ‘a man of untiring energy’ with ‘much
experience of the diseases peculiar to tropical Africa’. The publishers of the
Central African Planter shared the views of Dr Robertson on the capability of
Africans and this would have influenced their glowing views of him. In contrast
Alexander Hetherwick at Blantyre Mission complained that Robertson ‘was anti-
African, anti-mission and anti-Christian’. In September 1895 Robertson left the
mission and was appointed the first public doctor for the township of Blantyre,
looking after European patients, of which there were few.
Mrs Moir was the wife of John Moir the owner of Lauderdale Estate in Mlanje
District. John had been sacked as Manager of the African Lakes Company in 1893
and had purchased 4,200 acres from the company at Lauderdale, building himself
a house high up the valley near the ‘Crater’. Moir was of a religious disposition
and conducted church services on Sundays. He rode around the coffee fields on a
horse. When he was away in Scotland, Edward Laidlaw Thompson ran the estate.
It is worth noting that the European population in the country at that time was
tiny. In his report covering the first three years of the Administration 1891 – 1894,
Sir Harry Johnston calculated that in July 1891 there were only 57 Europeans
residing in the Eastern part of British Central Africa. By 1894 this number had
risen to 237 of which 3 were French, 2 Austrian Poles, 1 Italian, 1 Hungarian and1
Dutchman with the remainder being British subjects including those from
Australia, Cape Colony and Natal. On 1 June 1895, in his yearly report, Collector
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Gilbert Stevenson reported that in 1894 there were 16 European residents in
Mulanje District.
Fort Anderson
Fort Anderson was one of three stations in Mlanje District which was
one of the 12 administrative districts in British Central Africa: the other stations