Page 59 - 2020 SoMJ Vol 73 No 2_Neat

50 The Society of Malaŵi Journal

While in PEA, Anna Marie became very ill. She was evidently staying
at a French Jesuit Mission at the time. The missionaries were unable to assist her
and so she wrote letters to Dr Robertson for assistance. According to an article in
the Blantyre Mission magazine ‘Life and Work in British Central Africa’ written
after her death these were ‘piteous letters’, evidently from a desperately sick
woman. This article bears the initials G R - evidently George Robertson who as
noted was employed by the Mission. According to Edward Laidlaw Thomson ‘for
some reason Dr Robertson was either unwilling or unable to go over (the border)
at once but passed here (Lauderdale) on Saturday on his way to see her’. In spite
of receiving the ‘piteous letters’ Dr Robertson evidently was not to be rushed in
trying to assist Anna Marie.
st
` Two days before this on Thursday 21 September 1893 Anna Marie had
made her way back across the Ruo River to Bell’s Station (Fort Anderson) ‘in a
state of collapse’. She rallied somewhat that evening and when Bell had looked in
at Anna Marie in her tent at sunrise the next morning, he states he had found her
sleeping. A boy who had taken her some food at 9.30 a.m. reported to Bell that
she was ‘not good’ and it was discovered that she had died. It is possible that the
cause of death was blackwater fever which was prevalent at that time and often
deadly. Dr Robertson finally arrived at the station the following day.
Place of burial
nd
Anna Marie was buried on the afternoon of her death (22 September
1893) by Imlah (a planter), Watson and Croad at a nearby graveyard that had been
earmarked for Europeans, the first such grave on that site. Bell wrote a long article
about Mulanje District in two issues (June and July) of Volume 1 of the British
Central Africa Gazette in 1894. He stated that “some distance from the station a
small plot has been marked off as a European burial ground, but it is hoped that
further proof of its utility will long be deferred. Unfortunately, one grave already
exists that of Miss A M Hlawaczek, ‘an Austrian woman’ who died at Fort
Anderson on 22.9.1893”. Watson and Croad evidently owed their freedom in part
to Anna Marie and so can have been expected to give her a decent burial.
According to Edward Laidlaw Thomson, Bell was ‘too ill’ to attend the
burial. Bell’s absence seems strange given that he had been well enough to check
on her that same morning and it gives credence to the assertions made by Cullen
Young in 1950 and in the Nyasaland Journal three years later that a wrong had
been done to her by Bell, i.e. Bell may have been too embarrassed to attend the
burial. Given that Cullen Young’s comments were made over 50 years after her
death, one wonders how the memory of what happened to Anna Marie at Fort
Anderson was carried down the years. Cullen Young was only 13 years old when
Anna Marie died. He had acquired the photos of her walking in Mulanje in 1919
and this doubtless inspired in him an interest in her and her story. One possibility
is that C A Cardew who had been in the country in 1893 and who still lived there