Nyasaland

Nyasaland was the British protectorate along Lake Malawi, declared in 1891 and independent as Malawi in 1964. Britain arrived through missionaries rather than traders. David Livingstone had travelled the lake in the 1860s and campaigned for Christianity and commerce as a way to end the slave trade running from there to the Indian Ocean coast, and Scottish missions followed him. The protectorate was declared partly to forestall the Portuguese. It was poor: no minerals, poor soils, and an economy built on tea and tobacco estates and on exporting labour. By the 1950s a third of adult men were working in the mines of Rhodesia and South Africa at any time, and their remittances were the country's main income. John Chilembwe, an American-educated pastor, led a rising in 1915 against estate conditions and wartime conscription; it was crushed in days and he was shot, and he is now on the currency. The decisive struggle was against federation. Britain joined Nyasaland to the two Rhodesias in 1953 in a Central African Federation dominated by white settlers, and opposition to it made Hastings Banda's career. A state of emergency in 1959 and the Devlin Report, which described Nyasaland as a police state, broke the federation's political support in London. It was dissolved in 1963 and Malawi became independent the following July. Livingstone's heart is buried in Zambia and the rest of him in Westminster Abbey. Blantyre, the commercial capital, is named after his birthplace in Lanarkshire. Banda had practised medicine in Britain and Ghana for decades before returning in 1958. He then ruled Malawi for thirty years as a one-party state.

• Type: Polity
• Government: Colonial administration