African Lakes Corporation

The African Lakes Corporation plc (ALC) was a British company originally set-up in 1877 by Scottish businessmen to co-operate with Presbyterian missions in what is now Malawi. Building on its original connections with the Free Church of Scotland, it operated its businesses in Africa on a commercial basis with a larger philanthropic purpose. Its businesses in the colonial era included water transport on the lakes and rivers of Central Africa, wholesale and retail trading including the operation of general stores, labour recruitment, landowning and later an automotive business. The company later diversified, but suffered an economic decline in the 1990s and was liquidated in 2007. One of the last Directors of the company kindly bought the records of the company and donated them to Glasgow University Archive Services, where they are still available for research.

The predecessor of this company was established as the Livingstonia Central Africa Company in 1877 with its head office in Glasgow by a group of local businessmen and its first managers were two brothers, John Moir and Frederick Moir. It was renamed The African Lakes Company Limited in 1878 and The African Lakes Corporation Limited in 1894. John Moir left the company in 1890, but Frederick Moir returned to Scotland in 1891 and continued to work for it there. All three of the original directors of the Company and several of the original shareholders were connected to the Foreign Missions Committee of the Free Church of Scotland, the parent body of Livingstonia Mission. Their aim was to set up a trade and transport concern that would work in close cooperation with the missions, to combat the slave trade by introducing legitimate trade, to make a profit, and to develop European influence in the area. The company's shares were acquired by the British South Africa Company in the 1930s, which later absorbed its businesses. In 1893 the business of The African Lakes Company Limited was transferred to The African Lakes Trading Corporation Limited, a company registered in Scotland, which re-registered as a public limited company named The African Lakes Corporation plc in 1982.

The company established trading posts at locations along the shores of Lake Nyasa and in the Lower Shire Valley in the late 1870s and early 1880s. As first, its commercial activities were hampered by the requirement to supply the mission stations and by a lack of capital. Its managers, the Moir brothers, concentrated on trading ivory rather than cash crops but faced stiff completion from Swahili traders who offered the African elephant hunters the guns and ammunition that the company was unwilling to supply. The African Lakes Company made, or claimed to have made, treaties between 1884 and 1886 with local chiefs at the northwest of Lake Nyasa around Karonga, where it had a trading station, with the ambition of becoming a Chartered company and controlling the route along the Shire River to that Lake. The company gave up any ambition to control the Shire Highlands in 1886, as local missionaries protested that did not have the capacity to police this area effectively. However, it had promised to defend the people of the Karonga area of the lakeside against the well-armed Swahili traders seeking slaves as well as ivory and became involved in local warfare against the Swahili and their allies between 1887 and 1889. Its lack of success in this put an end to its political claims in this area also. However, the company claimed the treaties it had made with the chiefs also entitled it to ownership of over 2.7 million acres, amounting to all of what was the North Nyasa District (covering all of today’s Karonga, Chitipa and Rumphi District districts). Investigations in 1929 showed that the company’s claims were spurious: some supposed treaties had never been made, others were with people who were not chiefs of the areas claimed, and some were obtained by deception. The company was said to have made almost no effort to develop its lands, but had sold off some of it to plantations, and local people were concerned that there would be further sales. By this time of this report, the company had been taken over by the British South Africa Company, which agreed in 1930 to the cancellation of the land title in exchange for the grant of mineral rights over the same area.

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