Alfred Sharpe

Sir Alfred Sharpe, KCMG, CB (19 May 1853 in Lancaster – 10 December 1935) was Commissioner and Consul-General for the British Central Africa Protectorate and first Governor of Nyasaland.

He trained as a solicitor but was in turn a planter and a professional hunter before becoming a British colonial administrator. He was commissioner (a de facto governor) of the British Central Africa Protectorate from 1896 until 1907 and Governor of Nyasaland after the protectorate changed its name to Nyasaland in 1907 until his retirement in 1910. He was involved in some of the dramatic events which shaped south-Central Africa at the onset of colonialism.

Sharpe was born on 19 May 1853 at Lancaster, Lancashire, England. During his childhood his family moved from Lancaster, first to Wales and then to Switzerland and France as his father was a railway engineer, involved in railway construction in those countries. Sharpe was educated at Haileybury and Imperial Service College, near Hertford and trained with a private firm of solicitors, qualifying as a solicitor at age twenty-three. In 1883, he travelled with a cousin to Viti Levu, the largest island of Fiji, to start a sugar plantation. Their plantation venture failed within a year, as the cousins had no experience in tropical agriculture and because sugar prices were low. Sharpe started his administrative career in Fiji with a brief period as an acting stipendiary magistrate there in 1885–1886. He was offered the position of a district officer in Fiji, but he refused and then left for Central Africa. Sharpe was a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), 1891–1935; RGS Cuthbert Peek Award, 1898; Member of the Council of the RGS, 1913–1917.

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