The Shire Highlands

We're going to be looking here at the southern tip of the country, around the red marker.

Here is it closer. The red marker is Blantyre, the country's commercial center (Lilongwe, far to the north, is the capital). Zomba Mountain is at the top, the Mulanje Massif is at the lower right, and a bit of the Great Rift Valley is at the lower left coner. You can see hills rising up to the highland--the Shire Highlands--that fill the space between Blantyre, Zomba Maintain, and the Mulanje Massif.

Here's a map from the end of the 19th century. Same features, with Zomba and Mulanje but with a nice emphasis on the hills east of the Rift Valley.

(Harry Johnston, British Central Africa, 1897, facing p. 188.)

We're standing on those hills and looking into the Rift Valley, with the Shire River in the distance.

Forget the new canal being dug. See the Shire River, the town of Chikwawa, and if you're lucky in the distance some center-pivot sprinklers irrigating sugarcane.

Here's the river in February, the wet season.

And here's more conventionally irrigated cane.

A grocery transaction in Chikwawa.

Yes, you can (buy Coca-Cola).

There are also lots of small craft shops, here making door and window frames.

A simple lathe.

The rebar serves here as security bars.

Doors for sale.

This lowland suffers regularly from flooding.

We've come up into the hills to the east. This is tea country around the town of Thyolo and foggy as hell in the wet season.

Lousy weather for driving but great for Camellia sinensis.

These are getting old for a commercial planting.

Picking crew with rain gear.

Waiting for the scales.

How much you earn depends on how much you pick.

Lunchtime.

The fog did lift. Men tossed the bags easily, which seemed odd until you remembered that the bags just held tea leaves.

Workers' housing on a tea plantation east of Thyolo.

A trading center in Thyolo.

Flora's was closed, but the store was open.

Slim inventory, hinting at Malawi's lack of foreign exchange.

Perhaps the most stylish shop.

No customers, so plenty of time for a photo.

We're gone east a few miles. That's the Mulanje Massif.

Perennial waterfalls.

And tea.

Malawi's tea industry began here.

Apologies to this picker, who naturally resented being photographed by a stranger who didn't ask for his permission. I wanted to see his clippers, which isn't much of an excuse.

Zomba Mountain, seen here from the Stanfordish campus of the University of Malawi.

Corn fields follow us well up the slope, erosion be damned.

A bit higher, and we pass the lake formed by Mulunguzi Dam to supply domestic water to Zomba.

Dozens of men and women carry awkward loads of firewood down to Zomba.

View overlooking Zomba, with Mulanje Massif (upper left) about 40 miles away.

We've panned to the right but are still overlooking the Shire Highlands, pockmarked with volcanic remnants.

Perhaps the best known is this one, Chiradzulu. We're going to head a bit up onto its slope. (Most highways in at least this part of Malawi are in bad shape, but this road, S.145, is an exception.)

There's a government center here, closed on weekends but crowded on weekdays.

From that center, we can get another view over the Shire Highlands. You can see why the British thought that plantations might do well here. They tried coffee but settled on short-staple cotton.

Holdings today are small and devoted chiefly to corn. Tobacco is the chief cash crop (and Malawi's biggest export).

Household drying.

A purpose-built tobacco barn.

The Milepa Trading Center is at the approximate center of the Highlands, but, despite the surrounding crops, cash is very short.

No customers here.

No inventory there.

People still do need to cook, and the cheapest fuel is charcoal, carried to trading centers by bicycle. It will be repacked in one- or two-kilogram bags for retail sale.

Bike repair shop, with bottles of recycled motor oil for motorbikes.

Churches are ubiquitous.

But don't overlook the many mosques, like this one on the highway to Zomba.

The most famous (certainly the most photographed) church is this one in Blantyre.

Somewhere else on this website there are more photos of the place, including the interior, which was closed when I came by this time. Services are now held in a new building.

The church has a pioneer cemetery that would be fun to explore if you come equipped for puff adders, black mambas, etc. I wasn't. I think I count five stones here.

We're going to focus on the area between the William Jervis Tombstone, the Bishop Mackenzie Anglican Church, and the Providence Industrial Mission.

Notice the tangle of roads. No signs anywhere, and the roads are dirt tracks, wet in the wet season and often choked with tall grass. I forgot to mention gullies.

Closeup of the peninsula on the Namadze River where Bishop Mackenzie built a thatch church in 1861. It didn't last long. He died of malaria within a year, and the mission was abandoned.

Passable by a Toyota sedan? Best check. Answer: yes.

The buildings on the site today are all recent, but notice the cross and the plaque at its base.

Here it is, commemorating the 1959 visit of a soon-to-be Archibishop of Canterbury. He came to mark the approaching centenary of the Universities Mission to Central Africa (UMCA).

Bishop Charles Mackenzie (1825-62). Malaria killed an astonishing number of Europeans. One of them who it did not kill was Harry Johnston. The title page of his British Central Africa (1897) lists his honors and identifies him also as "formerly H.M. Commissioner and Consul-General in British Central Africa." Regarding malaria, Johnston wrote, "Briefly stated, the only serious drawback to British Central Africa as a field of enterprise for trader or planter is malarial fever, either in its ordinary form, or in its severest type which is commonly known as blackwater fever.... I might state with truth that but for malarial fever this country would be an earthly paradise; the "but" however is a very big one." (p. 178.)

You saw the Namadze River on the Google image. Can you see it here?

Right this way.

Mackenzie dug trenches as defenses against slaveraiders. Why? Because Mackenzie was sheltering crowds of people afraid of being captured.

A modern church on the site.

Interior.

Principal's office at the on-site school.

Textbooks.

Thirty-odd years later, another missionary arrived at a place called Mitsidi, on the fringe of Blantyre. It's still in business, not only with a church but a vocational school.

Monument.

Pan to the right. Joseph Booth was the missionary who created the place.

A blend of religiosity and hands-on vocational training.

Here he is, about three or four years after arriving.

(Emily Booth Langworthy, This Africa Was Mine, 1950, p. 14.)

Booth also set up the Plainfield Industrial Mission, which got a new name in 1908.

The mission church. It's SDA. Need help? Seventh Day Adventist. I wish I knew where the accent falls.

Ouch!

There's a school.

There are students.

There's a cemetery.

An illegible stone marks the grave of Joseph Watson, 1869-1903.

Here he is. He died of malaria after only four months here. HIs wife moved back to the states and lived a long life.

https://encyclopedia.adventist.org/article?id=7JA1

We come to a much more famous mission, the PIM, established by John Chilembwe, a protege of Joseph Booth, who got Chilembwe to the U.S. for training at the Virginia Theological Seminary.

Booth came home, a certified Baptist preacher, in 1900. The monument alludes to the fact that Chilembwe 15 years later organized a revolt. The British authorities killed him and demolished his church, though they eventually relented and allowed a new church on the site.

The revolt accomplished almost nothing but stands as the first shot in the struggle for independence.

There are few photos of Chilembwe. Here he is with his wife, who survived him by three years before dying in the flu epidemic of 1918. Don't know about the child.

The Sanjika Rocks, an emotive spot five minute's walk from Chilembwe's church. He is said to have come here to reflect. It would be a good spot for that.

Here's his church, along with the British detachment that was about to blow it up. The church isn't the equal of the fancy one in Blantyre, but it's a damned sight more impressive than one I could build.

Here's its replacement, the New Jerusalem Baptist Church, built 1929-33 by David Sharpe Malekebu, who had similarly gone to the United States and, in his case, come home as an M.D. He was the first American-trained medical doctor in the country. The second was Hastings Banda, who would become the country's president. Both attended Meharry Medical College in Tennessee, but their politics were very different, and Banda mocked Malekebu for not supporting him in the fight for independence.

Interior of the church. It's not used, I was told, because the nave is so narrow that there is very little room for people to see the preacher.

Pulpit.

The church that's actually used is this one, outdoors but roofed.

Big place.

Baptismal pool

Pastor's house.

One of Malekebu's first accomplishments was the opening of a school. That was in 1926.

It's still cooking.

Young'uns too.

On-campus farming, with corn and peanuts tended by students.

We come now to William Jervis Livingstone, manager of the Bruce Estate, the cotton plantation that included the land occupied by Chilembwe's mission. In 1915, men at Chilembwe's order beheaded Jervis.

Also his young assistant, Duncan McCormick.

https://www.lismoregaelicheritagecentre.org/object-of-the-month-may/

Monuments marked (past tense) their graves.

The tombstones are in this thicket.

Here they are as of February, 2026. The metal plates had disappeared.

And here's Livingstone's bungalow, now used as housing by staff of the Magomero Community Development College.

There are several other, more modest surviving buildings on the estate.

View from the main house.

Slightly different angle.

Bargaining for pumpkins at the nearby trading center.

A dozen people were hanging around.

Waiting.

APPENDIX: There are some earlier pictures of Malawi on this website, including of Blantyre and Zomba, so here are a few more, from 2026 instead of 2013.

Google Maps states that Blantyre "is known for its British colonial architecture." Well, perhaps Sergei and Larry should do a little ground-truthing. They could point of course to the old Victoria Hall.

Does this old admin building qualify as "colonial Victorian architecture"? Strictly speaking, I guess. so.

Then there's Mandala Top, the old headquarters of the African Lakes Company. Upstairs there's a fine research library with wretchedly limited hours.

A few miles to the east, in Limbe, there's the old Imperial Tobacco Building, not housing Illovo Sugar.

Here it is in the old days.

(https://www.rhodesianstudycircle.org.uk/the-imperial-tobacco-company/)

Limbe also has the old Shire Highlands Hotel, still in business.

Nice attached garden.

But we're near the bottom of the Victorian barrel. How about this?

I guess you could call it Georgian, though in 1946 it's not the usual George.

The reason I'm telling the boys to check it out is because Blantyre is the last place in the old British Empire where I'd look for a display of Victorian architecture. Perhaps Google Maps just didn't know what else to say. We're looking down Victoria Avenue, with the Victoria Hall down at the very end. There's damned little Victorian colonial architecture between here and there.

There's a lot of decay.

True, there's also investment, as in this Clocktower Mall. Are the stores profitable? Hard to know, but there sure aren't a lot of customers.

Almost 15 percent of Malawians are Muslim, most of them descendants of converts in the 19th century, but a smaller number are descended from arrivals in pre-partition India. That's probably the case here. An entrance plaque mall reads something like "What God has willed; Blessed is God."

The busiest store in the mall (there actually isn't a mall in the mall) is the Chipiku Plus supermarket, with a boggling display of the staples: rice and cornmeal.