Sir Harry Johnston's Stories of Anti-Slavery in British Central Africa

This paper uses the case study of one life to explore how an artist, author and colonial administrator used anti-slavery to sell imperial expansion to a metropolitan public as materially and morally desirable. A man such as the explorer Harry Johnston could find success mixing adventuring in Africa with literary or artistic efforts advertising the moral purpose of British influence. In 1888, he published his sketch of a Central African slave raid in the Graphic magazine. In starker terms than Victorian audiences had seen before, he showed the mayhem, murder, and disruption caused in a village when Arab slave traders raided. In an accompanying article, Johnston insisted that Britain and other European powers should use territorial control over areas of Africa to suppress this alien slave trade.  He followed this with the graphically illustrated book History of a Slave in 1889, imagining a Central African’s narrative of his ordeals that drew on stories Johnston had heard from ex-slaves in the western Sudan. Having captured other Africans to sell to an Arab slave trader, the imagined narrator found his own village invaded to satisfy the same trader’s greed. As Johnston’s brother put it, no sooner had Harry “finished fighting slavery with his pen and still more eloquent brush when he was called upon to combat it with the sword”, since he was appointed in 1891 as the first British resident of a new Nyassaland Protectorate. The paper will show how – on three levels – anti-slavery ideas drew public support for imperial expansion, converted private interests into national interests, and created greedy economic interests where they would otherwise have never existed.