(1858–1927). British explorer, botanist, and pioneer colonial administrator Harry Hamilton Johnston was closely involved in the so-called “scramble for Africa” among 19th-century European colonial powers. Widely traveled in that continent and speaking many African languages, he published 40 books on African subjects and from 1891 to 1895 served as the first British commissioner in Nyasaland, now the Republic of Malawi.
Born on June 12, 1858, in London, Johnston gained his early African experience as a painter, natural-history collector, and freelance journalist. He was in Tunis in 1879–80 and then traveled through Angola and up the Congo River in 1882–83. On a botanical expedition to Mount Kilimanjaro in Eastern Africa, he obtained a land concession that helped draw the frontiers between British and German territories in that region. Joining the consular service in 1885, he spent three years administering a British protectorate in eastern Nigeria. Between 1888 and 1891 he was highly influential in British African policy and obtained the treaties on which the United Kingdom based its claims to Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia. Knighted in 1896, Johnston served two years as consul general in Tunis and then was special commissioner in Uganda (1899–1901).
In addition to his books on Africa, Johnston wrote several novels. In The Gay-Dombeys (1919) and The Veneerings (1922) he follows the careers of supposed descendants of characters in novels by Charles Dickens. Johnston died on Aug. 31, 1927, at Woodsetts House, near Worksop, Nottinghamshire, England.