Autobiography, Unemotional and Concise
The Story. Those extraordinary young men, who throughout the last century devoted themselves to creating what is now known as the British Commonwealth of Nations, were apt to start almost anyhow and end almost everywhere. Sir Harry Johnston began life as a student of painting and zoology in London; he is ending it by writing vigorous novels in which there appear imaginary descendants of Dickens' characters; and he spent the intervening time in the British consular service.
With the unemotional conciseness of a consular report, this book gives the record of his amazingly versatile and far-flung career. An early passion for travel sent him to Tunis; he was meditating a trip to central Asia when one of those remarkable accidents which seemed always to be happening to intelligent and well-connected young Englishmen 40 years ago diverted him to the west coast of Africa, with a letter to Explorer Stanley in his pocket.
It was the great age of African exploration, when the world was thrilling to the achievements of Livingstone and Stanley, and the statesmen of Europe were at the height of their wild scramble for all the remaining corners of the earth. Young Johnston drifted naturally into Colonial administration as a Vice Consul in the Cameroons. Thereafter he served all over Africa, from Nigeria in the West to Mount Kilimanjaro and Nyasaland in the East. With an incomprehensible industry he controlled the natives, pushed British trade, extored, painted, studied native languages, worked as a botanist and zoologist, wrote books and articles, dealt with the delicate diplomatic questions raised by the colonial rivalry of the other European nations. He undertook exhausting expeditions, fought minor wars with Arab slave traders, assisted the missionaries to make the African world safe for commerce, apparently did it all with the utmost British gravity.
The Significance. The book is dry narrative. But it is interesting because it sets forth one of the most absorbing of stories—the incredible picture of 19th Century imperialism. The British colonized Africa under an impulse that seemed to spring equally from the mission societies, the British Museum, the trading companies, and to be carried on with a classic casualness. Johnston first met Cecil Rhodes at a bachelor dinnerparty in London. The two sat up all night discussing a new scheme for colonization in central Africa; when they parted the next morning Rhodes had given Johnston a check for £2000, and by afternoon, Johnston, while waiting for the Foreign Office to look into the matter, was already buying supplies for the expedition. It was the way things were done.