Blantyre and East Africa Ltd

Blantyre and East Africa Ltd is a company that was incorporated in Scotland in 1898 and is still in existence. Its main activity was the ownership of estates in the south of what is now Malawi. The main estate crops it grew were tobacco until the 1950s and tea, which it continued to grow until the company’s tea estates were sold. Blantyre and East Africa Ltd was one of four large estate-owning companies in colonial Nyasaland which together owned over 3.4 million acres of land, including the majority of the fertile land in the Shire Highlands. The company acquired most of its landholdings between 1898 and 1901 from several early European settlers, whose title to this land had been recognised by Certificates of Claim issued by the administration of the British Central Africa Protectorate. After the boom for Europeans growing tobacco ended in about 1927, the company retained one large estate in Zomba District where its tenants were encouraged to grow tobacco and others where it grew tea. It was also left with a scattering of small estates that it neither operated nor effectively managed but obtained cash rents from African tenants on crowded and unsupervised estates. Many of its estates, excluding the tea estates which it continued to manage directly, were sold to the colonial administration of Nyasaland between 1950 and 1955.