Very few claims were disallowed or reduced in extent, and around 3.7 million acres, or 15% of the land area of the protectorate, was alienated, mainly to European settlers.
In pre-colonial times, the right of land ownership in much of Malawi belonged under the rules of customary law to the African communities that occupied it.
Community leaders could allocate the use of communal land to its members, but usually declined to grant it to outsiders, follow established custom.
Customary law had little legal status in the early colonial period, as in 1902 the Parliament of the United Kingdom enacted the British Central Africa Order, which provided that English Law would generally apply in the British Central Africa Protectorate and that the Crown had sovereignty over all the land in the protectorate, which others held as its tenants.
[1] In the period after 1860, southern Malawi suffered insecurity through warfare and slave raiding: this led to the widespread abandonment fertile land.
Local chiefs tried to gain protection from European companies, settlers or missionaries who entered the area from the 1860s by granting them the right to cultivate vacant, insecure land.
Eugene Sharrer claimed to have acquired 363,034 acres, and he had attempted to induce chiefs to give up their sovereign rights: he may also have intended to form his own Chartered company.
Failing this, he or an assistant sought confirmation that the chiefs named in agreements had agreed to sell the land and had received a fair return for the sale.
Initially, the exact boundaries in many of Johnston's land grants were unclear, but in 1895 government surveyors were appointed and to record these boundaries on official plans[9] In addition, most Certificates of Claim included a non-disturbance clause providing that existing African villages and planted areas were not to be disturbed without consent from the protectorate government.
However, any new residents, many of which were migrants from Mozambique, were obliged to provide unpaid labour in lieu of rent for the land they occupied, under the system of thangata.
[13] The situation was not finally resolved until the colonial administration's Natives on Private Estates Ordinance 1928 removed the distinction between descendants of original residents and others by abolishing non-disturbance clauses.
His claim to the Chilingani Estate, Blantyre, was granted in 1893 and the land was disposed of at a profit in the same year to three European buyers, including 26,537 acres sold to Joseph Booth of the Zambezi Industrial Mission.
However, a report in 1929 questioned the validity of the claims, and investigation showed that many of the supposed treaties were spurious and lacked credible documentation.
Eugene Sharrer acquired 363,034 acres in three large and two smaller estates; about half his land was in the Shire valley, where he grew cotton from 1901.
Buchanan was originally a gardener and was the first planter to grow coffee and Virginia tobacco commercially in British Central Africa.
He died in 1896 and the estates of the Buchanan Brothers partnership were taken over by a group of largely Scottish landowners who became the shareholders of Blantyre and East Africa Ltd, a company formed in 1901.
Of the remaining Certificates of Claim, 18 were granted to missions, generally for small areas of land although the largest was for the islands of Likoma District.
When further areas of Crown land were alienated, or where parts of any estate that had been comprised in a Certificate of Claim was sold, the owner was granted a freehold title.