BRITISH EAST AFRICA.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1687, 29 June 1904, Page 21

BRITISH EAST AFRICA.

COMMISSIONER RESIGNS,

LONDON, June 22-

Sir O. N. E. Eliot. Commissioner and Commander-in-Ghief for the British East Africa Protectorate, has resigned his position. He has appealed to Mr Balfour, Prime Minister, to inquire into the circumstances of his resignation. He declares that the Marquis of Lansdowne, Foreign Secretary of State, prohibited grants of land to individuals, while ordering him to give a monopoly of enormous tracts on unduly advantageous terms to a Jewish East African syndicate. Sir Charles Eliot considers -thj> proposal was unjust and impolitic.

The Imperial British East African Company was incorporated by Royal Charter, dated September 3rd, 1388; and under the control of the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs* exercised sovereign jurisdiction over the. territories’leased to it by the Sultan of Zanzibar, or acquired by treaties entered into with native chiefs. A British Protectorate was announced over these territories on June lftiu, 1895, and the company handed over the administration on July Ist, 1895. These territories are now comprised under the name of the East African Protectorate. A great portion of the vast region in question consists of pasture lands or barren wastes, but there are not lacking extensive districts of great natural fertility on tne coast as well as in the interior. Sir Charles Eliot assumed the office of Commissioner and Commander-in-Chief of the British East African- Protectorate in 1900.