Colonial invasion

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9
Colonial invasion
during the last twenty years of the nineteenth century,
European Powers swiftly and painlessly partitioned the map of Africa among
themselves. To implement the partition on the ground, however, was anything
but swift or painless. Widespread possession of arms, codes of military hon-
our, and long hostility to governmental control made popular resistance to
conquest more formidable in Africa than, for example, in India. In creating
states in a turbulent and underpopulated continent, colonial administrators
faced the same problems as their African predecessors and often met them
in the same ways, but they had technological advantages: firepower, mechan-
ical transport, medical skills, literacy. The states they created before the First
World War were generally mere skeletons fleshed out and vitalised by African
political forces. But European conquest hadtwo crucial effects. As each colony
became a specialised producer for the world market, it acquired an economic
structure that often survived throughout the twentieth century, with a broad
distinction between African peasant production in western Africa and Euro-
pean capitalist production in eastern Africa perpetuating the ancient contrast
between the two regions. And the European intrusion had profound effects on
Africa’s demography.
partition
The slow European penetration of Africa during the nineteenth century began
to escalate into a scramble for territory during the late 1870s, for a complex
of reasons. One was a French initiative in Senegal launched in 1876 byanew
governor, Bri
`
ere de l’Isle. Faidherbe had pursued an expansionist policy there
twenty years earlier, but his departure in 1865 and France’s defeat by Prussia in
1871 had aborted it. Bri

`
ere de l’Isle, however, belonged to a faction determined
to revitalise France with colonial wealth, especially that of the West African
savanna. The faction included many colonial soldiers, eager for distinction
and accustomed in Algeria to extreme independence of action, and certain
politicians who secured funds in 1879 to surveyarailway from Senegal to the
Niger. The military used the money to finance military advance to the river
at Bamako in 1883.This forward policy extended to two other West African
193
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194 africans: the history of a continent
10.Colonial invasion.
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Colonial invasion 195
regions. First, French agents sought treaties with local notables on the lower
Niger that threatened long-established British trading interests. Second, in 1882
the French Assembly ratified a treaty in which the Tio ruler at Lake Malebo
on the River Congo professed to cede his hereditary rights to the traveller
Savorgnan de Brazza. This treaty, the basis of French empire in equatorial
Africa, threatened the plans of King Leopold II of Belgium, who, since 1876,
had used his private wealth to establish commercial stations on the lower Congo
but now felt obliged toadvanceterritorial claims. Fearing aFrench protectionist
regime on the lower Congo, but not desiring responsibility there themselves,
the British recognised Portugal’s ancient claims in the region in return for
freedom to trade there. This angered other European statesmen, especially the
German chancellor.
Bismarck had no wish for German colonies, but to protect German com-
mercial interests in Africa was a responsibility that might also earn him some

political support. He therefore authorised German protectorates in Southwest
Africa, Cameroun, and Togo during 1884, taking advantage ofa dispute between
his main European rivals, France and Britain. The dispute arose from events
in North Africa. In 1881 France declared a protectorate over deeply indebted
Tunisia, chiefly to prevent Italian predominance there. Egypt too was indebted
and was under joint Anglo-French financial control. When the Europeans
secured the Khedive Ismail’s deposition in 1879,Egypt’s political vacuum was
filled by Arabic-speaking landowners and army officers, led by Colonel Arabi,
hostile to foreign control. France and Britain drew up plans to invade, but a
new French government abandoned them. British officials in Cairo told their
government that order in Egypt was collapsing, enabling an imperialist faction
within the British Cabinet to insist on invasion of Egypt in August 1882.They
intended to entrench an amenable Egyptian regime, stabilise the finances, and
withdraw, but found this impossible. The resulting Anglo-French antagonism
left Bismarck great authority.
He used it to convene the Berlin Conference of 1884–5.This recognised
Leopold’s claims to the Congo Independent State (subsequently Belgian
Congo), acknowledged French rights in equatorial Africa, and insisted on free-
dom of trade throughout the region. The delegatesaccepted the British position
on the lower Niger and French primacy on its upper reaches. Most important,
the conference laid down that future European claims to African territory must
be more substantial than the informal predominance that Britain had hitherto
enjoyed through her naval and commercial power. The subsequent partition
was shaped by Britain’s attempts to defend her most valuable claims, either
strategic positions guarding sea routes to India or areas of especially extensive
trade, such as Nigeria.
The first step took place one day after the Berlin Conference ended, when
Bismarck declared a protectorate over mainland territory opposite Zanzibar
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196 africans: the history of a continent
where German adventurers had obtained treaties. Hitherto content to exercise
indirect influence here through the ruler of Zanzibar, Britain now partitioned
the region in a treaty of 1886 which gave modern Kenya to Britain and mainland
Tanzania to Germany. A further treaty in 1890 gave Britain a free hand in
Uganda, where the headwatersof the Nile were thought vital to Egypt’s security.
The Berlin Conference also precipitated rapid European expansion in West
Africa. The British declared a protectorate over the Niger Delta, whence they
later expanded into Igboland and Benin. They also asserted predominance
in Yorubaland in 1886 by brokering a peace treaty ending nearly a century
of warfare, subsequently persuading war-weary Yoruba states to accept British
residents. Britain thereby gained control of southern Nigeria, the richest part of
the West African forest. The main French conquests in this area were Dahomey,
taken after fierce resistance in 1892, and C
ˆ
ote d’Ivoire, initially seen as a route
from the coast to French positions on the Niger.
The upper Niger was France’s chief interest in West Africa. In 1888 her army
resumed its advance inland from Bamako, capturing the Tukulor capital at
Nioro in 1891,taking Jenne and Timbuktu in 1893–4, and expanding southwards
to conquer Futa Jalon and the Mossi capital in 1896.Thechiefadversary here
was Samori Ture, who during the 1870shad created a Mande-speaking state
between the upper Niger and the forest edge, dominating it through bands
of young professional gunmen financed by massive slave-raiding. His long
resistance ended with his capture in 1898.The French could now advance to
Lake Chad, where columns from the Niger, the Congo, and Algeria met in
1900.This advance eastwards had led coastal colonies to expand northwards to
secure their commercial hinterlands. Sierra Leone and Liberia were confined
quite closely to the coast, but the British had time to occupy Asante in 1896,
without resistance, and to declare a protectorate over the Sokoto Caliphate in

1900.
In West Africa the British were content that France should occupy huge areas
of ‘light soil’, as Britain’s prime minister described it. In northeastern Africa,
concern for Egypt’s security made the British more sensitive, but they had no
need toactuntil 1896 because the middle NileValley wascontrolled not bya rival
European power but by the Mahdist state. The Sudanese Mahdi, Muhammad
ibn Abdallah, had revealed himself in 1881 as leader of Sudan’s stateless peoples
against Egyptian rule, then weakened by political turmoil in Cairo. Three years
later his forces took Khartoum and established a theocratic regime, which
the British were content to contain. More alarmed by French ambitions in
Ethiopia, Britain encouraged Italian interests there, leading to the occupation
of Eritrea in 1889 and the advance southwards into the Christian kingdom that
Emperor Menelik repelled at the Battle of Adwa in 1896, the greatest African
victory against foreign invaders. This undermined British policy, as did French
schemes to approach the Nile from equatorial Africa. In 1898 Britain destroyed
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Colonial invasion 197
Mahdist forces at Omdurman and took control of the Sudan. Six years later
France abandoned her opposition to British policy in Egypt in return for a free
hand in Morocco, which she invaded in 1911.The Italians were compensated by
similar freedom to invade the Ottoman province of Tripoli (modern Libya).
The interconnections between events in different regions that converted
gradual expansion into a scramble also embraced southern Africa. Here the
main initiative was Britain’s unsuccessful annexation of the South African
Republic (Transvaal) in 1877 in an attempt to create a South African
Confederation under Cape leadership that would secure Britain’s imperial
communications. SevenyearslaterBismarckchallenged Britain’s regional hege-
mony by creating German Southwest Africa (Namibia). To prevent a junc-
tion between this and the hostile South African Republic that would block

expansion northwards, Britain declared her own protectorate over interven-
ing Bechuanaland (Botswana) in 1885.Ayear later, the discovery of gold in
the South African Republic transformed the situation, for with gold, and per-
haps European allies, the Republic might dominate southern Africa. Britain’s
first response was to encourage the diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes to launch
a pioneer column northwards intoSouthern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) in 1890,
hoping that gold discoveries there might offset the South African Republic.
Britain also occupied Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and Nyasaland (Malawi),
defying Portugal’s claims there but giving recognised borders to Mozambique
and Angola. Yet Southern Rhodesia’s gold proved disappointing. Instead, with
covert British acquiescence, Rhodes organised in 1895 an abortive invasion of
the South African Republic to provoke insurrection by British immigrants. Its
failure left no means of domination except the threat of war. In 1899 Britain’s
High Commissioner at the Cape, Sir Alfred Milner, manoeuvred President
Kruger of the South African Republic into issuing an ultimatum that drew
the reluctant British Cabinet into the Anglo-Boer War, not to control the gold
mines but to protect Britain’s position in South Africa against the threat aris-
ing from the gold mines. Victory cost Britain three years of war, nearly 500,000
troops engaged, 22,000 dead, and
£
222 million.
By the First World War, the European Powers had, on paper, partitioned
the entire African continent except Liberia and Ethiopia, both of which had
used firearms to extend their territories. On the ground, however, many large
and remote areas remained outside European control. Darfur in the Sudan
and Ovamboland in northern Namibia were conquered during the First World
War, the interior of British Somaliland in 1920.Berberfollowers of Abd el-
Krim in the Rif Mountains of northern Morocco resisted 250,000 Spanish and
French troops until 1926,while the High Atlas escaped colonial administration
until 1933.The Beduin of Libya had submitted two years earlier. Even in 1940 the

interior of the Western Sahara was outside European control.Yet these wereonly
major instances. Throughout the continent smaller groups, usually stateless,
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198 africans: the history of a continent
defied European overlords as they had defied all previous government. ‘I shall of
course go on walloping them until they surrender’, a 27-year-old district officer
wrote from central Nigeria in 1925.‘It’s rather a piteous sight watching a village
being knocked to pieces and I wish there was some other way but unfortunately
there isn’t.’
1
Only thirty-two years later he became the first governor-general
of independent Ghana. In Africa the experience of colonial rule was often very
brief indeed.
There had been no single European motive for the partition. Africa was not
central to European economies: during the 1870sitaccounted for little more
than 5 percent of Britain’s trade, most of it with Egypt and South Africa. Com-
mercial interests in tropical Africa were vital to annexations on the west coast,
but elsewhere merchants such as the Germans in Zanzibar often opposed colo-
nial conquest lest it disrupt existing trade. Successful businessmen left risky
colonial investments to less prosperous competitors or to enthusiasts with
noncommercial motives. Rhodes’s British South Africa Company never paid
adividend during the thirty-three years it administered Rhodesia. Only after
others had borne the costs of pioneering did the great German investment
banks or Belgium’s dominant trust, Soci
´
et
´
eG
´

en
´
erale, put money into Africa.
The important economic motives in the partition were Britain’s wider imperial
interests and such long-term hopes and fears as Leopold’s vision of Congolese
wealth, French dreams of Eldorado in Timbuktu, or British fears of exclu-
sion from protected French colonies. These motives might move statesmen,
although less than their strategic concerns to control the southern shores of
the Mediterranean or the routes to India.
YetEuropean statesmen did not always control imperial expansion. Bis-
marck certainly controlled his country’s, and so generally did British cabinets,
although their agents on the spot took the lead in Egypt in 1882 and to some
degree in South Africa, while missionary agitation outweighed other considera-
tions in Nyasaland. Such sectional interests were especially powerful in France’s
multiparty political system, where imperial expansion was driven forward by
ambitious colonels on the frontiers and the parti colonial in Paris, a pressure
group of colonial deputies, geographical and commercial interests, civil ser-
vants, retired officers, publicists, and professional patriots. They framed the
policies that took French troops to Lake Chad, threatened Britain on the Nile,
and acquired Morocco.
Moreover, Africa was partitioned not only because European statesmen or
soldiers willed it but because they for the first time possessed the technological
capacity to do it. Two obstacles had hitherto confined European power to the
African coastline, except in the north and south. One was disease, especially
malaria, which in the early nineteenth century killed within a year roughly
half of all Europeans reaching West Africa. The introduction of quinine pro-
phylaxis during the 1850sreduced the deathrate by about four-fifths and made
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Colonial invasion 199

European military operations possible. The other obstacle had been the absence
of overwhelming military superiority so long as early nineteenth-century mus-
kets took at least a minute to load, had an effective range of only eighty
metres, and misfired three times in ten. Breech-loading rifles were first used
extensively in 1866.Two decades later, they gave way to repeating rifles, which
French forces in West Africa began toadoptin1885,oneyear after the patenting
of the Maxim machine-gun, firing eleven bullets a second. Field artillery dev-
astated the palisaded strongholds of East Africa and the baked-mud defences
of the savanna, sparing the French a single casualty when driving the Tuku-
lor from Segu. Whereas Abd al-Qadir’s followers had fought the French in
the 1830swith a near-equality of weapons, the British at Omdurman in 1898
killed at least 10,800 Sudanese for the loss of only 49 dead on their own
side.
Both those campaigns wereexceptionalin employing large white forces. Most
colonial armies were warbands of African mercenaries barely distinguishable
from Mirambo’s or Samori’s. The Tirailleurs S
´
en
´
egalais who conquered the
West African savanna for France were mostly slaves, while many African troops
were deliberately recruited from ‘martial tribes’ in remote regions. Yet even
these forces had weapons vastly superiortothe muzzle-loaders that Buganda’s
warriors fired from the hip or at arm’s length from a range of about ten metres,
wearing their whitest cloth to display their courage. Several African leaders
acquired breech-loaders; Samori, for example, had perhaps six thousand at
his peak. But in tropical Africa only Ethiopia, Dahomey, the Tukulor, and the
Mahdists possessed a few artillery pieces, while Menelik and the Mahdists alone
used machine-guns. Abd el-Krim, however, employed over two hundred cap-
tured machine-guns and bought (but never used) three aeroplanes during the

1920s. By then Europeans were losing the near-monopoly of modern weapons
that had briefly made their conquest cheap enough in men and money to be
possible.
resistance and negotiation
Constrained by technological inferiority, Africans had to decide whether to
fight or negotiate with invaders seeking to convert their paper-partition into
power on the ground. This was a question of tactics, for the African objective
was the same in both cases: to preserve as much independence and power as
was possible in the circumstances. In choosing their tactics, Africans had to
consider their total situation. Those with previous experience of European fire-
power might think resistance futile, as did Asante in 1896 after experiencing in
1874 ‘guns which hit five Ashantees at once’. Others might be given no choice
but to fight. Ambitious French commanders, schooled in the Algerian tradi-
tion that Islam was irreconcilable, brushed aside attempts by Tukulor leaders
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200 africans: the history of a continent
to find a modus vivendi, just as British officers in Uganda treated Bunyoro as
an inevitable enemy because it had previously conflicted with visiting Euro-
peans and with the Buganda kingdom where the British made their base. Even
if negotiation were possible, some peoples could not hope to preserve their
way of life under European control, notably the slave-trading Yao chiefdoms
of Nyasaland, which resisted stockade by stockade. For others, by contrast, the
advantages of accepting an initially remote European paramountcy might seem
to outweigh its costs, as for most of the war-weary Yoruba kingdoms that signed
treaties with the British after one kingdom, Ijebu, had resisted and been heav-
ily defeated. Africans learned quickly from their neighbours. King Lewanika of
Bulozi asked his ally Khama in Bechuanaland whether, given his experience of
British ‘protection’, he recommended it, and accepted his assurance that he did –
advice coinciding with that given to Lewanika by a resident missionary, another

element in the situation. This Central African region illustrated the full com-
plexity of the historical circumstances within which Africans had to make their
choices. It was still dominated by the consequences of its invasion by Ndebele,
Kololo, and other South African groups during the first half of the nineteenth
century. The Ndebele military kingdom tried to coexist with Rhodes’s Pioneer
Column but was forced into war in 1893 by white aggression and the militancy
of its own young warriors. The whites found allies among some Shona peoples
who saw them as potential protectors against Ndebele aggression. Lewanika
also feared the Ndebele, which was one reason for negotiating with the British,
but more important was the instability of his Lozi throne, recaptured from
Kololo invaders only in 1864 and threatened by royal rivals, dissident subjects,
and numerous slaves. He wanted a British protectorate, he declared in 1888,‘to
protect myself against those [Lozi]. You do not know them; they are plotting
against my life.’
2
Amidst these complexcalculations, the one common feature was that African
polities were divided. Like the European Powers, each had its war and peace
parties, its hawks and doves. Sometimes, as in Asante and Dahomey, advocates
of the two policies had long contested power. Sometimes they were virtually
at war, as in Buganda, where the weaker Protestant party used the British
forces that arrived in 1890 as allies to secure its own predominance over Roman
Catholic, Muslim, and traditionalist parties. More commonly, the European
advance itself polarised opinion. In 1879,following the British victory over
the Zulu, the Pedi ruler, Sekhukhuni, proposed at a public meeting to accept
European rule, only to be denounced as a coward and compelled to resist.
Twelve years later, the Mpondo people on the northeastern border of the Cape
Colony fought a civil war over whether to fight the British. Such anguished
dispute divided the Sokoto Caliphate when British forces invaded in 1900.Each
emir made his own decision for war or submission. Kontagora, a militarised
frontier chiefdom deeply engaged in slaving, resisted in arms. Zaria, on poor

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Colonial invasion 201
termswith Sokoto, opened its gates. Kano strengthened and manned its walls
but made little resistance once the field guns breached them. Opinion in Sokoto
itself was divided between resistance, negotiation, and withdrawal. A minority
fought to the death outside the city, but others departed eastwards towards
Mecca, found their way blocked, had no chance to surrender, and died on 27
July 1903 with their Caliph Attahiru at the Battle of Burmi, some roped together
so that they could not retreat.
Where aims were so similar and decisions so complex, it would be idle to
think that ‘warrior societies’ inevitably fought or more pacific peoples invari-
ably negotiated. Sotho fought the Orange Free State in the 1850s and 1860s,
negotiated a British protectorate in 1868,fought in 1880 to prevent the Cape
government from disarming them, and in 1884 negotiated the restoration of
British protection. What mattered at any moment was whether the circum-
stances gave predominance to hawks or doves, on both African and European
sides. Yet hawks were especially numerous in two kinds of societies. Locally
dominant, militarised polities formed one category. They did not always fight –
Ibadan, the dominant Yoruba state, chose to negotiate – but the reasons against
resistance had to be compelling. Neither Sekhukhuni of the Pedi nor Lobengula
of the Ndebele could convince his young men to negotiate. Military honour
was vital here, as it was also for those like the Mahdists for whom resistance
was holy. The other societies with especially strong war parties were state-
less peoples who lived amidst continuous intervillage feuding, cherished their
own notions of honour, and had no experience of external rule. Often remote
and amorphous, they were exceptionally difficult to conquer. The Baoul
´
eof
C

ˆ
ote d’Ivoire, for example, fought the French village by village until 1911.The
Igbo of Nigeriawerenot fully defeated until 1919,theJola of Senegal not until
the 1920s, and the Dinka of southern Sudan not until 1927.Pastoralists like the
Somali or the Beduin of Libya were even more intractable, for their statelessness
and fierce independence were compounded by mobility and Islamic fervour.
Such societies – the militarily dominant and the stateless – not only resisted
most stubbornly but also launched the major rebellions against early colonial
rule.
To rebel against a colonial government was more difficult than to resist initial
conquest, for rebellion had to be organised both secretly and on a large scale
if it were to have hope of success. Most leaders of large armed rebellions were
therefore established political and military authorities in major states, espe-
cially where initial resistance to conquest had been muted, colonial demands
for tax and land and labour were heavy, and a favourable opportunity presented
itself. The Ndebele of Southern Rhodesia launched such a revolt in 1896, three
years after their defeat by Rhodes’s white pioneers in a war that had engaged
only part of the Ndebele forces. Embittered by seizure of land and cattle and
emboldened by the absence of many white policemen on the Jameson Raid,
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202 africans: the history of a continent
the Ndebele rose under their leading military commanders, mobilised subject
peoples and surrounding Shona clients who had not participated in the earlier
resistance, and spread the revolt to hitherto hostile Shona chiefdoms, which
now had their own reasons for insurrection. After besieging Bulawayo, Ndebele
leaders won important concessions before acceptingpeace. In Buganda, Kabaka
Mwanga launched a rebellion in 1897 mobilising many of those excluded from
the colonial and Christian order, but it was defeated by the British and the
dominant Christian chiefs. Three years later Asante sought to remedy by rebel-

lion its failure to resist British occupation in 1896,rising under the leadership
of a queen mother and military chiefs during the king’s exile and besieging the
British in Kumasi for four months until reinforcements suppressed the revolt.
The last great rebellion drawing chiefly on established political and military
institutions took place in Mozambique in 1917,whenthe Barwe people (a Shona
group) restored an ancient kingship and won widespread support at a time of
wartime grievances and Portuguese weakness.
Because grievances against early colonial rule were widespread, stateless peo-
ples and small chiefdoms launched many local revolts, but they generally lacked
the organisation to threaten European control on the scale achieved by Nde-
bele or Asante, even when they utilised institutions stretching across politi-
cal divisions such as the Nyabingi cult, which led opposition to German and
British control on the border between Rwanda and Uganda until 1928,orthe
secret society that organised the Ekumeku resistance to British rule in western
Igboland between 1898 and 1910. One exception to this narrowness of scale
was the Maji Maji rebellion of 1905–7 in German East Africa (modern Tan-
zania), which spread widely among stateless peoples through the leadership
of a prophet, Kinjikitile, who operated within the framework of a territorial
religious cult, spoke with the authority of divine possession, and distributed
water-medicine (maji)alleged to give invulnerability to bullets. Similar revolts
with religious inspiration took place in Upper Volta (Burkina Faso) in 1915–17
and in French Equatorial Africa in 1928–32. Elsewhere, however, large-scale
rebellion by stateless peoples took place only under Islamic inspiration. The
Sudanese Mahdi’s revolt against Egyptian rule had employed the same com-
bination of divine authority and multiethnic appeal as Kinjikitile’s. The chief
Islamic revolt against early European control took place in Niger in 1916–17,
when Tuareg tribes besieged Agades at a time of French weakness and decline
in the desert economy. Christianity inspired only one significant rebellion, in
1915,byplantation labourers in southern Nyasaland led by John Chilembwe,
an African clergyman with American training. His followers harboured mil-

lennial expectations and launched a brief and bloody attack on their employers
but gained no widespread support, for Christians were still few and engaged
in building up their strength within the colonial order, a task to which most
Africans turned once armed revolt was defeated.