The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire

by H. W. Crocker, III

  Alas, the sun set on British West Africa sooner than it should have—at least if the goal was to create parliamentary institutions. These were the inheritance of Ghana (independent in 1957), Nigeria (1960), Sierra Leone (1961), and The Gambia (1965), but Ghana, the first black African state to gain its independence, showed how swiftly socialism could wreck a relatively prosperous economy. Its leader Kwame Nkrumah (who ruled from 1957 to 1966, when he was overthrown in a coup while visiting Communist China) was widely admired by liberals and pan-Africanists even as he banned, jailed, and exiled his political opponents. All this was allegedly necessary to achieve Ghana’s great leap forward, though it amounted to a great leap backward in terms of the economy, justice, and freedom. Nigeria, for its part, became a land of military coups. Sierra Leone started off decently but drifted into the swamp of African reprimitivisation; British troops had to return in 2000 to defeat a barbarous rebel movement, the Revolutionary United Front, infamous for its mutilations, use of child soldiers, and other atrocities. If the people of Sierra Leone had a choice, they would likely gladly return to being a Crown colony faster than you can say peace and justice. Plucky little Gambia, meanwhile, has done moderately well and not coincidentally has been keen on maintaining its ties to Britain and a free market economy. All in all, Lord Lugard would be unhappy, but not surprised, at the history of post-imperial British West Africa

  Cry, the Beloved Country

  It is a myth that the British seized South Africa from black Africans. If they seized it from anyone, it was the Dutch. The Dutch had been at the Cape since 1652 (they were preceded by the Portuguese, who arrived a century and a half earlier). The land was sparsely populated with cattle-herding Hottentots and nomadic Bushmen. For centuries the Bantu peoples—who would later dominate South Africa, peoples like the Xhosa and the Zulu (who were not a separate tribe or clan until the eighteenth century)—had been migrating south, but they were still five hundred miles north of the early Dutch settlements.7 It would be another century before the Dutch, reinforced by Germans and French Huguenots, and by then a fully established tribe of Southern Africa themselves, met the Bantu.

  The Dutch—or Afrikaners or Boers (from the Dutch word for farmer)—were a sturdy, stubborn, independent-minded people; frontiersmen, deeply religious, devoted to family, self-reliant, and impatient of any government restraint; and there was not much of that from the Dutch East India Company, which had sponsored the settlement. The British began arriving in the eighteenth century and by 1806 had achieved paramount status, annexing the Cape. In the tribal history of Africa, the Hottentots had displaced the Bushmen, the Boers had displaced the Hottentots, and now the British were asserting their supremacy, while the Bantu tribes were migrating southwards staking their own claims. The Boers and the Bantu were cattlemen, and tough and hardy souls. The British, with their natural sense of superiority, saw themselves as the governing race, which would settle the claims between the Boers (whom they found unsympathetic) and the black Africans (whom they thought needed British protection from Boer rapacity, though constant border wars with the Xhosa were starting to bring some British officials to an almost Boer state of mind).

  The Boers were immune to the charms of high-minded British liberalism and trekked to escape it. The Boers defeated the Zulus, made peace with them, and established the Natalia Republic on the southeastern coast in 1839, only to have it annexed by the British in 1843. So they pushed inland, establishing the settlements of the Transvaal (recognized as independent by the British in 1852 and established as the South African Republic in 1856) and the independent Orange Free State (which was recognized by the British in 1854). At the same time, the British established local parliamentary institutions with voter rolls that included blacks and mixed-race voters if they had sufficient economic standing.

  South Africa remained a colonial backwater until it was discovered to be rich in diamonds in the late 1860s (gold discoveries followed in the 1880s), leading to a rush of immigrants and pressure on the British to annex, bring order, and assert their rights over more of southern Africa. Sir Theophilus Shepstone, a longtime British diplomat and expert in native affairs in South Africa (his father had been a missionary) arranged for the annexation of the Transvaal in 1877. The governor of the Cape Colony, Sir Bartle Frere, took the next step. Bordering the British colony of Natal was Zululand. The entire civilization of the Zulus was based on war and killing, and though the British were at peace with the Zulu, Frere thought war inevitable with such neighbors; moreover, given the Zulus’ fearsome reputation, if they were defeated by British arms, it would have a pacifying effect on every South African tribe. As James Morris noted in his book Heaven’s Command, the Zulu nation “was like a vast black predator lurking in its downlands, now pouncing upon the Swazis or the Basutos, now threatening the British or the Boers. Everybody was scared of the Zulus, and the British in particular were nervous that some grand Zulu washing of the spears might trigger off a native rising throughout South Africa.” Frere demanded the Zulus disband their armies and their belligerent way of life—and when they did not, the British pursued their own belligerent aims, marching into Zululand in what, in Morris’s apposite words, “composed a pattern of action that was to become almost compulsory in the later campaigns of the British Empire—the opening tragedy, the heroic redemption, the final crushing victory.”8 In the Zulu War of 1879, Isandhlwana was the opening tragedy, Rorke’s Drift the heroic redemption, and Ulundi the final crushing victory.

  The British troops were under the command of Lord Chelmsford—generally considered the goat of the war, he was nonetheless a gentleman in every sense. His goal was simple: the Zulus must be brought to battle so they could be crushed. Marching boldly into Zululand—or as boldly as he could given his slow, lengthy wagon train of supplies—Chelmsford divided his invading force into three columns. Though well-informed about the Zulus’ combat prowess and tactics, Chelmsford believed the bigger problem was luring them into battle: if that could be done, no Zulu army could possibly defeat the British, however small the British force.

  That proved true at Rorke’s Drift—a Zululand version of the Alamo, though with a happy ending for the defenders, with 150 Britons and colonials holding off a force of 4,000 Zulus—but it was preceded by the Battle of Isandhlwana, one of the greatest disasters in the annals of British imperial warfare. Chelmsford took 2,500 men, chasing a Zulu diversion, while leaving 1,700 men—British troops, South African volunteers, native levies—in an unlaagered, unentrenched camp on the plains of Isandlwhana, where they were overrun by 20,000 ferocious Zulus. The Zulus left behind them a field of carnage: more than 1,300 British dead; almost every corpse desecrated, slit open, guts stamped by Zulu feet, some beheaded, others degenitaled, some merely scalped or dejawed, two British drummer boys hung on meat hooks. Chelmsford returned to a burnt-out camp of stinking corpses, including more dead officers than had been lost at Waterloo; and more than a thousand rifles and hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition were now in Zulu hands.

  The British government—which had not authorized the attack on Zululand—was shocked at the catastrophe and sent General Sir Garnet Wolseley to save the day; Chelmsford, however, was equally keen to save his reputation. As Wolseley arrived at Durban, Chelmsford pressed an attack on the Zulu king Cetshwayo’s royal kraal at Ulundi. He was determined to crush the Zulus in open battle so that there could be no doubt they were well and truly beaten. Formed into the classic British square, Chelmsford’s 4,000 troops met the attack of 15,000 Zulus and sent them reeling. Ulundi lay open for Chelmsford, who set it ablaze. Honor redeemed, he finally heeded Wolseley’s orders and relinquished command. The Zulu kingdom was broken, but, as ever, it had been a close run thing.

  More problematic was the white tribe of South Africa, the Boers. They had fought with the British against the Zulu, but they still yearned to be free from the British yoke, if yoke it was. There were only 3,000 British troops in the entire Transvaal, an area of roughly 110,000 square m
iles. It wasn’t a matter of oppression so much as it was a matter of the incompatibility of two exceedingly different peoples—the imperial British, who believed they held Heaven’s command, and the dour, leathery, Old Testament-thumping, stiff-necked Afrikaners whose entire imagination was suffused with the idea of the frontier, the independent farmer, and of being answerable to no one but God.

  Zulu Dawn

  “What a wonderful people! They beat our generals, they convert our bishops, and they write ‘finis’ to a French dynasty.”

  Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli on the disaster of Isandhlwana, the pro-Zulu agitation of the liberal Anglican Bishop John William Colenso, and the death in battle of the only son and heir of Napoleon III, a commissioned lieutenant in the British army, quoted in Andre Maurois, Disraeli: A Picture of the Victorian Age (The Modern Library, 1955), p. 339

  In 1880, led by Paul Kruger—the craggy, heavy-set former vice president of the South African Republic—they rebelled; their first action being a massacre of Connaught Rangers who thought they were marching through a peaceful Transvaal. No more: the Boer was in the saddle and a gun was in his hand, and in a matter of three months he had retaken the Transvaal for himself. The British had been bewildered and besieged, and the Gladstone government, with no stomach for a fight, agreed to a self-governing Transvaal still under the Crown and nominal British supervision, including authority over the blacks whom the British deemed in need of protection.

  The Boer War

  The patchwork peace lasted nearly two decades. When it was undone it was with far greater violence than anything that had happened before. It wasn’t a campaign against a tribe; it was a full-scale war between two European armies. The war was sparked by the Boers’ refusal to give voting rights to the British in the Transvaal (unless they were residents for increasing periods of time, reaching fourteen years in 1890) and other challenges to Britain’s claim to be the paramount power in South Africa. It was the old issue revisited: the British believed in their divine right to rule, and the Boers wanted no part of it, preferring their own Boerish republic (which happened to be well-seeded with gold and diamonds that attracted uitlanders). Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain and South African High Commissioner Alfred Milner pressed the case for war, and precipitated it by getting the government to renounce recognition of the Transvaal as an independent state. Paul Kruger responded by demanding that the British drop all claims on the Transvaal and setting a deadline for the British to agree. They did not, and on 11 October 1899, the Boers invaded Natal and the Cape Colony.

  The commander in chief of the Cape Colony was General William Blunt, who had thought war against the Boers was unnecessary and imprudent—and as he had no orders to prepare for war, he had not. He was relieved of command, and the British troops were led by General Sir Redvers Buller. Buller appeared to have all the necessary bona fides—he had fought in China and Canada, and battled the Ashantis in West Africa, the Zulus in South Africa, and the Dervishes in the Sudan. But against the Boers he came a cropper. The British were besieged at Ladysmith, Kimberly, and Mafeking. In combat against the Boers, British commanders proved far too fond of frontal assaults. Boer tactics, on the contrary, counted on entrenching and blasting the gallant British infantry with powerful Mauser rifles. If the British ever got too close, the Boers simply mounted their ponies and galloped away. The result was a series of bloody British defeats and mounting British frustration, cheered on by much of the rest of the world, which sympathized with the Boers’ defiance and their twisting of the lion’s tail.

  Imperial Colossus

  Cecil Rhodes (1853–1902) was a self-made multi-millionaire who lent his name to a country (Rhodesia), the Rhodes scholarship (perhaps the most famous in the world), and created the mighty De Beers mining company. Like so many empire-builders, he was the son of a clergyman. A sickly child—he was asthmatic—he was sent to South Africa in the hope that the climate would help him. It did well enough that he became a diamond miner and purchaser of mines—interrupting his burgeoning business dealings only to attend Oxford. He followed his business success with political ambitions, becoming governor of the Cape Colony, from which position he had to resign after attempting to overthrow the government of the Transvaal in 1895 in a misadventure known as the Jameson Raid. His goal was to paint East Africa British imperial red from Cape to Cairo. Leftists who make him out to be an imperialist monster need to come to grips with the fact that he was a political liberal (he even favored Irish nationalism as long as it was maintained under the big tent of empire); as a member of the Progressive Party he stood by the slogan of “equal rights to every civilized man south of the Zambesi” (however much he was prone to think of blacks in terms of a laboring class that needed paternal direction); was an early conservationist; and if not in favor of world government, favored an imperial federation and an imperial parliament that would bring together the English-speaking peoples in a united cause. And of course that’s the problem—the left does not believe in “Anglo-Saxon” values and civilization and its mission to the world, as Rhodes did: God, he believed, “is manifestly fashioning the English-speaking race as the chosen instrument by which He will bring in a state of society based upon Justice, Liberty, and Peace.” God, he said, would want him “to paint as much of the map of Africa British red as possible, and to do what I can elsewhere to promote the unity and extend the influence of the English-speaking race.”a He is buried in the African hills he loved, in the country that was Rhodesia.

  The British needed a new commander to rescue the day and found one in Field Marshal Lord Roberts, known as “Little Bobs,” a five-foot-three bantam who had fought successfully in India, Abyssinia, and Afghanistan. Bobs turned the whole war around, relieving the besieged cities. The relief of Mafeking after 217 days (on 17 May 1900) was celebrated in England with more huzzahs and banners and streamers and parades and massed cheering than the wildest Hogmanay—though it was a town of only a little more than 8,000 people, 7,000 of them blacks. The defense had been led by Colonel Robert Baden-Powell—the Boy Scouts’ founder who seemed to be an overgrown boy himself—he had kept up spirits with amateur theatricals (he liked that sort of thing).

  Elsewhere, in swift strokes, Bobs captured the Boer towns, and on 5 June 1900 seized the Boer capital of Pretoria. Kruger scuttled off into exile, and by October it seemed peace was at hand. Bobs returned to England and left his second-in-command Lord Kitchener to do the mopping up, which proved to be an arduous and ugly business, involving the holding of Boer families in concentration camps, the burning of their farms, and the hunting down of Boer guerrillas. The final treaty ending the war—the Treaty of Vereeniging—was not reached until 31 May 1902.

  South Africa was officially unified in 1910 as a British dominion (putting it on the same level of status and self-government as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). The former Afrikaner republics retained a good deal of autonomy, proved resistant to British efforts to Anglicize them, and were politically powerful, though the Boers, as farmers, tended to be much poorer than the British who dominated industry. Largely black African areas—Basutoland, Bechuanaland, and Swaziland—were British protectorates. Rhodesia—then comprising Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe)—was governed by Cecil Rhodes’s British South African Company until 1923, when Northern Rhodesia became a protectorate and Southern Rhodesia became a largely self-governing colony.

  South Africa fought at Britain’s side in both world wars—though there was pro-German sentiment among a large number of Afrikaners. Jan Smuts—who had fought against the British in the Boer War—not only became a British field marshal and close confidant of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in World War II, but was a leader in the creation of both the League of Nations and the United Nations. He was also a Zionist, and a supporter of South Africa’s large Jewish minority. Twice prime minister of South Africa (latterly from 1939 to 1948), he lost the 1948 election largely because of his support for dismantling some of t
he segregationist laws that had been built up over the decades—a sign that Smuts was becoming too British for his own good, as the British, though complicit in racially discriminatory legislation, were generally more liberal on racial issues than the Afrikaners.

  After the 1948 election, the victorious National Party began building the system known as apartheid, with its complexity of racial classifications and laws, which made South Africa an irritant to the British Commonwealth, from which it exiled itself in 1961, becoming a republic. From then until the collapse of the apartheid regime in 1994 and the introduction of one-man, one-vote elections, South Africa was an international pariah. It was also, however, an embarrassment to the rest of Africa in a different way. While other African nations were failing, South Africa was a regional superpower, an economic colossus (in African terms at least), and, despite its harsh racial laws, a recipient of large numbers of African illegal immigrants who preferred the racial discrimination of South Africa to the oppression, corruption, violence, and economic regression of independent sub-Saharan Africa. If nothing else, the British had provided a political and economic model—and the colonists to make it work—that gave South Africa an enormous leg up over the rest of the continent.

  The Wind of Change

  On 3 February 1960, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan delivered a speech in Cape Town that reverberated the length of British Africa; it became known as “The Wind of Change” speech, from these lines: “The wind of change is blowing through this continent, and whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it.” The speech was largely a call for South Africa “to create a society which respects the rights of individuals, a society in which men are given the opportunity to grow to their full stature—and that must in our view include the opportunity to have an increasing share in political power and responsibility, a society in which individual merit and individual merit alone is the criterion for a man’s advancement. . . .”9