The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour

by Martin Meredith

  A new phase of France’s involvement in west Africa began after Napoleon III came to power in 1848. He favoured a policy of colonial expansion aimed at linking French territory in Algeria to its colony in Senegal. A forceful army officer, Louis Faidherbe, was appointed governor of Senegal in 1854 to drive the policy forward. Faidherbe had served in General Bugeaud’s flying columns in Algeria and had acquired a liking for African ventures. He took up his post in Saint Louis harbouring grand ambitions to establish French dominion not only over the whole of the Senegal region and the Upper Niger region to the east, but over an African empire stretching from Senegal to the Red Sea.

  To assist his campaign of conquest, Faidherbe recruited an army of Senegalese tirailleurs – ‘skirmishers’ – trained and led by French and local Afro-French officers. From Saint Louis, he pushed forward in all directions. North of the river he fought a three-year-long war against Trarza Moors for control of their inland trade routes. Along the Senegal River valley, he began construction of a series of forts, completing the first at Medina, 300 miles from the coast, intending to use it as a base for further expansion eastwards. He advanced southwards through Lebou territory, building a telegraph and road link to the French outpost on Gorée and renaming the Lebou capital of Ndakarou as Dakar. With weak states, he signed treaties of ‘protection’; with those that resisted, he used military force.

  The most formidable opposition that Faidherbe faced came from the forces of Umar Tal, ruler of the Tukolor empire. Umar was prepared to deal with the French as traders but was hostile to any French occupation of African soil. In 1855, he wrote a letter to the Muslim inhabitants of Saint Louis warning: ‘From now on I will make use of force and I will not cease until peace is demanded from me by your tyrant [Faidherbe].’ Many Muslims left Saint Louis to join Umar’s forces, including craftsmen whom Faidherbe needed to build his forts and maintain his equipment.

  In 1857, Umar laid siege to Medina with an army of 15,000 and nearly succeeded in capturing it. Only a relief expedition mounted by Faidherbe from Saint Louis staved off a French defeat. In negotiations in 1860, Faidherbe and Umar Tal agreed to demarcate a frontier between them that followed the course of the Upper Senegal and Bafang rivers. By the time Faidherbe left Senegal in 1865, he had turned the colony into a minor regional power, covering nearly a third of modern Senegal. But his ambition of advancing further eastwards towards the Upper Niger had been halted at the 1860 frontier.

  During the 1870s, a new military governor, Louis Brière de l’Isle, pursued a policy of aggressive expansion once more, determined to revive French prestige in the aftermath of France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war. He bullied Futa Toro into submission; crushed the Wolof kingdom of Cayor; and destroyed the Tukolor fort at Sabouciré in Upper Senegal. In 1880, he gave command of Upper Senegal to Colonel Gustave Borgnis-Desbordes with orders to launch a punitive expedition towards the Niger and impose a protectorate on the Tukolor town of Bamako which lay 150 miles west from the Tukolor capital at Segu. Borgnis-Desbordes was confident of success. ‘I am convinced that we can achieve the complete destruction of the detestable [Tukolor] empire,’ he wrote in April 1881. ‘Any other policy, in my opinion, would be feeble and inept; it would only serve British interests.’

  In February 1883, Borgnis-Desbordes led a battle-hardened column of cavalry, infantry and tirailleurs to the banks of the Niger at Bamako. At a ceremony to mark their arrival, he raised the tricolour, laid the foundation stone of a new fort and spoke enthusiastically about France’s civilising mission. The ceremony ended with an eleven-gun salute. ‘The noise made by our little cannons,’ Borgnis-Desbordes told his troops, ‘will not reach beyond the mountains which lie before us, yet, and you can be certain of this, their echo will be heard beyond the Senegal.’

  Henceforth, the rivalry between France and Britain in west Africa would become the dominant factor in shaping its fortunes.

  PART VI

  Southern Africa

  22

  MASTERS AND SERVANTS

  When Britain took possession of the Cape Colony in 1806 during the course of the Napoleonic Wars, its occupation was not expected to be permanent. Britain’s only interest in the Cape was its use as a naval base halfway along the vital trade route between Europe and Asia. To ensure the colony did not fall into French hands, a British garrison was stationed in Cape Town and at the harbour at Simon’s Town on False Bay. But the vast hinterland beyond the Cape peninsula seemed to offer nothing but trouble and expense.

  The turbulent eastern frontier, where conflict between trekboers, Khoikhoi and Xhosa clans had become endemic, was a persistent worry. In an attempt to impose some form of law and order there, the British governor, Lord Caledon, sent Colonel Richard Collins as commissioner to the area, asking him to recommend a course of action. Collins’s report in 1809 had a profound influence on government policy. He concluded that there was no hope of permanent peace on the eastern frontier unless Xhosa and the whites were kept firmly apart. He therefore proposed that military force should be used to drive out the Xhosa not only from the Zuurveld, the area of contested land west of the colonial boundary at the Fish River, but from the area further east up to the Keiskamma River. He further suggested that up to six thousand whites should be recruited from Europe to set up small agricultural farms along the eastern banks of the Fish River to provide a barrier to any future Xhosa encroachment.

  The first phase of conquest began in 1811. Led by Colonel John Graham, a combined force of regular troops, colonial commandos and units of the newly formed Khoikhoi Cape Regiment launched a scorched-earth campaign against the Zuurveld Xhosa, burning crops and villages and seizing cattle and driving out some 20,000 men, women and children across the Fish River. In his report to London on the success of the mission, the governor, Sir John Cradock, remarked: ‘I am happy to add that in the course of this service there has not been shed more Kaffir blood than would seem necessary to impress on the minds of these savages a proper degree of terror and respect.’ A military outpost was set up on an abandoned trekboer farm in the centre of Zuurveld and named Graham’s Town. The Cape Regiment, led by white officers, moved its headquarters there.

  Determined to regain lost lands, a Xhosa warrior-prophet, Nxele (also known as Makana), led an army of 6,000 men in an attack on Graham’s Town in 1819, intending ‘to chase the white men from the earth and drive them into the sea’. The attack, in broad daylight, failed. Four months later, after British forces had laid waste to a vast stretch of Xhosa territory beyond the Fish River, Nxele gave himself up at a military camp, hoping to stop the slaughter. ‘People say that I have occasioned this war,’ he said. ‘Let me see whether delivering myself up to the conquerors will restore peace to my country.’

  Nxele was sentenced to life imprisonment, taken in shackles to Algoa Bay, put on board the brig Salisbury and delivered to Robben Island, 400 miles away, off the coast at Cape Town. It had been used since the seventeenth century as a prison colony for both criminal convicts and political dissidents. Within a year of his imprisonment, Nxele, along with a group of other inmates, helped organise an escape, seized a fishing boat and headed for the mainland three miles away. As the boat came in to the breakers off Blauberg beach, it capsized. According to the survivors, Nxele clung for some time to a rock, shouting encouragement to others to reach the shore, until he was swept off and engulfed by the raging surf.

  Nxele was never forgotten by his Xhosa followers. Many refused to believe that he was dead and waited for years for his return, giving rise to a new Xhosa expression, ‘Kukuzakuka Nxele’, the coming of Nxele, meaning forlorn hope.

  In the aftermath of the Xhosa attack, the British government decided to proceed with the idea of populating the Zuurveld with immigrant settlers, hoping that it would lead to greater security on the eastern frontier. In London, the plan was presented to parliament as an ‘economy measure’ that would help reduce unemployment and alleviate social unrest prevalent after the end of the Napoleonic Wars.
Parliament duly voted £50,000 to transport volunteers to the Zuurveld and set them up as agricultural farmers on allotments of about one hundred acres. Some 4,000 men, women and children were chosen from among 80,000 applicants, lured by tales of opportunity in a green and pleasant land. The majority of men selected were urban artisans with no farming experience. What none of them was told, until their arrival at Algoa Bay in 1820, was that the land they had been allocated was in fiercely disputed territory where five frontier wars had previously occurred.

  As the 1820 immigrants caught sight of the ‘barren and unpromising’ coastline of Algoa Bay, disillusionment swiftly set in. ‘The hearts of many sank within them,’ William Shaw, a Methodist minister, wrote in his diary, ‘and the inquiry was often reiterated – “Can this be the fine country, the ‘land of promise’, to which we have been lured by highly coloured descriptions and by pictures drawn in our imaginations?” We are deceived and ruined, was the hasty conclusion of many.’

  As they moved inland, travelling in ox-wagons over rough terrain with no roads, their sense of disillusionment only deepened. The Boer guides who accompanied them warned them that the sour-grass land of the Zuurveld for which they were destined was not in the least suitable for cultivation, only for cattle-rearing. For three successive years, their crops were ruined, first from blight, then rust, then locusts. Scorching drought was followed by floods that washed away their flimsy wattle-and-daub dwellings. By the end of 1823, more than half had abandoned the land and retreated to villages.

  *

  Under British rule, the character of the Cape slowly began to change. It remained a slave-owning society, heavily dependent on slave labour. But British officials, while anxious to minimise expenditure on the colony, nevertheless introduced a series of reforms designed to bring the Cape into line with British practice elsewhere and provide a framework of administration that took greater account of the interests of the indigenous population. In 1808, they banned the import of slaves. In 1811, in an attempt to improve the judicial system in the rural hinterland, high court judges were sent on circuit to district headquarters to hear criminal and civil cases and check on the activities of local courts. Hitherto, local courts had rarely handed down convictions in cases where servants had challenged their employers over breaches of contract or assault or other crimes. The first of the new circuit courts passed without incident, but the second, known as the ‘Black Circuit’, caused outrage among frontier Boers by pronouncing guilty verdicts on colonists charged with maltreatment of Khoikhoi.

  New regulations were introduced to sort out the rights and obligations of both masters and servants. The ‘Hottentot Proclamation’ of 1809 sought to safeguard Khoikhoi against such abuses as arbitrary wage deductions and withholdings. Labour contracts henceforth had to be written down in triplicate, with one copy being retained by the authorities. In cases of dispute, the Khoikhoi were accorded equal access to the law. But they were also encumbered by legal restraints, previously used to control slaves, that had the effect of tying them more tightly into a life of servitude. They were required to have a ‘fixed place of abode’. They were not allowed to move without obtaining an official certificate or ‘pass’. Without a pass, they were liable to labour conscription. In 1812, a government ordinance empowered white landowners to enrol as apprentices children raised on their farms from the age of eight for a period of ten years – a practice little different from slavery.

  Missionaries from Europe arriving in the Cape took up the cause of the Khoikhoi, seeking to improve their lot. A mission station founded by the London Missionary Society (LMS) in 1803 at Bethelsdorp near Algoa Bay became a haven for Khoikhoi who had left frontier farms. In the 1820s, the superintendent of the LMS network in the Cape, John Philip, a radical evangelist, campaigned vociferously for civil rights for the Khoikhoi, citing evidence of their persecution and maltreatment at the hands of their trekboer employers and collusion of local officials. Failing to make headway in the Cape, Philip returned to England in 1826 and persuaded the Anti-Slavery Society to take up the Khoikhoi issue as part of their campaign against slavery. In 1828, he published a polemic entitled Researches in South Africa, railing against the injustices meted out to the Khoikhoi. ‘I found them,’ he wrote in the Preface, ‘in the most oppressed condition of any people under any civilized government known to us upon earth . . . The Hottentot has a right to a fair price for his labour; to an exemption from cruelty and oppression; to choose the place of his abode, and to enjoy the society of his children.’

  Influential figures in the Cape Colony, notably Andries Stockenstrom, a prominent government official, were also at work advocating reform. Bowing to a surge of criticism, the Cape government in 1828 issued Ordinance 50 making ‘Hottentots and other free Persons of colour’ equal with whites before the law, removing legal restrictions on their movements and giving them the right to acquire land. But the practical effect was limited. Almost all productive land was in white hands. In the eastern districts, only one Khoikhoi applicant was successful in acquiring land. Without land, the options facing the Khoikhoi were to remain as servants of white masters or live in poverty in a shack on the outskirts of a town or a mission station.

  A series of other government reforms brought about more profound change. The old system of land tenure which enabled trekboers to pay a small annual fee for the right to occupy a 6,000-acre ‘loan’ farm, treating it as their outright property to be bought, sold and inherited at will, was abolished in favour of a quit-rent system, intended to promote more productive farming practices. The old monopoly system enjoyed by butchers, bakers, wine traders and auctioneers was replaced by a free enterprise regime which tended to benefit English-speaking traders familiar with it. A new language policy was proclaimed: in 1822, the government announced that over the following five years English would be phased in as the only language permitted in the courts and government offices. In place of Dutch officials, the government appointed qualified lawyers from Britain to the Court of Justice and introduced British legal procedures. Administrative changes in 1828 led to the abolition in rural districts of the offices of landdrost and heemraden and the appointment of mainly English-speaking magistrates and commissioners. In Cape Town, English-speaking trustees replaced the local city council known as the Burgher Senate. Government schools were set up using English as the medium of education. By the 1830s, English had become not only the main language of the administration but of political argument and debate.

  The culmination of British reforms came in 1833 when parliament in London passed a law emancipating slaves throughout the empire and providing compensation to slave-owners for the loss of ‘property’. Slaves were to remain apprenticed to their former owners for a transitional period of five years, after which they would become legally free. In the Cape, slaves still formed a significant part of the population, numbering in all some 39,000. Most were by now of mixed descent, born in the colony and accustomed to speaking the taal. The great majority lived in Cape Town and Stellenbosch; some 6,500 were owned by Boer farmers in eastern frontier districts.

  These changes alienated much of the burgher population. Many colonists found the idea that Khoikhoi and slaves could be placed on an equal footing with white Christians repugnant, ‘contrary to the laws of God and the natural distinction of race and religion’. The fear of gelykstelling – the social levelling between masters and servants – ran deep. The arrangements for compensation for the emancipation of slaves also caused resentment. Slave-owners were told the government would pay only £34 per slave, far less than the £73 computed by a special committee appointed to evaluate the financial value of Cape slaves. They were further aggrieved to learn that compensation was to be paid out in London, requiring them to use the services of agents who took a hefty slice. There was more anger when the changes led not only to a shortage of labour but an outbreak of pilfering and theft. Demanding a new law against vagrancy to deal with it, they were outraged when the British authorities countermanded
their proposed legislation.

  Frontier Boers, long accustomed to living according to their own rules, largely beyond the reach of government authority, had additional grievances. Once used to expanding eastwards at will to meet their demand for land, they were now blocked by the stubborn resistance of the Xhosa beyond the Fish River. The frontier region, moreover, was still plagued by insecurity: cattle rustling was endemic both ways across the border. At the end of 1834, Xhosa warriors invaded the Colony, destroying white farms and seizing vast herds of cattle in another attempt to recover land lost in earlier wars. Once more, they were driven back. The British governor in Cape Town, Sir Benjamin D’Urban, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, castigated them as ‘treacherous and irreclaimable savages’ and took it upon himself to annex more Xhosa land in reprisal, intending to make it available for white settlement. But to the fury of the colonists, the British government in London, spurred on by missionary activists, repudiated the annexation and blamed white encroachment as the cause of the conflict. ‘The Caffres had ample justification for the war,’ concluded the colonial secretary, Lord Glenelg.

  Determined to cast off British authority, a small group of Boer leaders on the eastern frontier organised the exodus of families across the Orange River border into the highveld beyond, intending to set up their own state and recreate the society of the frontier trekboers as it was before the coming of the British. Reconnaisance parties reported that there was land there suitable for settlement – ‘a plentiful supply of water, grass of excellent quality and an abundance of timber’.

  In a ‘Manifesto’ sent to the Graham’s Town Journal, Piet Retief, an emigrant leader, cited a list of grievances including ‘severe losses’ resulting from the emancipation of slaves and ‘the unjustified odium which has been cast upon us by interested and dishonest persons, under the cloak of religion [missionary activists], whose testimony is believed in England to the exclusion of all evidence in our favour’. This kind of prejudice, he claimed, would lead to ‘the total ruin of our country’. He also complained about ‘the turbulent and dishonest conduct of vagrants’; and ‘the plunder which we have endured from the Caffres and other coloured classes’.