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

by Martin Meredith

  Like two predators, Germany and Britain – the eagle and the lion – proceeded to carve up much of east Africa between them. The sultan’s authority was confined to the three islands of Zanzibar, Pemba and Mafia, a strip of the Swahili coast ten miles in depth and 600 miles long, and five towns on the Benadir coast. The rest of the great interior plateau stretching for 1,000 miles inland was split between two separate ‘spheres of interest’, one for Germany and one for Britain. The border between them followed a line running north-westwards from the mouth of the Wanga River near the coast to the eastern shore of the Victoria Nyanza. Maasailand was sliced into two. The zone to the north went to Britain, the zone to the south to Germany. The western frontier was left undefined. Beyond lay Buganda, the ‘pearl of Africa’, which the colonial lobbies in both Germany and Britain coveted. This would be their next target.

  When Buganda’s volatile ruler, Mwanga, learned that white foreigners had taken the sultan’s land on the coast and were advancing further inland, he was convinced that they intended to ‘eat’ Buganda as well. The position of white missionaries based at his capital at Mengo became increasingly precarious. Mwanga suspected that they might be precursors of a white invasion. When the missionary Alexander Mackay went to the kabaka’s palace in September 1885 to seek permission for a Church Missionary Society bishop, James Hannington, to visit Buganda, Mwanga was immediately wary. The route that Hannington planned to take was not the traditional one via Tabora and the southern approach to Buganda but a shortcut recently pioneered by the explorer Joseph Thomson that led from Mombasa through Maasai territory to Busoga on the eastern flank of Buganda – a forbidden zone that Buganda folklore foretold would be used as an invasion route from the east. Mwanga gave his assent for Hannington’s visit, but instructed that he should use a route across the Victoria Nyanza.

  Mackay’s letter to Hannington warning him to avoid the Busoga route never reached him. In October, Hannington and his team of fifty porters were arrested in Busoga on Mwanga’s orders. Mackay and his French rival, Père Lourdel, pleaded for mercy, but to no avail. After being held for eight days, Hannington was taken to a forest clearing, stripped naked and stabbed to death, along with almost all his porters.

  For month after month, the beleaguered Christian community in Mengo endured persecution. The culmination came in June 1886 after a number of young pages refused to submit to Mwanga’s sexual demands. In a fit of rage, Mwanga ordered all Christian ‘readers’ at court to be seized. Some were castrated, some hacked to death. One large group – Protestants and Catholics alike – were burned alive on a funeral pyre. In all, forty-five Christians died, refusing to recant their faith. In a letter appealing for outside intervention, Mackay spoke of ‘suffering and dreadful wrongs’.

  Unwilling to become involved in administration anywhere in east Africa, the British government passed the task to a private enterprise, the East African Association, a collection of businessmen, humanitarians and imperial enthusiasts headed by a Scottish shipping magnate, William Mackinnon. With government approval, Mackinnon’s association obtained a concession from Sultan Barghash in 1887 giving it the right to administer the east coast ports north of the partition line with Germany for a period of fifty years in exchange for an annual payment of rent. Barghash also agreed to use his influence to persuade local chiefs in the British zone of east Africa to sign treaties transferring sovereignty to Mackinnon’s association. One of Mackinnon’s main aims was to make sure that Buganda was included in the British sphere of interest. In April 1888, he launched a public company, the Imperial British East Africa Company, which took over the East African Association’s concession. In September 1888, his company was granted a royal charter giving it political responsibilities as well as commercial rights, on the understanding that it should extend its field of operation to Buganda and keep the Germans out. In the summer of 1888, Mackinnon received reports that a group of German colonialists had commissioned Carl Peters to lead a new expedition to found colonies beyond the Victoria Nyanza. Losing no time, the Imperial British East Africa Company set up headquarters at Mombasa, making a show of flying the sultan’s red flag, and organised a large caravan to advance inland.

  Germany’s occupation of its own zone in east Africa had meanwhile run into serious trouble. In April 1888, the sultan had agreed to lease to Peters’ German East Africa Company the administration of the whole southern coastal strip assigned to him under the terms of the Anglo-German agreement of 1886, including the newly built port of Dar es Salaam. But the company’s heavy-handed attempts to impose its rule provoked a series of revolts. To restore control, Bismarck sent out military reinforcements, cancelled the schützbrief awarded to Peters’ company and ordered direct government control.

  Peters returned to Germany, but was soon involved in planning another expedition to the interior, confident that he would eventually obtain official approval. He landed on a deserted beach near Lamu, north of Mombasa, fought his way through Kikuyuland and Maasailand, and reached Buganda in February 1890 ahead of the British. With the help of Père Lourdel and other French priests, Peters persuaded Mwanga to sign a treaty with his German East Africa Company.

  He was, however, too late. In another piece of European horse-trading, ratified on 1 July 1890, Britain and Germany reached agreement on the partition of east Africa which rendered his treaty void. In exchange for ceding Germany control of Heligoland, a small island in the North Sea captured by Britain during the Napoleonic Wars, Britain gained rights to a protectorate over Zanzibar and recognition that its sphere of interest included Buganda. In a separate deal, Germany purchased the sultan’s strip of mainland territory for £200,000, and German East Africa duly became an imperial colony (later known as Tanganyika).

  It was left to Mackinnon’s Imperial British East Africa Company to establish a British presence on the ground in Buganda. Mackinnon hired a former British army officer, Captain Frederick Lugard, to lead an expedition of 300 men from Mombasa to Mwanga’s capital at Mengo and impose a protectorate on Buganda. To help ensure the right outcome, Lugard took with him a devastating new weapon, a Maxim machine gun, capable of firing eleven bullets a second.

  Mwanga was already in a weak position. His hold over his kingdom had been weakened by years of factional violence between Protestants, Catholics, Muslims and pagan traditionalists. Deposed by a Muslim faction in 1888, he had regained power in 1889 with the help of Christian factions. When Lugard arrived in December 1890, the two rival Christian factions, the Wa-Ingleza and the Wa-Fransa, were embroiled once more in power struggles and feuds over land rights.

  Setting up headquarters at Kampala, a hilltop overlooking the royal palace at Mengo, about a mile to the south, Lugard made it clear, as he put it in his diary, that he had not ‘come here to trifle and fool’ with Mwanga. Mwanga was presented with ‘a treaty of friendship’ that stripped Buganda of its independence. It required Mwanga to hand over administrative control to the company, to accept company command of a new standing army, and to obtain the company’s consent in dealing with state matters. Slave trading and slave raiding were to be prohibited, and foreign traders and missionaries were to be free to settle in the country.

  After a few days’ reflection, cowed by the threat of military force, Mwanga made his mark. ‘He did it with bad grace, just dashing the pen at the paper and making a blot,’ wrote Lugard, ‘but I made him go at it again and on the second copy he behaved himself and made a proper cross.’ Mwanga later complained to a Church Missionary Society priest: ‘The English have come . . . They eat my land, and yet they give me nothing at all. They have made me sign a treaty . . . and I get nothing from them in return.’

  Company rule was fraught with difficulty from the start. The power struggles between the Wa-Ingleza and the Wa-Fransa continued unabated. Lugard tried to remain impartial in factional disputes but was steadily drawn into them. French priests, resentful of British authority, stirred up animosity among the Catholic faction, aided and abetted by Mwa
nga. In 1892, open warfare between the two factions broke out, prompting Lugard’s intervention on the side of the Wa-Ingleza. The drain on the company’s resources was so severe that it proposed to evacuate Buganda: by 1892, the company had spent half a million pounds and was losing more money every month.

  The British government, mindful of the likely cost of intervention, remained reluctant to come to the rescue. But the idea of abandoning Buganda altogether stirred public alarm in England. In September, the London Times thundered: ‘Withdrawal would be nothing short of a national calamity.’ The missionary movement led a campaign to ‘Save Uganda’, agitating for the British government to step in and take control. Returning to England, Lugard lent his weight to the campaign, addressing one public meeting after another, warning that without British rule, Buganda would descend into civil war and fall victim to slave traders – or the Germans or the French.

  Determined to keep out other European powers, the British government agreed to take over control from the company in 1893, raised the Union flag at a ceremony at Kampala Fort and formally declared Buganda a protectorate in August 1894.

  Once in possession of Buganda, Britain extended its area of control to neighbouring kingdoms. Some kingdoms, such as Toro, a target of Bunyoro aggression, submitted readily to British rule. Ankole too signed an accord with the British in 1894. But Bunyoro itself put up fierce resistance. The omukama of Bunyoro, Kabarega, led a guerrilla campaign against British forces for four years. Mwanga himself tried to raise a rebellion against the British in 1897, but Ganda chiefs sided with the British, fought against him and pledged allegiance to his one-year-old son, Daudi Chwa. Mwanga fled to German East Africa, was detained, escaped and then joined forces with Kabarega, previously his arch-enemy. Captured in 1898, Mwanga was exiled to the Seychelles where he died in 1903. Kabarega was captured in 1899 and also sent to the Seychelles and remained there for twenty-four years.

  The kingdom of Buganda became the core of a new Uganda Protectorate incorporating three other major Bantu kingdoms: Toro, Ankole and Buganda’s traditional adversary, Bunyoro. The Baganda fared well out of this arrangement. They became the principal ally of the British in their occupation of the whole region of the Upper Nile, providing levies to fight against Kabarega and being rewarded with great chunks of Bunyoro territory. Buganda’s Christian chiefs were quick to see the advantages of literacy and of European weapons and emerged as a new oligarchy of landowners. Many served the British as subordinate officials administering other parts of the Uganda Protectorate. Their status was confirmed by special agreement in 1900. Under British protection, the kabaka kept his title and his office, but real power was assigned to a Lukiiko, a council of aristocrats. This system of ‘indirect rule’, devised by the British for Buganda, became the template they used for other kingdoms and territories they occupied.

  The Protectorate of Uganda was eventually extended to include large areas to the north of the Bantu kingdoms populated by Nilotic people: the Acholi, Lango, Madi and Karamajong. A new northern boundary was outlined that took in much of Samuel Baker’s province of Equatoria. The peoples of the north had little in common with their southern neighbours, neither language, nor culture, nor customs. In the rush to establish imperial control, such issues were of little concern. But the faultlines that underlay the new territories emerging in Africa were to provide endless trouble in the future.

  The main preoccupation of British ministers, once they had decided to take direct control of Buganda and the Upper Nile, was how to safeguard the region from encroachment by rival European states. To ensure that the eastern approaches to Buganda were secure, the British government declared a protectorate in 1895 over the land between Mombasa and the Victoria Nyanza inhabited by the Kamba, Kikuyu, Maasai, Nandi and Luo. But this still left Buganda and the Upper Nile exposed to invasion from other directions. Buganda was 700 miles from the coast. It took a caravan three months to travel there from Mombasa. The obvious solution was to build a railway. The problem was that there was no commercial case for one. For the foreseeable future, there was no likelihood of enough traffic being generated to justify building one. The case for building a railway was solely strategic.

  Returning to office as prime minister in June 1895, Lord Salisbury was determined to proceed with construction with all possible speed, using whatever government funds were needed. He suspected that Leopold might act in collusion with the French to seize control of the Upper Nile. Even though only a preliminary survey of a route had been made, in 1896 Salisbury obtained parliamentary approval to spend £3 million on construction. Critics derided the project as ‘a lunatic line’.

  The proposed route ran roughly parallel to the caravan trail that stretched from Mombasa, traversed the Rift Valley and its steep escarpments and headed towards the shores of the Victoria Nyanza. A terminus for the railway was planned at Kisumu, a Luo village on the edge of the Kavirondo Gulf. The final 200 miles between Kisumu and Mengo’s port of Entebbe was to be covered not by rail but by shallow-draft steamer.

  Construction started in 1896 but proceeded slowly. The bulk of the labour force, which reached a peak of 18,000, had to be imported from India. Engineers encountered every conceivable hazard, including a group of man-eating lions at the Tsavo River crossing 130 miles inland, which terrorised construction crews for months on end and took the lives of twenty-eight Indian labourers. The casualty rate from disease – malaria, dysentery, tropical ulcers, pneumonia – ran into thousands. Some 1,500 transport animals died in the tsetse fly belt beyond the coast.

  In May 1899, the railhead reached mile 327 on a marshy flatland bisected by a small stream known to the Maasai as Uaso Nairobi – ‘cold water’. The railhead boss, Ronald Preston, described it as ‘a bleak, swampy stretch of soppy landscape, devoid of human habitation of any sort’; not a single tree grew there, he said; it was the resort only of ‘thousands of wild animals of every species’. However unappealing the site was, it was the last stretch of level ground that the rail route crossed before it wound its way upwards to the summit of the Kikuyu escarpment, climbing 2,000 feet over a distance of twenty-seven miles, and then plunged in steep falls more than 1,500 feet to the floor of the Rift Valley. The barren patch of land at Uaso Nairobi was consequently chosen as the nerve centre of the entire railway. It was soon covered with rows of weather-beaten tents, corrugated-iron huts and a random collection of Indian shops. Medical officers warned that it was ‘an unhealthy locality swarming with mosquitoes’. But it was eventually named as the headquarters of Britain’s East Africa Protectorate, the future Kenya.

  The railhead eventually reached Kisumu in December 1901. The costs of construction by then had risen to £5.5 million. Although widely regarded as a triumph of engineering, the conundrum remained about how the railway should be made to pay. The East Africa Protectorate was thought to be a ‘wasteland’, with poor economic prospects. Its only significant export was ivory. It was even less able than Uganda to help sustain railway operations without a massive subsidy.

  Several early travellers, however, had noted that the highlands of the Rift Valley region seemed to offer great agricultural potential. Writing about the Mau escarpment on the western flank of the Rift Valley in 1893, Captain Lugard observed: ‘The soil is extremely rich and is covered with excellent and luxurious pasture throughout the year, with which is mixed white clover and trefoil. The country is intersected by small streams, the rainfall is abundant, patches of forest supply bamboos and timber for building and fuel. Game roams over the acres of undulating grass, and the climate is cold and bracing.’ The Mau, said Lugard, was not only ideal for ranching but ‘capable of producing almost illimitable supplies of grain and other produce’.

  The idea began to dawn that the highlands were suitable for European farming and that what was needed to sustain the Protectorate and the railway that crossed through it was white settlement.

  42

  CARVING UP THE NIGER

  On the west coast of Africa, the mai
n race for territory was between Britain and France. Determined to keep the French from encroaching on the Niger Delta and the lucrative trade in palm-oil, the British government dispatched its consul, Edward Hewett, there in May 1884, armed with a sheaf of blank treaty forms. In the following months, Hewett signed scores of treaties with kings and chiefs at ports along the Niger coast acknowledging their internal sovereignty but giving Britain political rights to a protectorate. Leaving the chiefs of the Cameroon River until last, Hewett arrived five days too late to prevent the Germans from obtaining their own treaty. But otherwise his efforts in the months leading up to the Berlin conference enabled British ministers to lay claim to hegemony over the Oil Rivers.

  The work of George Goldie’s National African Company in obtaining treaties in the Lower Niger region over the previous eight years added to the claims that British representatives in Berlin were able to make. In addition, by waging a price war, Goldie managed to force out of business two French firms operating in the Lower Niger region, thus fortifying British claims, trouncing the French and giving himself an effective monopoly at a stroke. In the haggling that went on in Berlin, Bismarck was willing to accept British claims in the Niger districts in exchange for Britain’s promise to recognise Leopold’s claims in the Congo Basin.

  In the aftermath of the Berlin conference, the British government formed the Oil Rivers Protectorate to cover the Delta region and awarded a royal charter to Goldie’s renamed Royal Niger Company to cover the Lower Niger. All this was carried out at minimum expense to the British exchequer. Other than employing a few extra officials, Britain’s method of administering the Oil Rivers Protectorate – a coastal territory running from east of the small island colony of Lagos to Calabar – differed little from the era before the Berlin conference when it used consuls and gunboats to enforce its writ. Officials regarded the Oil Rivers as a ‘paper protectorate’. ‘Our policy may for the present chiefly assume a negative character,’ said the newly appointed vice-consul. ‘So long as we keep other European nations out, we need not be in a hurry to go in.’