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

by Martin Meredith

  Goldie’s Royal Niger Company, on the other hand, used its powers to the full to maintain a trade monopoly, even though the Berlin conference had declared the Niger to be a free trade zone open to navigation by European states other than Britain. The company established headquarters at Asaba on the Niger River, controlled the seaport at Akassa and ran an extensive network of trading posts. It was empowered to administer justice and to collect customs duties free from any direct government interference. French and German traders struggled to get a footing on the Lower Niger; while in the Oil Rivers territory, British trading houses resented Goldie’s encroachment in an area they had previously dominated.

  African traders too found themselves at a disadvantage. Before the arrival of the Niger Company in Akassa, middlemen in Brass had played a prominent role in both the palm-oil and liquor trades in the Delta. But, as Goldie sought to crush competition, they now faced punitive levies for doing business in ‘company’ territory.

  Further eastwards, along the coast at Opobo, the local king, Jaja, also became a casualty of British rule. Born in Igboland in 1821, Jaja had been kidnapped as a youth, sold into slavery and taken to Bonny, a centre of the palm-oil trade, where he developed an expertise in trading. In 1869, he broke away from Bonny, founded a new settlement at Opobo and proclaimed himself King Jaja. He was so successful in gaining a stranglehold on trade with oil-producing areas in the hinterland that many of the Bonny canoe houses moved to Opobo. He cultivated contacts with British business partners, selling them 8,000 tons of palm-oil a year. He was also keen to take advantage of European technology. He sent one of his sons to a Glasgow school, set up a secular school run by Europeans and lived in a European-style house. He was adamant, however, at keeping missionaries at bay, refusing them entry, aware that their preaching would undermine his own authority.

  His business methods were ruthless. He kept a tight monopoly on trade along coastal rivers, preventing foreign traders from gaining access to hinterland markets. Anyone who sought to evade his monopoly, white or black, faced reprisals. In 1881, he sent a force of fifty armed canoes to deal with the Kwa Igbo for trying to trade directly with European merchants. Several hundred were executed. In a further attempt to extend his monopoly and reduce dependence on European merchants in the Delta, he started to export palm-oil directly to the ports of Liverpool and Glasgow.

  When Edward Hewett visited Opobo during his treaty-making trip in 1884, Jaja welcomed the idea of British ‘protection’ but wanted clarification as to what it meant in practice. Hewett told him: ‘The Queen does not want to take your country or your markets, but at the same time she is anxious that no other nation should take them. She undertakes to extend her gracious power and protection, which will leave your country still under your government: she has no wish to disturb your rule.’ Determined to maintain his monopoly, Jaja insisted that the standard clause in the treaty guaranteeing free trade was omitted.

  Jaja was soon drawn into a trade war with British trading houses which wanted access to the markets he controlled, resented the direct trade he had opened with Britain, and cited the Berlin rule about the freedom to trade on the Niger to justify their actions. British officials were also keen to curb Jaja’s power and prosperity. In 1887, the British consul, Harry Johnston, decided to force the issue. Although, under the terms of the treaty he had signed with the British, Jaja was entitled to levy duties on English traders operating in his jurisdiction, Johnston ordered him to stop doing so on the grounds that his direct shipments of palm-oil to Britain without duties constituted unfair competition. When Jaja prevaricated, Johnston arrived at Opobo on board a British gunboat, determined to bring him to heel.

  Johnston invited Jaja on board his ship, but, fearing for his safety, Jaja at first refused to go. Only when Johnston gave him a safe-conduct guarantee did he agree to a meeting. Johnston’s guarantee read: ‘I hereby assure you that whether you accept or reject my proposals tomorrow no restraint whatever will be put on you . . . you will be free to go as soon as you have heard the message of the Government.’ But once on board, Jaja was told he either had to face trial for obstructing trade on the highway or face a British bombardment. He was taken to Accra, found guilty and sent into exile on an island in the Caribbean.

  Other prominent African traders who challenged British rule suffered a similar fate. In their attempts to regulate trade along the Benin River in the 1850s, British officials recognised the authority of a line of Itsekiri kings, according them the title of ‘governor’. In 1884, the Itsekiri governor Nana Olomu signed treaties with Consul Hewett bringing the Benin River, Warri and parts of western Ijo under British ‘protection’. Nana was regarded as a leader of exceptional ability. But the monopoly of trade he established over the Benin River, like Jaja in Opobo, aroused the resentment of British merchants. When British officials issued edicts insisting that the river should be open to all traders, Nana defied them and placed a bar across the creek leading to his headquarters at Ebrohimi. The British responded to this challenge to their authority with gunboats and troops. Taken prisoner, Nana was deported to the Gold Coast.

  Military force was also used against the ancient kingdom of Benin. By 1896, Benin was the only significant state in the Oil Rivers region that remained outside Britain’s sphere of influence, an area the British redesignated as the Niger Coast Protectorate. Although the Oba of Benin, Ovonramwen, had signed a treaty with Britain in 1892, agreeing to open trade links, abolish the kingdom’s trade in slaves and end the practice of human sacrifice, he remained sceptical of British intentions, fearing that their real purpose was to annex his kingdom. Several attempts to persuade him to implement the 1892 treaty failed. In March 1896, a trade dispute brought traffic to a halt. British traders appealed for government intervention, spreading tales of a ‘cannibal kingdom’ where wholesale human sacrifice occurred.

  Acting on his own account, an ambitious Protectorate official, James Phillips, devised a plan to invade Benin, depose the Oba and annex Benin. In a letter to Lord Salisbury, he wrote: ‘I have reason to hope that sufficient ivory would be found in the King’s house to pay the expenses incurred in removing the King from his stool.’ Without waiting for official approval, in January 1897 Phillips led a large column to Gwato, the port for Benin, where it was annihilated. In retaliation, the British government authorised what was called the Benin Punitive Expedition. In February 1897, a British invasion force captured Benin City. Journalists accompanying it described finding ‘crucifixion trees’ and evidence of mass slaughter. The king’s palaces were looted and scores of buildings burned down.

  Among the loot that the British took away were hundreds of rectangular brass plaques dating back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, depicting prominent figures and other aspects of ceremonial life at the royal court. Commonly known as the ‘Benin Bronzes’, they were dispersed to museums in Britain and Europe and led to a reassessment there about the importance of west African art. The fate of Ovonramwen, meanwhile, was to be sent into exile, while his kingdom became an appendage of the British empire.

  From their bases on the coast, the British expanded ever deeper into the hinterland. In 1893, they established control over most of Yorubaland, bringing an end to a century of civil war and opening the way for trade with Lagos. Further north, however, they found the French trying to muscle into territory they regarded as their own ‘sphere of influence’.

  In an attempt to resolve the feud that had begun as a result of the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, Britain and France had signed an agreement in 1890 covering the separate spheres of interest they claimed in Africa. Britain recognised French claims to a vast swathe of territory running from Algeria to the Upper Niger, including several million square miles of the Sahara, in all about a quarter of the entire continent. France recognised British claims to paramountcy over the Gambia, Sierra Leone, the Lower Niger and the Gold Coast.

  Both sides expressed satisfaction with the outcome. In an official report in Augu
st 1890, the French boasted:

  Without much effort, without any real sacrifice, without the expense of exploration . . . without a single treaty . . . we have secured the recognition by Britain, the only Power whose rivalry we need fear . . . that Algeria and Senegal will in the near future form a single domain . . . We have joined to the Senegal 2,500 kilometres of the Niger which thus becomes, for most of its course, a French river . . . Today the government can proclaim to the nation that this vast African empire is no longer a dream, a distant ideal . . . but a reality.

  Britain’s Lord Salisbury, however, thought that he had obtained the better part of the bargain. He told the House of Lords in August 1890:

  I will not dwell upon the respective advantages of places which are utterly unknown not only to your Lordships, but to the rest of the white human race . . . Anyone who looks at the map and merely measures the degrees will perhaps be of the opinion that France has laid claim to a very considerable stretch of country. But it is necessary to judge land not merely by its extent but also by its value. This land is what agriculturalists call ‘very light land’; that is to say, it is the desert of the Sahara.

  The boundaries of this hinterland, however, remained ill-defined. Only coastal territories were demarcated, but none of them had limits to the north. A boundary between Britain’s colony at Lagos and the French protectorate at Porto Novo was drawn for a hundred miles inland but the area beyond was left open.

  In 1892, after a series of disputes with the inland kingdom of Dahomey, the French in Porto Novo embarked on a campaign of conquest. King Behanzin sent an appeal for help to the outside world, but to no avail. After five months of resistance, Dahomey capitulated and Behanzin was sent into exile. The French next set their sights northwards on the kingdom of Borgu. Borgu’s domain stretched as far north as the Bussa rapids on the Middle Niger. It offered the French the possibility of gaining a port on the stretch of the Niger River that was navigable to the sea.

  French advances towards the Middle Niger alarmed Goldie’s Royal Niger Company. The company had previously signed a treaty with the king of Bussa who had claimed to be ‘Lord of all Borgu’. But the French maintained that the rightful overlord of Borgu was the king of Nikki, a town to the west, and dispatched Captain Henri Decoeur from Dahomey to sign a treaty with him. Determined to keep the French out, Goldie hired Captain Lugard, fresh from his endeavours in Uganda, to race from London to Borgu and obtain a treaty from the king of Nikki before the French did. Lugard arrived in Nikki on 5 November 1894 and obtained a treaty on 10 November signed not by the king himself but by the king’s principal adviser, acting in the king’s name. Five days after Lugard had left Nikki, Decoeur arrived there and on 26 November ‘persuaded’ the king to sign, in person, a treaty of protection with France. The French rejected the validity of Lugard’s treaty and sent three more military expeditions to the Middle Niger to establish a French presence there. For more than three years, the French and the British remained at a stand-off in the Middle Niger. Not until 1898 did they negotiate a settlement: France gained Nikki, but Bussa and most of Borgu went to Britain, thus depriving France of a port on the navigable stretch of the Niger below Bussa.

  Because of the need to gain more effective control over the sphere of interest it claimed in the Middle Niger region, the British government came to regard the remit it had given the Niger Company no longer suitable for the purpose. While the French were able to mobilise military forces to pursue their ambitions, the Niger Company remained essentially a trading enterprise with only a limited presence beyond the banks of the Niger River. Moreover, there was deep disquiet about its attempts to enforce a monopoly on trade, in violation of its royal charter.

  In 1895, Brassmen, aggrieved by the loss of trade, attacked the company’s headquarters at the port of Akassa, wrecked the boatyard and workshops and massacred local employees. More than seventy were shot or hacked to death. Others were taken prisoner and then cooked and eaten in an orgy of human sacrifice presided over by a fetish priest. King Koko and his chiefs made clear to a British vice-consul who witnessed these events that their grievance was not with ‘the good old Queen’ but with the company. Hoping to stave off reprisals, they wrote to the Prince of Wales: ‘[We] are now very sorry indeed, particularly in the killing and eating of the parts of its employees.’ British officials issued a series of ultimatums instructing the Brassmen to surrender their chiefs and armaments, but when these were ignored, they ordered the destruction of Koko’s capital at Nembe. Nevertheless, much of the blame for the Brassmen’s revolt was attached to the company.

  In January 1900, the British government took control of all the company’s territories, incorporated its various protectorates into a region it called Nigeria and set up three new administrative areas: to the west, Lagos remained an official colony together with a small protectorate; in the south, the Niger Coast Protectorate was integrated with the company’s territories south of Idah to form the Protectorate of Southern Nigeria; and in the north lay a vast area called the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria, which amounted to little more than claims on a map.

  Large parts of Southern Nigeria had yet to experience foreign intervention. The Aro Confederacy, guardians of the renowned Aro Chukwa oracle, who had dominated trade throughout Igboland for two centuries, put up determined resistance against British intrusion. Many of the acephalous village societies to the east of the Niger River followed suit. Time and again, the British had to resort to punitive expeditions to enforce their control. Not until 1906 did they manage to establish effective administration there. The Igbo were not fully defeated until 1919.

  In Northern Nigeria, the task of bringing the emirates of the Sokoto Caliphate under British rule was given to Frederick Lugard. Appointed high commissioner in January 1900, Lugard hoisted the Union flag at Lokoja, an outpost on the Middle Niger, but beyond that stretched an expanse of 300,000 square miles with a population of some 15 million where no British presence existed. Lugard was given a small budget for administration and only limited military resources – a West African Frontier Force of 3,000 African troops under the command of British officers. Moreover, the sultan of Sokoto, Abdurrahman, was adamant in rejecting all notion of British rule. In May 1902, he wrote (in Arabic) to Lugard: ‘From us to you. I do not consent that any one from you should ever dwell with us. Between us and you there are no dwellings except as between Mussulmans and Unbelievers, – War, as God Almighty has enjoined on us.’

  Lugard chose to consider Abdurrahman’s note as tantamount to a declaration of war and resolved to take Sokoto by force. After several sharp actions, Kano capitulated, then Sokoto. The cavalry charges of the sultan’s forces were no match against repeater rifles, artillery and Maxim guns. A new sultan, Muhammad Attahiru, was installed. In a speech approving Attahiru’s appointment, Lugard made it clear that the old empire of Usuman dan Fodio was at an end: ‘The Fulani in old times under Dan Fodio conquered this country. They took the right to rule over it, to levy taxes, to depose kings and to create kings. They in turn have by defeat lost their rule which has come into the hands of the British.’

  But Lugard also recognised that, with so few men of their own on the ground and such limited funds available, the British had no alternative but to rely on Fulani cooperation to maintain Britain’s authority. Lugard therefore fashioned a system of indirect rule for Northern Nigeria, stationing British Residents at the courts of the emirs, but allowing them to continue to police, tax and administer justice in accordance with Islamic traditions of law and discipline, much as before. In later years, the British turned Lugard’s makeshift policy of indirect rule into an entire formula for administration in other parts of Africa.

  In setting up their own empire in western Sudan, the French tended to rely on military force rather than treaty-making. The way was led by French army officers keen to gain promotion and honours for the military. Commanders in the field determined the course of action, sometimes in defiance of instructions from Paris.
Their purpose was to acquire as much territory as possible on France’s behalf. Success was measured in terms of the square kilométrage they acquired. Treaties with African leaders were obtained for tactical reasons and broken when it was expedient to do so. What mattered was conquest. All this was done in the name of France’s ‘civilising mission’.

  The focus of French attention was on the Upper Niger. Two principal African empires stood in the way. One was the Tukolor empire led by Amadou Seku, the son of its founder, Umar Tal. Despite a peace treaty which the French had negotiated with Amadou, an ambitious French officer, Colonel Louis Archinard, launched an assault against the empire, capturing the Tukolor capital of Segu in 1890. Archinard’s explanation was that Amadou had threatened to break the peace. Amadou’s army fought on, but year by year was forced to retreat. In place of the Tukolor empire, the French set up a new entity called Soudan Français, with headquarters in Bamako.

  France’s other main adversary was a Mandinka warlord, Samori Ture, who in the 1870s had carved out his own Wassoulou empire in the Upper Niger basin. From his base on the Milo, a tributary of the Upper Niger, Samori extended his conquests to the Bure goldfields and to Kankan, a key Dyula trading centre. With an army of 30,000 infantry and 3,000 cavalry, he proved a formidable obstacle. After several initial clashes, Samori signed a treaty in 1886 demarcating a border with the French, but the treaty did not last. As the French pushed into his territory, Samori retreated from his capital at Bissandugu, moving eastwards to set up a new empire in the Middle Volta region. For seven years, displaying remarkable military and administrative skills, he managed to hold the French at bay. But he was eventually captured in 1898 and sent into exile to Gabon, dying there two years later.