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

by Martin Meredith

  What bound the Sanusiyya together, as much as religious obedience, was trade. The Sanusi order became an organisation primarily for traders benefiting from the stability it brought. Sanusi himself combined the teaching of Islam with respect for practical work in the material world. According to oral tradition, he told his followers: ‘The paper-pushers and the praise-mongers believe they shall precede us in God’s favour; but, by God, they will not!’ The Sanusi used their religious prestige and moral influence to protect caravans and gained in return by levying tolls, leasing storage space and receiving gifts and offerings from merchants.

  A central part of the trade in the Sanusiyya domain was the trans-Saharan traffic in slaves. The desert route between the sultanate of Wadai and Benghazi became the main artery for black slaves from the south once other routes from the Sahel to the Mediterranean ports had been closed down by European prohibition and by restrictions imposed by the Ottoman rulers of Tripoli. Benghazi in the nineteenth century was a small, remote port, cut off from Tripolitania by the Sirtica and from Egypt by the Western Desert. Despite the presence of several European vice-consuls there, it tended to escape attention.

  The Wadai road to Benghazi was one of the most difficult and dangerous of the trans-Saharan highways. Long stretches were waterless, which meant that slaves were forced to march for fourteen hours a day for up to twenty days between oases. Since all lives depended on keeping up the pace, no caravan was allowed to slow down or halt to enable stragglers to keep up; they were simply abandoned to die on the road. A British vice-consul in Benghazi, Francis Gilbert, reported in 1847: ‘I have been told that the chief reason for so many being abandoned on the journey is not so much the scarcity of food and water, but from the swelling of the feet in traversing the hot sands, they are unable to keep up with the others, and there being no spare camels to carry them, they are left to die in the desert.’

  Winter journeys carried their own particular hazards. In May 1850, another British vice-consul, George Herman, rode out from Benghazi to watch the arrival of a Wadai slave caravan. It was, he reported, about 2,000 yards long and ‘moved at the rate of two miles per hour in perfect silence’. Nine out of ten slaves were women and girls. Some 1,200 slaves had managed to survive the crossing, but 430 had died during the 162-day journey between Wadai and the entrepôt at Augila. Herman noted that tents had been issued on the journey only to ‘the principal officers and merchants, their followers and some few of the more valuable slaves’. The rest of the caravan were left to fend for themselves at night. ‘The action of the dews on the half-naked, youthful and impoverished frames of those unfortunates would alone have been sufficient to produce a great mortality among them.’ In 1850, the Sardinian consul in Tripoli reported that a caravan of between 2,500 and 3,000 had been lost on the route between Wadai and Benghazi.

  The Sanusi themselves used slaves as agricultural labourers and domestic servants. Those slaves who survived the journey to Benghazi were bought by Benghazi residents or sold on to the Levant. For a period of more than fifty years, the Sanusi kept up the trade, moving as many as 4,000 slaves a year up the road from Wadai. A British archaeologist, Herbert Weld Blundell, who travelled through Cyrenaica in 1894–5, described the Sanusiyya as ‘a very large, well-organised slave driving and slave dealing corporation, managed by the heads of the Brotherhood’.

  Facing European encroachment into their domain, however, the Sanusi transformed themselves into a political and military organisation. When the French advanced southwards from Algeria in the 1900s, occupying the southern Saharan lands of modern Niger and Chad, the Sanusi fought recurrent wars against them. During the First World War, Sanusi agents stirred up a Tuareg rebellion against the French, imperilling their hold over Tuareg territory.

  Sanusi resistance in their home base in Cyrenaica proved even more formidable. In an act of unprovoked aggression in 1911, Italy declared war on Turkey and sent an invasion force to seize the ports of Tripoli, Benghazi, Derna and Tobruk. The Italians eventually managed to wrest control of the coastal plain of Cyrenaica, forcing the Turks to evacuate Libya, but the vast desert region remained under Sanusi dominance. Italian attempts to conquer the Sanusi heartland provoked nine years of guerrilla warfare. It was not until 1931 that the Italians, using aerial bombardment, concentration camps and miles of barbed wire fences, were able to enforce their control.

  The final bout of European haggling over north African territory occurred over Morocco. France, Spain, Germany and Britain were all involved. France overcame British objections by promising Britain a free hand in Egypt and bought off German claims by agreeing to transfer a large slice of territory from the French Congo to the German colony of Kamerun (Cameroon). The end result in 1912 was to divide Morocco into two zones of foreign control: Spain was allocated a northern protectorate based on the ports of Ceuta and Melilla; France gained the main protectorate which included Casablanca, Fez and Marrakesh. The sultan was left as the nominal ruler under European protection.

  The advent of European rule at the end of the nineteenth century effectively brought to an end the long-distance traffic in African slaves which had endured for more than eleven hundred years. The scale of the trade in the nineteenth century surpassed that of all previous centuries. According to modern estimates, the trans-Atlantic route took 4 million slaves; the trans-Saharan route, 1.2 million; the Red Sea route, 492,000; and the east African route, 442,000. In all, 6.1 million.

  Overall, between 800 and 1900, trans-Saharan slave traffic amounted to an estimated 7.2 million; Red Sea traffic, to 2.4 million; and east African traffic, to 2.9 million. Trans-Atlantic traffic between 1450 and 1900 amounted to an estimated 11.3 million. But while long-distance traffic petered out, internal slavery remained deeply embedded in many African societies, lasting long into the twentieth century.

  PART XII

  Congo’s Heart of Darkness

  47

  BULA MATARI

  In 1890, a 32-year-old Polish seaman named Konrad Korzeniowski arrived in the Congo as a river-boat captain. Eight years later, having adopted the name of Joseph Conrad, he used his experiences to write a novel exposing the madness of greed and corruption that overtook Leopold’s Congo Free State. Titled Heart of Darkness, it became one of the most enduring novels of modern times.

  The narrator of Heart of Darkness, Charlie Marlow, is hired by an ivory-trading company to sail a steamboat up an unnamed river. His destination is a trading post called the Inner Station run by one of the company’s most outstanding agents, Mr Kurtz. ‘A remarkable person,’ Marlow is told. ‘Sends in as much ivory as all the others put together.’ Kurtz is also a poet and intellectual, the author of an eloquent report to the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, on which he has scrawled: ‘Exterminate the brutes!’

  Marlow begins his journey, as Conrad had done, taking the long route around the rapids to ‘Central Station’ – the road that Stanley built from the port of Matadi to Stanley Pool. At Central Station, Marlow finds the talk is all about ivory:

  The word ‘ivory’ rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff of some corpse. By Jove! I’ve never seen anything so unreal in my life. And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared speck of earth struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion.

  At Central Station, Marlow learns that Kurtz is ill. He also hears rumours that he has descended into some kind of savagery. His journey to the Inner Station is delayed, but eventually he sets off upriver, just as Conrad did on his way to Stanley Falls.

  Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of the sunshine. The long stret
ches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvery sandbanks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side. The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands. You lost your way on that river as you would in a desert and butted all day long against shoals trying to find the channel till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off for ever from everything you had known.

  The journey is filled with foreboding.

  Sometimes we came upon a station close by the bank, clinging to the skirts of the unknown, and the white men rushing out of a tumble-down hovel, with great gestures of joy and surprise and welcome, seemed very strange – had the appearance of being held there captive by a spell. The word ivory would ring in the air for a while – and on we went again into the silence . . . We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness.

  Approaching Inner Station, Marlow, on the steamboat, observes Kurtz’s house on the riverbank through binoculars. On top of the fence-posts in front of the house, he glimpses what at first he thinks are ornamental knobs, but then discovers that each is ‘black, dried, sunken with closed eyelids – a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth’.

  With a cargo of ivory and the ill Kurtz on board, Marlow returns downstream. Kurtz talks of grandiose plans, but dies on the way, whispering in despair, ‘The horror! The horror!’

  No other episode of colonial occupation acquired such lasting notoriety as Leopold’s Congo Free State. Among the African inhabitants, the regime he set up and the European agents he employed became collectively known by the Kikongo term Bula Matari. It was a name meaning ‘Breaker of Rocks’ originally given to Henry Stanley by a Bakongo chief watching him at work with a sledge-hammer. But what it came to signify was the crushing force and terror that Leopold employed to exploit his private empire.

  Leopold’s principal objective was to amass as large a fortune for himself as possible. Ivory was at first his main hope. From river stations, company agents scoured the country, sending out hunting parties, raiding villages, press-ganging porters, acquiring tusks in exchange for a few beads or brass rods or by simply confiscating them. Local inhabitants were prohibited from selling or delivering ivory to anyone else; nor were they allowed to receive money in payment. The agents were meanwhile paid on a commission basis: the more ivory they collected, the more they earned. Their methods of obtaining ivory and conscripting porters to carry it consequently became increasingly ruthless. The symbol of Leopold’s rule became the chicotte – a whip of raw, sun-dried hippopotamus hide, cut into long sharp-edged strips, used to flay victims, sometimes to death.

  Leopold’s river stations served not just as ivory-collection points but as military outposts. His control ultimately came to depend on the Force Publique, a mercenary army composed of white officers and African auxiliaries, notorious for brutal conduct, which eventually consumed half of the state’s budget.

  The Congo Free State was afflicted from the start by revolts, uprisings, mutinies and intermittent warfare. One immediate problem facing Leopold was that much of eastern Congo was held by the Swahili-Arab warlord Tippu Tip, whose Manyema empire built on ivory and slaves by now extended to the vast region east of the Stanley Falls. In 1886, Tippu Tip’s headstrong nephew overran the river station at Stanley Falls. To avoid a costly confrontation, Leopold took Henry Stanley’s advice and offered Tippu Tip the post of governor of eastern Congo, with a free hand to exploit ivory and whatever other riches he could find. Tippu Tip duly accumulated another fortune in ivory. ‘Life was very good in Stanley Falls,’ he recalled of the four years he spent there before he retired to Zanzibar. ‘Trade was wonderful, and the number of tusks coming in was staggering.’ Tippu Tip’s appointment, however, was but a temporary expedient. Leopold recognised that in the long run a war for control of eastern Congo between the Congo Free State and Swahili-Arab traders was inevitable.

  Leopold also encountered resistance in his drive to extend the boundaries of the Congo Free State to Katanga. In the 1860s, a Nyamwezi trader, Msiri, had carved out an empire for himself along the copper-rich watershed between the Zambezi and the Congo tributaries, imposing military rule over local Lunda chiefdoms and profiting from long-distance trade in ivory, slaves, salt and copper products. From his capital at Bunkeya near the Lofoi River, his caravans reached both the Angolan port of Benguela and the Swahili coast opposite Zanzibar. A Plymouth Brethren missionary, Frederick Arnot, who ventured to Bunkeya in 1886 was horrified by the brutality of Msiri’s rule. ‘Hearing of him talk of his wars, and seeing all round his yard human skulls . . . the sensation creeps over one of being in a monster’s den . . . He has the name of being very kind among his people, but at the same time very strict. He does not stop at taking their heads off.’ Missionary endeavours made little difference. In 1890, another missionary, Dan Crawford, recorded: ‘To characterize Mushidi’s [Msiri’s] mode of government as rigorous is altogether to choose the wrong word. It is murderous.’

  Leopold dispatched three armed expeditions to gain control of Katanga. The first, a 300-man column, arrived in April 1891. Msiri allowed them to build a small Free State post two days’ journey from Bunkeya on a site beside the Lofoi River, hoping to benefit from their presence as his power began to wane. A second column, led by a Force Publique officer, Alexandre Delcommune, arrived in Bunkeya in October 1891. ‘All you have to do,’ Delcommune told Msiri, ‘is accept the protection of Boula-Matari, to fly the flag with the star at each of your villages, and then things will calm down and peace and plenty will return to your country.’ Msiri rejected the offer.

  The third column, consisting of 330 men, arrived in Bunkeya in December 1891. It had been organised by the Compagnie de Katanga, a commercial company chartered by Leopold to occupy Katanga in exchange for one-third of ‘vacant’ land and exclusive mineral rights there. It was led by a Canadian mercenary, Captain Grant Stairs, who was determined to force Msiri into submission. When Msiri held firm, refusing to fly the flag of Bula Matari, Stairs grabbed a pole from Msiri’s palisade, hoisted the flag on a high hill overlooking Bunkeya and sent messengers to Msiri to tell him that ‘in future he was expected to obey the white man’.

  Msiri reacted by retreating at night to a fortified village on the outskirts of Bunkeya. Stairs decided that the ‘poor comedy’ had gone on long enough and sent an armed detachment to arrest him. In the fracas that ensued, Msiri was shot dead by a Belgian officer. The following day, according to the account of another Belgian officer, Msiri’s head was strung up on a pole as an ‘example’ to the peoples of Katanga.

  Leopold’s showdown with the Swahili-Arabs of eastern Congo followed soon afterwards. It began in 1892 as Force Publique units and European traders penetrated ever deeper into their domain, plundering for ivory, precipitating clashes. Both sides fought by proxy, arming and leading rival tribal groups into battle. A Force Publique officer, Captain Guillaume van Kerckhoven, boasted how he paid his black soldiers five brass rods per human head they brought him during military operations. One of his expeditions was described by the Congo’s governor-general as being like ‘a hurricane which passed through leaving nothing but devastation behind it’.

  In March 1893, a combined column of Force Publique troops and Batatele auxiliaries stormed the old slaving town of Nyangwe. In April, they captured Kasongo, a walled city of 50,000 inhabitants on the Lualaba River which Tippu Tip’s son, Sefu, used as his capital. The attack on Kasongo was carried out so swiftly that the city was taken virtually intact. The column’s medical officer, Captain Sidney Hinde, wrote of the impressive range of luxuries available in Kasongo.

  . . . even the common soldiers slept on silk and satin mattresses, in carved beds with silk mosquito curtains. The room I took possession of was eighty feet long and fifteen feet wide, with a door leading into an orange garden, beyond which was a view extending over five miles . . . We found many European luxuries, the use of which we had almost
forgotten; candles, sugar, matches, silver and glass goblets and decanters were in profusion. We also took about twenty-five tons of ivory; ten or eleven tons of powder; millions of caps; cartridges for every kind of rifle, gun and revolver . . . The granaries throughout the town were stocked with enormous quantities of rice, coffee, maize and other food; the gardens were luxurious and well-planted; and oranges, both sweet and bitter, guavas, pomegranates, pineapples, mangoes and bananas abounded at every turn . . .

  I was constantly astonished by the splendid work which had been done in the neighbourhood by the Arabs. Kasongo was built in the corner of a virgin forest, and for miles around all the brushwood and the great majority of trees had been cleared away. In the forest-clearing fine crops of sugar-cane, rice, maize and fruits grew. I have ridden through a single rice-field for an hour and a half.

  The cost of establishing the Congo Free State as a personal enterprise, however, was far beyond Leopold’s private means. To stave off bankruptcy, he resorted to a variety of measures. He persuaded Belgium’s parliament to award him an interest-free loan of £1 million. He declared ownership of all land deemed to be ‘vacant’ and then leased it out to commercial companies, such as the Compagnie de Katanga, granting them long-term concessions in exchange for a share of the profits. One Belgian company – the Compagnie du Congo pour le Commerce et l’Industrie – was given a contract to build a railway around the Lower Congo rapids from Matadi to Leopoldville, gaining in return the right to 1,500 hectares of land for every kilometre of line it constructed, amounting in all to nearly 8,000 square kilometres. Leopold also set up his own commercial company, Domaine de la Couronne, awarding himself a monopoly of 100,000 square miles in the centre of the Congo Basin with control of all the revenue it produced.