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

by Martin Meredith

  In the following days, a wave of violence radiated out from Okahandja. German farms and homesteads were attacked. As the conflagration spread, Maherero wrote to Hendrik Witbooi appealing for a united front against the Germans:

  All our obedience and patience with the Germans is of little avail for each day they shoot someone dead for no reason at all. Hence I appeal to you, my Brother, not to hold aloof from the uprising, but to make your voice heard so that all Africa may take up arms against the Germans. Let us die fighting rather than die as a result of maltreatment, imprisonment and some other calamity. Tell all the Kapiteins [chiefs] down there to rise and do battle.

  But Witbooi held back until it was too late.

  Determined to crush the uprising by force and exact vengeance, Kaiser Wilhelm appointed a new military commander, General Lothar von Trotha, and dispatched him with reinforcements from Berlin with orders to use ‘fair means or foul’. A veteran of Germany’s colonial army in east Africa, with a reputation for extreme ruthlessness, von Trotha was clear about what was needed:

  I know enough tribes in Africa. They all have the same mentality insofar as they yield only to force. It was and remains my policy to apply this force by absolute terrorism and even cruelty. I shall destroy the rebellious tribes by shedding rivers of blood and money. Only then will it be possible to sow the seeds of something new that will endure.

  As von Trotha assembled a huge colonial army – some 6,000 men, more than the number of settlers in the colony – Maherero retreated to the Waterberg, a mountain range on the edge of the dry wilderness known to the Herero as the Omaheke. He took with him some 50,000 followers, two-thirds of the Herero population. His options were limited. Herero attacks on white settlers had long since ended. Some Herero sub-chiefs favoured negotiations.

  But von Trotha was scornful of the idea of negotiations and rejected Herero approaches. His plan was not just to defeat the Herero but to annihilate them. In August 1904, his troops encircled Herero encampments in the Waterberg. Under fire, desperate to escape, the Herero found a weak link in the German cordon. Thousands of men, women and children broke through to the waterless Omaheke, fleeing with whatever possessions they could carry. To prevent their return, von Trotha sealed off waterholes, set up patrols, erected guard posts along the perimeter of the desert and then issued a Vernichtungsbefehl or extermination order.

  I, the Great General of the German soldiers, address this letter to the Herero people. The Herero are no longer considered German subjects. They have murdered, stolen, cut off ears and other parts from wounded soldiers, and now refuse to fight on, out of cowardice. I have this to say to them . . . the Herero people will have to leave the country. Otherwise I shall force them to do so by means of guns. Within the German boundaries, every Herero, whether found armed or unarmed, with or without cattle, will be shot. I shall not accept any more women or children. I shall drive them back to their people – otherwise I shall order shots to be fired at them.

  With a large part of the Herero population trapped in the desert, many dying there of exhaustion and thirst, von Trotha set about rounding up groups still left in Hereroland. German troops were formed into what became known as Cleansing Patrols – Aufklärungspatrouillen – and given orders to shoot on sight if necessary. Many Herero were tricked into surrendering with assurances that it was safe for them to return from the bush and then killed. Those who survived were taken to Konzentrationslagers and forced to work as labourers. A German missionary, describing conditions in the Swakopmund camp, one of five main camps, wrote in the Swakopmund Missionary Chronicle in December 1905:

  From early morning until late at night, on weekends as well as on Sundays and holidays, they had to work under the clubs of the raw overseers until they broke down. Added to this, food was extremely scarce . . . Like cattle, hundreds were driven to death and like cattle they were buried.

  By the end of 1905, only 15,000 Herero were left alive in German South-West Africa out of a previous population of 80,000. Some 2,000 others managed to cross the Omaheke and the Kalahari to seek safety in British Bechuanaland.

  The shockwaves from the brutal suppression of the Herero people spread southwards to Namaland. In October 1904, Hendrik Witbooi and other Nama kapiteins joined the uprising, fearing they would be next under attack. For twelve months they fought a debilitating guerrilla war against the Germans, but after Witbooi’s death in October 1905, Nama resistance faded. Like the Herero, Nama clans who surrendered were herded into concentration camps. The mortality rate in one of the camps – a windswept island lying off the harbour at Lüderitzbucht (Angra Pequena) – was so high that German officials referred to it as ‘Death Island’. Out of a previous Nama population of about 20,000, only about half survived.

  In December 1905, Kaiser Wilhelm formally expropriated all Herero land. In May 1907, he issued a similar decree expropriating almost all Nama land, leaving aside only a few pockets in Nama hands. In all, the German government took possession of more than 100 million acres of land previously held by Nama, Herero, Damara and San peoples, handing it out to German settlers.

  As a memorial to the soldiers and settlers who had lost their lives in the wars against the Herero and Nama, the Germans commissioned a sixteen-foot bronze statue of a mounted soldier. The statue was erected on a site in Windhoek previously used for a concentration camp where some four thousand Herero, mainly women and children, had died of hardship and disease. At a ceremony to mark its unveiling, the German governor, Theodor Seitz, declared: ‘The venerable colonial soldier that looks out over the land from here announces to the world that we are the masters of this place, now and for ever.’

  A similar uprising against German rule broke out in its colony in east Africa (Tanganyika). It was inspired by a spirit medium, Kinjikitile Ngwale, living in a village on the western slopes of the Matumbi Hills, 120 miles south of Dar es Salaam, who urged local tribesmen to unite and drive out the Germans. German rule in east Africa was no less rapacious than in south-west Africa. The Germans used Swahili agents – akidas – to enforce tax collection and farming quotas with a high level of violence and intimidation. Villagers were required to work on communal plots growing cash crops such as cotton for meagre payments. As resentment over German rule mounted, hundreds flocked to Kinjikitile’s village at Ngarambe to listen to his message of revolt. He promised them that a ‘war medicine’ consisting of magic water (maji) and millet seeds was strong enough to turn German bullets into water.

  The ‘maji-maji’ uprising began in 1905 when two elders from Nandete walked to the cotton fields and in an act of symbolic defiance uprooted three cotton plants. It spread rapidly throughout the region, drawing in acephalous clans – the Matumbi, Kichi and Ngindo – in a united campaign of resistance. Armed only with cap guns, spears and arrows, they launched attacks on German outposts, killed a party of missionaries and cut supply lines. But after four weeks, when thousands died in an attempt to storm a German garrison equipped with machine guns, the revolt lost momentum.

  The Germans reacted by calling in reinforcements and by instigating a scorched-earth policy, destroying villages and laying waste to vast stretches of the central and southern highlands. ‘Only hunger and want can bring about a final submission,’ declared the German governor, Gustav Adolf Graf von Götzen. ‘Military action alone will remain more or less a drop in the ocean.’ Official German reports claimed that 26,000 ‘rebels’ were killed in military action. In the famine that followed perhaps as many as 250,000 lives were lost.

  PART XIV

  Africa in 1914

  53

  INTERREGNUM

  By the time the scramble for Africa was over, some 10,000 African polities had been amalgamated into forty European colonies and protectorates. The boundaries of the new states, drawn up by negotiators in Europe using maps that were largely inaccurate, took little account of the existing mosaic of monarchies, chiefdoms and acephalous societies on the ground. Nearly half of the new frontiers were geometric l
ines, lines of latitude and longitude or other straight lines. In some cases, African societies were rent apart: the Bakongo were partitioned between Belgian Congo, French Congo and Portuguese Angola. In other cases, Europe’s colonial territories enclosed an assortment of disparate groups: in 1914, Britain joined together its northern and southern protectorates in Nigeria, creating a new country in which 300 different languages were spoken.

  Having expended so much effort on acquiring African territory, Europe’s colonial powers then lost much of their earlier interest. Few parts of Africa offered the prospect of immediate wealth. Colonial governments were concerned above all to make their territories self-supporting. Their remit was limited to maintaining law and order, raising taxation and providing an infrastructure of roads and railways. Economic activity was left to commercial companies. Education was placed in the hands of missionaries. Administration was kept to a minimum. Only a thin white line of control existed.

  With so few men on the ground, colonial governments relied heavily on African chiefs and other intermediaries to collaborate with officials and exercise control on their behalf. The British, in particular, favoured a system of ‘indirect rule’, using African authorities to keep order, collect taxes and supply labour, which involved a minimum of staff and expense. The model they used was Lugard’s method of dealing with the Sokoto Caliphate in northern Nigeria, which allowed Fulani emirs to continue to govern in accordance with local traditions of law and discipline. In cases where chiefdoms did not exist, as among the acephalous village societies of the Igbo of southern Nigeria, chiefdoms were invented. The French pursued similar policies. The first French governor to rule Morocco, Marshal Lyautey, declared: ‘There is in every society a ruling class born to rule . . . Get it on our side.’ In west Africa, the French appointed Africans as chefs de canton, often chosen from the ranks of the more efficient clerks and interpreters in government service.

  Colonial rule was imposed with authoritarian vigour. In the early years, forced labour was commonly used for public projects such as road-building and porterage. In the territories of French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa, the indigenous population was subject to the Code de l’Indigénat, which enabled French administrators to order arbitrary punishment such as imprisonment without trial for anyone whom they deemed troublesome. The Belgians and Portuguese employed similar measures.

  Year by year, the new colonies gradually took shape. Railway lines snaking into the interior from the coast reached Kumasi, the capital of Asante, in 1903; Bamako, on the Niger River, in 1905; Katanga in 1910; Kano in 1912; and Lake Tanganyika in 1914. New patterns of economic activity were established. In west Africa, peasant farmers were encouraged to grow cash crops for European markets. By 1914, the Gold Coast had become the world’s largest single producer of cocoa. Senegal and northern Nigeria specialised in groundnut production. Senegal’s groundnut exports multiplied ten times between the 1880s and the First World War. Other peasant crops exported from west Africa included coffee and palm-oil. In east Africa, Uganda became a major producer of cotton. In other areas of eastern and southern Africa, white settlement was regarded as the key to agricultural development. In Britain’s East African Protectorate (renamed ‘Kenya’ in 1920), white settlers began moving into the highlands around the Rift Valley in the 1900s in a determined effort to turn it into ‘white-man’s country’. But their numbers remained small, scattered over vast districts.

  Once railways had opened up the interior, European mining companies arrived to exploit the cornucopia of mineral deposits there. British companies took over the goldfields of Asante. Belgium’s Union Minière obtained exclusive control of copper mining in Katanga. European investment was ploughed into tin production from ancient mines on the Jos plateau of northern Nigeria; diamond exploration in Angola; and phosphate exports from Tunisia.

  Through the efforts of Christian missionaries, literacy and primary education were slowly introduced throughout much of tropical Africa. By 1910, about 16,000 European missionaries were stationed there. They founded networks of village schools, providing a simple education in reading, writing, arithmetic and religious instruction in order to spread the Christian message and increase church numbers. Years of work were devoted to translating the Bible, prayers and hymns into vernacular languages and transcribing oral languages into written form for the first time. Mission-educated Africans became catechists and teachers, spreading both Christianity and education ever further. By 1914, there were an estimated seven million Christians in Africa.

  Under colonial rule, Islam too expanded rapidly across large parts of west Africa. By allowing Muslim emirs to rule northern Nigeria in accordance with Islamic traditions of law and discipline, Britain conferred a stamp of legitimacy on Muslim leadership and Islamic governance and culture. Muslim clerics were able to proselytise in non-Muslim areas of the north hitherto inaccessible to them as a result of warfare or banditry, and to establish Koranic schools and brotherhoods there. The French, having spent years seeking to smash Muslim resistance to their advances in west Africa, were more distrustful of Muslim ambitions, but soon came to terms with the Murid brotherhood of Senegal when they proved to be a vital factor in boosting groundnut production. The redirection of trade away from traditional northern routes towards the coastal zones of west Africa stimulated further expansion. Islam took root in Yorubaland and in major ports such as Lagos, Dakar and Accra. Whereas Christianity was often seen as ‘the white man’s religion’, Islam presented itself as an African religion. Compared to the heavy demands made by Christian missionaries on their recruits, in particular their insistence on an end to customary practices such as polygamy, converting to Islam involved few obstacles. In west Africa, Islam made far greater progress than Christianity.

  No sooner had the imperial map of Africa been marked out on the ground, however, than European states went to war with each other, dragging Africa into the fray. From the outset of the First World War, colonial powers sought to occupy the territory of their rivals, using African troops to fight on their behalf on opposing sides. The first ‘British’ shot of the whole war was fired by a Gold Coast sergeant in August 1914 when British forces, in liaison with the French, invaded the small German colony of Togo. The German governor of Togo tried to forestall the invasion by suggesting by telegram that Togo should remain neutral so that Africans would not witness the spectacle of war between Europeans, but to no avail. By the end of August Togo was in Allied hands.

  The Anglo-French campaign to take over German Kamerun proved to be a more arduous task. In August, the British sent in troops from the Gambia, Sierra Leone, Gold Coast and Nigeria; French columns advanced from French Equatorial Africa. But it was not until February 1916 that the last German outpost capitulated. Germany’s colony in South-West Africa meanwhile was overrun after a three-month campaign launched by an expeditionary army from South Africa. In east Africa, German forces under the command of General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck fought on until November 1918, using guerrilla tactics to keep the British and their allies at bay, surrendering only when hearing of the armistice in Europe.

  The impact of the war on several African territories was profound. Colonial powers recruited or conscripted more than two million Africans as soldiers, porters or labourers. In French West Africa, chiefs were given quotas to fill. The French used troops not only for operations in Africa but in Europe. Around 150,000 Africans served on the Western Front in France and Belgium; some 30,000 were killed in action there. One regiment from Morocco became the most highly decorated regiment in the whole of the French army. In east Africa, the campaign against von Lettow-Vorbeck’s guerrilla forces brought devastation to rural areas. Both sides used scorched-earth tactics, burning villages, destroying crops and requisitioning labour to deprive their opponents of supplies and support. ‘Behind us we leave destroyed fields, ransacked magazines and, for the immediate future, starvation,’ wrote Ludwig Deppe, a German doctor. ‘We are no longer the agents of culture; our track
is marked by death, plundering and evacuated villages.’

  In the aftermath of the First World War, Germany’s colonies were shared out among Britain, France, Belgium and South Africa. Tanganyika was handed over to Britain; South-West Africa to South Africa; the tiny highland kingdoms of Ruanda and Urundi (Rwanda and Burundi) were passed to Belgium; and Togo and Cameroon were divided up between Britain and France. As a reward for Italian support in the First World War, Britain gave Jubaland to Italy to form part of Italian Somalia, moving the border of Kenya westwards. Britain also took control of Dar Fur, an independent sultanate which had sided with the Ottomans, incorporating it into colonial Sudan.

  Once the new colonial dispensation had been put in place, Africa resumed its role as an imperial backwater. The pace of development was slow. Colonial powers saw no need for more rapid progress. Colonial rule was expected to last for hundreds of years.

  54

  A VEILED PROTECTORATE

  Britain’s occupation of Egypt, initially intended to be a short-term venture, soon turned into a permanent presence. For a period of more than sixty years Egypt was encumbered by a succession of British proconsuls with the power to intervene as they saw fit, backed up by a local British garrison. The tone was set by Lord Cromer (Evelyn Baring), Britain’s consul-general from 1883 to1907, an austere, autocratic figure who insisted from the start that Egypt needed a prolonged period of British rule to restore its finances and reform its administration. Nominally, Egypt remained an autonomous state ruled by the Muhammad Ali dynasty, owing allegiance to the Ottoman authorities in Istanbul. In practice, the nerve centre of power was the British consulate. While Egyptians remained at the head of government departments and ministries, real control lay with British officials. One of Cromer’s officials, Alfred Milner, described Britain’s form of government in Egypt as a ‘veiled protectorate’. When the young khedive, Abbas Hilmi II, the son of Tawfiq, sought to challenge Cromer’s authority, he was publicly rebuked.