The girls were allowed to share some of the excitement of Scouting, learning how to find their way by the stars, how to clean their teeth with a stick, or ‘How to Secure a Burglar with Eight Inches of Cord’.* They were taught the prevailing belief in the uplifting qualities of ‘playing the game’. Mainly, though, it was the function of girls to learn how to help males to expand and consolidate the empire. ‘It is men’s work to defend the Empire in person, and to be prepared to fight for their country and their homes. But you must not forget that you can play a very important part in holding the Empire by becoming experts at ambulance work and nursing.’ Settling in a colony could offer many ‘delightful prospects’, such as ‘turning packing-cases into furniture’ and ‘producing capital meals with three bricks and a baking pot’. The thing to remember was that ‘To a true-hearted girl who wishes to make a man happy, there is bliss in an African hut.’
Chapter Eight
‘The more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race’
Cecil Rhodes, 1877
The hero of Rudyard Kipling’s 1893 short story ‘The Bridge-Builders’ is a no-nonsense Scottish engineer. Findlayson is building a railway bridge across the mighty Ganges. Thousands upon thousands of Indian labourers have toiled for three years constructing the stone plinths and riveting together the British-made steel girders which will cross the biggest river in the entire subcontinent. The Viceroy himself is to be present at the opening of the causeway. As a reward for his tireless efforts Findlayson dreams of being made a Companion of the Star of India, the Victorian decoration invented to honour congenial Indian princes and particularly significant British public servants.* Then one night the engineer receives a telegram from a British outpost further upstream. There is a huge flood rolling down from the Himalayas, which will strike the uncompleted bridge in hours. The work of empire risks destruction by a force of nature and an alarmed Findlayson orders the massive camp gong to be struck, waking the entire workforce. The site foreman, Peroo, ‘a lascar† familiar with every port between Rockhampton and London’, will organize the emergency flood defences in the little time available before the torrent strikes. Several hours later, with the rain pouring down on the two exhausted men, the roiling flood arrives. There is nothing more to be done, and Peroo takes an old tobacco tin from his waistband, opens it and offers the engineer a couple of brown pellets, to ‘kill all weariness, besides the fever that follows the rain’. It is opium, and before he knows where he is, this upstanding Scot is delirious, dreaming of talking animals, many-limbed Indian gods and praying in sacred temples.
His bridge survives the flood, but that is entirely due to the quality of British engineering rather than to any Indian gods. Findlayson is rescued from his druggy reverie by an Indian prince with the sporty affectations and languid disdain of an English education. The episode with the opium is not mentioned again. British modernity has tamed ancient India.
Massive engineering works stamped the British presence upon the world, evidence not merely of technological achievement, but demonstrations of purpose. Inside a metal tube in the public library at the diamond town of Kimberley, for example, is the rolled-up map of Africa on which Cecil Rhodes drew a pencil line the entire length of the continent depicting the railway which he hoped would one day run the 5,000 miles from the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa to Cairo and the Mediterranean. That line was never completed, but on 7 November 1885 the last spike was driven into another track that had been laid through the Rockies, over bogs and prairies, through floods and forest fires, snowfall and avalanche, and that effectively created the Dominion of Canada by tying in British Columbia to the rest of the country. Thirty years later, Western Australia was welded into the Commonwealth of Australia by a track that crossed endless desert and included 300 miles of dead-straight line.
Perhaps the most openly imperialist railway line of all was the link built in the 1890s between the Indian Ocean and Lake Victoria in east Africa. It is now a rackety, dirty, unreliable thing, a wholly inadequate memorial to the 2,498 workers who lost their lives building it. At different times this remarkable route carried a young Queen Elizabeth, Winston Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt. The latter in 1909 spent most of the time when he wasn’t either eating or sleeping sitting on an observation platform at the front of the locomotive. ‘This embodiment of the eager, masterful, materialistic civilization of today’, he wrote, ‘was pushed through a region in which nature, both as regards wild man and wild beast, does not differ materially from what it was in Europe in the late Pleistocene.’ Now, as you rattle out of Nairobi you are advised to shut the window, because if you don’t there’s a good chance someone will lob a pile of human shit through it. The train passes through Kibera, the biggest shanty town in Africa, home to perhaps a million people, which formally doesn’t exist yet whose cardboard, wood and corrugated-iron shacks probably house a third of the population of the capital – not that anyone ventures in to take an accurate census. But then the whole of Nairobi was an accident – it just happened to have the last bit of flat ground where colonial engineers could turn around a locomotive before the line they were building snaked its way up through the highlands towards Lake Victoria. The ugly mess of a city which grew up on the swampy ground has nothing much to commend it, even a century later.
At the time, the newspapers called this ambitious piece of engineering the Lunatic Line and even when it was finished the commissioner appointed by London to ‘look after’ east Africa admitted he had really no idea what its purpose was. The truth was that the motive for the line lay in the recently created German colony next door (now Rwanda, Burundi and the mainland part of Tanzania). The Uganda Railway, to give it its formal title (although almost its entire length lay within modern Kenya), was an imperial gesture, a giant metal spike nailing together British territory and providing a direct link between the Indian Ocean and the lake which was the source of the Nile. And the hardships they had to overcome to build it! Over a million railway sleepers had to be laid in relentless heat, yet it reached such an altitude that – on the Equator – it serviced what was said to be the coldest railway station in the British Empire. From here it plunged down into the Great Rift Valley on an incline so steep it was initially considered impossible for any railway line. Angry tribespeople fought to prevent the line crossing their land. In the single month of November 1896 a total of 27½ inches of rain fell, making work impossible. The following February, malaria swept through the camps. Dysentery struck repeatedly. Tropical heat and poor sanitation turned scratches into sores. Biting flies laid eggs which grew into maggots under the skin. Pneumonia struck down those with weak chests. There were even outbreaks of bubonic plague. An Indian army officer, Colonel J. H. Patterson, the engineer who had been given the task of overseeing work on the railway, dealt with the first of these outbreaks by putting a match to the camp.
This exceptional man also had to tackle the most dramatic hazard of all, during the building of a bridge at Tsavo. ‘Our work was soon interrupted in a rude and startling manner,’ he recalled later. ‘Two most voracious and insatiable man-eating lions appeared upon the scene, and for nine months waged an intermittent warfare against the railway and all those connected with it.’ Night after night the two lions stalked the camp, picking off a man here, another there, dragging them into the bush as the rest of the camp lay awake listening to the victims’ screams. The labourers built thorn fences, set fires, stationed watchmen and soon began strapping their beds as high up in the surrounding trees as they dared. Next, they simply refused to continue working and demanded to leave, saying they had signed up ‘to work for the government not to supply food for lions’. Colonel Patterson summoned the District Officer, who arrived after dark with an African sergeant, and as they walked to the colonel’s camp one of the lions leaped upon them, its claws tearing through the DO’s shirt and the skin on his back, before the creature dragged the sergeant away into the bushes. The men listened to the animal cho
mping its way through the sergeant’s bones.
Attempts to poison the lions with the contaminated carcasses of dead transport animals failed. (‘The wily man-eaters would not touch them, and much preferred live men to dead donkeys,’ wrote the colonel later.) Patterson built a platform in one of the trees and settled down to wait for a shot at the lions, but when one of them appeared he realized to his horror that the animal was stalking him. Eventually, of course, high-velocity rifle defeated four-legged beast, at which point labourers poured out of the camp and threw themselves at his feet in gratitude. The colonel shot dead the second lion some time later, but only after narrowly escaping the same fate as the District Officer’s sergeant and scores of others.* How many people had been taken by the lions is unknown – the only figure established with any precision was the total number of ‘coolie’ Indian labourers eaten by the lions, which was twenty-eight.
In the late 1890s, over 30,000 Indians had been brought to Africa on three-year contracts specifically to build the railway. British admiration for their railway-building skills was soon offset by anxieties about conditions in the camps in which they lived. There was, some of the white colonists claimed, a worryingly high proportion of thieves among them, who were introducing Africans to crime. The camps were alive with venereal disease and frequently sizzled with tension between Hindus and Muslims. They were crowded with ‘prostitutes, small boys and other accessories to the bestial vices so commonly practised by Orientals’. To make matters worse, many of the coolies had passed themselves off to their recruiters in Punjab or Gujerat as having skills they turned out not to possess. Yet from this small army of Indian workers emerged not only one of the most impressive railways ever built, but also one of the most economically productive – and politically discriminated against – communities in Africa. Imperial British feelings towards these workers were always ambiguous. In the hierarchy of races that the British imagined to exist, the Indians sat higher than poor Africans. But the station-master babu, with his sonorous English, was considered a comical figure. (One of them was supposed to have sounded the alarm about another man-eating lion with the telegraph message: ‘Pumping-engine employee wickedly assassinated by fractious carnivore. I unable pacify it. Situation perilous. Implore you alleviate my predicament.’)
Yet the British could also see how one part of the empire might nourish another part and encouraged more Indians to migrate to the region: ‘Indian trade, enterprise and emigration require a suitable outlet. East Africa is, and should be, from every point of view, the America of the Hindu,’ said the British Special Commissioner in Uganda, Sir Harry Johnston, in 1901. During the First World War, Indian soldiers were deployed to combat the guerrilla war being fought from German East Africa, and at war’s end prominent Asians argued that, since they had been just as active as the British settlers in developing Kenya, why should they not have similar rights to vote and to acquire land? The Colonial Office cooked up a characteristically inadequate compromise – limited representation on the legislative council, while, for the sake of their health, the highlands of the country were to be kept exclusively for white settlers. This tiered idea of citizenship more or less pacified the white settlers, and was grudgingly accepted by many Indians. But it did nothing at all for the indigenous African population, and, unsurprisingly, when independence came to Kenya in 1963 the Asians felt the force of their resentment. As the first President, Jomo Kenyatta, implemented a policy of ‘Africanization’ they were increasingly resented, treated as scapegoats and forced from their businesses. Many decided to take at face value the promise that those who held British passports were entitled to live in Britain. Between 1965 and 1967 over 20,000 Kenyan Asians arrived in Britain. A few years later, in 1972, Uganda’s home-grown tyrant, Idi Amin, decided to exploit African resentment at the commercial success of the Indian community, and gave Ugandan Asians ninety days to leave the country. About 30,000 emigrated to Britain and began to rebuild their lives, in many cases from scratch. They took their work ethic with them, rejuvenating some decaying British businesses and often starting small, family-run corner shops, open for long hours every day of the week, which transformed the high streets of Britain in a way the empire-builders could never have anticipated.
In the summer of 1877 a young Englishman sat down at his desk in a small corrugated-iron shack in a mining town in South Africa and wrote his will. This was an odd enough thing for any twenty-four-year-old to do. Even odder was what he proposed to do with his worldly goods. In a four-page, handwritten letter, Cecil Rhodes left everything he had for the creation of a world government.
In an accompanying ‘Confession of Faith’ Rhodes explained how this would be done. A Secret Society would be formed, which would eventually ‘render wars impossible and promote the best interests of humanity’. World peace is the dream of children or idealists and – as the failures of the United Nations and the proliferation of wars across the globe testify – has never been achieved. But Cecil Rhodes’s plan had one practical mechanism. It would be a racial rule, to be achieved by exporting settlers from Britain across the world. Global government would then be exercised from a parliament in London, to which the settlers would send representatives. The scope of his ambition was breathtaking. The territories to be colonized included ‘the entire continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the Islands of Cyprus and Candia [Crete], the whole of South America, the islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan’, and, for good measure, ‘the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire’.
The man who saw this colour-saturated vision of imperialism had been born the fifth son of the vicar of Bishop’s Stortford in Hertfordshire, and his own life bore witness to the possibilities that empire offered those with the nerve to seize a chance. Rhodes’s father had evidently no great expectations of him and packed the boy off as a gangling teenager to South Africa in 1871. Here he soon joined the torrent of chancers, roustabouts, remittance men and ne’er-do-wells pouring on to the dusty fields near the Orange River where a fifteen-year-old farmer’s son had picked up a curious-looking stone one day and set off a diamond rush. Rhodes and his brother staked a claim on a little flat-topped hill soon to become what was reckoned to be the biggest hole in the ground ever dug by hand. A fellow digger describes a thin, fair-haired, blue-eyed young man seated on an upturned bucket, gazing down on the spectacle beneath him, as uncountable numbers of other young men (most of the really hard work was being done by the black labourers) tore into the ground and hoisted buckets to the surface on a spider’s web of wires. The settlement which grew up around the hole, soon to be named Kimberley (after the Colonial Secretary) was a dusty, drab place of open drains, dead animals and drunks. For most of the prospectors the vision of sudden, immense wealth remained no more than a dream – it was said that the only people who made consistent money were the dealers who came into town with wagon-loads of water. But the earth did contain great quantities of diamonds – by the time the mine was worked out the Big Hole would yield nearly 3,000 kilograms of them. Rhodes had a natural talent for mining, acute commercial sense (for example, getting hold of a pump to empty the mine of water) and a good measure of luck. So the will that Rhodes drew up in South Africa was not quite the parcelling out of a few books and trinkets which might be expected from most twenty-four-year-olds.
The oddly schizophrenic life Cecil Rhodes led at this time – long university vacations in the single-minded frenzy of Kimberley and misty term-times in Oxford mingling with the men who would run the country – moulded his view of the world. In his first year in Kimberley, Rhodes had read Winwood Reade’s The Martyrdom of Man, a sweeping analysis of how, by a process akin to evolution, mankind might be perfected. Rhodes later declared, ‘That book has made me what I am.’ Rhodes was struck by the power in the world of certain religions, especially ‘the Romish Church’, of which h
e observed that ‘every enthusiast, call it if you like every madman, finds employment in it’. In place of religious mumbo-jumbo, Cecil Rhodes preferred racial mania. ‘I contend’, he wrote, ‘that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race.’ When he returned to South Africa, Cecil Rhodes soon had the chance to put his convictions into action, and in so doing became the most sabre-toothed of all empire-builders. ‘It is our duty to seize every opportunity of acquiring more territory,’ he had written, ‘and we should keep this one idea steadily before our eyes that more territory simply means more of the Anglo-Saxon race, more of the best, the most human, most honourable race the world possesses.’
Rhodes was an unusual advertisement for this exemplary, honourable breed. As ruthless in the political career he now sought as he was in his business dealings, he displayed that hypocritical talent for concealing self-interest behind high-mindedness that England’s enemies so despise. He used his position in parliament to advance his own business interests and played so fast and loose in his dealings with African rulers that it is remarkable any of them ever trusted a white man again. By the late 1880s, an increasingly fleshy Rhodes was in control of most of the output of the Kimberley diamond mine, having bought out his rival, Barney Barnato, a one-time music-hall entertainer, boxer and bouncer who had schemed and cheated his way from birth in Whitechapel to immense wealth and some eminence in South Africa.* Rhodes’s tactics in creating an effective monopoly were more grey than white, but it is unarguable that he did in the end make out what was believed at the time to have been the largest cheque ever written, for ‘Five Million, Three Hundred and Thirty Eight Thousand, Six Hundred and Fifty Pounds Only’ – to take control of the company.* After more frenetic digging, the hole in the ground in Kimberley continued to grow, eventually reaching a depth of nearly 700 feet, with a circumference of almost a mile. Though the drains of Kimberley still stank, the diamond barons built themselves fancy mansions and the place had the wealth to become the first city in the southern hemisphere to install electric street lights. A fortunate 250 citizens of this fur-coat-and-no-knickers settlement were members of the squat two-storey Kimberley Club, at whose bar it was said that you could find more millionaires per square foot than anywhere else on earth. Here men who could have given the term nouveau riche a bad name attempted to ape the behaviour and prejudices of the exclusive gentlemen’s clubs of St James’s: Rhodes’s offer to put Barney Barnato up for membership of this parvenu paradise is said to have been one of the inducements that persuaded the East End boy to sell out to him.
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