by Melvyn Bragg
MELVYN BRAGG: I ask this with due tentativity – have we real evidence that she expanded trade in the Near East, as we now call it, in Africa, as we now call it, as well as Punt? I mean is there … ?
ELIZABETH FROOD: We have archaeological material, material culture of oils and things, new things, products, new musical instruments, new military weapons that are coming into Egypt. And she would have been a driver for that, certainly.
While Hatshepsut was an exceptional person in ancient Egypt, she was supported, to some extent, by someone for whom there is a relatively high level of biographical material. This was Senenmut, who, it appears, rose from a modest background to become tutor to Hatshepsut’s daughter Neferure, and he is sometimes depicted in statues (including one on display at the British Museum) enveloping her in his cloak, something that Campbell Price described as ‘unheard of, royal people don’t touch non-royal people, let alone be shown in a statue form like this’. Moreover, he was not married, which was unusual for an elite man.
CAMPBELL PRICE: This has led to speculation that he may be Hatshepsut’s lover and there’s one particularly controversial graffito that seems to show some sexual act between a man and a woman, which some have interpreted as Hatshepsut and Senenmut. Now I don’t think the evidence is strong for that, I don’t think any of us here think, but …
MELVYN BRAGG: There are two shaking heads on your left.
CAMPBELL PRICE: … but this illustrates the thing about Hatshepsut. The story is so attractive, people like to speculate.
Senenmut also created what Kate Spence described as ‘incredible cryptographic inscriptions with hieroglyphs, friezes around the mortuary temple, which are representations of Hatshepsut’s name’.
KATE SPENCE: They say Hatshepsut’s name but they represent part of her as a cobra goddess with sort of uplifted ka arms and sun discs. They’re beautiful, beautiful things.
Senenmut added images of himself praying, something that, we heard, ordinary Egyptians would have found very, very problematic, so it appears he had the confidence to take such liberties with his position. In Kate Spence’s view, he was an extraordinarily talented individual, whose talent was recognised by a very talented female ruler who needed someone like that to help her create the monuments, the ideas, all the new things she was coming up with, since the level of innovation in her reign was extraordinary. As the surviving inscriptions show, she changed the way in which pharaohs were depicted in relation to gods, or at least the extent to which that relationship was emphasised.
KATE SPENCE: Hatshepsut is represented as the bodily son of the god Amun. The god Amun is said to come to her mother in her bedchamber in the form of the king … but she knows that it isn’t really her husband because he smells nice, he smells of the scent of Punt and all the myrrh that is being brought back is to create the scents of Amun’s home and background.
For all her achievements, nothing is known of Hatshepsut’s decline or death. What is known is that, within a few years, perhaps two decades, her name started to be erased from records, something on which all of Melvyn’s guests had theories. Campbell Price looked at Hatshepsut’s long period in power, around fifteen years, which suggested she had support at court, and he pointed to the relatively long time before her name disappeared. Thutmose III, once her coruler, was the sole pharaoh by then. Egyptologists used to speculate that he erased her name as an act of revenge or aggression, but if that were the case he might have done this earlier. Kate Spence suggested that succession may have been an issue, and that her name disappeared as she represented a competing family line. Elizabeth Frood identified some elements of her name and image being removed soon after she disappeared from history, but this erasing then petered out until later in the reign of Thutmose III when it was taken up again, presenting a more complex process. That writing out of history was not only Hatshepsut’s fate, as Senenmut’s name was erased as well. And, with that, the programme ended.
In the studio immediately afterwards, there was some regret that Hatshepsut’s diplomacy had not been discussed, or her legacy. But there was more discussion of the graffito, supposedly of Hatshepsut and Senenmut, although the date and the identities are not clear and people have tended to see what they wanted to see.
ELIZABETH FROOD: But you have a pharaoh – a woman in a pharaonic headdress – being in a sexual position with a man.
KATE SPENCE: Except I don’t think it’s a headdress, I think it’s a representation of a wig.
CAMPBELL PRICE: A wig.
KATE SPENCE: It’s just a woman and a man engaging in a sexual act and there is some graffiti in the cave that is of a similar date.
For Elizabeth Frood, the discussions around the graffito tell us much about how Egyptologists have changed their approach to gender. In the early twentieth century, Hatshepsut was viewed as a woman who was being manipulated by Senenmut, who supposedly had a torrid relationship with him and was influenced by men in the court. Now she is seen as a powerful woman in her own right. And that mention of powerful women may have prompted Campbell Price to remember something he had meant to say in the programme. He had read a newspaper column in the mid-1990s in which Tina Turner claimed she was a reincarnation of Hatshepsut, and that inspired the first track of her album Private Dancer, ‘I Might Have Been Queen’.
And Melvyn explained why he had called Campbell Price ‘Graham’.
MELVYN BRAGG: I know a Graham Price, he was a big friend of mine when I was a kid. My mother’s best friend was Mary Price and her son, my age, was Graham.
All roads lead to Wigton!
THE BERLIN CONFERENCE
On 15 November 1884, the representatives of fourteen world powers arrived at the Berlin palace of the German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, for an international summit. For the next three months, they sat locked in negotiation in a grand ballroom, dominated by a 16ft-high map of Africa. Officially the summit was known as the Conference on West African Affairs; in practice, the delegates were discussing the future of the entire continent and how to carve it up. European powers had been setting up colonies in Africa for decades, now they decided which parts of the continent they would each be allowed to treat as their own. The conference was part of the process known as ‘the scramble for Africa’ and the decisions reached at it had effects that have lasted to the present day. Not a single African took part in the summit and only two of the diplomats involved in these crucial negotiations had ever set foot there.
Map of Africa before the continent was carved up by European empires in the scramble for Africa.
With Melvyn to discuss the Berlin Conference and the scramble for Africa were: Richard Drayton, Rhodes professor of imperial history at King’s College London; Richard Rathbone, emeritus professor of African history at SOAS, University of London; and Joanna Lewis, associate professor at the London School of Economics.
Before the discussion turned to the late nineteenth century and the conference, Richard Drayton traced the origins of those European interests in Africa. In early modern times, by their Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, Spain and Portugal claimed to divide the world between them, with Spain taking the Americas and Portugal taking Africa, though other European powers disputed that carve-up. Within 200 years, Africa had become a critical part of the European global economy, with African slaves essential for the production of all commodities in the New World, and, between 1500 and 1800, more Africans than Europeans crossed the Atlantic. This trade was also a central part of the processing of profits for the Europeans’ East India trading companies. For example, they traded a product, such as Indian cloth, for African slaves, who were then sold in America for money. Before the nineteenth century, there was already considerable imperial competition for Africa underway.
RICHARD DRAYTON: We can see there both a kind of scramble to explore Africa between France and Britain, but, most clearly, also a scramble to acquire particular secured trading enclaves.
On the west coast of Africa, more easily reached by sea, Britain
claimed the mouth of the Gambia River and controlled some areas such as Sierra Leone, which became a formal colony by the end of the eighteenth century, while the French placed themselves at Senegal. The Dutch had been in the Cape from the seventeenth century, and the Portuguese still claimed large parts of Africa. Mostly the interests were on the coasts, accessible by sea, but the Industrial Revolution introduced new transport technologies and new means of waging war.
MELVYN BRAGG: Transport and arms?
RICHARD DRAYTON: Transport and arms, I think, are probably the two most significant technological revolutions. The breech loader, smokeless powder, the rifle, the machine gun …
MELVYN BRAGG: The repeater rifle.
RICHARD DRAYTON: The repeater rifle by the late nineteenth century is generating a significant arms gap between Europeans and non-Europeans.
The building of steamboats that could go up rivers, the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869 with its links to east Africa, and the construction of railways combined to make Europeans look at the interior of Africa as somewhere that might be profitable. For example, Gabon had been a French stronghold from the eighteenth century and it was by travelling up the River Ogooué in Gabon that an Italian-born French explorer, Pietro di Brazzà, reached the hinterland of the Congo and began to negotiate with King Makoko to establish a French claim to the vast interior.
RICHARD RATHBONE: I think the key thing to grab hold of is getting the image of Africa as very, very gigantic; it is an absolutely enormous continent and much, much bigger than Mercator maps presented.
Europeans were nibbling around the edges on the west coast, Omani Arabs on the east coast, but the interior was untouched. Meanwhile, in the north, the Ottoman Empire was collapsing and that spurred on the Europeans.
RICHARD RATHBONE: It’s not just technology but it’s also the fact that, by the late nineteenth century, it’s clear that the Ottoman Empire’s on its knees. Hence the French have taken Algeria in 1830, the Italians have got their eyes on what will become Libya, the British are already trying to control Egypt. This is a fantastic transformation in terms of balance of power.
France and Britain were the two major European players in Africa before the Berlin Conference. France was expanding up the Senegal River and across the shores of the Sahara and then into the Sahara itself, conquering by military force from almost the westerly point of Africa across to Lake Chad and then down to the Congo River and up to the Mediterranean. The British had parts of the Gold Coast, the mouth of the Niger, the Gambia and Sierra Leone, the latter an enclave for freed slaves by that point. The Portuguese held Angola and Mozambique and had done so for a long time. Cape Town was chiefly a port for the Dutch East India Company and then a coaling station for the East India Company. Arab traders from places like Oman came to dominate Zanzibar, interested in the ivory trade and the slave trade. In the Horn of Africa was the independent empire of Ethiopia, which had been resisting invasion attempts for centuries.
Into this came King Leopold II of the Belgians, who wanted a large piece of Africa for himself. He had taken power in 1865 over a small and new kingdom that had seceded from the Netherlands in 1830.
JOANNA LEWIS: He’s definitely got kingdom envy, empire envy. His first cousin is Queen Victoria, about to be made Empress of India, and there he is with virtually no territory overseas at all. He tries to do something about it, he actually tries to buy the Philippines, but that didn’t work.
Leopold II, we heard, wanted to have some imperial real estate, to take his seat alongside all his cousins in the other royal families in Europe, and he did this in a way that was ruthless, brilliant and deadly. He had long been fascinated by the explorers in Africa such as David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley and by the proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society. He learned that none of the major powers was yet that interested in central Africa, and he noticed that there was a lot of support for organisations going into Africa with the aim of stopping slavery. He was one of the first to congratulate Stanley on his return after mapping the Congo, and tried to buy his services. In 1876, Leopold set up a front for his goal of dominating the Congo, which was the African International Association, or Association Internationale Africaine.
MELVYN BRAGG: [Purportedly] the aim of the [asssociation] was to civilise, [it was] humanitarian. He was doing this for unblemished motives. In fact, he was buying it for himself.
JOANNA LEWIS: He said he was doing it from the heart, he was putting his own money behind the institute. He got philanthropist anti-slavers to support it. And he gets Stanley to go back to Africa and start making treaties with chiefs up the Congo River.
Leopold II then had his agent go to America and get the Americans to recognise that his association had sovereignty over an area of 1.3 million square miles. From that, the French supported the association if they could have some first rights themselves. The crisis came when Britain recognised Portuguese control over a region near the mouth of the Congo, and Germany refused to ratify that. It was perceived that Britain was in a position of decline and looking slightly vulnerable, so could be challenged.
For the roots of the Berlin Conference, Richard Drayton noted the role of the Ottoman question and Bismarck’s diplomacy, as the Reich’s chancellor wanted to maintain Germany’s place within the European state system. He was concerned about France, which wanted to recover Alsace-Lorraine, and about the extent to which Britain wanted a commercial monopoly.
RICHARD DRAYTON: But the real roots of the conference actually lie in Franco-British competition. That’s actually the nub of the matter. And the ways in which free-trading Britain had locked up bits of the palm oil trade along the Niger through a cunning device called the ‘trust’, which restricted Africans’ ability to trade freely with Europeans …
MELVYN BRAGG: There’re always these weasel words, aren’t there? Trust – all that stuff.
RICHARD DRAYTON: And the French, of course, were doing exactly the same, using tolls and tariffs and other forms of protective contracts.
Once Britain had endorsed Portugal’s claims, Bismarck very quickly recognised one of his adventurers, Adolf Lüderitz, who had created a small trading port in Namibia at Angra Pequena in 1883. As the tempo increased, Bismarck gave a grand speech about why there should be a conference in Berlin, and it opened in November 1884 with all the European powers rather than only the major ones, as Bismarck wanted to play them off against each other and to act as a counterweight to Britain and France.
At that point, Britain was still the major maritime power in the world, with Germany challenging.
RICHARD RATHBONE: In the case of Britain and Germany, it’s certainly the case that, as the palm oil trade in west Africa grows, for example, one of the major beneficiaries of that is Hamburg, and it’s the Hamburg merchant shipping companies carrying a great deal of these very valuable cargoes back. So there’s real competition for goods, but also competition for access to ports.
The British Foreign Office was a tiny agency in all of this. The secretary of state for the colonies was a minor post and the colonial office was a ‘tiny little instrument in Whitehall’, at least until the discovery of gold in South Africa in the 1880s when the potential reward from the empires became much greater. Until then, the trade was in commodities.
RICHARD RATHBONE: Here is a world of pressure-group politics in which major ports like Liverpool, London, Hamburg, Marseilles and Bordeaux are playing big roles in pushing their governments to, sometimes, I think, rather unwillingly, go along with it. Bismarck has to follow the Hamburg line because they’re crucially important to his electoral politics.
One of the considerations at the conference was the doctrine of effective occupation. Joanna Lewis explained that European powers such as Leopold II argued that, as they had treaties with chiefs who had handed over their rights to trade and to the waterways, these powers, in effect, were going to be in charge of everything and were the recognised government. Leopold had taken the advice of an Oxford scholar
called Sir Travers Twists, who told him how to convert his association into being recognised as a formal state by following certain steps.
JOANNA LEWIS: This is why he gets Stanley to up the ante with making treaties with the chiefs and the treaties are quite shocking. For example, two chiefs are told that they will get a piece of cloth every month if they hand over all the rights to their kingdoms and will always give labour for various projects when they’re asked for it.
MELVYN BRAGG: For a piece of cloth every month?
JOANNA LEWIS: Yes.
Richard Drayton added that the principle of effective occupation, where proof of sovereignty would be found in government, had emerged already by the seventeenth century and was the basis on which the French, British and Dutch claimed their colonial spaces.
RICHARD DRAYTON: It draws on the Roman law. It certainly is something that the French are pushing particularly hard and we see the ambassador of France write to Jules Ferry in December 1884 saying this has got to be our strong card and we must occupy and prove that we occupy and are in a position not only to keep what we claim, but to administer or at least to govern the country.
To this, Richard Rathbone added that effective occupation permitted a colonial world in which there were very powerful capital cities, from where rule was conducted, and then incredibly weak peripheries, something that is still visible on maps on which very little detail appears for the hinterland.
The Berlin Conference of 1884–5 was a meeting of the major European powers to negotiate and formalise their claims to territory in Africa.
The commercial interests were all around the fringes of the conference, lobbying for influence, expecting representation. Nearly all of the territories under consideration were being administered not by the European states, but by those carrying out work that had been put out to relatively small companies as part of purportedly benign missions. Nowhere, though, were there any delegates from the continent that was being carved up.
