Ghosts of Empire

by Kwasi Kwarteng

  In addition to commercial rivals, both British and foreign, there were the do-gooders, the missionaries and temperance societies, who made life difficult for traders by objecting to such activities as the liquor traffic, which the Royal Niger Company promoted. From a lofty height, the Duke of Westminster, President of the United Committee for the Prevention of the Demoralization of Native Races by the Liquor Traffic, wrote to Lord Salisbury to express ‘his gratification at how great a diminution [has] taken place in the amount of intoxicating liquors introduced into the Niger Territories, and of the benefits which have resulted from this diminution’.25 It was against this earnest background of rather absurdly named committees that imperial adventurers like Goldie had to operate. The activities of these committees and activists are redolent of the world of Gilbert and Sullivan or, in a slightly later form, of P. G. Wodehouse.

  Assailed by the strictures of such bodies as the United Committee for the Prevention of the Demoralization of Native Races, and by difficulties put in his way by the Germans, Liverpool merchants and local ‘semi-civilized negroes’, Goldie required an iron nerve to push through his schemes for the company. Every inch the imperial hero, at five foot nine he was not particularly tall, even by late Victorian standards, but was a ‘fair blue-eyed man, with piercing eyes, which seemed to bore holes into one’. The piercing glance was a characteristic which endured ‘to the end of his life’. His intellect was of a ‘kind born to dominate and impress’. He was a particularly hard taskmaster, never taking no for an answer. As the first office boy of the Royal Niger Company, Joseph Trigge, remembered, those ‘who did not carry out his instructions, or showed slackness, were severely dealt with’. ‘Don’t tell me that anything cannot be done. Go and do it!’ Goldie would scream. He had a coterie of devoted followers who helped him, but essentially the Royal Niger Company was a one-man show.26

  Goldie’s single-mindedness was an important characteristic which enabled him to get things done, but it also meant that he was cantankerous and difficult. His biographer, generally biased in his favour, admitted that he ‘combined uncontrollable passions, ruthlessness, indifference to individuals, contempt for sentimentality in any form, with the excitability and sensitiveness of a child’. He was ‘a violent and uncompromising man’, a defiant self-willed atheist who ‘represented the intellectual attitude of the Huxley and Darwin period’. Fond of women, he was never a faithful husband, though he had developed a close bond with his wife, the governess with whom he had fled to France in 1870. She died in 1898, by which time his work in West Africa was drawing to its close. The company could not hold its charter indefinitely. As the Conservatives were re-elected in 1895 and Joseph Chamberlain took control of the Colonial Office, a new spirit of imperialism would overturn the world of freebooters like George Goldie. In many ways a modern man, an enthusiastic lover of Ibsen’s plays and Wagner’s music, Goldie was overtaken by events. Towards the end of the 1890s, as the Charter was not renewed, Lord Salisbury thanked the Royal Niger Company for its work, expressing his high esteem for the ‘adventurers and patriots to whose efforts the preparation of this territory’ was due. Goldie came back to England, but never held another post linked to the empire. When he died in 1925, aged seventy-nine, he remained unshaken in his belief that there ‘was no God and no life to come’.27

  The country over which Goldie had presided as the unofficial leading statesman was not really a country at all. The mad scramble for Africa had been notoriously careless of ethnic boundaries and tribal distinctions. As Lord Salisbury himself described it, the partition of Africa was haphazard and disorganized. After an agreement with the French in 1892, Salisbury wrote that ‘we have been engaged in drawing lines upon maps where no white man’s foot has ever trod; we have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where the mountains and rivers and lakes were’.28 In the eyes of the British the country which we would later know as Nigeria was, like Julius Caesar’s Gaul, split into three parts. In simple terms the British understood, there was a northern region, which was predominantly Muslim, a western region, which was dominated by the Yoruba tribe, and an eastern region, where the Igbo were the predominant ethnic group. This was an oversimplified view, but it informed British attitudes about Nigeria.

  For the British, the division of Nigeria into three parts was a crucially important fact in its short history. The north was dominated by feudal, Islamic lords known as emirs. In the west, the Yorubas had a society in which chiefs were powerful. In the east, the Igbos were widely known to be less feudal. Perhaps the best description of Igbo culture in the years when the British first arrived as committed imperialists is Chinua Achebe’s celebrated novel Things Fall Apart, which chronicles the reaction of an Igbo village strongman, Okonkwo, to the arrival of the British. Achebe illustrates the relatively open nature of Igbo culture. In the east, in the Igbo villages, age ‘was respected among his people, but achievement was revered. As the elders said, if a child washed his hands he could eat with kings.’29

  The novel shows a world in which warriors lived in compounds with their wives and children. The wealthy man in Okonkwo’s village had ‘three barns, nine wives and thirty children’. The men wrestled to establish their prestige. Achebe, in an unsentimental way, reveals how the arrival of British missionaries and officials affected the lives of the Igbo for ever. A white man suddenly arrives in this unnamed Igbo village. ‘During the last planting season a white man had appeared in their clan.’ ‘An albino,’ suggested Okonkwo. ‘He was not an albino,’ replied Obierika, Okonkwo’s friend. ‘He was quite different ... The first people who saw him ran away, but he stood beckoning to them. In the end the fearless ones were near and even touched him. The elders consulted their oracle and it told them that the strange man would break their clan and spread destruction among them . . . And so they killed the white man . . . For a long time nothing happened. The rains had come and yams had been sown . . . And then one morning three white men led by a band of ordinary men like us came to the clan.’ The men then went away. For many ‘weeks nothing else happened’. Then market day came round. ‘The three white men and a very large number of other men surrounded the market . . . they began to shoot. Everybody was killed, except the old and sick.’ The Igbo clan was now ‘completely empty’.30 The violence of this outcome was not typical. The missionaries were more widespread, particularly in the south, that is among the eastern Igbo and the Yoruba in the west. At the end of Achebe’s book, the young District Commissioner decides to write a book about his experiences in Niger; ‘after much thought’ he settles on the title ‘The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger’.31

  The role of missionaries was well known in late Victorian Britain. As one contemporary writer remarked, the boys at the St Mary’s Redcliffe School in Bristol were asked one day to write an essay on a British colony. One of the boys wrote, ‘Africa is a British colony. I will tell you how England makes her colonies. First she gets a missionary; when the missionary has found a specially beautiful and fertile tract of country, he gets all his people round him and says, “Let us pray,” and when all the eyes are shut, up goes the British Flag!’32 The commentator realized that the ‘great mass of the people of Nigeria [had] come under the protection of the British flag with their eyes shut’. It was for the servants of empire to see that ‘when their eyes are opened to appreciate the significance of the raising of that flag, they may have reason to be grateful for its presence’.33

  The problem in Nigeria was that the missionaries operated only in the coastal areas, in the south, among the Igbos in particular. In the north, the Muslim emirs were left untouched by the zeal of Christian missionaries. The northern emirs were allowed considerable autonomy, which would soon become enshrined in policy. Once the Charter of the Royal Niger Company had run out at the end of the 1890s, the British government decided to take an active role in colonial affairs. This new approach was adopted agai
nst a background of fear and uncertainty. Africa, for the Victorians, was the great unknown continent, where, it was widely believed, cannibalism and paganism were rampant. The traditional stereotypes of the ‘dark continent’ were not founded on pure fantasy. West Africa was known as the ‘white man’s grave’, and the mortality rates there were extremely high. More than forty years before Goldie set foot in West Africa, scores of sailors had died of fever and other illnesses. Of forty-eight Europeans who had steamed up the Niger river in three ships in the years 1832–4, thirty-eight had died of fever. Later Nigerians would joke that the mosquito should be recognized as a national hero, as it had prevented the mass arrival of white settlers, which no doubt smoothed Nigeria’s political path.34 As Mary Kingsley observed, ‘Britain’s greatest enemy in West Africa ... is death.’35 Tales of cannibalism were not wholly fanciful either. When the warriors of the Brass area on the Niger delta launched an attack on an outpost of the Royal Niger Company in 1895, they justified eating some of their prisoners on the ground that it was ‘their custom under such circumstances to kill and eat those captured’, particularly as it was ‘thought advisable to have a big human feast in order to get rid of an epidemic of small-pox’.36 Nigeria could not be colonized in the way that Rhodesia, South Africa or Kenya could–countries which would attract white settlers willing to live there for generations. It needed tough men, who could withstand the climate, to administer the country and keep the natives at bay.

  As was so often the case in the story of empire, the right man came at the right time to do the job. The next figure after George Goldie who imposed his personality on Nigeria was the colonial administrator Lord Lugard, one of those imperialists who enjoyed tremendous fame and renown while they were alive, only to be forgotten as memories of the empire faded in the years after the Second World War. The son of a Cambridge-educated clergyman, who had ‘rowed in his college boat when it was head of the river’, Lugard was tough and, though not academic, highly intelligent. As a priest, Lugard’s father had the reputation of always volunteering for postings which had ‘the worst reputation for mortality’. The Reverend Lugard spent twenty-seven years in the sweltering heat of Madras, where his son, Frederick, was born in 1858. He attended Rossall School in Lancashire, one of the newer English public schools, which had been founded in the nineteenth century to educate the sons of clergymen. There Lugard did not excel in the narrow Classical curriculum, but ended up, as did so many of the empire-builders of the age, in the army, after only eight months at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. Lugard and his contemporaries were hastily given their commission and sent out to Afghanistan, where the frontier was especially turbulent in 1878.37

  Despite service in Uganda, Afghanistan and India, it was in Nigeria that Lugard found his vocation. Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary, who had deserted Gladstone’s Liberals over his opposition to Irish Home Rule in the 1880s, was, by the 1890s, a particularly bellicose imperialist with a seat in the Conservative Cabinet. He wanted to establish a West African Frontier Force. When it was formed, Lugard was appointed to head it with the temporary rank of colonel commandant. In 1900 he was appointed high commissioner of Northern Nigeria. There he conducted a series of military campaigns which successively reduced the independent emirs to a subordinate status. His staff was small and his finances restricted, but his energy and determination were immense. His biographer, Margery Perham, fell into hero-worship when describing his ‘almost incredible feats of endurance’. He was small in stature, and his physique ‘allowed him to do two men’s work in a climate and in conditions which halved the capacities of most men’.38 For hour upon hour he would toil away at his desk, writing letters and memoranda to the officials he so despised in Whitehall. It was inevitable that he ended up meeting and falling in love with Flora Shaw, the woman journalist of The Times who had first given Nigeria its name in her article of 1897. The only problem was that Shaw, as we have seen, was in love with George Goldie and was upset not to have married him after his wife had died in 1898. Goldie refused her offer of marriage, but four years later, on the island of Madeira, Flora Shaw, in accepting Lugard, finally married an imperial administrator and superman worthy of her hand.

  The marriage, which took place in 1902, was in many ways extraordinary. The fact that Shaw was now forty-nine and her husband forty-four was not, in itself, out of the ordinary. The most unusual feature of the marriage was that Miss Shaw was a famous professional in her own right. As Lugard’s biographer observed, if ‘the Victorian age had been as rigidly conventional as some members of later generations have pictured it, this young woman’s career would have been not merely remarkable but impossible’. The union of the imperial soldier and administrator with the brilliant and beautiful Times journalist who, though not in the earliest bloom of youth, still captivated men, by always dressing in black and by her cleverness, clearly titillated the imperial classes of Edwardian England. In a written note to Lugard, Lord Curzon could not resist offering his praise and congratulations, expressed in a characteristically well-turned phrase: ‘If it be the Miss Flora Shaw I congratulate you. If it be another may she be equally brilliant and not less charming.’

  The Lugards would form a powerful couple, equally devoted to one another’s interests. Flora’s death in 1929, at the age of seventy-seven, was a blow from which Frederick, now Lord, Lugard would never recover. He kept her room in their Surrey house untouched until his own death at the age of eighty-seven, in 1945. Lugard had reached a ripe old age, but his family were unusually long lived. His father had died in 1900, having been born in 1808, while his brother reached his hundredth birthday in 1960.

  Both Lugards were official experts of empire and extremely well connected. Flora Lugard was a staunch Conservative who, like many Conservatives of the time, knew a great deal more about, and was actually more liberal about, imperial questions than many Liberals of her time. May 1906 saw her at Blenheim Palace, the home of the Duke of Marlborough, where one morning she was talking to the Duke about railways in Nigeria. In the course of this conversation, the Duke’s cousin Winston Churchill walked in and proceeded to give his views. At this point, Churchill was under-secretary of state for the colonies in the Liberal government which had taken office in December 1905. Flora Lugard, with the keen journalist’s eye, thought Churchill ‘so hopelessly ignorant in regard to colonial affairs and at the same time so full of personal activity that the damage he [might] do appears to be colossal’. She also noticed, like many other contemporaries, that the young Churchill ‘spoke all the time as if he and not Lord Elgin [his superior at the Colonial Office] was the Secretary of State’.39

  Lugard himself had very strong views about Nigeria. He was a believer in deeds and, like so many of the most ardent imperialists, mistrusted cerebral indulgences. He was committed to the British Empire and to British supremacy, although he happily entertained Nigerian friends at home in Surrey in his retirement in the 1930s. The ambiguity of Lugard’s position was common to imperial servants. They were often friendly with ‘natives’, while maintaining openly the superiority of the British. It is very easy to discover what Lugard thought about the empire because, in his retirement, he was one of the most prolific authors and theorists of imperialism. He coined the phrase the ‘dual mandate’ in the colonies, which simply recognized that the colonial powers, particularly Britain, had not colonized Africa and Asia merely through philanthropy. One part of the mandate was to make money, the second part was to develop the colonies for the benefit of the indigenous peoples themselves. It was quite a neat formula which suggested that both the subject peoples and the imperial power could benefit from colonialism: ‘Let it be admitted at the outset that European brains, capital and energy have not been, and never will be, expended in developing the resources of Africa from motives of pure philanthropy; that Europe is in Africa for the benefit of her own industrial classes, and of the native races in their progress to a higher plane.’40

  An attractive feature of thi
s notion of dual mandate was that the ‘benefit’ of colonialism ‘could be made reciprocal’. It was the ‘aim and desire of civilised administration to fulfil this dual mandate’. Even though his book Dual Mandate was published as late as 1922, Lugard showed himself to be an imperialist of the old school. His ideas, though organized and systematic, had shown no development from the 1890s, when it was accepted without question that the British were the best imperialists, blessed by innate talent to excel other nations. In his book Lugard happily quoted Lord Salisbury speaking in the House of Lords in 1895, when Salisbury had shown no reticence in boasting to his fellow peers about British superiority in business and investment: ‘Our people, when they go into possession of a new territory, carry with them such a power of initiative, such an extraordinary courage and resource in the solving of new problems . . . that if they are pitted against an equal number–I care not what race it is, or what the part of the world [it] is–and if you keep politics and negotiations off them, it will be our people that will be masters.’ No matter what the opposition did, British commerce would prevail: ‘it will be our capital that will rule’.41