The Rise and Fall of the British Empire

by Lawrence, James

  This local equilibrium was upset by France. From the mid-1870s a small, highly motivated clique of French soldiers and politicians became entranced by the idea of creating a sprawling empire, which would stretch from West Africa across the western Sahara. This province might prove another India, enriching France and enhancing its status in the world, which had been diminished by the humiliations of the Franco-Prussian War. The key to the region’s economic exploitation was thought to be a railway that would cross from West Africa to the Red Sea, never leaving French soil, and which would serve as a conduit for the entire trade of Africa north of the Sahara. The inspiration for this trans-continental railway was the American Union Pacific Railroad, which had been completed in 1869 and was currently opening up the West. Rhodes had also recognised the potential of a railway bisecting Africa and, from the 1890s, planned a Cape to Cairo line which would, needless to say, run across British territory.

  The French took their first steps towards a West African empire in the late 1870s. The impetus came from two highly-placed imperialists, Admiral Jean de Jauréguiberry, the Minister for Marine, and Charles de Freycinet, a railway enthusiast, who was Minister for Public Works. They approved probes inland from Senegal, while the gunboat Voltigeur was ordered into Nigerian waters to make contact with and extract treaties from local chiefs. Simultaneously the explorer, Savorgnan de Brazza, was making agreements with rulers in the Congo basin. Confronted with trespassers in regions hitherto under the loose control of Britain, British consuls started to collect treaties.

  These pledges were ammunition for British and French statesmen and diplomats to whom fell the task of haggling over who had what. Britain’s main fear was that the protectionist French would obtain swathes of the West African hinterland, which would leave the Gambia, Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast as stranded coastal colonies without any inland trade. Furthermore, France might secure the Upper Niger and so strangle the trade that passed down the river from northern Nigeria and the western Sudan. British commercial interests got some safeguards from the settlement made at Berlin during 1885: Britain was allowed a sphere of influence which stretched up the Niger and inland from the Gold Coast.

  As elsewhere in Africa, the British government now faced the problem of giving substance to its authority over paper protectorates. It was, as in southern and eastern Africa, lucky to find a private corporation that was willing to undertake what otherwise was a tiresome and costly business. The Royal Niger Company was chartered in 1886 to trade and govern along the lower and mid-Niger. The company was the creation of George Taubman Goldie, a Manxman who had, until 1877, led a directionless life as an extremely diffident professional soldier and wanderer. In that year he visited the Niger coast and saw the chance to make his mark on the world. A childhood worshipper of Rajah Brooke, Goldie later claimed that, ‘My dream as a child was to colour the map red,’ and there is no reason to disbelieve him. In Nigeria he found a convenient blank, and like Brooke, he had the cash to fulfil his ambitions. Within a few years he had organised the local merchants and laid the foundations for his own company.

  During the late 1880s and early 1890s, there were plenty of Goldies, and for that matter Lugards among the young French officers who were pursuing promotion and medals in West Africa. Their collective motto was ‘Prenez l’initiative’, even if that meant, and it often did, ignoring orders from hesitant bureaucrats in Paris. By the early 1890s, the French conquest of West Africa and the western Sahara had entered a decisive phase, with the momentum sustained by soldiers convinced that they knew better than their masters, one of whom once remarked that colonial commanders constituted what was in effect an independent state, answerable to no one. Perhaps so, but politicians were wary of asserting authority over the French army which, in right-wing, ultra-nationalist circles was seen as the embodiment of the country’s honour.

  French aggression in West Africa had never unduly troubled Salisbury, who once sardonically questioned the ultimate value of vast areas of ‘light soil’, his euphemism for sand. This view was quietly held by many in France, and was reflected in the failure of the projected trans-Saharan railway to attract any investment. It was less easy, however, for British ministers to dismiss out of hand France’s West African adventures after 1894, when it had become plain that they might end with the seizure of the Upper Niger. Goldie had been among the first to sense the danger, and in July 1894 he hired Lugard to lead a small expedition deep into northern Nigeria and negotiate treaties which would bring its rulers into Britain’s orbit. Almost simultaneously, Captain Decouer had been commissioned to proceed from Dahomey into the same area and for the same purpose. There was also a rumour that the Germans were preparing an expedition for this end.22

  Lugard’s treaty-gathering trek through Borgu during the autumn and early winter of 1894 was a superhuman feat of perseverance. He and his party endured extremes of temperature (his dog died of heat exhaustion), torrential rain, an ambush and bouts of fever. Lugard overcame the latter by self-medication in the form of a course of antipyrin and a thirteen-mile march in the blazing sun, which produced a curative sweat. Native medicines, whose ingredients he did not investigate too closely, provided an apparent antidote to poison from an arrowhead which had pierced his skull. Lugard deserved and got what he wanted, an agreement in which the aged and decrepit King of Nikki accepted the protection and friendship of Britain and its agent, the Royal Niger Company. The trouble was that just over a fortnight later Decoeur arrived at Nikki and went away, like Lugard, with a treaty.

  The Upper Niger now became a focus for Anglo-French rivalry. The chief protagonists were Chamberlain, who became Colonial Secretary in June 1895, and Gabriel Hanotaux, who took over France’s Foreign Ministry in April 1896. Chamberlain refused on principle to relinquish an inch of African territory to which Britain had a legal claim, while Hanotaux sought to prevent Africa from becoming another India in which French ambitions were checked by a combination of British guile and bullying. The British, he believed, used their language as a cover for deception (‘elle affirme, elle n’explique pas’) and therefore France would have to resort to action to get her way rather than waste time on otiose negotiations over the validity of treaties. Only Marchand on the banks of the Nile and Senegalese tirailleurs on the banks of the Niger would stop Britain in her tracks.

  It was Britain which was first off the mark in the confrontation on the Niger. With Chamberlain’s blessing, Goldie launched a war against Bida and Ilorin, whose rulers had refused to fulfil their promises to abandon slave-raiding. The campaign of January 1897 was not just a humanitarian crusade, it was a fearsome demonstration of the military power of the company and, by association, Britain. A twelve-pounder gun was manhandled, with considerable difficulty, through the bush to hurl shells against the walls of Bida at a range of two miles. But what really struck terror into the spearmen and mailed cavalry of the two states were the company’s six Maxim guns, the ‘bindigat ruiva’ (water guns) or ‘piss guns’. They enabled an army of 500 men, mostly Hausa constabulary, to beat a mediaeval horde, believed to outnumber them by thirty to one.

  Goldie’s little war alerted the French to British intentions, and during 1896–7 advance parties of their colonial forces filtered into Borgu, where tricolores were hoisted over native villages and old treaties waved about as proof that they were now French property. Chamberlain foresaw a collision, and began taking precautions. In June 1897 he proposed the immediate formation of a 2,000-strong black army, the West Africa Frontier Force, and appointed Lugard its commander and Britain’s special commissioner for northern Nigeria. Obviously Lugard’s experience counted, but Chamberlain was also making a gesture designed to show the French that Britain was going to take a tough line. In France, Lugard was detested on account of his alleged massacre of Catholic converts in Uganda and, more recently, his coup at Nikki. When Lugard arrived in Nigeria in the spring of 1898, The Times reported that for Frenchmen he ‘symbolised … the fierce and grasping spirit of perfidi
ous Albion. He is for them the stuff of which legends are made.’23

  A comedy of manners rather than a legend emerged from the Anglo-French stand-off in Borgu during the summer of 1898. Lugard had officered the West Africa Frontier Force with men of his own kidney, all of whom could have stepped from the pages of a G.A. Henty yarn. They were young, ex-public-school boys with a love of sport and taste for adventure. Field command was in the hands of Colonel James Willcocks, another sportsman and veteran of several Indian campaigns. It was he who set out from Jebba into Borgu where, at Lugard’s instructions, he was to hoist the Union Jack wherever he thought fit, taking care to avoid villages over which the tricolore was already flying. There followed a bizarre charade in which British units sidestepped French villages and occasionally collided with French detachments. There were some wrangles, usually about such niceties of protocol as saluting flags, but the prevailing mood on both sides was one of nervous good humour. International rivalries were forgotten as professional empire-builders discovered, over drinks and cigarettes by a campfire, that they had much in common as soldiers and gentlemen.24 As Captain George Abadie observed of one French officer he encountered, he was ‘a gentleman … and one knows how to deal with him.’25

  There were a few fire-eaters on both sides, including some of the native troops, who yearned for a fight. The French position was, in fact, precarious, since their rule was still being resisted in other parts of West Africa. During the confrontation on the Niger, troops had had to be hurried to the Ivory Coast to deal with Samory Touré, France’s most tenacious adversary in West Africa, and to suppress an uprising in Soudan (Mali). Furthermore, as Lugard appreciated, a shooting war on the Niger would leave the French isolated throughout the region since the navy would blockade their West African ports.

  Throughout the crisis, Chamberlain remained in full control as the telegraph line had been extended from Lagos to Jebba so that the men-on-the-spot could not take matters into their own hands. It was diplomatic camel-trading that finally ended the confrontation and Britain, who got the best of the deal, secured Borgu and with it all the territory which now lies within the boundaries of modern Nigeria. All that remained was for Chamberlain to tie up the administrative loose ends. Lagos and the coastal Oil Rivers Protectorate were amalgamated in 1900 as Southern Nigeria, the company was abolished, and its territories passed into the government of the new colony of Northern Nigeria, whose first governor was Lugard.

  Similar consolidation occurred in Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast where, boundaries having been fixed with the French, pacification followed. Regions where British control had hitherto been fitful or non-existent were brought to heel. In 1887, at the conclusion of a campaign against the Yonni of Sierra Leone, the British commander told their chiefs, ‘The Queen has shown you her power by sending her force and taking the country, which now belongs to me and the governor.’ The message was punched home with a demonstration of Maxim-gun fire which ‘much surprised’ them.26 It took two expeditions, in 1895 and 1900, to convince the Asante of the strength and permanence of the new order in the Gold Coast. The last was a particularly brutal affair in which British officers had the utmost difficulty in restraining their native troops who seemed to have regarded the campaign as a licence to plunder and rape.27

  As the terrifying lessons of conquest sank in, the conquerors often found it easy to overawe their new subjects. When Captain Abadie arrived in Ilorin a year after Goldie’s campaign, he found its people submissive. Commandeering lodgings was an easy business, and afterwards Abadie remarked on the drollery of ‘two very hot and dirty, begrimed, badly clothed Englishmen dictating to a crowd of about six hundred Muhammadans, all big swells, and kicking them out.’28 A clue to their reaction was revealed soon after; when Abadie set up his camera to photograph the local prince all his attendants fled at the sight of the tripod which reminded them of the mounting for a machine-gun.

  The two men’s overbearing behaviour was an extreme example of the self-confidence of their class. British social attitudes were exported to Africa, where the orthodoxy that the government of naïve native peoples was best entrusted to gentlemen was already taking root. Surveying the employees of the trading companies in Lagos in 1898, Lieutenant Archibald Eden was appalled by what he saw:

  The type of Englishman, in the shape of the trader, whom we meet in these parts, is too awful for words to describe; they are all more-or-less counter-jumpers of the worst type and biggest bounders into the bargain.29

  Lieutenant Ladislaus Pope-Hennessey, who arrived at the same time, took an instant dislike to the colonial government officials, who were all ‘bounders’ and ‘cads’ addicted to ‘cocktails’, a novelty which the young officer found distasteful. Lugard shared these prejudices and feared that the conduct of men who were not gentlemen lowered respect for all white men.

  He and Goldie had separately discovered ‘gentlemen’ among the Fulani Muslim princes of central and northern Nigeria and were impressed by their sophistication, bearing and the orderly procedures of their law courts and administration. Here were men with whom the British could cooperate, and Islamic institutions could be adopted to suit British needs. The first preliminary was the by now ritual trial of strength which occurred between 1902 and 1904, when the states of Sokoto and Kano were invaded and their armies defeated by Lugard.

  Resistance from the ruling élite ceased, but there was a sudden upsurge of popular opposition to the British in February 1905 under the banner of Mahdist millennialism. The followers of this movement, including many slaves and ex-slaves, identified the British and French armies which had entered their country during the past decade with Baggal, an anti-Christ figure who, in Islamic eschatology, would appear before the coming of the Mandi. The rebels surprised and overcame a British column at Satiru, capturing a slightly damaged Maxim gun, rifles and ammunition. No use was made of these spoils. Like its counterpart in the Sudan, the Nigerian Mahdist movement was backward-looking, and so the insurgents disdained to use the implements of modern, infidel war, relying instead on faith and traditional weaponry. In their next engagement, they adopted a mass charge and were defeated with over 2,000 dead.30

  The Fulani aristocracy cooperated with the British in the suppression of this uprising, which threatened their own as well as their conqueror’s authority. The two were now working in tandem as Lugard had introduced the system known either as ‘indirect rule’ or ‘dual control’. He wanted above all to maintain a continuity of government and assure Britain’s new subjects that, with the exception of slavery, Islamic practices were to be preserved and respected. Once this was clear, Muslim princes and clergy rallied behind the new order and the old courts and civil service continued to function, but under the eye of a British resident. This form of government suited the circumstances of Northern Nigeria for it was inexpensive and required limited manpower. Moreover, an instinctive rapport developed between the princes and the conservative, public-school and university educated administrators who were filling the ranks of the Nigerian civil service during the 1900s. Interestingly, the Colonial Office recruiters preferred sportsmen, who were presumably fitter and, most importantly, knew how to play by the rules.

  The day-to-day running of indirect rule is vividly described in Joyce Cary’s Aissa Saved (1932), which is set in the fictional province of Yanrin in 1921. Cary, who served in the Nigerian civil service, was aware of the tensions created by the new order. Alongside the emir and his Muslim staff, all of whom followed the paths of tradition, was a new élite which had been created over the past forty years by British educators in Sierra Leone and southern Nigeria. Early colonial government depended on this body of literate blacks, one of whom, a graduate from a Sierra Leone mission school and a Royal Niger Company agent at Ekow, was described by a British officer who met him in 1892. The clerk was ‘sleek and polite’ and, ‘a great man in the eyes of the local aborigines’ with whom he exchanged palm oil for ‘gaudy Manchester cottons’. In the evening he ‘played select
ions from Hymns Ancient and Modern on a harmonium in the drawing room of a hut, hung with portraits of the royal family.’31

  Lugard admitted the value of such men, but insisted that they should never usurp or interfere with the functions of men whose power derived from tradition. No African clerk or constable could override the judgement of, say, a village headman. This was the rule in Cary’s Yanrin, where Jacob, an educated Christian from the coast, considered himself one of the three ‘civilised persons’ in the region. He wore white man’s clothing, was less deferential than the local natives, and had absorbed some politics. On hearing that a massacre of Christian converts was imminent in a nearby town, he urges Bradgate, the British resident, to take immediate action. ‘I run for you, sah, because I say, if dem Christians done get killed someone go write paper in England, write praps parliament member, den ma frien Mister Bradgate catch big trouble.’ As in India, the British faced the dilemma of how to handle a class of educated natives who were vital for everyday administration, but who knew something of the outside world and the political values which obtained in it. They were not always compliant collaborators, as Jacob’s remarks suggest, and it is not surprising that British administrators preferred the old hierarchies of Africa.

  9

  Ye Sons of the Southern Cross: The White Dominions

  In his patriotic vision, The Poets’ Pilgrimage to Waterloo, Robert Southey wrote of ‘those distant lands, where Britain blest with her redundant life the East and West’. He was thinking of Canada and Australia, which, like many of his countrymen, he saw as repositories for superfluous men and women, unwanted by reason of their poverty or criminality. This was the age of Robert Malthus, the parson-schoolmaster who devoted his life to studying the calculus of population growth, and concluded that a spiralling birth rate could only be checked by cyclical famines. This bleak prognosis was widely accepted and appeared confirmed by the starvation that followed bad harvests during the 1810s.