Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (63 page)

Yet the moment Livingstone decided that the slave trade would only ever be conquered if the Europeans created African colonies, he began to put pressure on successive British governments. He met with no success at all in the fourteen years left to him. In 1860, Lord Palmerston wrote: ‘I am very unwilling to embark on new schemes of British possessions. Dr L’s information is valuable, but he must not be allowed to tempt us to form colonies only to be reached by forcing steamers up cataracts.’
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In mid-century, Britain was the workshop of the world, out-producing all its rivals, and did not need new colonies, in the eyes of its politicians, in order to increase its wealth or power.

Like David Livingstone, John Speke saw the creation of colonies as the best way to improve life for Africans. When he first reached Lake Victoria, he was shocked by the poverty of local people, given the extraordinary fertility of the land. Why were they so poor, he wondered? In part, their bountiful environment
seemed responsible. They did not need to make clothes because the weather was so congenial, and the soil produced enough in its natural state to make agricultural effort unnecessary. So why build up a food surplus to sell and thus provide the means for other projects? Most of all, he blamed poverty on small local wars. ‘The great cause [of poverty] is their want of a strong protecting government to preserve peace, without which nothing can prosper.’ It struck him that,

… if, instead of this district being in the hands of its present owners, it were ruled by a few scores of Europeans, what an entire revolution a few years would bring forth. An extensive market would be opened to the world … and commerce would clear the way for civilization and enlightenment.
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Speke, again like Livingstone, feared that Africans would be ‘wiped off the face of the earth’ by the Arab-Swahili slave trade, unless Britain established some African equivalent of the British Raj.
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A few years later, he appealed for missionaries to go out to the Sudan, Bunyoro, Buganda and Rwanda to pave the way for ‘legitimate commerce’. In his opinion, Africans ‘considered the slave trade legitimate from the fact that slaves are purchased with European articles of merchandise’. What was required, said Speke, was that Africans themselves should be ‘taught to abhor the slave trade’. Pressure, he said, should also be put on the Sultan of Zanzibar to end the trade in his dominions.
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If Speke had not died in 1864, his voice would have been added to Livingstone’s in advocating the formation of new colonies for humanitarian reasons.

Stanley would only come to believe that colonies (as opposed to internationalised rivers and trading stations) would have to be created after he came across 2,300 recently captured slaves on the upper Congo in 1883 and thought himself ‘in a kind of evil dream’, witnessing such ‘indescribable inhumanity’. He guessed that in order to obtain this number of slaves, the Arabs would have shot the same number to prevent resistance. At this time, half a million people were being displaced or enslaved annually in central Africa.
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The case for intervention was a very powerful one. These explorers had not – as is sometimes suggested – broken open an unspoiled paradise and exposed it to the exploitative greed of the world’s capitalists for the very first time.
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On the upper Nile in the early 1860s, Samuel Baker had found European, Egyptian and Sudanese slave traders in the process of establishing trading posts within fifty miles of Lake Albert. Also in the 1860s David Livingstone had been shocked to find Nyamwezi chiefs selling members of neighbouring tribes and indeed their own people to a handful of alien intruders.
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The internal slave trade of the Africans themselves provoked him to say that this ‘perpetual capturing and sale of children’ from subject tribes made the Portuguese and Arab trades ‘appear a small evil by comparison’.
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A decade earlier, David Livingstone had encountered the Portuguese slave trader Silva Porto in the centre of the continent on the Zambezi.

In the 1840s the Victorian passion for ivory piano keys, knife handles and the backs of brushes could no longer be met by African traders alone, so the coastal Arab-Swahili (whose Arab ancestors had arrived on the East African coast in the ninth century) had started to penetrate deeper and deeper into the interior to bring back ever greater numbers of tusks and the slaves required to carry them. Stanley wrote incredulously:

Every pound weight of ivory has cost the life of a man woman or child, for every five pounds a hut has been burned, for every two tusks a whole village has been destroyed … It is simply incredible that because ivory is required for ornaments or billiard games, the rich heart of Africa should be laid waste.
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Samuel Baker remarked sardonically that because the slave traders had made the country so dangerous, he had often had no choice but to travel with their large caravans:

It is remarkably pleasant travelling in company with these robbers, they convert every country into a wasps’ nest. There’s no plan of action or travelling and I being dependent on their movements am more like a donkey than an explorer.
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From Rwanda and Buganda in the north, to Lake Nyasa (Malawi) and the Shire Highlands in the south, the Nile explorers found that Arab-Swahili traders had preceded them by a decade or two, bringing destruction and suffering in their wake. The slave and ivory traders had also brought gunpowder and guns far into the interior – though, sadly, these were not recent imports. The Dutch had sold 20,000 tons of gunpowder annually along the West African coast from 1700 for over a century, while on the East African coast the Portuguese had first sailed into the Zambezi estuary with gunpowder and cannons in the mid-1500s.
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African migrations and warfare also brought widespread disruption. The northward movement of the Ngoni was witnessed by Speke and by Livingstone, who recorded the murders and the thefts of cattle near Lake Nyasa. In the 1870s Mirambo of the Nyamwezi, with his child soldiers and Ngoni mercenaries, fought the Arabs for control of the caravan routes to Lakes Tanganyika and Victoria in a prolonged war that sucked in many innocent people,
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while Msiri, another central African ruler, was extending his power by invading his neighbours’ land and by allying himself with the arch slave trader Tippu Tip. This enabled him to kill the
kasembe
of the Luba-Lunda people and consolidate his power over south-east Katanga with its copper resources.

Not that Mwata Kasembe VII had been an angel as David Livingstone had observed in 1867:

When he usurped power five years ago, his country was densely peopled; but he was so severe in his punishments – cropping the ears, lopping off the hands, and other mutilations, selling the children for very slight offences, that his subjects gradually dispersed themselves in the neighbouring countries beyond his power.
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If Britain, France and Germany had not established colonies and protectorates within the area investigated by the Nile explorers, the Arab-Swahili slave traders would have continued up the Nile extending their control over Bunyoro and Buganda. The fate of the tribes in Equatoria would have been annihilation.
The Sudanese Arabs would also have spread westwards through Chad, having first overwhelmed the Sultanate of Darfur. Even in Baker’s and Gordon’s day they had reached the Bahr el-Ghazal and Equatoria. Arabs from the south had made Lake Victoria an immense depot for the slave trade a decade before Stanley arrived. By then Tippu Tip’s empire stretched from Lake Tanganyika, through Manyema to the Congo and the Lomani. Inevitably, the whole of central equatorial Africa would have become part of the Muslim world, with slavery an inescapable part of it, unless the colonial powers had come to stay. They did, and by the opening years of the twentieth century had suppressed the slave trade throughout East Africa, stopping a horrifying annual loss of people. Between 1800 and 1870 nearly two million slaves had been exported across the Sahara or by sea to Egypt, Arabia and the Gulf.
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In 1859, Speke had listed the benefits which in his opinion would accrue if ‘a few scores of Europeans’ came out to manage the southern shores of Lake Victoria, and a little later Livingstone described his ideal colonial administrator. This versatile individual would not compete with Africans in manual labour, but would ‘take a leading part in managing the land … and extending the varieties of the production of the soil’. He would take ‘a lead too in trade and in all public matters … [and] would be an unmixed advantage to everyone below and around him, for he would fill a place that is practically vacant’.
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This might almost have been an advance job description for the later colonial district commissioner. Doubtless Livingstone would have approved of these men’s university degrees, and their practical agricultural skills and advice-giving, but would have less admired their colonial assumption of superiority in all things. He had written of Africans in the mid-1850s in a different spirit:

With a general opinion they are wiser than their white neighbours … Each tribe has a considerable consciousness of goodness … In Africa they have less of what the Germans call philosophy to uphold their views; less diplomacy, protocols & notes … They have few theories but
many ideas … There is no search after the supreme good such as we are to believe the ancient philosophers engaged in … But the African cares not at all for these utterly inane speculations. The pleasures of animal life are ever present to his mind as the supreme good, and but for his innumerable phantoms he would enjoy his luscious climate as well as it is possible for a man to do.
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Before the militarised expeditions of the 1890s, the Nile explorers had been on a level playing field with the people whose territory they had risked their lives to investigate. They paid in trade goods for the right of passage through tribal lands, and on many occasions were detained against their will for many months at the whim of African chiefs. Speke was detained by Mutesa for five months, Baker by Kamrasi for ten, Livingstone by Kasembe for three. Their hosts could at any moment have ended their lives. This situation was typical of that more innocent period which preceded the two decades during which the land was wrested from its owners by force.

The memorably fatalistic Chief Commoro of the Latuka had shared his disconcerting ideas on the subject of theft with Samuel Baker in 1863:

Most people are bad; if they are strong they take from the weak. The good people are all weak; they are good because they are not strong enough to be bad.
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Undoubtedly, in the context of the Scramble for Africa, the Europeans were strong and took land and sovereignty from the weak in the name of high-sounding principles – some of which were genuine, such as the desire to end the slave trade, and others false and exploitative. Episodes of resistance and conquest would take place in parts of almost every African colony.
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Rulers like Kabarega, Mwanga and Prempeh of the Asante would be exiled. In most cases engagements would be small, continuing over several decades, with submission eventually occurring through a gradual process of unchallenged intrusion by small numbers of whites. Livingstone in a rare moment of pessimism wrote of the arrival of colonists as ‘a terrible necessity’, but still maintained that on people of British stock
depended the ‘hopes of the world for liberty and progress’.
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Indeed most British imperial agents firmly believed that they were in Africa not only thanks to superior weaponry but also because they were, in their own estimation, the culturally superior representatives of an empire whose mission was to bring peace, prosperity and justice to less fortunate people. The moral inconsistency of occasionally having to kill people who resisted their ‘civilising mission’ did not dismay Sir Hesketh Bell, the first British Governor of Uganda, as he demonstrated when writing about some ‘wild’ Bagisu tribesmen in the east of the country:

I am sending two companies of the King’s African Rifles to make them [the Bagisu] realise that they must come into line with the rest of the Protectorate … Hardly a year passes without the need of punishing these wild tribes for the slaying of unarmed and peaceful traders, and nothing but a show of force will induce them to mend their ways.

Since the Bagisu had always felt free to kill intruders on their land, they might justifiably have asked why they should suddenly change their behaviour when they had signed no agreement with anyone and not been defeated in battle. But Bell knew he would only be able to bring peace to this large country and govern it if he managed to stamp out acts of violence against people of all races. For this task he had been given a budget fit only for running a few British parishes, a tiny military force and twenty civil servants and commissioners. With these laughable resources he not only had to punish Africans who killed traders but also take on slave traders, warlords and adventurers in search of easy money.
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Arthur Mounteney Jephson, Stanley’s favourite officer on the Emin Pasha Expedition, wrote in his diary several years before Uganda became a protectorate:

The ordinary native only grows just enough corn for the use of himself & his family; let him once see that what he grows has a very substantial value & he will cultivate more & be more hardworking & thrifty; he will not then be so ready to go to war with his neighbour … & the
little petty wars which are the curse of Africa, will, with the coming of the railway & the consequent increase in trade, gradually cease.
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