The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (48 page)

Lugard was profoundly affected by what he saw as he traversed East Africa. The region was collapsing into anarchy from which it could only be rescued by Britain:

The African knows no peace. One day you may see peace and plenty, well-tilled fields, and children playing in the sun; on the next you may find the corpses of the men, the bodies of the children half burnt in the flames which consumed the village, while the women are captives of the victorious raiders. Not against the slave-trade alone are our efforts needed … The
Pax Britannica
which shall stop this lawless raiding and this constant inter-tribal war will be the greatest blessing that Africa has known since the Flood.
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Such descriptions of the uncertainty and violence of African life were the stock-in-trade of the first-hand accounts of the continent which appeared in late-Victorian Britain. Readers were introduced to a land of contrasts in which all that was good was of European origin and all that was bad was of African. For instance, two eyewitness descriptions of Nigeria, published in the 1890s, refer to ‘vile pagan customs’, ‘wild lawless people’ and a ‘kingdom of darkness’.
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One author was struck by the coastal town of Bonny where the cleanness and order of the missionary settlement highlighted the grossness and depravity of the native township, where, ironically, the streets were littered with discarded bottles of ‘trader gin’.
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Like the mission tracts of an earlier generation, such material provided a call to duty; the British people had to give their wholehearted support to men like Lugard, who had shouldered what Kipling called ‘the white man’s burden’. It was appropriate that his employer, the British Imperial East Africa Company, set its device of a lightbulb on their postage stamps: it symbolised modernity and bringing light to a benighted region.

Lugard had developed his own views on how enlightenment should be spread in Africa, based on his experiences there and as a soldier in India. He wanted government along the lines that had evolved in India in which the administration would be impartial, firm, and respect local institutions and conventions. ‘An arbitrary and despotic rule, which takes no account of native customs, traditions and prejudices,’ he wrote, ‘is not suited to the successful development of infant civilisation nor, in my view, in accordance with the spirit of British colonial rule.’
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He had in mind the Indian practice of indirect rule by which Britain had adopted and sometimes adjusted existing political structures and cooperated with established rulers. It was an attractive alternative to the infinitely more expensive and wearisome process of creating an entirely new system of government, which was bound to provoke upheavals and resentment.

This theory was not of course new but, as applied by Lugard to Africa, proved very influential. There as elsewhere, Britain entered into an alliance of convenience with local rulers who, in return for concessions such as the extirpation of slavery, were allowed to continue in positions of authority so long as they exercised their power in a manner approved by British advisers. By the early 1920s schools had been set up in East Africa where chiefs’ sons were educated for future responsibility. At these and other government schools, boys and girls wore a uniform based upon African rather than European dress, which had been once
de rigueur
for an African seeking a European-style education. In some areas, missionaries were adapting pagan initiation rites so that the traditional period of preparation for circumcision became one in which the youth learned the virtues of Christian ‘manliness’.
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Money-making as well as civilising had been a function of the British Imperial East Africa Company. The two were not as compatible as they had once been in India, and by 1891 the company was tottering on the verge of bankruptcy. The upshot was that Uganda and British East Africa (Kenya), which had fallen to Britain’s lot after the 1890 agreement with Germany, passed into Foreign and then Colonial Office control. The misfortunes of the company were evidence that claims that Africa offered an unlimited outlet for British manufactures were overblown. They had, however, helped provide the original impetus for African colonisation and had given hope to British businessmen trapped in a recession. The
Leeds Mercury
of 28 February 1885 had predicted that Africa would become a ‘vast market’ for ‘cotton goods, blankets, crockery, muskets [this was true enough], hardware of all kinds, and cheap finery of every description’. But how were the Africans to pay for all these goods?

This irritating question was ignored during the optimistic period when Africa was being opened up, but it returned to trouble governments and businessmen at the turn of the century, by which time everyone was wiser about the actual conditions on the continent. Outside South Africa there were no King Solomon’s mines. An economic revolution was clearly needed to create customers and, given that nearly all of them were under foreign government, the change would have to be imposed from above. A favourite metaphor of the 1890s, and one used by Chamberlain, was that the colonies were outlying ‘estates’ which, through careful management and investment, could be made profitable both to their owner and their inhabitants. This process was, however, complicated by the fact that the Colonial Office had inherited and cherished the old liberal tradition that it and its agents were trustees for gullible and child-like native populations, who needed protection from the unscrupulous and from each other.

At the same time, current economic orthodoxy insisted that capital investment in any enterprise was the task of individuals, not governments. There had been considerable opposition to demands by the British Imperial East Africa Company for a subsidy to help fund a railway from Mombasa to the shores of the Indian Ocean, which would both serve as a conduit for trade and tighten Britain’s grip on the source of the White Nile. In 1896, Chamberlain recognised the line’s potential and agreed to underwrite some of its costs. By 1913, when the arrangement ended, the British government had paid £2.8 million in grants for the development of East Africa.

The railway was completed in 1903 and five years later was making a respectable annual profit of £60,000. By this time the economic development of Kenya was well underway, the local authorities having, in 1903, agreed to set aside a huge upland region of temperate climate and fertile soil for white settlement. Agriculture, practised by Europeans using modern methods, offered the only means of making the region self-supporting and, incidentally, of helping make the railway pay. As in Southern Rhodesia, land on either side of the track was reserved for Europeans who therefore had easy access to transport and outside markets.

Richard Meinertzhagen encountered one of the first white pioneers in Nairobi in 1902, and heard from him that in Kenya ‘the white man is the master race and that the black man must forever remain cheap labour and slaves’.
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It was a view which, in various and often less trenchant forms, was held by successive settlers. In 1916 they numbered 8,000 and included a sprinkling of Boers who had trekked up from South Africa, bringing with them the racial attitudes of their homeland. Matters were further complicated in East Africa by another consequence of economic changes, the presence of Indians. They had been shipped there as indentured labourers to help build the railway, and afterwards settled as shopkeepers and clerks; they were also undertaking skilled work for which there were no qualified Africans. By 1920, there were 23,000 Indians in Kenya squeezed between 10,000 whites, mostly settlers and their families, and nearly three million Africans.

The colonial government faced a dilemma. Although no money-spinning staple such as cotton, sugar or tobacco had emerged to provide an early boost for the Kenyan economy, coffee- and maize-growing and ranching were flourishing and the 1914–19 war in East Africa had provided a welcomed impetus for growth. In the latter year there were two million acres earmarked for white farmers, and the government was extensively advertising a scheme to attract British ex-officers to invest their gratuities in Kenyan farms. Private capital was essential for the Kenyan settler, as it had been for his North American predecessor (£2,000 was considered the minimum in 1919), and he needed abundant, cheap labour.

Since the start of white colonisation, the colonial authorities had had to concoct ways in which to push sections of the black population towards regular wage-earning and the market economy. The annual Hut Tax of three rupees (20p) a hut, with a further three rupees per wife for hut-owners with more than one, and a poll tax of three rupees for every adult non-householder, forced Africans to seek cash. Kenya also adopted in 1918 a measure that had its origins in South Africa, and which had been copied in Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, by which blacks were banned from living in areas set aside for Europeans unless they undertook to work for the owner.

Unskilled labour for Europeans was at this period highly unpopular for understandable reasons. For years the prevailing wisdom had been that the reason why most Africans kept out of the western economy was ingrained laziness. Hard work for regular hours appeared not to come naturally to them, nor did they appreciate its moral value. An explorer who had crossed East Africa in 1884 with a party of unwilling porters, congratulated himself on his return for having driven them forcefully, for they had come back ‘as men, with their moral and physical defects cast off’.
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Lugard, faced with malingerers among his porters, dosed them with a mixture of water, salt and mustard, which one, who was cured, pronounced ‘a very fierce medicine’.
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A more common astringent was the sjambok, a rhino-hide whip which was commonly used on black miners at the Wankie colliery in Southern Rhodesia during the early 1900s.
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It had been a frequent form of punishment for insubordinate black labourers during the Boer War, and in November 1914 the commander of HMS
Dartmouth
at Cape Town asked Admiralty permission to flog striking Arab and Indian lascars, on the grounds that no other correction would have any effect.
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Lord Cranworth, in his guidebook for would-be farmers in Kenya published in 1919, warned against too many beatings; but for offences such as lying, petty pilfering, cruelty to children and animals, ‘the whip is the best and kindest preventive and cure’.
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Lady Cranworth, counselling the new settler’s wife, strongly recommended regular inspections of the kitchen, a disagreeable chore which invariably ended with ‘a feeling of soreness on the part, the posterior part, of the cook’.
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It appears that Swahili (part African, part Arab) and native cooks were never fastidious about washing utensils.

Not surprisingly, given their needs, a substantial minority of Kenyan settlers favoured a union with South Africa, whose government would, they believed, treat them more sympathetically than the Colonial Office.
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Despite regular polo and soccer matches between teams of officials and farmers, tension remained high. It reached breaking point in 1921 after the announcement that Indian representatives were to be added to the governor’s council. This measure was interpreted as a step towards a multi-racial Kenya in which the outnumbered settlers might soon find their interests overridden.

A resistance movement sprang up and there was heady talk of rebellion. The man of the moment was Brigadier-General Philip Wheatley, an ex-officer in the Indian army with a hearty dislike of Indian nationalism, whose blustering, extreme right-wing views made him a living prototype of David Low’s cartoon figure, Colonel Blimp. Kenya was a natural sanctuary for Blimps, and they rallied round Wheatley and concocted a hare-brained plan for settlers’
coup d’état
with the slogan ‘For King and Kenya’. What in many respects was a trailer for the unilateral declaration of independence by Rhodesia in 1964, turned out to be a damp squib with the settlers pulling back at the last moment. The episode did provoke the Colonial Office to issue a white paper in 1922 that set out official policy in an unambiguous manner: ‘Primarily Kenya is an African territory’ in which ‘the interests of the African natives must be paramount’.
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West Africa was also a black man’s country. It was an inhospitable region where a combination of humidity, heat, and a febriferous coastline combined to give it the notorious reputation of ‘the white man’s grave’. In the late eighteenth century convicted criminals were sentenced to undertake garrison duty there as a form of delayed death sentence, and during most of the nineteenth, the mortality rate among troops in Sierra Leone was the highest in the empire. Advances in medical knowledge increased a European’s chances of survival, but in the years immediately before the First World War, officials in the Gold Coast were expected to spend no more than twelve months there before being sent on leave. Their colleagues in Northern Nigeria did eighteen-month stints and, one observed, they counted themselves unlucky if they had more than three bouts of fever in a year.
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