Ghosts of Empire (45 page)

This development was an instance of the British Empire following trade. Even in the high imperialistic days of the late nineteenth century, it was British business and enterprise which so often forged a path that was only later followed by the bureaucrats and pith-helmet-wearing district commissioners. British commentators of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries commonly referred with pride to the commercial origins of their empire. The belief in the ‘superiority of the Teuton' accompanied an aggressive free-trade ideology. Before Joseph Chamberlain's entry into the Colonial Office in 1895, the ‘merchant was expected to create empire'.
¹⁴
Far from being something despised in official circles, business and trade were revered by the leaders of the British Empire in London. In the Jubilee year of 1897, the British Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, the third Marquess of Salisbury, used his speech at the Guildhall to launch a paean of praise for British business, playing down strategic motives or motives of sheer glory-seeking behind the growth of empire. The colonial mission in Africa, according to the Prime Minister, was about money and commerce:

For Goldie, although money was not a primary motivation, ‘the opening up of Tropical Africa' was a significant achievement of the Victorian age. The empire, he noted in 1898, was dependent ‘on the condition of the national fibre'. From the library of the Naval and Military Club, in
London's Piccadilly, he wrote that ‘although it may be that the British Empire has now reached its zenith, and must gradually decline to the position of a second-rate power, we are not bound to accept such assertions without the production of more valid evidence'.
¹⁶

To men like Goldie, imperialism was a highly businesslike matter. Although he did much to suppress slavery in West Africa, where Arab and Fulani raiders were still trafficking in human slaves at the end of the nineteenth century, Goldie was pragmatic even about this evil trade. As early as 1886, he wrote to the Foreign Secretary, the Conservative Earl of Iddesleigh, formerly Stafford Northcote, arguing that even ‘domestic slavery, repugnant as it is to modern European ideas, cannot safely be repressed by force at present . . . intertwined as it is with the whole social system of Central Africa'.
¹⁷
Goldie's flexibility was shown by how in the early to mid-1880s he managed to grow the National African Company (which had taken over the assets of the United Africa Trading Company), finally acquiring a Royal Charter for it in July 1886, at which point it became known as the Royal Niger Company. During this period, he persuaded local chiefs to sign away many of their rights over their country in a series of treaties which, it seems, were often imperfectly understood by the chiefs themselves.

Between December 1884 and October 1886, a period just short of two years, the company had signed 237 separate treaties with local chiefs. The treaties followed a typical formula: ‘We the undersigned King and Chiefs of Sengana, with a view to the bettering of the condition of our country and people, do this day cede to the National African Company (Limited) for ever the whole of our territory extending from the boundary of Akassa territory to Kolama territory.' Not only would land be signed over in this way, but legal authority was likewise handed over. ‘We also give to the said National African Company . . . full power to settle all native disputes arising from any cause whatsoever.'
¹⁸
In return for this generous concession, the company would allow the chiefs considerable autonomy. It would be given ‘full power to mine, farm, and build in any portion of our territory', while it would promise not ‘to interfere with any of the native laws or customs of the country, consistent with the maintenance of order and good government'. The treaties were always signed by interpreters like
James Broom Walker Apre, native of Akassa, who would solemnly declare that they were ‘well acquainted with the language of the King and people of the country . . . [and had] truly and faithfully explained the above Agreement, and that they understood its meaning'.
¹⁹

These treaties were resented by the French and the Germans, who were involved in empire-building and trading of their own. The Germans protested to the British Foreign Office about the treaties. The case of the King of Nupé rumbled on for years. In 1888, the Germans wrote to the British Foreign Office, complaining that the ‘King of Nupé emphatically denies having sold his kingdom to the company'. The company had imposed duties and taxes on other merchants trading in this area, but it had no right to do this, as far as the Germans were concerned. They argued that the King of Nupé had ‘never ceded to the Royal Niger Company nor to anybody else any of his lands or territories'. They added that the King ‘alone as Sovereign King of Nupé [had] a right to levy duties'. Goldie fired back to the Foreign Office his riposte that the Germans had long been a nuisance to the company. The dispute had been the outcome of the ‘German intrigues which have given the Company so much trouble during the past few years'. The Germans, Goldie believed, had poisoned the ‘minds of the native rulers, especially as rumours pass rapidly in Central Africa from district to district and acquire strength by repetition'.

In the wake of the international Conference of Berlin in 1885, which precipitated the controversial ‘Scramble for Africa', the Germans, the French and the British were all vying for trade and dominance in West Africa. Goldie complained to his political masters in the Foreign Office in London that the Germans had claimed that ‘wherever the English went they subjugated and oppressed the populations, that the native laws and customs would be overthrown, and that the power of the Chiefs would be abolished'.
²⁰
The company, as far as Goldie was concerned, had no ‘desire to interfere more than is absolutely necessary with the internal arrangements of the Chiefs of Central Africa'.

Goldie's shrewd dealings with the chiefs secured the Royal Niger Company's position as the dominant force in the commercial affairs of the region round the Niger delta and the banks of the river further inland. He not only blamed foreigners, the French and the Germans for interfering in
the company's business. The native chiefs often relapsed into their ‘old uncommercial pursuits of slave-hunting and inter-tribal war'. This problem was aggravated by the fact that, in every tribe, there were ‘almost invariably to be found the influence of the numerous semi-civilized negroes–subjects of Great Britain or a British Protectorate'. These ‘semi-civilized negroes' had been educated by missionaries or had picked up some literacy and knowledge of English by commerce. It was Goldie's view that, despite their ‘very limited education', they exercised a ‘deplorable influence over the native tribes'. ‘These foreign negroes have persistently endeavoured, and will doubtless continue to endeavour, to shake the influence of the company with the natives.'
²¹

Goldie's Royal Niger Company was beset by enemies and rivals. The monopoly of trade he was trying to establish not only opposed the interests of natives and Germans, it also aroused the anger of British merchants who had been trading in the Niger delta area for years. As the
North German Gazette
complained in July 1888, ‘It is well known . . . here that the merchants who are established in the Niger Territory . . . Germans and English, irrespective of nationality, have for a considerable time made bitter complaints about the conduct of the Royal Niger Company.' The company was ‘trying to monopolize trade in those parts'.
²²
The merchants of Liverpool, some of whom had been trading in West Africa since the 1850s, objected to the dominance the Royal Niger Company sought to establish over commerce in this part of the world. Like the Germans, the Liverpool traders lobbied the British government, and their local Members of Parliament, to curtail the company's powers. The Liverpool firm Messrs Stuart and Douglas had written to their MP, W. F. Lawrence, at the end of 1886 to complain about the company's monopolistic practices: ‘Healthy competition does not suit the policy of the Niger Company, hence the monopoly they have set up.' The Liverpool traders objected to the level of duty the company charged other traders. They also argued that ‘The action of the Niger Company is no benefit to the natives, not to the civilization they so much vaunt nor to European merchants, but is intended to crush native traders . . . and English merchants who have hitherto so long dealt with the natives, to the great benefit of this country . . .'
²³

What they wanted was to ‘induce the Foreign Secretary to either greatly
modify the powers of monopoly conferred upon the Niger Company by the Royal Charter, or to revoke the Charter; the latter course being, according to the general opinion, the most desirable'. Lawrence, a dutiful MP, continued to lobby hard for his constituents. He wrote to the Foreign Office, on behalf of the Liverpool Africa Association, urging the ‘revocation of the Charter'. The Foreign Office replied that the company was fulfilling its mission and that the Liverpool merchants had not ‘given due consideration to the altered circumstances of the African continent, under which the whole of the West Coast, with a few unimportant exceptions, is now under the Protectorate of European Powers'. This new reality meant that the ‘old unchecked licence of trade is a thing of the past'. The company was simply doing the job of the British government at a much less burdensome cost to the British taxpayer: ‘the Royal Niger Company in offering to undertake the administration of the vast and hitherto almost inaccessible districts adjoining the Niger . . . has rendered good service by relieving the Imperial revenues of the heavy expense of direct administration'.
²⁴
This was empire on the cheap.

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.