The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (29 page)

Wolseley called the Ashanti war “the most horrible war I ever took part in”
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(and he took part in quite a few, stretching from Burma to Canada, India to South Africa, China to Egypt, and the Sudan). British casualties—dead, wounded, or invalided home—amounted to more than 40 percent of his force, and more than 70 percent were sick over the course of the two-month campaign. In January 1896, the British formally (and forcibly) annexed the Ashanti kingdom into the British Empire (among those leading troops on that campaign was Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts). The final act of the Ashanti wars was an Ashanti rebellion, the so-called “War of the Golden Stool,” the stool being the sacred throne of the Ashanti monarchy. The Ashanti royal family was exiled to the Seychelles, but the golden stool was hidden and not rediscovered until 1920. In the interest of peace, the British let the Ashanti keep it.

The crucial figure in the development of British West Africa was Frederick Lugard (who was made a baron for his service, though like all too many empire-builders he left no heir to his title). The son of a clergyman (an army chaplain), Lugard started life as a soldier. He was educated at Sandhurst and saw duty in Afghanistan, the Sudan, and Burma, though soldiering did not—or so he believed—suit him; he thought of himself as having a “
woman's
character,”
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too emotionally soft to be a soldier. Nevertheless, he hired himself out to fight against slavers in Nyasaland—hoping to get himself killed as a cure for a broken heart, but instead only managed to get badly wounded.

He found his niche as an imperial troubleshooter, conqueror, and administrator. It was a role Lugard first took up with the Imperial British East Africa Company, which hired him to open Uganda to British trade and influence. He did this with aplomb and a single Maxim gun.

Lugard was a model Victorian—serious, active, with a deep moralistic strain. His methods were sometimes harsh, he was an imperialist of the most ardent stripe, but he also recognized the Empire's hold on Africa would be temporary: “For two or three generations we can show the Negro what we are; then we shall be asked to go away. Then we shall leave the land to those it belongs to, with the feeling that they have better business friends in us than in other white men.”
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The key phrase was “we can show the Negro what we are.” Lugard was the man who shaped the British civil service in West Africa, and he shaped it in his own upright, paternalistic image. A District Commissioner had to be courageous and strong, a man with moral force and a Maxim gun to back it up: “we do not intend to be fooled . . . we come like men that are not afraid,”
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as he said when he marched into Uganda. The District Commissioner had to be a fair and disinterested dispenser of justice, and he had to advance the cause of civilized standards and economic development and enterprise.

Lugard's method was indirect rule—ruling through local elites who had been won over to the imperial cause—which was a common enough British imperial strategy but one that he developed, expounded, and made his own as a practical political philosophy. It meant that the hundred disparate tribes of Nigeria could be governed in ways that preserved their traditions and cultures, while a British representative was kept on hand to make sure that all due obeisance was given to fair play, free trade, and the requisite moral decencies (though these sometimes required a sliding scale, as even
the anti-slavery-minded Lugard tolerated, up to a point, the limited practice of slavery in Islamic northern Nigeria).

Lugard envisioned African self-government at a local level, leading eventually to self-government at a regional level, and after some considerable time at the highest level in independent states. Africa was his passion, but unlike later liberals he did not clothe the Africans with any sort of inherent moral superiority; on the contrary, his view, based on his long, adventurous experience on the continent, was a justification for imperial paternalism. The average African, he said, tended to be a “happy, thriftless, excitable person, naturally courteous and polite, full of personal vanity, with little sense of veracity . . . his thoughts are concentrated on the events and feelings of the moment, and he suffers little from apprehension of the future or grief for the past.”
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It was the Empire's role to guide such men in the ways of honesty, industry, and sobriety.

Alas, the sun set on British West Africa sooner than it should have—at least if the goal was to create parliamentary institutions. These were the inheritance of Ghana (independent in 1957), Nigeria (1960), Sierra Leone (1961), and The Gambia (1965), but Ghana, the first black African state to gain its independence, showed how swiftly socialism could wreck a relatively prosperous economy. Its leader Kwame Nkrumah (who ruled from 1957 to 1966, when he was overthrown in a coup while visiting Communist China) was widely admired by liberals and pan-Africanists even as he banned, jailed, and exiled his political opponents. All this was allegedly necessary to achieve Ghana's great leap forward, though it amounted to a great leap backward in terms of the economy, justice, and freedom. Nigeria, for its part, became a land of military coups. Sierra Leone started off decently but drifted into the swamp of African reprimitivisation; British troops had to return in 2000 to defeat a barbarous rebel movement, the Revolutionary United Front, infamous for its mutilations, use of child soldiers, and other atrocities. If the people of Sierra Leone had a choice, they would likely gladly return to being a Crown colony faster than you can say peace and justice. Plucky little Gambia, meanwhile, has done moderately well and not coincidentally has been keen on maintaining its ties to Britain and a free market economy. All in all, Lord Lugard would be unhappy, but not surprised, at the history of post-imperial British West Africa

It is a myth that the British seized South Africa from black Africans. If they seized it from anyone, it was the Dutch. The Dutch had been at the Cape since 1652 (they were preceded by the Portuguese, who arrived a century and a half earlier). The land was sparsely populated with cattle-herding
Hottentots and nomadic Bushmen. For centuries the Bantu peoples—who would later dominate South Africa, peoples like the Xhosa and the Zulu (who were not a separate tribe or clan until the eighteenth century)—had been migrating south, but they were still five hundred miles north of the early Dutch settlements.
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It would be another century before the Dutch, reinforced by Germans and French Huguenots, and by then a fully established tribe of Southern Africa themselves, met the Bantu.

The Dutch—or Afrikaners or Boers (from the Dutch word for farmer)—were a sturdy, stubborn, independent-minded people; frontiersmen, deeply religious, devoted to family, self-reliant, and impatient of any government restraint; and there was not much of that from the Dutch East India Company, which had sponsored the settlement. The British began arriving in the eighteenth century and by 1806 had achieved paramount status, annexing the Cape. In the tribal history of Africa, the Hottentots had displaced the Bushmen, the Boers had displaced the Hottentots, and now the British were asserting their supremacy, while the Bantu tribes were migrating southwards staking their own claims. The Boers and the Bantu were cattlemen, and tough and hardy souls. The British, with their natural sense of superiority, saw themselves as the governing race, which would settle the claims between the Boers (whom they found unsympathetic) and the black Africans (whom they thought needed British protection from Boer rapacity, though constant border wars with the Xhosa were starting to bring some British officials to an almost Boer state of mind).

The Boers were immune to the charms of high-minded British liberalism and trekked to escape it. The Boers defeated the Zulus, made peace with them, and established the Natalia Republic on the southeastern coast in 1839, only to have it annexed by the British in 1843. So they pushed inland, establishing the settlements of the Transvaal (recognized as independent by the British in 1852 and established as the South African Republic in 1856) and the independent Orange Free State (which was recognized by the
British in 1854). At the same time, the British established local parliamentary institutions with voter rolls that included blacks and mixed-race voters if they had sufficient economic standing.

South Africa remained a colonial backwater until it was discovered to be rich in diamonds in the late 1860s (gold discoveries followed in the 1880s), leading to a rush of immigrants and pressure on the British to annex, bring order, and assert their rights over more of southern Africa. Sir Theophilus Shepstone, a longtime British diplomat and expert in native affairs in South Africa (his father had been a missionary) arranged for the annexation of the Transvaal in 1877. The governor of the Cape Colony, Sir Bartle Frere, took the next step. Bordering the British colony of Natal was Zululand. The entire civilization of the Zulus was based on war and killing, and though the British were at peace with the Zulu, Frere thought war inevitable with such neighbors; moreover, given the Zulus' fearsome reputation, if they were defeated by British arms, it would have a pacifying effect on every South African tribe. As James Morris noted in his book
Heaven's Command
, the Zulu nation “was like a vast black predator lurking in its downlands, now pouncing upon the Swazis or the Basutos, now threatening the British or the Boers. Everybody was scared of the Zulus, and the British in particular were nervous that some grand Zulu washing of the spears might trigger off a native rising throughout South Africa.” Frere demanded the Zulus disband their armies and their belligerent way of life—and when they did not, the British pursued their own belligerent aims, marching into Zululand in what, in Morris's apposite words, “composed a pattern of action that was to become almost compulsory in the later campaigns of the British Empire—the opening tragedy, the heroic redemption, the final crushing victory.”
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In the Zulu War of 1879, Isandhlwana was the opening tragedy, Rorke's Drift the heroic redemption, and Ulundi the final crushing victory.

The British troops were under the command of Lord Chelmsford—generally considered the goat of the war, he was nonetheless a gentleman
in every sense. His goal was simple: the Zulus must be brought to battle so they could be crushed. Marching boldly into Zululand—or as boldly as he could given his slow, lengthy wagon train of supplies—Chelmsford divided his invading force into three columns. Though well-informed about the Zulus' combat prowess and tactics, Chelmsford believed the bigger problem was luring them into battle: if that could be done, no Zulu army could possibly defeat the British, however small the British force.

That proved true at Rorke's Drift—a Zululand version of the Alamo, though with a happy ending for the defenders, with 150 Britons and colonials holding off a force of 4,000 Zulus—but it was preceded by the Battle of Isandhlwana, one of the greatest disasters in the annals of British imperial warfare. Chelmsford took 2,500 men, chasing a Zulu diversion, while leaving 1,700 men—British troops, South African volunteers, native levies—in an unlaagered, unentrenched camp on the plains of Isandlwhana, where they were overrun by 20,000 ferocious Zulus. The Zulus left behind them a field of carnage: more than 1,300 British dead; almost every corpse desecrated, slit open, guts stamped by Zulu feet, some beheaded, others degenitaled, some merely scalped or dejawed, two British drummer boys hung on meat hooks. Chelmsford returned to a burnt-out camp of stinking corpses, including more dead officers than had been lost at Waterloo; and more than a thousand rifles and hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition were now in Zulu hands.

The British government—which had not authorized the attack on Zululand—was shocked at the catastrophe and sent General Sir Garnet Wolseley to save the day; Chelmsford, however, was equally keen to save his reputation. As Wolseley arrived at Durban, Chelmsford pressed an attack on the Zulu king Cetshwayo's royal kraal at Ulundi. He was determined to crush the Zulus in open battle so that there could be no doubt they were well and truly beaten. Formed into the classic British square, Chelmsford's 4,000
troops met the attack of 15,000 Zulus and sent them reeling. Ulundi lay open for Chelmsford, who set it ablaze. Honor redeemed, he finally heeded Wolseley's orders and relinquished command. The Zulu kingdom was broken, but, as ever, it had been a close run thing.