6. AFRICA

Africans in Europe

In Charles II’s time there was talk of an English expedition to the Guinea coast, to be led by Prince Rupert; it was abandoned, for one reason because of blood-curdling rumours about the natives, ‘a hellish people’ with poisoned arrows who ate their prisoners, and about terrifying monsters in the interior.¹ Africa – the Africa of the Negro, the ‘black Moor’ or blackamoor as Elizabethans called him by contrast with the ‘white Moor’ of the northern fringe – was already reputed the Dark Continent. There was a Dutch colony at the Cape, and older Portuguese settlements on the coasts chiefly exporting slaves; otherwise Africa was unknown, as most of it was long to remain, or known only by the kind of tales that Defoe wove together in 1720 in his Captain Singleton. The first Africans his imaginary party of castaways fell in with on their journey across the continent from east to west were ‘an ignorant, ravenous, brutish sort of people, even worse than the natives of any other country that we had seen’,² and the rest were little different. Only the white men’s muskets cleared a way through them. As the slave-trade grew and prospered, it suited Europe to think Africa so unmitigatedly barbarous that no removal from it could worsen the lot of its inhabitants.

While his homeland was still unknown, the Negro himself could be met with over most of the world, nearly always as slave or freedman; over the Americas since the sixteenth century, over the Arab and Muslim world since before Islam began. Two Negroes were in Captain Cook’s crew when he set out to explore the South Seas, though they perished wretchedly on the way.³ Some of the earliest Chinese interpreters employed by the English at Canton – strange go-betweens of East and West – were African runagates from Portuguese Macao.⁴ At the Mikado’s first reception of foreign envoys a young prince displayed a childish eagerness to be shown a black man; another preferred the sight of a European cat.5 Not even the Jews have gone through such wanderings and experiences up and down the world.

Europe itself had a sprinkling of Africans, besides the many assimilated into the population of southern Portugal where their influence on the physical type still struck visitors in the nineteenth century.⁶ In the eighteenth century there were believed to be several thousands in London, and sales were advertised and rewards offered for absconders until slavery on British soil was ended by the Mansfield judgment of 1772.⁷ An aura of servitude clung to Africans as a race, finding such expression as the Amsterdam inn-sign on which a Negro in chains crouched at the feet of a pipe-smoking young white merchant.⁸ It took a softened, stylized form in the vogue, which has left many quaint memorials in Dresden china,⁹ of African flunkeys or page-boys in great houses. A multitude of black faces may at times repel white people (and equally the converse), but a black face here and there was attractively exotic, and set off the powdered hair and satin gowns of the company as the ladies’ patches did their cheeks. An urbanized aristocracy wants its servants very distinctly marked off from it, as a different species of humanity, and an African in European finery met this requirement perfectly. In 1748 a Lieutenant Bemish brought home a black boy, ‘a good-natured child, about ten years old’, to present to Admiral Boscawen’s lady, who felt she could not civilly decline, especially as the boy had been handsomely rigged out in her livery.¹⁰ A black attendant stands behind Josephine in David’s painting of her court circle.

Individuals could win esteem by more than picturesqueness. A Duke of Buckingham recorded in a polemic against Catholicism that some of its doctrinal fallacies were readily detected by a young African of his household.¹¹ Dr Johnson’s servant Frank enjoys a modest celebrity in English literary annals. Early in the next century Mrs Cappe, widow of an Evangelical clergyman, wrote in the highest terms of her servant John Hacket, a Negro born free in Jamaica who made his own way to London; he attended her daughters through a hazardous voyage from Italy, giving proof of devoted loyalty and presence of mind. He had taught himself to read the Bible. Yet he was ‘one of that cruelly treated, and unjustly despised race, of whom it has been disputed, whether they should be reckoned as beings of the same species’. ‘Generous fire, and lively animation’, were among the qualities Mrs Cappe ascribed to them.12 If a torrid climate engendered torrid emotions, as was conventionally assumed, the African might be expected to have the fieriest temperament of all. Men like Hacket, unconscious missionaries of their race, must have helped to sustain antislavery ardour through the long struggle for abolition. They were ancestors too of a long line of African characters, sympathetically if not always flatteringly drawn, in English fiction, where there are few equivalent figures from India or China.

Africans in the Americas

Schopenhauer refuted pantheism by pointing out the absurdity of any God transforming himself into a world where on an average day six million slaves received sixty million blows.¹³ In the history of Negro slavery the extraordinary thing is the ability of the race to survive, though myriads of individuals perished; it lacked the faculty which Chinese exiles owed to a more complex social evolution of mastering a new environment and rising in it. It was the endurance of the African, where other enslaved races sank under the white man’s burdens, that made him so profitable; while his weakness in collective organization in his own land made him an easy prey. It warped his masters, Arab or Turk, Spaniard or Englishman, as much as it degraded him; it conditioned western Europe to think of all ‘native’ peoples as destined bondsmen.

Spanish and Portuguese apologists have often maintained that their forms of slavery in the Americas were softened by Catholicism, that their laws held the Negro a human being whereas those of Protestant British or Dutch treated him as a chattel. In reality what regulated the degree of exploitation was not the owner’s nationality or religion but the extent to which there was a lucrative market for the products of slave labour.¹⁴ Thus the slave code of 1840 in Cuba, still under the sway of Catholic Spain, was far harsher than the earlier one; in Brazil conditions were often vile.15 Much the same might be said as to degrees of exploitation of serfs in eastern Europe. It may be added that whether slavery continued in the nineteenth century did not depend in any simple way on whether areas of the New World were still under European rule or had become independent. But in all cases moral growth and idealism were required before abolition could come about.¹⁶ Even where economic changes made slavery less profitable, it would not end automatically; any social system gathers round it habits and prejudices not merely money-grubbing. In England humanitarian agitation was a powerful agent in the suppression of the slave trade in 1807 and of slavery in the colonies in 1838. In Spain it was nearly a century slower to develop.

Opponents of slavery, like all reformers, were often portrayed as maudlin sentimentalists. What the sturdy sensible Briton thought can be gathered from Tom Cringle’s Log, an autobiographical novel about a roistering career in the West Indies in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Slavetrading, this hard-headed Scotsman admitted, was very wrong, but slavery was what most Negroes were designed for. He thought of them with an exceedingly rough sort of good humour; a practical joke in which someone let fly with a hard apple that landed ‘bash on the blackamoor’s obtuse snout’ made him hold his sides.¹⁷ Having pictured Jamaican society as made up of ‘a miserable, squalid, half-fed, ill-dothed, overworked race’ of blacks and ‘an unwholesome-looking crew of saffron-faced tyrants’, he was agreeably surprised at what he found, even if he did witness ‘not a few rum scenes’. It was the same in Cuba, where the slaves all looked to him ‘deucedly well cared for, and fat, and contented’.¹⁸ Conditions were not so bad there in his time as a little later, when there was a long series of slave risings ferociously suppressed by Spanish governors. An English traveller about the same time reported that planters in Demerara, one of whose daughters he married, behaved very decently, but a hundred pages later had to regret that their Negroes were rebelling.¹⁹

Altogether there were dozens of slave risings up and down the West Indies. The colony whose slaves, aided by special circumstances, seized freedom was Haiti. When the French Revolution started in 1789 this western division of the old Hispaniola was a French colony, the eastern (since 1844 the Dominican Republic) still Spanish. Haiti was growing sugar under pressure, and the death-rate among the slaves was exceptionally high. In 1791 they revolted, and ‘the vapouring crowds of negroes’, as a British historian characteristically terms them,20 found a leader in Toussaint L’Ouverture, one of the greatest of all Africans. It swelled into one of the two greatest Black rebellions in history, the other being that of the slaves brought into southern Iraq to drain marshes for the Arabs a thousand years before; and these two along with the Spartacus rising in Roman Italy may be counted the three most tremendous slave revolts in all history.

France like England had an anti-slavery movement, and in 1793 when the Robespierrists were in power in Paris they proclaimed an end to colonial slavery forty-five years before Britain. The planters refused to accept this, and in 1794 the idealists of the French Revolution were guillotined and replaced by the profiteers, who eventually found the boss they needed in Napoleon. In 1802 he sent an army to reconquer Haiti, with the covert intention of restoring slavery. Toussaint was defeated, treacherously sent to France, and thrown into a dungeon where he perished wretchedly in 1803. This earned him Wordsworth’s sonnet, the noblest tribute ever paid by a European to an African. But it was typical of Europe that Napoleon was far less often reproached, then and afterwards, for his treatment of the Negro hero than for his hasty execution of an insignificant Bourbon princeling the year after Toussaint’s death.

No savagery that has been recorded of Africans anywhere could outdo some of the acts of the French in their efforts to regain control of the island.²¹ Disease helped the defenders to wipe them out. But anything like a constructive programme had vanished with Toussaint; and Haiti was starting its free life under the most adverse conditions, cut off from any counsel or comfort, hated by the colonists all round. ‘Every white slave-owner, in Jamaica, Cuba, or Texas, lived in dread of another Toussaint L’Ouverture.’²² In 1804, the year when Napoleon made himself Emperor of the French, Dessalines – an African born – declared himself emperor of Haiti. He was the first of a set of sanguinary chiefs whom Europeans could depict as examples of innate African ferocity, but who can as plausibly be thought imitators of the white men they had known. These white men left behind them an infusion of their blood as well as of their habits, and a great deal of Haiti’s anarchical feuding was a contest between Negro and mulatto.

A union with the other, mainly mulatto, half of the island, now freed from Spain, only lasted twenty years. Haiti continued to exist, a free black kingdom and then republic, but it accomplished little more, and made a standing target for satire. White visitors were apt to take the same malicious pleasure in the failure of these self-emancipated Africans to manage their own affairs, as today when they see African countries like the Congo fumbling and floundering. An early sightseer was ‘Tom Cringle’, who gleefully described a general dilapidation and decay, the people looking much less well off than ‘the blackies of Jamaica’, the once rich sugar plantations derelict.23 He met the Counts of Lemonade and Marmalade, and made great fun of this comic peerage.²⁴ Nearly all the able-bodied men seemed to have been drafted into the army of the tyrant king, Henri Christophe, who reigned from 1812 to 1820. His rival Pétion, called by admirers the black Washington, made a better impression on Cringle, largely because though very dark he had European features and had lived in Europe.²⁵

H. H. Prichard, a geographer who was in Haiti at the beginning of the next century, gave his book on it the title, plainly intended to shock, Where Black Rules White: in fact there were very few whites to be ruled. He was a man of conventional outlook for whom the French Revolutionaries, and particularly the Amis des Noirs or emancipationists, were the ‘madmen of liberty’.²⁶ Slaves might have been ill-treated, but ‘negroes have far duller nerves and are less susceptible to pain than Europeans’²⁷ – a thought that consoled many Europeans for the sufferings of Africans as well as of Chinese. He had a good word for Toussaint, but considered him no evidence for ‘the pronegro line of argument’: indeed he could scarcely bring himself to believe that Toussaint was a pure Negro.²⁸ Other Europeans have been unwilling to believe that Jesus was a Jew; and when Prichard wrote Africa was being partitioned, and had to be thought of as deserving its fate. He related the lurid tales of King Christophe, but had a certain esteem for him as a ruler who knew how to strike awe into his subjects: ‘the will of a strong man usually holds the key to any situation’.29 Strength of any kind was a virtue to the imperial age. In Kipling’s philosophy East and West might come together at odd moments when ‘two strong men’ – not two good men – met.

Marmalade had risen to Duke, but there had been no similar ascent of the nation: Prichard saw only sloth, disorder, cruelty, the uniforms of a preposterous army, economic torpor. All that still lingered from his golden age of white rule was the dregs of that French culture or way of life whose spell, able to outlive the worst-hated French dominion, has often puzzled and exasperated Englishmen. ‘With his whole heart and soul,’ Prichard wrote distastefully of the Haitian with a smattering of education, ‘he admires France … Moreover, he regards the rest of the world through French eyes.’³⁰ If so he saw it through a glass, darkly, for apparently Boers were imagined to be rebel blacks, and their successes against the British applauded accordingly.³¹

Not many years later Van Dongen the Fauve painter made a full-length portrait of a Haitian ambassador standing uneasily elegant in glittering costume before the allegorical figures of a ship of the old days under full sail and a small Negro carrying a load on his head; an enigmatic vision of past and present.³² Haiti’s slaves had freed themselves and become a nation, if a very poor one; those of Jamaica and other colonies were emancipated from above, like the serfs in Russia, however much in both cases revolt or fear of revolt may have helped to speed emancipation. In both cases, and in the USA, the result was legal freedom without political or economic freedom, and strife continuing on new lines. In Jamaica the whites complained of their plantations going to the dogs because Negroes would not work on their terms, and imported Asian coolie labour; race relations worsened, until in 1865 disturbances broke out, some white men were killed, and Governor Eyre retaliated vengefully. There was heated controversy in England, where Carlyle of course and other prominent men more surprisingly made Eyre a national hero. It was a fresh fit of the hysteria stirred up a few years earlier by the Indian Mutiny, but it was also one of the few occasions when England was roused to serious debate on how other races ought to be treated.

Tensions became less acute after 1865 in the British West Indies. Most of these were turned into Crown Colonies, losing the archaic self-government that meant government by the white settlers – here as in India, or later in Rhodesia, a far worse lot than officials from Britain mostly were, and slow to shed the ‘nigger-driving’ mentality of slave days. But this was still not an environment where Negroes could find their feet and win respect. Visitors, and readers at home, contemplated them with mild amusement, as irresponsible loafers in the sun. An easy-going Anglican clergyman who officiated out there for a while soon decided that ‘Black people are nothing but children’, and saw no point in being censorious about the lax unions that passed for marriage among them. An experience he enjoyed was a funeral at which he read the service with a sexton dressed in loin-cloth and top-hat.33

Away from British territory a Jamaican Negro like James Kempton, flogged by some ruffians in Peru during a time of anarchy, enjoyed the protection of the British flag; but only as a third-rate citizen, since he served no diplomatic purpose like Don Pacifico, the Gibraltar Jew of Palmerston’s ‘Civis Romanus’ oration. The Foreign Office asked for £100 on Kempton’s behalf; it settled for £50, and Lord Salisbury scribbled in his humorous vein: ‘The negro will ask to be flogged again.’³⁴

The Slave Trade and its Suppression

The Negroes whose toil laid the foundations of the New World came mostly from two regions of western Africa, the Portuguese settlement of Angola and the ‘Slave Coast’ or southern rim of the great westerly bulge. Along this coast Europeans, without being in occupation of it, could easily come by all the slaves they required on a basis of fair exchange, rum and gunpowder for men and women. African simplicity was not that of a garden of Eden: many of its inhabitants were as willing to sell one another for a bottle as ancient Britons or Russians once were. War-captives, or offenders condemned for crime or witchcraft, were brought down to the coast and disposed of by the chiefs there to the foreign dealers. It is a question worth asking whether this turmoil of man-hunting was the result of the foreign demand, or whether the prime cause was over-population, supply stimulating demand. In either case the merchant from Liverpool or Glasgow was no robber, not always even a receiver of stolen goods, and had a clear conscience. It was left to low Spanish, Portuguese, or half-caste slavers to go about catching their wares themselves. Reputable dealers were often on excellent terms with the coastal chiefs, arranged for their sons to go to school in England, and accepted temporary wives from them.

Behind this cordiality the true reaction of Europe and Africa to each other was different. ‘The Natives are cheated … in every possible way,’ wrote the former slave-trader John Newton after his religious conversion, and the more contact they had with the white man the more ‘jealous, insidious and revengeful’ they grew. Each race looked on the other as ‘consummate villains’, and a Negro taxed with dishonesty would sometimes retort: ‘What! do you think I am a White Man?’35 Baron Munchausen, some of whose most surprising adventures befell him in Africa – that ‘prodigious field of discovery’³⁶ – once met a party of Negroes who had seized European shipping and started a trade in white slaves for work on plantations in cold latitudes. They had contracted ‘a barbarous prejudice … that the white people have no souls !’³⁷

That black people had only second-rate souls, and that they were better off as slaves, even in Turkey, than in their own land, was a conviction that faded very slowly from the European mind. Albert Smith strolling about the slave-market at Constantinople felt it must be a blessing to these poor degraded creatures to be provided with a master and regular work.³⁸ He himself might have blinked and gibbered after being marched for a month in an Arab slave-gang. Thackeray was shocked here, less so at Cairo where he fell back on the comforting stereotype of Africans as happy, carefree creatures, shackled in body but spared the heavy load of thought and doubt,³⁹ the real white-man’s-burden as it felt to those who suffered from it and envied the artless classes or races that had never eaten of the tree of knowledge. He was heartened by a holiday festivity in the swarming black suburb of Alexandria. ‘Every one of these jolly faces was on the broad grin.’40

But officially England, and emotionally many Englishmen, were committed to regarding the slave trade as the world’s deepest abomination, which England’s duty was not merely to renounce but to persuade or compel others to renounce. Burton stood in the slave-market at Mecca and silently vowed to strike the death-blow at the traffic in eastern Africa.⁴¹ To Ruskin the greatest painting of the greatest artist of the age was Turner’s Slave Ship, exhibited in 1840. It showed an enormous Atlantic swell at the end of a storm, littered with bodies thrown overboard, and lurid sunset colours falling ‘like the shadow of death upon the guilty ship … its thin masts written upon the sky in lines of blood’.⁴²

Pressure of humanitarian opinion was important here too. There was no reason of pure economics why slavery should not continue, hitched on to capitalism. The US gave up the slave trade only a year after Britain, but John Bull’s European competitors, who never believed him to be quite so transparently honest as he liked to be thought, suspected that his aim was to deprive them of an advantage which he himself no longer needed. Through most of the nineteenth century British diplomacy was entangled in vexatious disputes arising out of its attempts to make effective the pledges to abandon slave-trading obtained at the end of the Napoleonic wars. Anti-slavery societies in England kept on prodding the Foreign Office, which would have liked to forget about the matter, to prod the worst backsliders, Spain and Portugal.

Britain, France and the US worked out measures for patrolling the western coasts of Africa, and British tax-payers plumed themselves on the part played by their ships; the navy’s popularity owed much to this. Kingston’s midshipmen threw themselves with enthusiasm into the work, and held in horror the degenerate Spanish or Portuguese traffickers. ‘To an Englishman no class of men are more hateful.’⁴³ All this could make for self-righteousness, and a belief, not quite extinct today, in Britannia’s right to ‘police the seas’ anywhere. It gave John Bull a sort of treasury of merit, which he felt able to draw on whenever assailed by qualms about items like opium or misgivings about his moral supereminence.

As late as 1888 The Times alleged that slave-running still flourished along eastern Africa and across the Indian Ocean, under French as well as Arab auspices.44 All round Africa the hunt for the slaver led to closer acquaintance with the continent; it also paved the way for occupation of parts of it. Formerly the argument in defence of the trade, that removal from Africa was the Negro’s only chance of redemption, had been repeated by men as prominent as Nelson: now that he was no longer to be carried off to civilization, it might be right that civilization should be carried to him. Sympathy, which he now received, seldom implied respect. Progress was Europe’s watchword, and Africa far more even than Asia appeared incapable of it. Its stagnation at a low material level was a fact, which can be tentatively explained in terms of a slow drift of population from north to south, away from the Mediterranean and its culture, over an unwelcoming land-mass where it was too thinly spread to develop a technology equal to some of its arts.⁴⁵ These arts found few to appreciate them among Europeans in Africa, one of whom spoke for nearly all when he dismissed its music as ‘those unearthly noises which in Africa pass current for song’.⁴⁶ Only late in the nineteenth century did artistic Europe begin to discover Africa, its sculpture first and foremost.

Meanwhile African backwardness was accounted for in sundry ways. One was to think of the black man as descended from Ham, the black son of Noah; Europeans were still reading their Old Testaments, and deriving from that ancient oriental source notions as bizarre as any they met with in Dahomey or Swaziland. Missionaries were often advocates of annexation. They were sometimes mixed up with trade; but what weighed more was the desire to see the weak protected against the strong, above all against the slave-raider. They showed best when denouncing the evil done by lawless European enterprise. Once European government was established, and with it a more orderly exploitation, they usually felt obliged as in India to acquiesce in whatever its policies might be.

Europeans in Western Africa

Those who talked of the descendants of Ham had in mind the pure Negro type they were familiar with in America; that is, the West African, less modified by admixture of northern or ‘Caucasoid’ blood than the other two main families, the Nilotic and the Bantu.47 He was the African they thought they knew best, but thanks to the distorting slave-relationship may really have understood least. Physically he was the darkest of hue among the main African races, the one most unlike themselves and therefore most readily assumed to be inferior to themselves. This was enough to give West Africa a ‘darker’ look than most of the continent. Its crocodiles and jungles, its fatal diseases and steaming heat, strengthened the impression. Our feelings about a country are always coloured by its climate; English weather has given the Englishman much of his reputation for sullenness. Mungo Park, it is true, having returned in 1799 to his native Scotland after his first search for the Niger, thought better of it, and decided as he told Scott that ‘he would rather brave Africa with all its horrors’ than stay here.⁴⁸ He went back to perish.

There were well-established kingdoms along the Guinea coast, but none of an inviting aspect. What did most to bring Ashanti, Benin, Dahomey into the news were their annual rituals of human sacrifice, and the king of Dahomey’s regiment of Amazons. West African life was permeated too by the activities of secret societies with their weird ju-ju, harder to fathom and easier to shudder at than the secret societies of China. But amid all that was fearsome or grotesque in the region, the after-effects of the slave trade were the worst. It was the missionaries who felt most concern about them, and who had a big share in forming opinion in Europe because few other white men except desperadoes ventured out here.

The evil that the slave-dealers had done lived after them, as the first pioneers of the Church of Scotland Mission found when they started work in 1846 at Calabar. A Parliamentary committee had been told that this port, where trade with Europe was three centuries old, was the most barbarous spot in Africa; human skulls were kicked about in the streets.49 Coastal chiefs who had been thrown up by the slave trade, and ruled and robbed by virtue of their Western fire-arms, went by such Haitian-flavoured names as Adam Duke or King Eyo Honesty. The West has displayed a perverse talent for making friends with the worst scoundrels of other lands. ‘These African Nabobs drank champagne copiously’, we read,⁵⁰ but older habits of royalty were kept up too. One that it cost the missionaries long years of effort to check was the killing of scores of slaves at the funerals of great men, to attend them into the next world.⁵¹ Slaves were still being brought down the rivers from the interior, and since they could no longer be exported except by stealth they were perhaps slaughtered more wastefully than in former times. To the missionaries all African women seemed to be treated little better than slaves. In the Calabar area female circumcision was the rule, widows were virtually outcasts, all twin children were destroyed. A long struggle had to be waged for the right of women converts of the poorer class to appear in public decently clothed.⁵² In Europe women were starting their long struggle in the opposite direction.

European contact was still for the most part making things worse rather than better. Low-grade gin and rum, the chief imports, circulated far inland and led to ‘wild excesses’.⁵³ Life was very wild along the rivers when ‘Trader Horn’ went out, about 1871, a young fellow fresh from peaceful Britain, to sink or swim among slave-raiders, ivory-hunters, and cannibals. Of the lot he found the cannibals the most respectable, the men good trackers and workers and the women exceptionally faithful – whereas many of the headmen who sold him rubber would ‘trot out’ their wives and bid him help himself.⁵⁴ Winwood Reade’s book on Africa came out in 1872; three years earlier he was exploring the Niger. About its people he was in one sense a pessimist, in another an optimist. Africa as it was, thrown on its own resources, he thought frightful; Africa as it might be, with civilizing influence from outside, full of promise. To him the more romantic features of native life were only varnish, the reality beneath was terror. ‘It is impossible to describe, or even to imagine, the tremulous condition of the savage mind; yet the traveller can see from their aspect and manners that they dwell in a state of never-ceasing dread.’55

Even he could look back on the slave trade as a painful kind of escape from this darkness, and he thought it would be no bad thing if Turkey, banished from Europe, came to reign over Africa instead, for Turkish rule was ‘perfection itself’ compared with any in Africa.⁵⁶ Given a chance, Africans could go ahead. ‘The negroes are imitative in an extraordinary degree, and imitation is the first principle of progress.’ Whether their endowments were in all respects equal to those of Europeans was a question ‘idle and unimportant’; there was no lack of useful things they could do well.⁵⁷ Reade thought highly of the progress being made, with the help of missionary schools, in Sierra Leone, the settlement for freed slaves. Its people called themselves Englishmen, and he welcomed them as such. ‘However ludicrous it may seem to hear a negro boasting about Lord Nelson and Waterloo … it shows that he possesses a kind of emulation.’⁵⁸

How much of the terror of daily life in West Africa was a shadow-play projected by the European mind can only be guessed; but the aptitudes Reade found in the Negro must have been moulded by traditional African society. Anthropologists were to piece together a picture of this as an existence with its own normality, not one of insensate violence. More recently African writers still close enough to the lingering past have begun bringing it more vividly to life for us. A remarkable novel by Chinua Achebe carries us into one of those Nigerian villages that the missionaries were peering at through jungle glooms. It is a place where a boy can be murdered as an act of revenge against another village; a woman whose twin children have been taken from her is one of the first to join the Christians when they come. Yet it is also a place with orderly standards of good and ill, cordial neighbourship, athletic sports, music, palm wine and democratic self-rule, all knit together by clan spirit and by a strange, sometimes cruel, religious cult. When this guardian cult is desecrated by a rash convert the community is plunged in horror. ‘ It seemed as if the very soul of the tribe wept for a great evil that was coming – its own death.’⁵⁹

All over Africa there was a twilight of old gods who had served men faithfully enough in their time. The friendly Bushman who guided Laurens van der Post to the shrine in the Slippery Hills said to him mournfully when it was time to leave: ‘The spirits of the hills are not what they were, Master … Ten years ago they would have killed you all for coming.’60

France was the country promptest to occupy territories in West Africa. Besides completing the conquest of Algeria, Napoleon III built up some old coastal settlements into the colony of Senegal, with Dakar for its capital and a force of native auxiliaries who helped French power to expand by stages into other regions. Dahomey was taken in 1894. It was in the first stage that France was most deliberately setting out to transform a part of the Dark Continent, to bring it into the charmed circle of civilization. Mid-century Europe was more enlightened in some ways than either the earlier Europe of the time when British conquest in India began, or the later, when the general scramble for Africa took place. Senegal’s first governor, Faidherbe, won praise for his work, not from Frenchmen alone. The French ideal, inherited from the Revolution, was of equality of rights and laws for all subjects of France, incorporation in a single commonweal. In Senegal, as half a century before in the Rhineland, France looked with the courage of this conviction for men capable of being developed to the highest human level, in other words of being turned into Frenchmen.

It was a new version of an old optimism about the perfectibility of man; but this called for something like perfection in the teacher, and it has been part of France’s history to alternate more widely than its neighbours between exalted ideal and cynical realism. In 1848 and 1870 citizenship was conferred on the Senegalese so far brought under French rule, with the right to send a deputy to the Assembly in Paris. Subsequently tests were imposed, which very few Africans were able to pass.⁶¹ For this small minority the price of initiation into French culture might well be loss of any real contact with their own people.⁶² Unlike Hindus or Muslims they had no religious anchor strong enough to hold against the tides of the new age. For the majority French rule meant in practice an administration like that of other empires, more straightforwardly authoritarian as time went on and the dream of assimilation faded. A type of district officer that Englishmen could admire grew up: ‘paternal towards the natives, strict yet benevolent, reactionary yet understanding.’63

Africans without citizen rights were liable to corvée labour, and all, educated or not, were reckoned fit for the highest duty and honour of the nineteenth-century European, compulsory service in the army. France after 1870 was short of manpower to face Germany with, and conscripted Africans to fill the gap. Conscription was one of those new forms of slavery that Europe was inventing for itself and others in place of the old. It took a heavy toll of health and family happiness in more backward European countries like Spain or Russia, and in Africa the toll must have been far heavier.⁶⁴ Senegalese and other Negro troops were put to good use on the western front in 1914–18; they were sometimes unsteady under heavy fire, but their habit of killing prisoners on the spot helped to unnerve the Germans.⁶⁵

Frenchmen in their colonies, unlike Britons, have prided themselves on knowing how to get on cordially with their subjects. A good deal of mingling, on diverse levels, did develop. A factor that promoted it was language; African languages, not in French colonies alone, changed bewilderingly from district to district, so that a lingua franca was now necessary, and French or English pidgin could provide it.⁶⁶ As to the quality of the mixing, there may be some general truth in the surmise of a novelist in search of copy, at a party at Libreville, that what he was seeing was ‘the worst whites mixing with the worst blacks’.⁶⁷ Possibly there is always an attraction between the best elements of two races, and between the worst. This intercourse is another thing we have begun to learn about in late years from the African side. Oyono’s novel about the French Cameroons gives an extremely unpleasant picture of it, and of sexual relations between the races in particular. He can easily be believed when he says that the rulers knew their subjects far less than they were known by them. ‘The eyes that live in the native location strip the whites naked. The whites on the other hand go about blind.’⁶⁸ An uneasy awareness of this, an irritated impulse to turn the tables, must have helped to push European colonists into a great many arbitrary acts of force.

From 1844 there was a British protectorate over the Niger coast, and missionaries favoured extensions of it. Mary Slessor served as vice-consul as well as missionary at her river station. The government was not desirous of going further, because prospects of gain were limited. Penetration inland was left to business enterprise, chiefly to the chartered company that in 1886 became the Royal Niger Company. Englishmen trusted mightily in legitimate trade, as Frenchmen did in culture, to bleach the darkness out of Africa; and the substitution of palm-oil for slaves was an improvement, even if commerce and civilization did not prove so exactly congruent as earlier Victorians thought them. What roused most interest at home was always a spirited campaign, with some well-known regiment taking part. There could be no effective resistance by village republics, but only from the kingdoms, which therefore caught the eye and were regarded as more typical of West African life than they really were.

The first Ashanti war, in what is now Ghana, was fought in 1821, the most spectacular in 1873, when the Ashantis put fifteen or twenty thousand men in the field who were admitted to be ‘brave and warlike’, though savage – whereas the Hausa auxiliaries whom the British were trying to lick into shape were at first so timid and superstitious that they would hang their guns up in trees and pray to them.69 Not all races have been equally eager to accept the white Prometheus’s gift of gunpowder. There were Highlanders in the fight, and a Scots town honoured their commander with a banquet at which the Provost held forth on ‘the spread of civilization and the prevention and prohibition of slavery and cruelty’.⁷⁰

The Gold Coast was annexed in 1874, the Ashanti state inland not until 1896. King Prempeh was then removed; he had swelled in British minds into an ogre, an image of all African barbarism. Many years later he came back briefly into the limelight when the Prince of Wales was touring Africa soon after the Great War. The illustrated book of the tour dwelt on ‘the indescribably abhorrent condition of Kumasi’, the Ashanti capital, in former days, and introduced to its readers a Prempeh who had seen the light and been allowed to return on a comfortable pension, a good Christian now and ‘an active participant in Church and municipal work’.71 This was as good as Nero or Bluebeard turning deacon, and if a Prempeh could be so marvellously changed by British influence, surely all Africa could. But the book was careful to explain that while the ‘white man’s burden in West Africa’ included the duty of training its people for self-government, that goal was still far off: they had ‘ accepted the superficial attributes of civilization, but would straightway shed them and relapse and revert to primitive savagery if their white mentors withdrew’.⁷²

In 1900 the British government stepped into the Niger Company’s shoes, and modern Nigeria took shape. Achebe’s novel is a reminder that the coming of European authority to a Nigerian district might he a painful intrusion, the worse for being accompanied by African policemen of alien tribes, inclined to make the most of their power. The irreconcilable who kills one of these and takes his own life is a truly tragic figure. To the well-meaning commissioner he is simply a paragraph for a book to be written on ‘The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger’.⁷³

Village democracy and unity was Africa’s most valuable social heritage, though by itself it fostered as in Asia an over-rigid conservatism. It was something unfamiliar to Westerners, who did not know how to work with it or through it. Instead there was much recourse in British Africa to ‘indirect rule’, widely under discussion by this date among all colonial administrators. It meant delegation of authority to native notables, even if chiefs or headmen had to be manufactured for the purpose as landlords had been in parts of India. The system made for inertia just as the old village did, but lacked its compensating virtues.⁷⁴ In northern Nigeria, where it went furthest, there were petty autocrats ready to be taken under the British wing. There as in the Soudan, Islam had been carried down into middle Africa by better-armed invaders. Their chiefs, the Fulani emirs, were colourful personages who could be collected, with their horsemen in antique chain armour, to grace durbars, small imitations of those held in India. Always fond of ceremonial, Englishmen shared with their Indian subjects an old-world taste for such displays, and adopted the Hindi tamasha, spectacle, into their language.

Europeans in Eastern Africa

One of Burton’s journeys, in 1854–5, carried him inland from the north-east coast through Somalia to the capital of another small Muslim despot, Harar. He was the first European to reach it, and he lay down for his first night’s sleep rejoicing in the thought that he was ‘under the roof of a bigoted prince whose least word was death; amongst a people who detest foreigners … and the fated instrument of their future downfall’.75

He had travelled through an abode of bloodshed and rapine, of mixed population – Galla, Harari, Somali – and clan vendettas. On this side of Africa too slave-raiding was rampant, Arab dealers foraging far afield or buying captives from the more warlike tribes who seized them. Even warfare had grown sordid, brutal, unchivalrous. ‘“Conscience”, I may observe,’ wrote Burton, ‘does not exist in Eastern Africa, and “Repentance” expresses regret for missed opportunities of mortal crime.’⁷⁶ There were few Noble Savages in Burton’s world. He thought archaic peoples in the mass more mercenary than civilized man. It was no use punishing them for outrages by killing a few of them; ‘The fine is the only true way to produce a lasting impression upon their heads and hearts.’⁷⁷ These denizens of Somalia were as little refined in body as in soul. ‘The men were wild as ourang-outangs,’ he says of a Danakil caravan, ‘and the women fit only to flog cattle.’⁷⁸

A man like Burton roved for the sake of adventure, and because he was out of place in a Europe where the thrill of danger was being standardized into wars of mass armies, as it were gigantic Cook’s Tours where the tame citizen felt adventurous at the word of command. It is revealing of his distaste for his homeland, and especially for its plebeians, that when he occasionally lets fall an indulgent remark about savages he is comparing them with his fellow-countrymen. He got a better reception from the wild inhabitants of one place than he would have expected in a mining district in England, or in ‘enlightened Scotland’ where any stranger was a target for hoots or brickbats. ‘The ridiculous Somali peruke of crimsoned sheep-skin’ was a shade less ‘barbarous’ than the headgear of Wales.79 But to lend his rovings and his disgusts with mankind a meaning – over and above his genuine hatred of the slave trade – he had to cultivate the semi-mystical creed of empire; he had to convince himself and his readers that Britain somehow needed colonies, and that there were races all over Asia and Africa that needed Britain. Somalis were a case in point: they were not incapable of progress, but had ‘lapsed into barbarism by reason of their political condition – the rude equality of the Hottentots’.⁸⁰ A democratic state of society thus became for Burton a positive vice, not unconnected with another cardinal failing, a ‘worse than Asiatic idleness’.⁸¹ This remark may be set beside one by an administrator in an African colony later on: ‘The natives think we are lazy dogs, but very clever at making the black man do our work.’⁸²

Harar, which Burton looked forward to seeing under the British flag, forty years later was absorbed into Abyssinia, that still half-mythical country, or confusion of petty principalities. It was an old outpost of Christendom, but its outlandish Church, like the related Coptic Church in Egypt, awoke little feeling of kinship in Europe. To Shakespeare the word ‘Ethiopian’ meant African, black, as ‘Habshi’ or Abyssinian had done for ages in India, and the usage was current in the US as late as the Civil War. Bruce the explorer was there in 1769; closely pressed by Boswell about the inhabitants’ colour he defined it as ‘tawny copper’. Abyssinia he called ‘a barbarous, mountainous country’.⁸³ It survived a British punitive expedition in 1868, a sort of African Afghanistan no one was sufficiently foolish to want until in 1896 Italy proved hungry and rash enough. By then a new ruler, Menelek II, was strengthening the country and expanding it into an Amhara empire; it was he who reduced Harar to a vassal position. (In 1964 Arnold Toynbee was shown the house there where Haile Selassie was educated as a boy by French missionaries.⁸⁴) W. S. Blunt was disgusted at the sight of mushroom Italy, only just freed from Austria, attacking ‘the oldest free people and kingdom in the world … and there was not a voice in Europe to cry shame ! All the English papers applauded.’85 European approval did not save the Italians from a resounding defeat at Adowa, one of Africa’s very few victories over Europe.

In 1857–8 Lieutenant Speke, in quest of the sources of the Nile, penetrated into Uganda. Down here he was in the midst of a population which he regarded as inferior to the Hamitic races of northern Africa. Two boys he met were ‘of the common negro breed … such as no one could love but their mothers’.⁸⁶ He was very much aware that conquering migrants had come down from the north, and was on the look-out for faces showing evidence of racial differences. Englishmen listened from the cradle to nonsense about Norman blood and Normal noses, and Speke was prepared to feel some faint affinity with an African aristocracy, a crude precursor of the European. He was never better pleased on his journey than in Karague, the territory of a well-featured king named Rumanika. ‘The farther we went in this country the better we liked it, as the people were all kept in good order’, and the ruler and his brother were ‘as unlike as they could be to the common order of the natives … They had fine oval faces, large eyes, and high noses, denoting the best blood of Abyssinia.’⁸⁷ At the equator Abyssinian blood looked comparatively blue.

Other travellers were struck by this superimposition of ‘higher’ stocks on ‘lower’, Africa’s substitute for higher and lower classes; Grogan, for instance, who crossed Africa from south to north at the end of the century. He contrasted the tall, well-built Awemba of one district with their Mambwe neighbours, ‘the ordinary, dirty, stunted, cringing or insolent, ill-fed type of Central Africa’. He saw the ruling Watutsi of Ruanda as ‘descendants of a great wave of Galla invasion’ from the north, and in Uganda the upper class of Galla origin shone by contrast with ‘the coarse, squat, ape-like appearance of the rabble’.⁸⁸ All this implied that the mass of Africans deserved to be ruled by men of higher race, and that European conquest would only mean for them a change to a better set of masters. In all these impressions there must have been a subjective bias. One of the best authorities on central Africa, Sir Harry Johnston, could detect no general variation of skin colour between ‘higher’ and ‘lower’.89 Europeans came from a society so permeated by class consciousness, and were so conditioned to the need of having social inferiors to look down on, that they were likely to magnify any analogous divisions in Africa, or to imagine them.

The Africans whom Speke saw most of, and who probably inspired many of his large generalizations, were the sort he picked up on the coast as porters: slaves, or vagrant ex-slaves, men tom from home and family and thrown on a callous world where to survive from day to day was the best they could hope for. A foreigner might have generalized in similar terms about the British character after employing a gang of Irish navvies. Speke gave the African of this type good marks for strength and endurance, but for no higher qualities. ‘Economy, care, or forethought never enters his head … A wonderful amount of loquacity, great risibility, but no stability – a creature of impulse – a grown child, in short.’ ‘Great forbearance, occasionally tinctured with a little fatherly severity’, was required in managing him.⁹⁰ What Speke understood by this we learn when we find that he often ordered a porter a hundred or more lashes.⁹¹

It would be interesting to know what his men thought about him. Ten of them ran away early on because they supposed white men to be cannibals and thought they were being taken into the bush to be devoured.⁹² This notion of the white man coming to eat up the black was widespread,⁹³ and may be allowed a degree of poetical truth at least. Livingstone found that many Africans believed the white man to come not from across the sea but out of the sea depths.⁹⁴ Even Rumanika, who turned out very sensible, was alarmed at Speke’s approach, thinking his visitors might be ‘some fearful monsters that were not quite human’.⁹⁵

Speke’s prescription for Africa was the same as Burton’s – British rule. Black men were improvident because they were ‘lazy’, and they were lazy because they lacked ‘a strong protecting government’.⁹⁶ The logic is equivocal, as if what Speke really meant was a strong coercive government, ready for fatherly severity. But any such distinction he would have called hair-splitting. After ages of stagnation the time had come when ‘the African must soon either step out from his darkness, or be superseded by a being superior to himself. Could a government be formed for them [sic] like ours in India, they would be saved; but without it, I fear there is very little chance.’97 In Buganda he saw and much disliked the most pretentious government this part of Africa had produced for itself. It was a state founded on conquest, and now degenerate. Mtesa, the kabaka or king, was a pampered youth of twenty-five, too feather-pated to want to hear any news of the outside world, but eager to borrow a pair of trousers too short for him, so that ‘his black feet and hands stuck out at the extremities as an organ-player’s monkey’s do’.⁹⁸ He was delighted to get his hands on some guns, and set about shooting his subjects for sport. Ministers or attendants were liable to be flogged or executed at any moment, for any reason or none. Mtesa’s wives stood in most danger of all:⁹⁹ he was a lady-killer in the most literal sense, but vacancies were quickly filled with new brides presented by fathers seeking his favour.

No doubt it was only a few years since adolescents were hanged in England for petty theft. Soldiers’ costumes in Buganda that Speke found absurd¹⁰⁰ were not more so than Europe’s busbies and shakoes; the lion-step or royal gait cannot have been more grotesque than the goose-step. Tyranny like Mtesa’s, moreover, was felt chiefly in a limited sphere round the royal hut. But this was the sphere that foreigners would draw most of their conclusions from. As everywhere in Afro-Asia they would be strongly affected by the sexual pattern they found, and this was bound to be most repulsive in the royal harems they saw or heard about, which all over Afro-Asia were mere private brothels. Speke pitied Mtesa’s women, and was amused or disgusted by the custom he met with here and elsewhere of royal wives being fattened to such dimensions that some could not stand unaided. One such beauty he was enterprising enough to take measurements of.¹⁰¹

Speke came home northward, by way of the Soudan, where Turk-Egyptian power was still expanding. It seemed hardly distinguishable from brigandage. He encountered it first in the shape of ‘a very black man, named Mahamed, in full Egyptian regimentals’, at the head of ‘a ragamuffin mixture of Nubians, Egyptians, and slaves of all sorts’, who insisted on embracing him.102 Before long the Soudan or its most warlike tribes, led by the Mahdi, rebelled. This might appear natural and laudable, but about the same time the British were occupying Egypt, and General Gordon’s death at Khartoum in 1885 gave a generation of Englishmen an emotional symbol of civilization stabbed by savagery. Mahdism, this ‘new power emerging out of the African darkness’,¹⁰³ was indeed very far from angelical, but Europe treated it as purely diabolical, one more witches’ brew of African primitivism and Muslim fanaticism. Kitchener’s conquest of the Soudan at Omdurman in 1898 was set down as the close of ‘a chapter which, even in the history of the Soudan, is unparalleled for horror and human depravity’.¹⁰⁴ The moral was that any African land cutting loose from the outer world was bound to relapse instead of advancing. Civilization was learning something from barbarism, as well as the other way about; the Mahdi’s tomb was desecrated and his skull carried off by General Kitchener, who in young Winston Churchill’s opinion ‘behaved like a blackguard’.¹⁰⁵

When Speke set out, the travels farther south in eastern Africa of the greatest of all African explorers had just been published, and were making a stir. Livingstone first went to Africa in 1841, and died still on the march in 1873. In 1857 he gave up his connection with the London Missionary Society for an official commission to explore, with the rank of consul. He is a more enigmatic figure than any of the others. What drove him on through the wilderness was in part the same thirst for discovery that carried Mungo Park to his death; but with this went an equally overmastering desire to discover ways of saving the land, African bodies still more than African souls, from destruction. Throughout the area of his wanderings the slave trade was still growing, with Zanzibar under its Arab ruler and the Portuguese possessions, themselves expanding, as the chief sources of infection. Livingstone denounced them more and more openly, and also made enemies by his criticism of the Boers who were spreading desolation from the south. To prevent worse things he came to favour occupation of territory by Britain, and African nationalists of a later day have sometimes reckoned him among the empire-builders.

Most of his Africa was a chaos of warring peoples, and it would be astonishing if his private estimate of the human race in the end was very high – whatever his secret opinion of Divine Providence may have been. Africans were preyed on by white men and Arabs, but also, as in West Africa, by one another. And he was at a loss for words to convey to readers at home ‘the degradation to which the people have been sunk by centuries of barbarism and the hard struggle for the necessaries of life’.106 At times he seemed to be of the commonest way of thinking about Africans. ‘They are mere children, as easily pleased as babies.’¹⁰⁷ Even the best Christians forgot that on Sundays they prayed to become as little children themselves. But what set Livingstone apart was that his estimate of African capabilities rose as time went on, or at all events he was more willing to suspend judgement. He was baffled by the contradictions he saw among the Makololo. ‘They perform actions sometimes remarkably good, and sometimes equally the reverse … On the whole, I think they exhibit just the same strange mixture of good and evil as men do elsewhere.’¹⁰⁸

Livingstone was proud of his Highland descent. His Scotland lay on Europe’s verge, and knew the hard struggle for survival, and a Scotsman with imagination – Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific was another – might gain an insight into the workings of untutored minds denied to the average Westerner. Besides this, he took account of the African outside Africa as well as at home. What he had read of slavery in the US inspired the hatred of slavery that he brought with him to Africa; and he was impressed by what he heard of the bearing of Negro soldiers in the Civil War, in which his son Robert lost his life.¹⁰⁹ He was spared the knowledge of how meagre were the fruits of the war for Negro progress.

Twenty years after Livingstone’s death the Australian missionary Booth came out to the same part of Africa. He had more democratic views than most preachers from England, and held that Africa could only be redeemed in the end by Africans.¹¹⁰ Lawlessness still reigned. Yet his ten-year-old daughter Emily was to remember the black men among whom she lived, and who carried her over long journeys on their shoulders, for their almost invariable friendliness and goodness. ‘I had absolutely no fear of them.’111 White men she knew of who got into trouble with them usually brought it on themselves:¹¹² they were often quite as wild as any of the inhabitants. ‘The bottle, the bullet, and the Bible’ were the companions of Europeans of very distinct species.¹¹³ Grogan, an explorer with no evangelical nonsense about him, saw some of these species at a boozing party where he met ‘the most cosmopolitan crowd imaginable … animal-faced Boers, leavened with Jews, parasites, businessmen, nondescripts, and every type of civilized savage’.¹¹⁴

As in other parts of the world the spectacle of native oppressing native helped the outsider to feel that he might as well join in and do the same. In Nyasaland the dominant Ngoni or Angoni, of warlike Zulu stock, exploited as well as protected the Tonga peasantry. The Ngoni also practised cruelties like witch-hunts and ordeal by poison on themselves, as the Zulus and other fighting peoples of Africa often seem to have done; the habit of violence against their neighbours reacted on their own relationships. Imperial Europe was to undergo the same experience.

Missions like that of the Church of Scotland at Blantyre were acquiring a degree of informal control over their spheres of influence, and here and outside them concern for the safety of their converts made them advocates of intervention by their governments. Christianity had always boasted its martyrs, and there were new ones in this age in many far-off lands. A persecution in Madagascar had attracted a good deal of attention. Preachers and pirates arrived there about the same time, the latter according to Trelawney plundering and murdering ‘whenever they wanted a salad, or a fresh egg’.¹¹⁵ Missionaries got a footing because the Hova people were building up their power over the island, and wanted Western arms and training. Under Queen Ranavalona (1828–61) there was a sharp anti-Christian reaction, after which her successors reversed her policy and adopted Christianity. Ballantyne prefaced a novel about Madagascar by calling it ‘one of the most interesting and progressive islands of the world’.¹¹⁶ But his story, founded on mission records, was of the persecution by Ranavalona, and painted her as a most bloodthirsty despot, a female Prempeh; it was bound to turn readers’ thoughts to other areas where similar troubles might be threatening.

One of these was Buganda, where regular mission work started in 1877, but where King Mwanga, the son of Mtesa, fell foul of the converts and killed a number of them. He was only taking the same view as European kings in the age of religious wars, that a subject who chose to differ from his ruler in religion was a rebel. In Madagascar the Christians had been left to rough it, but in Uganda there were other motives for intervention: interests of strategy, and of an East Africa Company, and a growing inclination to annex territory in general. Good and bad arguments reinforced each other, and in 1890 a protectorate was declared over Zanzibar, in 1893 over Nyasaland – which brought the Tonga peasantry relief from the Angoni – and in 1894 over Buganda. Next year the French took Madagascar, and its last sovereign, another queen, was deported to Algeria. Even an English onlooker was willing to put the blame on native tyranny and corruption, rather than French greed.117 Hova rule had alienated many of the other inhabitants; Protestant groups now formed a national resistance, and were persecuted again, this time by the French.

Southern Africa : the Conflict of Races

It was the misfortune of the Dutch settlers in Africa’s deep south, which they have never outgrown, that they came at a time when slavery was in European eyes a natural institution. They were then cut off from their homeland by the advent of the British at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The British too were there for three decades before the abolition of slavery in the empire; but they had a home country to keep them from complete stagnation. Any enlightenment they received from it they failed to pass on to the Boers. Whatever successes it may have had with native races, Britain made a poor job of the two European stocks it became responsible for, Boers and French Canadians.

This southern tip of the continent held a medley of the most primitive races, Bushman and Hottentot, which had been pushed down into it, along with some of the most energetic Bantu tribes still pressing down from farther north. Hottentots were a cross between Bushmen and some earlier invaders. Win-wood Reade expressed the common view when he called them ‘a dwarfish race who have restless, rambling, ape-like eyes’;118 and their name entered the English vocabulary as an equivalent for idiot or underling. They were little able to defend themselves against the Boers, whose predatory instincts were deepened by having a population easily enslaved to work on. Along the frontiers of the gradually expanding colony were Bantu tribes of another mettle, and a series of ‘Kaffir wars’ against them went on for a hundred years. During one of these, in 1850, Hottentots inside the colony seized the chance to rebel. Kaffirs too came under the Boer yoke, and there is a glimpse of how they were regarded in Olive Schreiner’s first novel, written in the 1870s: when family prayers were held on the farm the Kaffir workers were not present, ‘because Tant’ Sannie held they were descended from apes, and needed no salvation’.¹¹⁹ Darwin may have met with obstruction in some Christian quarters, in others he had been anticipated. ‘Kaffir’ or ‘Caffre’, a corruption of the Arab term for pagan, was itself an index of the gulf between the races. Africans considered it ‘an insulting epithet’.¹²⁰

In 1836 a section of the Boers set out on their trek northeastward to found two little independent republics. They were actuated both by a noble love of freedom and by an ignoble grudge at the British action in emancipating their slaves. Their descendants would look back on this migration in terms borrowed from later empire-builders, as civilized society imposing order on anarchy.¹²¹ At the time these Boers were not much concerned with phrases, and plunged into the anarchy as one set of savages among others, the most destructive because the best equipped, with guns and horses. One of their stratagems was to go on raids driving a crowd of Africans in front of them as a screen, and open fire on a village over their heads; they then carried off their victims’ cattle, women, and children.¹²² They were not above employing bands of armed Hottentots and other Africans; like all European territories on the continent this was conquered with the aid of Africans under the white man’s orders, as India was with that of Indians.

Likewise the Cape Dutch had indulged freely in native women, and fathered a large mixed or ‘Coloured’ community. Some of these, the ‘Griquas’, established a small border republic of their own, under an able leader who won Livingstone’s praise by forbidding raiding expeditions.123 The Boer trekkers had white wives with them, who in harsh pioneering condititions had to be treated as partners, and white offspring had to be multiplied; black women had therefore to be discarded, except as menials. There was no native aristocracy to be conciliated and made use of, as in Indonesia. Here in south Africa the Dutch were following their natural line of development, the same as that of the British in India, towards racialism, sexual taboos and apartheid.

Of the peoples they overran, those whose labour could be exploited were reduced to servitude, the rest got rid of. Bushmen were among the chief sufferers. They were ‘looked upon as vermin and exterminated on contact’, as General Smuts’s son and biographer tells us, and by Zulus as well as Boers.¹²⁴ Both complained of pilfering; but these hunters when expelled from their lands had no recourse but to steal cattle. Boer and Bantu between them turned the veld into the scene of carnage pictured – with it may be hoped some overstatement – by Laurens van der Post.¹²⁵ Britons coming up later from the Cape joined in the mêlée, while the British government looked the other way. When Sir J. Campbell asked in Parliament in 1881 whether it approved of the plundering or destruction of crops and property in the fighting against the Basutos, that model of a Victorian under-secretary M. E. Grant Duff replied that the responsibility lay with the Cape Colony authorities: Her Majesty’s Government ‘expresses neither approval nor disapproval’.¹²⁶ Three years later, however, Basutoland was taken out of the Cape’s jurisdiction, and Bechuanaland was also made a protectorate, with a Scottish missionary for its first deputy-commissioner.

Of all the southern Bantu the most striking were the Zulus. Their tribes were being welded into a nation, and conquering far and wide, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, under Tchaka, a leader as remarkable in his very different way as that other great African of the same epoch, Toussaint. Zulus in the south, Mehemet All’s Turk-Egyptians in the north, were forging empires in Africa before any of the Europeans joined in. Egypt was set going by the stimulus of Western contact, and there are hints of this, slighter and more devious, in the Zulu case too. Tchaka’s predecessor, Dingiswayo, had been a wanderer, and in touch with a white man; he opened trade with Delagoa Bay and began to create the regiments that made the Zulu army famous. Tchaka was interested in the white man’s weapons, and though he seems to have concluded that his own were better he did employ a detachment of European and Hottentot musketeers.127 More generally he was eager to learn about the white man’s arts and teach them to his people, and therefore avoided conflict with the English; he toyed with the idea of sending young men to England for training.¹²⁸

A trading party that visited Tchaka in 1824 was impressed by ‘the order and discipline maintained in the country’. It was impressed in a different way when Tchaka, conversing genially as he took his bath, all of a sudden decided to have one of his attendants killed, and the man’s neck was wrung on the spot.¹²⁹ Europe’s picture of Zululand shared this contradictoriness. No other African people caught the Western, especially the British, imagination so powerfully. Besides their splendid physique they were ‘shrewd, energetic, and brave’, wrote Livingstone, and except for colour and hair ‘would take rank among the foremost Europeans’.¹³⁰ To the generations of English boys who had the luck to grow up on Rider Haggard’s novels they shared the heroic aura of the Red Indians. But all that was heard of them apart from their fighting prowess – their bloody witch-hunts, their devastating raids, their despotic rulers surrounded by executioners – had a repulsive flavour, like Red Indian torture or Aztec human sacrifice.

Tchaka was murdered in 1828. He could scarcely have led his people further. Like the Asiatic monarchs of that century who tried to equip their kingdoms for survival, he was too much embedded in the past to be able to enter the future that he descried from afar. Superstition, ferocity, a vast harem, weighed him down. But the nation he welded with blood and iron outlasted him, came through a defeat by Boer fire-arms in 1838, and showed signs of a capacity to evolve further. Left to itself Zululand might have grown into a country both modern and African, a more original, more intriguing facet of mankind’s total experience that any now likely to be produced by southern Africa. Unfortunately the impis were still armed with spears when the last Kaffir war brought them into collision with the British in 1879. Their victory over one British force at Isandhlwana was another of Africa’s few triumphs, and the superlative courage they displayed was second to none that Europe was ever confronted with. A war correspondent at the final battle at Ulundi watched them charge under ‘pitiless showers of death’ from the Gatling guns; those Zulus, he wrote, ‘could dare and die with a valour and devotion unsurpassed by the soldiery of any age or of any nationality’.131

In the white conquest of southern Africa gold and diamonds were the strongest lure; the search was directed by men like Rhodes, of the same stamp as the Morgans and Rockefellers who were rearing empires of another sort in America. In London the interested section of the Stock Exchange came to be known as the ‘Kaffir Circus’. To this holy of holies of Europe financial racketeers flocked together from all quarters, men to whom all flags were flags of convenience, among them a number of Asiatic Jews.¹³² These men, rootless and emancipated, gained a welcome in the highest circles by their skill in manipulating stocks and shares, and by helping their patrons to shake off old-fashioned prejudices. About the end of the century moralists as well as socialists were complaining of a moral degeneracy among Europe’s upper classes, now far on in their metamorphosis from aristocracy into plutocracy: rampant materialism, worship of wealth and luxury, contempt for moral scruples.¹³³ ‘The Stock Exchange had become the centre of the national life’;¹³⁴ high society was bewitched by prospects of new Eldorados, and the cheap newspaper reader was taught to revel in them too, at least in fantasy. Ideas of civilizing the backward native were overlaid by the frank philosophy of the giant in the old rhyme:

Be he living or be he dead
I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.

In Kipling’s Recessional of 1897, his finest poem and one of the few great English poems of that time, the misgivings of more responsible men of empire perhaps found expression.

The corruption of English society by the Nabobs with their Indian loot was being repeated a century later on a European scale. Despite the lamentable record of the old English and Dutch East India Companies in the treatment of native peoples, ‘development’ was again being entrusted very largely to chartered companies of private speculators. Rhodes and his South Africa Company received their charter in 1889, and organized more systematically the methods that were already being used in southern Africa. Like the British North Borneo Company it set up its own force of mercenaries; one of Olive Schreiner’s stories was about an English recruit and his change of heart on the subject of nigger-shooting.135 ‘The Chartered Company never cared a snap of its fingers for the Colonial Office,’ wrote E. D. Morel, a stalwart defender of African rights: it was too well-connected to bother about mild protests. ‘The Rhodesian outrage is an intolerable national disgrace.’¹³⁶

One incident in the scramble for Africa was the Boer War of 1899–1902. This conflict between white men had all the bitterness of civil war, but neither serious cause nor serious result so far as the basic problem of race relations was concerned. As a young Boer of the Cape, Smuts had advocated partnership of Boer and Briton under Rhodes’s direction. ‘Unless the white race closes its ranks,’ he said in a speech in 1895, ‘its position will soon become untenable in the face of the overwhelming majority of prolific barbarism.’¹³⁷ Only the reckless impatience of the Kaffir Circus for quicker profits precipitated the struggle with the Boer republics. Before this was over Boers who experienced the ‘methods of barbarism’¹³⁸ for which the British Liberal leader censured the British army had time to wonder whether Europe was really much less barbarous than Africa. A habit of treating troublesome natives as ‘vermin’ was bound to brutalize white men’s treatment of one another when they fell out. In the wild and whirling propaganda in England against the Boers an assortment of the clichés accumulated in Western dealings with coloured men were now turned against fellow-whites. Boers, exactly like Chinese, could be impressed only by strength. ‘There is not in the whole world,’ solemnly pronounced the Scotsman of Edinburgh, ‘a man more ready than your Dutch Afrikander to understand the argument of force’.139

Belgians and Germans

With the scramble for territory went the humbug of ‘treaties’, scraps of paper that chiefs were cajoled or bullied into signing, and with them signing away lands that did not belong to them. The black man scrawling his mark on a document, as he hugged his bottle of rum, became a stock figure of fun. Frontier lines were drawn on maps in distant capitals, tribes and nationalities were split up as slave families had been by the auctioneer, populations were bandied about from flag to flag – ‘disloyalty’ to any of which was a capital crime. Africans were being disposed of as Europeans were by their princes not long before, when the Congress of Vienna reckoned them up and distributed them in lots of so many thousand ‘souls’.

When Blunt was in Rome to attend a peace conference in 1891 he was repelled by the Italian attitude to native peoples: they could not even, as Englishmen could, speak of them with any decency.¹⁴⁰ The brutalism that was reviving in Europe was displayed most grimly in the ‘Congo Free State’ sanctioned by the Berlin Conference on Africa in 1885, and from then until 1908 a private empire of King Leopold of the Belgians. Here could be seen private enterprise at its worst, free from all public inquiry or check, and the new plutocracy at its glossiest, with a royal manager. Its devious origins show how missionary zeal, like all Europe’s better impulses, could be exploited by money-grubbers. A titular Archbishop of Carthage launched with papal approval a campaign for stronger action against slave-trading; he invited Christian soldiers to volunteer, and dreamed of a new order of knights-errant.¹⁴¹ Leopold encouraged the idea, and when his ‘Free State’ was set up humanitarians rejoiced.

His agent for the preliminary spadework or collection of ‘treaties’ was H. M. Stanley, the Anglo-American explorer whose chief performance in Africa was his expedition to find Livingstone in 1871–2. Those who saw him at the Berlin Conference were puzzled: he ‘spoke with real affection of the natives’, but there was something about him that belied his words.142 He may have been speaking more from the heart when he inspected an early model of the Maxim gun and declared that it ‘would be of valuable service in helping civilization to overcome barbarism’.¹⁴³ It has been said that his newspaper sponsors really wanted him to find not Livingstone but sensational stuff for them to print, and that he manufactured excitement by moving with a huge retinue that could only feed itself by plundering.¹⁴⁴ North America and Europe were indeed avid for blood-and-thunder yarns about Africa, as an outlet maybe for repressed blood-and-thunder impulses of their own.

In the Congo it was as easy as elsewhere to employ Africans of one tribe against another. Leopold assembled a mercenary army with, by 1905, 360 officers from up and down Europe, and 16,000 natives. Its business was to ensure quick profits in rubber, ivory, or palm-oil collected as tribute or by forced labour. The consequences were of a sort and on a scale not seen again in the world until the Nazi epoch, when they were seen in Europe itself. Africa, or this part of it, now became very truly a Dark Continent, but its darkness was one the invaders brought with them, the sombre shadow of the white man. Revelations of what was happening percolated very slowly through Europe’s self-complacency, before the Belgian government at last in 1908 assumed responsibility for the Congo. Inevitably in a colony where Africans had been instigated to torment and kill one another for so many years, the new régime adopted the policy, which was never relaxed, of treating them all as a race of juvenile criminals.

Indirectly the Belgian public was responsible all along for its king’s misdoings; as the French public was more directly for the not much better state of affairs in the French Congo, where in spite of De Brazza the first governor, a man of an older and better school, get-rich-quick syndicates were given a free hand.¹⁴⁵ Their nemesis came to both Belgium and France in 1914. But all the talk in Allied countries was now of German atrocities in Belgium, instead of Belgian or French atrocities in the Congo; which led on easily to a belief that Germany’s conduct in Africa, where most of its few colonies were, must have been equally atrocious. This was erected into a dogma of Allied war propaganda, and paved the way for the confiscation of all German colonies by the treaty of Versailles.146

Before 1914 Englishmen had usually thought of German colonial methods with respect; the same kind of respect for efficiency that they felt for the Dutch, whose system the Germans were in some ways emulating though without their financial success. Grogan admired all that he saw of German work in Tanganyika. He liked the freedom of action allowed to officials, ‘not cramped by the ignorant babblings of sentimentalism’; he gave less questionable praise to their thoroughness in learning languages.¹⁴⁷ This empire too was brought into being partly by well-meaning missionaries, of whom Germany since the eighteenth century had been a nursery. By 1870 there were eight strong mission societies, ‘active centres of agitation for national expansion’.¹⁴⁸ But Europe had two selves, further apart than ever before in human history because this new Europe was more complex and altering more rapidly; and the discordance was revealed most of all in the encounter with Africa, the region most opposite to it. And within Europe it was Germany that had the most deeply divided soul. Until the nineteenth century much of it was hke Russia a land of lord and serf; Germans for a very long time had consoled themselves by looking down on Slavs as inferiors; German nationalism, unlike French, had from the start a racialist tinge; German respect for Culture easily bred contempt for the uncultivated, in or out of Europe.

When Germany suddenly entered the colonial field in 1884 imperialism in its virgin fields was sinking towards its lowest moral level. This country which for centuries had watched others act while it theorized, and was now free to act at last, displayed with increasing violence down to 1945 an impulse to push action, as it had formerly pushed metaphysical speculation, to its furthest and maddest extreme. The worst episode in German Africa was the suppression of the Heŗero rising in the south-west in 1904, after which many of the tribesmen were driven off their land into the desert to perish and make way for culture. ‘The German ideal of colonisation,’ writes Smuts’s son, ‘was … extermination’, and not ‘straightforward extermination, but sadistic ill-treatment, flogging, interference with women and brutality’.149 Such a charge does not come best from an Afrikaaner; it does all the same apply exactly to German behaviour in occupied east Europe after 1939. Here again happenings in Africa and other colonial regions were a rehearsal for what was to happen in Europe.

The fate of the Hereros was not unknown to other governments. A report to the British Foreign Office in 1909 said that German policy with the native was ‘to reduce him to a state of serfdom, and, where he resists, to destroy him altogether. The native, to the German, is a baboon and nothing more.’¹⁵⁰ With relations worsening between the two countries it may seem odd that propaganda was not made out of this long before 1914, But on the one hand, German admistration, under criticism at home from the Socialist and Catholic parties, was improving:¹⁵¹ it became, as in Prussia, orderly and legalistic, if severe. A new Colonial Secretary, Demburg, worked to give the natives protection, in spite of ‘endless odium’ heaped on him by those who did not want natives protected.¹⁵² On the other hand, to denounce another government’s colonial methods would have invited obvious retorts. Even in South-West Africa human rights were scarcely more blatantly ignored than they had lately been in some British territories, in Rhodesia, for instance, as Morel pointed out.¹⁵³ The difference was that in one case German troops carried out the orders of German officers, in the other Britain shuffled responsibility on to its colonists, much as Belgium left the Congo to Leopold.

White Settlers

It was in areas where colonists from Europe were settling in numbers that the native population was likely to fare worst. Failure to foresee this was another missionary miscalculation. Livingstone was eager to see Europeans coming out, and was always looking for healthy uplands where they could live. He wanted immigrants who would not themselves farm, but would guide and superintend Africans; that African use of the land was inefficient and wasteful was a commonplace. He had left Britain soon after the abolition of colonial slavery, when feelings kindled by the long campaign were still warm, and he seems to have gone on conjuring up in fancy a settler community public-spirited and philanthropic. In fact, wherever settlement took place the African would be exchanging the risk of kidnapping into slavery for the certainty of reduction to peonage.

Most of Asia was preserved from white immigrants by its climate or its teeming population. Regions where mixed colonies could grow, with big European minorities among native majorities, were virtually confined to Africa and to that overseas Africa, the southern United States. One such was Algeria. France had found no other colony of settlement since losing Canada; it had its eye for a while on New Zealand, but was forestalled there by Britain. In Algeria the newcomers got control of the most fertile land, reducing its former communal possessors to tenants or labourers, a situation destined to end in one of the most atrocious of all colonial wars. Of the settlers who compelled France for years to go on fighting it, about one quarter are said to have been authentic Frenchmen: the rest were flotsam and jetsam of the Mediterranean, hardened into a distinctive amalgam by pride in their sole original asset, white or near-white blood. A pauperized European, like a decadent aristocrat, is proud of his ‘blood’ because he has nothing else to be proud of.

In such a society dividing lines of class and race coincided and deepened each other. Traditional Africa itself had many precedents for this, and in many parts of Europe class and nationality coincided. Croat peasants lived under Magyar landlords, Czech under German, Irish under English. In Ireland religion aggravated the division still further, as colour did in Africa, and between Protestant Ascendancy at Dublin and White Supremacy at Cape Town the analogies are close. Wherever the future of a large white community depended in this way on the permanent subjection of Africans, it had the strongest inducement to believe that they were inferior by nature, and therefore must always be at the bottom, and ought to be grateful to their betters for keeping them there. A regular body of doctrine was emerging; it drew on both science and divinity, pseudo-Darwin and pseudo-Bible harnessed together. It was flattering to the white man to think that inalienable higher qualities, not merely better weapons, had brought him to the top. A flight of fancy in a recent book on the Zulus, the more startling because most of the book is quite rational, illustrates this mystical tendency. Tchaka’s amicable reception of some English visitors is taken to prove that the white men possessed an ‘indefinable aristocratic ascendancy’, ‘some dominant quality even in rags which compelled the black men to regard them as their superior’.154 By an exactly parallel convention of late-feudal times in Europe, Shakespeare’s young princes and gentlemen, even when brought up in ignorance among churls, have an innate nobility of soul which lifts them above their fellows, and which their fellows recognize. Livingstone, who saw no sovereign virtue in either white or blue blood, observed that to the black man the first sight of a white man was apt to be ‘frightfully repulsive’.¹⁵⁵

Mystique of race was Democracy’s vulgarization of an older mystique of class. It gave white settlers an agreeable sensation of being one large family, as an aristocracy always is, a counterfeit of the equality that western Europe had dreamed of for so long, and to so little avail. This had an insidious attraction for muddle-headed plebeians arriving from Europe, where on a larger scale classes were being drawn together in brotherly harmony by a common sensation of superiority to the lesser breeds outside; above all to plebeians from England, accustomed to breathe an air composed of oxygen, nitrogen, and snobbery. To keep up the family feeling an exclusiveness like that of caste was necessary. ‘The system of Government in Kenya,’ wrote Jomo Kenyatta in his rebel days, ‘is based on strict racial discrimination … The white man looks upon his own authority and prestige as of the greatest importance’: all male Africans had to carry a certificate with their fingerprints, and resented it as ‘a mark of their virtual serfdom’.¹⁵⁶

They resented it all the more because Indians in Kenya were exempt. As in Asia, European power brought with it an influx of other aliens. There was a brief, unpleasant experiment with Chinese labour in the gold mines of South Africa; Indian immigrants were more numerous in the south, and also in east Africa which had always had links with India. Many of them were or became shopkeepers, traders, professional men, and their desire was to be as close as they could to the white man’s level and as far as they could above the black majority. They began to find their way into Mozambique too. Portugal’s growing colonies needed more educated men, and were free from racialism of the doctrinal kind; ultimately this allowed the few Africans who could get an education to be assimilated into the dominant minority, but Indians found it much easier to pass the tests. For the ordinary African in Livingstone’s day the term current in Mozambique was bicho, animal; in Angola he was addressed as ‘devil’, or ‘brute’. ‘In fact slave-owners come to regard their slaves as not human.’157 Whatever Shakespeare had in mind when he drew Caliban, it is understandable that some modern readers outside Europe have seen in him a personification of the races crushed down and exploited by the white man.

In South Africa the foundations of racial antagonism were being laid deepest. The Boer War called forth some talk in Britain about protection of the African against the Boer; but when it was over the two white peoples very soon came to terms at the expense of the black peoples.¹⁵⁸ The Liberal conscience hit on one of its happy compromises by keeping the three protectorates of Bechuanaland, Basutoland and Swaziland, but doing nothing to develop them, so that their inhabitants had no choice but to migrate into the Union and work for whatever wages the white employer chose to pay. In the Union itself Boer and British outlook differed chiefly in the way they were expressed.¹⁵⁹ Isolation from the world, religiosity, and now a humiliating defeat in war that had to be wiped out by louder self-assertion, all led the Boers towards a Teutonically elaborate and obsessive philosophy of race, a forerunner of Hitler’s. Englishmen smiled at the verbiage but copied the behaviour. ‘The settler,’ said a guidebook for British immigrants, in plain practical language, ‘will not find much difficulty in handling the natives, provided he and his wife avoid familiarity with them, exercise close supervision and enforce strict discipline … The native despises the employer who is slack and lenient.’¹⁶⁰

Cheap labour, the same oracle pointed out, ensured plenty of leisure for the white woman, who would have a native maid to bring her tea in bed in the morning.161 Very few European women would be proof against temptations like this; it would scarcely be fair to expect women, not yet admitted to a full share of higher responsibilities in Europe, to uphold Europe’s higher values in Africa. They have on the contrary, like other underprivileged Europeans, been prompt converts to apartheid. The least regrettable consequence has been to inhibit white men still further from relations with black women, which if allowed would almost always be unedifying. In an area like the Congo where white women were few the white man continued to make do with black women; he might even come to prefer them.¹⁶². It does not appear that this in any way improved his attitude to the black race. Men in general have always lived with women in general, and have always treated them as inferiors.

The ‘Child-Races’ and their Reaction

Rider Haggard’s mysterious white queen made a symbol of the white race ruling over the black that caught Western fancy, and had a brood of bastard imitations.¹⁶³ All over Africa the same pattern was emerging – ‘a handful of Europeans in command, directing, watching, while the African men run and stumble, robbed of dignity’.¹⁶⁴ That Africans must be prepared to labour for their new rulers seemed too obvious for discussion. It still comes naturally to white men to speak of someone ‘working like a black’. Never tired of inveighing against ‘sentimental balderdash’ about Africa, Grogan was typical in recommending a ‘good sound system of compulsory labour’, which he said would do more to improve the native in five years than missionary effort in fifty: ‘a little firmness would transform him from a useless and dangerous brute’ into a useful being.¹⁶⁵

Africans were no longer taken away to America to produce commodities for Europe, but instead they were to perform the task at home. Various modes of compulsion were brought to bear, and backed by a robust labour discipline. ‘The nigger is a lazy beast,’ said Sir Rudolph Slatin of the Soudan, ‘and must be compelled to work – compelled by Government.’ Asked how, he replied: ‘With a stick.’166 Europe was only practising on others what it formerly practised on itself – that is, on its poorer classes, educated in the early days of capitalism by much flogging, branding and jailing. An English historian critical of Hohenzollern despotism in Prussia admitted that ‘personal guidance – even forceful guidance – may be necessary in early stages, as we have found it necessary among the childraces of Africa’.¹⁶⁷

This notion of the African as a minor, endorsed at times even by a Livingstone, took very strong hold. Spaniards and Boers had questioned whether natives had souls: modern Europeans cared less about that, but doubted whether they had minds, or minds capable of adult growth. A theory came to be fashionable that mental growth in the African ceased early, that childhood was never left behind. Johnston lent his authority to it, and conjectured that obsession with sex was what arrested mental development at puberty.¹⁶⁸ The white man’s smothered impatience with his own tediously decent conventions, his sneaking envy of the more untrammelled sexual life of the less civilized, often peeped out through disguises like this. Johnston found much to like in Africans, not least a habitual cheerfulness; they were always ready to laugh, ‘and laughter lights up their faces to advantage, making them quite like a man and a brother’.¹⁶⁹ Others less charitably saw in this jolliness another symptom of childishness. The infantilism, real or pretended, of the human being reduced to hopeless dependence provided confirmation; and many Africans were in a state of dependence on the will of others before men like Speke or Grogan first saw them.

Grogan’s picture of the African was that of the average middling European, neither idealist nor blackguard, at the end of a century of exploration and conquest. He was a worshipper of Rhodes, a frank believer in Africa for the white man, but also in orderly rational government for black men, so abject a race in his view that to hew wood and draw water for Europeans would be a blessed advance for it. Here and there on his long march he could not help reflecting that some African peoples left to themselves got on quite well, so finely adjusted to their environment that it would be a pity to see them disrupted.170 And no one described more ghoulishly the vast horrors of the Congo under Leopold’s regime, ‘a vampire growth, intended to suck the country dry’.¹⁷¹ But overwhelmingly his sense was of a total inaccessibility of the African mind, if indeed there was any mind governing the motions of African limbs and tongues. The African was ‘fundamentally inferior in mental development and ethical possibilities (call it soul if you will)’; he stood at a point of evolution ‘but slightly superior to the lower animals’; he was destitute of qualities prized in Europe like pity and gratitude.¹⁷²

Grogan arrived at the conclusion which the strong always arrive at about the weak whom they cannot understand – that Africans only understood force, and positively enjoyed being ruled ‘with a rod of iron’ by Arabs, far better than by easygoing Britons.¹⁷³ In principle his advice was ‘to let the native see that you respect him in his own line, but take your own absolute superiority for granted’, while treating him with scrupulous justice.¹⁷⁴ In practice he felt that fist and boot might serve better; under stress of irritation ‘one is often tempted to think that the Boer method of treating natives is, after all, the only one they deserve’.¹⁷⁵

A more academic writer, at ease in England, summed up the matter by saying that Europe’s duty was to train Africa to industrious habits, without brutality but equally ‘without pretending to treat the African as the equal of the white man in any way’.¹⁷⁶ Even outside the white settlement areas where black inferiority was the law and the prophets, few Europeans had any real faith in an ascent of the African masses to a civilized level. If there was disagreement, it turned rather on whether or not a few African individuals were capable of the ascent. It had its counterpart at home in disagreement between conservatives who held the working class to be congenitally unfit for higher education, and liberals ready to welcome a few clever members of it into universities. As a Fabian pamphleteer was to lament, proposals to raise standards of living were derided by those who professed to know the African. ‘An overwhelming barrage of evidence on the “laziness”, “imbecility”, “unreliability” of the native workman is produced which is not easily disposed of.’177 The African’s first steps in his new world were bound to be halting. He was left morally shelterless by the crumbling of the old clan and its ways, his eternal verities. A mass of uprooted villagers huddled in shanty-towns made as dismal a sight as Europe’s derelicts in the slums of New York; the Zulu who was never known to tremble on the battlefield cut a poor figure as the white man’s servant, wearing his master’s old clothes. It was a fact often observed in ancient as well as modern times, a classical scholar pointed out, that ‘enslaved people lapse into a state of extreme degradation and immorality’. He instanced the Africans locked up in their compounds at Kimberley.¹⁷⁸

As in the Americas, what determined the treatment of Africans was their profitability. Where there were no assets like diamonds to attract men like Rhodes, men like the Scottish missionaries at Blantyre, the heirs of Livingstone, had more room. Their self-governing Kirk gave converts a new framework in place of the old clan democracy, and round it a Malawi nation could gradually come into being.¹⁷⁹ ‘Now he’s talking like a real Nyasa,’ says someone in a story by an African writer, ‘a real Brak Scosh’ – or black Scot.¹⁸⁰ Yet Nyasaland was not immune from the reaction against Europe that Africa, more sluggishly than Asia, was experiencing by the early years of the twentieth century. Political movements could not grow quickly, and African protest took a negative form, a turning back to traditional values, good or bad, or else, more positively, a religious form. Here, as in Taiping China, Christianity fused with local cults to produce new sects often of a messianic cast, somewhat as Islam in the Soudan had engendered Mahdism. ‘Ethiopianism’, the impulse towards separatist churches run by Africans instead of by white men, was appearing from 1884. It was an African minister, John Chilembwe, who headed the small rebellion of 1915 in Nyasaland, a milestone of modern African history.¹⁸¹

Africa was no longer existing in isolation. Some years before this a Nyasalander called on his people to emulate ‘our fellow country Japan’;¹⁸² Chilembwe, a convert of Booth, was taken by him to America, and got his education there. Many new African ideas were being worked out first by Africans in Europe, especially Britain, and in America. These ideas, among men drawn from many corners of Africa, veered almost at once towards Pan-Africanism. It was a repudiation of the old fatal mosaic of tribe and clan, in a continent where few elements of the European nation-state existed; it was also a reflex of the solidarity of white men against black. Thus Africa was ahead of Europe in catching at least a glimmering vision of continental union. In 1900 the first Pan-African Congress was held in London,183 a year after Europe had held its first Hague Peace Conference with the less ambitious but not less unsuccessful aim of limiting war.

What was for Africans a rosy dream might be for Europeans a gloomy spectre. A Black as well as Yellow Peril floated at times before them. Occasionally, half-seriously, there was a notion of the Negro having mental endowments that would one day render him formidable. ‘They have marvellous abilities, that strange race,’ says a lawyer in Hilaire Belloc’s most entertaining fantasy.¹⁸⁴ As a rule it was Negro muscle, the Negro as a fighting-man or fighting-machine, that aroused misgivings. Years before 1914 Europe was beginning to be frightened by its own weapons; and if war was destined to grow more murderous year by year, the most primitive race might prove the best adapted to it. More than in the case of the Yellow Peril, the fear was mainly of some European Power adding a vast native army to its own, for use against its neighbours. This formed one of the gravest accusations against Germany after 1914, and was worked up sensationally in the Allied Press.¹⁸⁵ German apologists could argue that Germany had not in fact sought to militarize its colonies, but had only armed a few thousand natives for police duties.¹⁸⁶ Whether this abstention owed more to respect for native rights or to fear, or contempt, of native capabilities, may be less clear. It was the French who had really been training a black army and were using it in Europe, and at the end of the War Clemenceau insisted on the right to raise forces even in mandated territories. Lloyd George gave way with a perfunctory proviso that France should not ‘train big nigger armies for the purposes of aggression’.¹⁸⁷

Hazier but still more upsetting to weak nerves was the thought, an emanation of the white man’s uneasy conscience, of a rising of black against white, a race war of revenge. Grogan talked darkly of ‘dusky Napoleons’, reminding his readers how formidable Zululand and Ruanda had proved that Africans could be once they merged their tribalism in large entities.188 The Mahdi and his largely Negro or Arab-Negro army of ‘Fuzzy-Wuzzies’ in the Soudan were not forgotten. In 1910 the popular novelist John Buchan, one of many Scotsmen who have earned a good living by supplying upper-class England with spectacles to look at the world through, wrote a tale about an educated but atavistic African uniting his people for a crusade against the white man.¹⁸⁹

What was really about to erupt was the first of Europe’s two great internecine wars, its own relapse into savagery. When white men in the most desolate parts of Africa recoiled from scenes of massacre and ravage, they were in a way recoiling from something lurking in their own souls. Caliban, the African, was the baser self that Christendom with its dualistic philosophy of soul and flesh had always been conscious of; he was the insecurely chained Adam of the Puritan preachers, the Hyde of Stevenson’s novel,¹⁹⁰ the id of the Freudians. When he was let loose the same devastation that Africans or invaders had inflicted on Africa would fall on Europe.

NOTES

1. A. Hamilton, Memoirs of the Count de Grammont (1713), pp. 285–8 (English edn, 1906).

2. Defoe, The Life, Adventures and Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton (1720), p. 18 (Everyman edn).

3. Captain Cook’s Voyages of Discovery (Everyman edn), pp. 16–17.

4. A, Coates, Prelude to Hongkong (1966), pp. 4, 13.

5. Sir E. Satow, A Diplomat in Japan (1921), pp. 371–2.

6. See Lord Carnarvon, Portugal and Galicia (3rd edn, 1848), p. 10; W. E. Baxter, The Tagus and the Tiber (1852), Vol. 1, pp. 27, 64.

7. See E. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1964), pp. 44 ff.

8. ‘Multatuli’, Max Havelaar (1860), pp. 77–8 (English edn, New York, 1927).

9. There are some good specimens in the china collection at Fenton House, Hampstead, London.

10. C. Aspinall-Oglander, Admiral’s Wife (Life and Letters of Mrs Edward Boscawen) (1940), p. 124.

11. Duke of Buckingham, Works, Vol. 2, pp. 179–80 (1775 edn).

12. Memoirs of the Life of the Late Mrs Catherine Cappe, by herself (2nd edn, 1823), pp. 333–8. cf. her account of an unfortunate mulatto girl from Jamaica, who had ‘ all the genius, generosity, and fire, united with all the eccentricity of a native West-Indian’ (pp. 236–9).

13. ‘Some Words on Pantheism’, in Selected Essays of Schopenhauer, ed. E. B. Bax (1888).

14. See E. Williams, op. cit., generally; he is followed by H. Hoetink, The Two Variants in Caribbean Race Relations (English edn, Oxford, 1967), pp. 23 ff.

15. See e.g. Cook’s Voyages, p. 14, on the mortality among Negroes in Brazilian gold-workings in 1768 – ‘Who can read this without emotion !’

16. Neglect of this fact by E. Williams, op. cit., was criticized by R. Anstey and J. D. Hargreaves in a seminar on the slave trade at the Centre of African Studies, Edinburgh, June 1965.

17. M. Scott, Tom Cringle’s Log (1836), p. 249 (Everyman edn).

18. ibid., pp. 125, 289.

19. C. Waterton, Wanderings in South America (1825), pp. 80–81, 208–9 (1906 edn).

20. J. H. Rose, The Life of Napoleon I (6th edn, 1913), Vol. 1, p. 359.

21. See e.g. the episode described in R. Korngold, Citizen Toussaint (1945). pp. 256–7.

22. E. Williams, op. cit., p. 202.

23. M. Scott, op. cit., pp. 413, 421.

24. ibid., p. 420.

25. ibid., p. 424.

26. H. H. Prichard, Where Black Rules White (revised edn, 1910), p. xi.

27. ibid., p. 200.

28. ibid., p. 359.

29. ibid., p. 259.

30. ibid., p. 327.

31. ibid., p. 297.

32. Portrait of Auguste Casseus at Nice; exhibited at the French Institute, Edinburgh, August 1966.

33. A. Goldring, Some Reminiscences of an Unclerical Cleric (1926), pp. 100–104.

34. Minute on a memorandum by P. Currie, in Foreign Office 61.359 (1884), Public Record Office, London.

35. J. Newton, Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade (1788), pp. 22–4, 31. I owe these references, and some of the foregoing detail on the trade, to my colleague Mr C. Fyfe, of the Centre of African Studies at Edinburgh University.

36. E. A. Raspe, Baron Munchausen (1785), Sequel, Chapter 21.

37. ibid., Chapter 24.

38. A. Smith, A Month at Constantinople (1850), pp. 128–30.

39. W. M. Thackeray, Notes of a Journey from Cornhìll to Grand Cairo (1845), pp. 126–7, 293–5 (1888 edn).

40. ibid., pp. 260–61.

41. R. F. Burton, A Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1855), Vol. 2, p. 252 (Bohn Library edn).

42. J. Ruskin, Modern Painters, Part 2 (1846), Sec. 5, Chapter 3, paras. 39–40.

43. W. H. G. Kingston, The Three Midshipmen (2nd edn, 1873), Chapter 8 ff.

44. The Times, 14 September 1888, p. 3, col. 4.

45. B. Davidson, The African Awakening (1955), pp. 38 ff. I am glad to have been able to discuss this problem with Mr Davidson.

46. E. S. Grogan and A. H. Sharp, From the Cape to Cairo (1900), p. 183 (Nelson edn, n.d.).

47. ‘Hamitic’ has confusingly come to denote the northern language-group akin to Semitic (Berber, Egyptian), and then their speakers, with reference to their Caucasian affinities, cf. C. G. Seligman, Races of Africa (revised edn, 1939), p. 18: ‘The history of Africa south of the Sahara is no more than the story of the permeation … of the Negro and Bushman aborigines by Hamitic blood and culture.’ Whether the stress should be laid on blood or on culture is today a controversial issue.

48. J. G. Lockhart, The Life of Sir Walter Scott (1838), Vol. 2, p. 169 (Edinburgh edn, 1902).

49. D. M. McFarlan, Calabar. The Church of Scotland Mission 1846–1946 (Edinburgh, 1946), pp. 2–3.

50. Trader Horn. The Ivory Coast in the Earlies (reminiscences, ed. E. Lewis, 1927), p. 30 (Penguin edn).

51. See, for much horrid detail on this, D. M. McFarlan, op. cit., pp. 32–3, 52–3, 163.

52. ibid., pp. 49, 62–3, 66.

53. ibid., pp. 63–4, 97

54. Trader Horn, pp. 25, 167, 94–5.

55. W. Reade, The Martyrdom of Man (1872), pp. 227–9 (Thinker’s Library edn).

56. ibid., pp. 242–3.

57. ibid., pp. 316–17.

58. ibid., p. 303. There is a lesson for today on p. 317: ‘Experience has shown that, whenever aliens are treated as citizens, they become citizens, whatever may be their religion or their race.’

59. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958), p. 168 (1966 edn).

60. Laurens van der Post, The Lost World of the Kalahari (1958), p. 187 (Penguin edn).

61. In 1939 only 0–5 per cent of the inhabitants of French West Africa had full citizenship: D. K. Fieldhouse, The Colonial Empires (1966), p. 315.

62. P. Worsley, The Third World (1964), pp. 119–20.

63. R. Maugham, The Slaves of Timbuktu (1961), p. 73 (1964 edn).

64. There is much on this in G. E. S. Gorer, Africa Dances (1935).

65. A. Home, The Price of Glory. Verdun 1916 (Penguin edn, 1964), p. 308.

66. See R. B. LePage, The National Language Question (Oxford, 1964).

67. Graham Greene, In Search of a Character (1961), p. 93 (the time referred to is 1946).

68. F. Oyono, Houseboy (English edn, 1966), p. 81.

69. W. Baird, General Wauchope (Edinburgh, 1900), pp 39, 41.

70. ibid., pp. 49–50.

71. See A. St J. Adcock, The Prince of Wales’ African Book (1926).

72. ibid.

73. Chinua Achebe, op. cit., pp. 176–87.

74. cf. A. J. Hanna, European Rule in Africa (1961), pp. 22–3, on how the new science of Social Anthropology fostered the preservation of tribal society as if in a museum, until educated Africans protested.

75. R. F. Burton, First Footsteps in East Africa (1856), p. 205 (Everyman edn).

76. ibid., pp. 127–8.

77. ibid., p. 18n.

78. ibid., p. 65.

79. ibid., pp. 50, 85.

80. ibid., pp. 13–14.

81. ibid., p. 96, n. 2; cf. pp. 316–17, 323. cf. Trotsky’s indignation at the ‘extreme Oriental laziness’ of Stalin (Stalin, English edn, 1969, Vol. I, p. 210).

82. Cited by G. A. Shepperson, ‘Church and Sect in Central Africa’, in Rhodes-Livingstone Journal, No. XXXIII (October 1963), p. 83.

83. Boswell for the Defence, ed. W. K. Wimsatt and F. A. Pottle (1960), p. 274.

84. A. J. Toynbee, Between Niger and Nile (1965), p. 39.

85. W. S. Blunt, My Diaries (1932 edn), p. 217.

86. J. H. Speke, Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (1863), p. 438 (Everyman edn).

87. ibid., p. 168.

88. E. S. Grogan and A. H. Sharp, op. cit., pp. 96, 145, 227.

89. Sir H. H. Johnston, British Central Africa (1897), p. 394 (3rd edn, 1906). But Uganda had legends clearly indicating ‘the advent from the north of a “white”, i.e. Hamitic aristocracy’ (C. G. Seligman, op. cit., p. 210).

90. J. H. Speke, op. cit., p. 14.

91. ibid., p. 222.

92. ibid., p. 30; cf. p. 397.

93. G. A. Shepperson, ‘Myth and Reality in Malawi’ (Herskovits memorial lecture; Northwestern University, 1966), pp. 6–7; P. Worsley, op. cit., p. 25.

94. D. Livingstone, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857), p. 206 (1912 edn).

95. J. H. Speke, op. cit., p. 173.

96. ibid., pp. 3–4.

97. ibid., p. 8; cf. p. 45.

98. ibid., pp. 236–9, 281, 288.

99. ibid., pp. 289, 306, 315, 328, 358.

100. ibid., pp. 334, 237.

101. ibid., pp. 212–14, 189.

102. ibid., pp. 453–4.

103. W. Baird, op. cit., p. 89.

104. Sir A. Colvin, The Making of Egypt (1906), p. 250 (Nelson edn).

105. W. S. Blunt, op. cit., p. 684.

106. D. Livingstone, op. cit., p. 113.

107. J. I. McNair, Livingstone the Liberator (1940), p. 99.

108. D. Livingstone, op. cit., p. 349.

109. I owe these details of Livingstone’s interest in America to Professor G. A. Shepperson’s lecture on him to the Historical Association conference at Edinburgh in April 1967.

110. G. A. Shepperson, ‘The Politics of African Church Separatist Movements in British Central Africa, 1892–1916’, in Africa, Vol. XXIV (1954), p. 237. Joseph Booth was a Baptist, who became a leading member of the Watchtower movement, ofren regarded by officialdom in Africa as subversive.

111. Emily Booth Langworthy, This Africa was Mine (Stirling, 1952), p. 27.

112. ibid., p. 124.

113. ibid., p. 15.

114. E. S. Grogan and A. H. Sharp, op. cit., p. 21.

115. E. J. Trelawney, The Adventures of a Younger Son (1831), p. 156 (World’s Classics edn).

116. R. M. Ballantyne, The Fugitives (1887).

117. E. F. Knight, Madagascar in War Time (1896), pp. 20 ff., 92 ff.

118. W. Reade, op. cit., p. 222.

119. Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm (1883), Chapter 5.

120. D. Livingstone, op. cit., p. 145.

121. J. C. Smuts, Jan Christian Smuts (1952), p. 10.

122. D. Livingstone, op. cit., p. 30.

123. ibid., p. 78.

124. J. C. Smuts, op. cit., p. 5.

125. Laurens van der Post, op. cit., Chapter 2. He had family traditions about how the Bushmen were got rid of. They seem to have survived in larger numbers than he supposed.

126. Hansard, 3rd Series, Vol. CCLVIII (1881), Col. 1, 652.

127. E. A. Ritter, Shaka Zulu (1958 edn), pp. 236, 292.

128. ibid., pp. 244, 307, 310.

129. ibid., pp. 231, 235.

130. D. Livingstone, op. cit., p. 72.

131. A. Forbes, Memories and Studies of War and Peace (1898), p. 43.

132. See F. W. Hirst, ‘Imperialism and Finance’, in Liberalism and the Empire, by F. W. Hirst, G. Murray and J. L. Hammond (1900).

133. There is a good deal on this theme in Collections and Recollections (Series 2) by the Right Hon. G. W. E. Russell (1909; first published 1902).

134. A. G. Gardiner, The Life of Sir William Harcourt (1923), Vol. 2, p. 367.

135. Olive Schreiner, Trooper Peter Halkett of Mashonaland (1897). On the conventional whitewashing of Rhodes cf. T. Ranger, ‘The Last Word on Rhodes’, in Past and Present, No. 28 (1964).

136. E. D. Morel, The Black Man’s Burden (Manchester, ?1920), pp. 45. 52.

137. J. C. Smuts, op. cit., p. 31.

138. Campbell-Bannerman, speech on 14 June 1901 and in Parliament on 17 June. On the resulting uproar see J. A. Spender, The Life of the Right Hun. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1923), Vol. 1, pp. 323 ff.

139. The Scutsmun, 4 October 1899, third leader.

140. W. S. Blunt, op. cit., p. 60.

141. Comte L. de Lichtervelde, Leopold of the Belgians (English edn, 1928), p. 199.

142. Sir J. Rennell Rodd, Social and Diplomatic Memories 1884–1893 (1922), Chapter 2.

143. A. Bott, Our Fathers, 1870–1900 (1931), p. 122.

144. This charge was repeated by E. S. Grogan in old age, in a talk on the BBC on 11 December 1964.

145. E. D. Morel, op. cit., Chapter 10.

146. W. R. Louis, Great Britain and Germany’s Lost Colonies, 1914–1919 (Oxford, 1967), pp. ix, 16.

147. E. S. Grogan and A. H. Sharp, op. cit., pp. 121, 378.

148. M. E. Townsend, The Rise and Fall of Germany’s Colonial Empire (1930), p. 43.

149. J. C. Smuts, op. cit., pp. 149–50.

150. W. R. Louis, op. cit., p. 31.

151. A. H. H. Schnee (former Governor of E. Africa), Germar Colonisation Past and Future (English adaptation, 1926), p. 71.

152. W. H. Dawson, Industrial Germany (1912), p. 261.

153. E. D. Morel, op. cit., pp. 56–7.

154. E. A. Ritter, op. cit., p. 242.

155. J. 1. McNair, op. cit., p. 238.

156. Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya: the Land of Conflict (Manchester, n.d.), pp. 5–6. When some white skins were first seen there they were thought to be the result of some pitiful disease (p. 7).

157. D. Livingstone, op. cit., p. 311.

158. See on this J. A. Hobson, The Crisis of Liberalism (1909), p. 243.

159. cf. J. C. Smuts, op. cit., p. 306: ‘The British outlook is one of goodwill and tolerance, however misguided and over-emphasized … The Boer, after centuries of fighting for a foothold in this country, takes a sterner view of things.’

160. C. Norton, Opportunity in South Africa (1948), pp. 69–70.

161. ibid., pp. 94–5.

162. B. Davidson, op. cit., p. 18.

163. H. Rider Haggard, She (1887). cf. the unpleasant film-star in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Last Tycoon (1941), who ‘modelled herself after one of those queens in the Tarzan comics who rule mysteriously over a nation of blacks’ (Penguin edn, p. 63).

164. B. Davidson, op. cit., p. 16.

165. E. S. Grogan and A. H. Sharp, op. cit., pp. 65, 369–71.

166. F. W. Hirst, etc., op. cit., p. 135.

167. L. Ragg, Dante Alighieri, Apostle of Freedom (1921), p. 34.

168. H. H. Johnston, op. cit., p. 408.

169. ibid., p. 407.

170. E. S. Grogan and A. H. Sharp, op. cit., pp. 136, 337.

171. ibid., p. 251; cf. pp. 185–9.

172. ibid., pp. 356, 361, 363.

173. ibid., p. 365.

174. ibid., p. 296.

175. ibid., pp. 255–6.

176. J. S. Keltie, The Tartition of Africa (1893), p. 5r4.

177. L. Silberman, Crisis in Africa (1947), p. 7.

178. Gilbert Murray, ‘The Exploitation of Inferior Races in Ancient and Modern Times’, in F. W. Hirst, etc., op. cit., p. 148.

179. See G. A. Shepperson, ‘Myth and Reality in Malawi’.

180. A. Hutchinson, ‘Machado’, in Modern African Stories, ed. E. A. Komey and E. Mphahlele (1964), p. 102. My colleague the Rev. A. C. Ross, who knows Malawi well, tells me that the expression is widely current there and in South Africa; a fact of which his native Scotland may be proud.

181. See G. A. Shepperson and T. Price, Independent African; John Chilembwe (Edinburgh, 1958).

182. G. A. Shepperson, ‘African Church Separatist Movements’, p. 240.

183. See I. Geiss, article on ‘Pan-Africanism’, in Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 4, No. I (1969).

184. Hilaire Belloc, The Mercy of Allah (1922), p. 117 (1932 edn).

185. W. R. Louis, op. cit., pp. 2–3, 94–5, 85–6.

186. A. H. H. Schnee, op. cit., p. 79.

187. W. R. Louis, op. cit., p. 137.

188. E. S. Grogan and A. H. Sharp, op. cit., p. 361.

189. John Buchan, Prester John (1910).

190. R. L. Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). Hyde is the lurking evil within Jekyll’s personality, which assumes a separate existence and comes to dominate him.