By the time the scramble for Africa was over, some 10,000 African polities had been amalgamated into forty European colonies and protectorates. The boundaries of the new states, drawn up by negotiators in Europe using maps that were largely inaccurate, took little account of the existing mosaic of monarchies, chiefdoms and acephalous societies on the ground. Nearly half of the new frontiers were geometric lines, lines of latitude and longitude or other straight lines. In some cases, African societies were rent apart: the Bakongo were partitioned between Belgian Congo, French Congo and Portuguese Angola. In other cases, Europe’s colonial territories enclosed an assortment of disparate groups: in 1914, Britain joined together its northern and southern protectorates in Nigeria, creating a new country in which 300 different languages were spoken.
Having expended so much effort on acquiring African territory, Europe’s colonial powers then lost much of their earlier interest. Few parts of Africa offered the prospect of immediate wealth. Colonial governments were concerned above all to make their territories self-supporting. Their remit was limited to maintaining law and order, raising taxation and providing an infrastructure of roads and railways. Economic activity was left to commercial companies. Education was placed in the hands of missionaries. Administration was kept to a minimum. Only a thin white line of control existed.
With so few men on the ground, colonial governments relied heavily on African chiefs and other intermediaries to collaborate with officials and exercise control on their behalf. The British, in particular, favoured a system of ‘indirect rule’, using African authorities to keep order, collect taxes and supply labour, which involved a minimum of staff and expense. The model they used was Lugard’s method of dealing with the Sokoto Caliphate in northern Nigeria, which allowed Fulani emirs to continue to govern in accordance with local traditions of law and discipline. In cases where chiefdoms did not exist, as among the acephalous village societies of the Igbo of southern Nigeria, chiefdoms were invented. The French pursued similar policies. The first French governor to rule Morocco, Marshal Lyautey, declared: ‘There is in every society a ruling class born to rule . . . Get it on our side.’ In west Africa, the French appointed Africans as chefs de canton, often chosen from the ranks of the more efficient clerks and interpreters in government service.
Colonial rule was imposed with authoritarian vigour. In the early years, forced labour was commonly used for public projects such as road-building and porterage. In the territories of French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa, the indigenous population was subject to the Code de l’Indigénat, which enabled French administrators to order arbitrary punishment such as imprisonment without trial for anyone whom they deemed troublesome. The Belgians and Portuguese employed similar measures.
Year by year, the new colonies gradually took shape. Railway lines snaking into the interior from the coast reached Kumasi, the capital of Asante, in 1903; Bamako, on the Niger River, in 1905; Katanga in 1910; Kano in 1912; and Lake Tanganyika in 1914. New patterns of economic activity were established. In west Africa, peasant farmers were encouraged to grow cash crops for European markets. By 1914, the Gold Coast had become the world’s largest single producer of cocoa. Senegal and northern Nigeria specialised in groundnut production. Senegal’s groundnut exports multiplied ten times between the 1880s and the First World War. Other peasant crops exported from west Africa included coffee and palm-oil. In east Africa, Uganda became a major producer of cotton. In other areas of eastern and southern Africa, white settlement was regarded as the key to agricultural development. In Britain’s East African Protectorate (renamed ‘Kenya’ in 1920), white settlers began moving into the highlands around the Rift Valley in the 1900s in a determined effort to turn it into ‘white-man’s country’. But their numbers remained small, scattered over vast districts.
Once railways had opened up the interior, European mining companies arrived to exploit the cornucopia of mineral deposits there. British companies took over the goldfields of Asante. Belgium’s Union Minière obtained exclusive control of copper mining in Katanga. European investment was ploughed into tin production from ancient mines on the Jos plateau of northern Nigeria; diamond exploration in Angola; and phosphate exports from Tunisia.
Through the efforts of Christian missionaries, literacy and primary education were slowly introduced throughout much of tropical Africa. By 1910, about 16,000 European missionaries were stationed there. They founded networks of village schools, providing a simple education in reading, writing, arithmetic and religious instruction in order to spread the Christian message and increase church numbers. Years of work were devoted to translating the Bible, prayers and hymns into vernacular languages and transcribing oral languages into written form for the first time. Mission-educated Africans became catechists and teachers, spreading both Christianity and education ever further. By 1914, there were an estimated seven million Christians in Africa.
Under colonial rule, Islam too expanded rapidly across large parts of west Africa. By allowing Muslim emirs to rule northern Nigeria in accordance with Islamic traditions of law and discipline, Britain conferred a stamp of legitimacy on Muslim leadership and Islamic governance and culture. Muslim clerics were able to proselytise in non-Muslim areas of the north hitherto inaccessible to them as a result of warfare or banditry, and to establish Koranic schools and brotherhoods there. The French, having spent years seeking to smash Muslim resistance to their advances in west Africa, were more distrustful of Muslim ambitions, but soon came to terms with the Murid brotherhood of Senegal when they proved to be a vital factor in boosting groundnut production. The redirection of trade away from traditional northern routes towards the coastal zones of west Africa stimulated further expansion. Islam took root in Yorubaland and in major ports such as Lagos, Dakar and Accra. Whereas Christianity was often seen as ‘the white man’s religion’, Islam presented itself as an African religion. Compared to the heavy demands made by Christian missionaries on their recruits, in particular their insistence on an end to customary practices such as polygamy, converting to Islam involved few obstacles. In west Africa, Islam made far greater progress than Christianity.
No sooner had the imperial map of Africa been marked out on the ground, however, than European states went to war with each other, dragging Africa into the fray. From the outset of the First World War, colonial powers sought to occupy the territory of their rivals, using African troops to fight on their behalf on opposing sides. The first ‘British’ shot of the whole war was fired by a Gold Coast sergeant in August 1914 when British forces, in liaison with the French, invaded the small German colony of Togo. The German governor of Togo tried to forestall the invasion by suggesting by telegram that Togo should remain neutral so that Africans would not witness the spectacle of war between Europeans, but to no avail. By the end of August Togo was in Allied hands.
The Anglo-French campaign to take over German Kamerun proved to be a more arduous task. In August, the British sent in troops from the Gambia, Sierra Leone, Gold Coast and Nigeria; French columns advanced from French Equatorial Africa. But it was not until February 1916 that the last German outpost capitulated. Germany’s colony in South-West Africa meanwhile was overrun after a three-month campaign launched by an expeditionary army from South Africa. In east Africa, German forces under the command of General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck fought on until November 1918, using guerrilla tactics to keep the British and their allies at bay, surrendering only when hearing of the armistice in Europe.
The impact of the war on several African territories was profound. Colonial powers recruited or conscripted more than two million Africans as soldiers, porters or labourers. In French West Africa, chiefs were given quotas to fill. The French used troops not only for operations in Africa but in Europe. Around 150,000 Africans served on the Western Front in France and Belgium; some 30,000 were killed in action there. One regiment from Morocco became the most highly decorated regiment in the whole of the French army. In east Africa, the campaign against von Lettow-Vorbeck’s guerrilla forces brought devastation to rural areas. Both sides used scorched-earth tactics, burning villages, destroying crops and requisitioning labour to deprive their opponents of supplies and support. ‘Behind us we leave destroyed fields, ransacked magazines and, for the immediate future, starvation,’ wrote Ludwig Deppe, a German doctor. ‘We are no longer the agents of culture; our track is marked by death, plundering and evacuated villages.’
In the aftermath of the First World War, Germany’s colonies were shared out among Britain, France, Belgium and South Africa. Tanganyika was handed over to Britain; South-West Africa to South Africa; the tiny highland kingdoms of Ruanda and Urundi (Rwanda and Burundi) were passed to Belgium; and Togo and Cameroon were divided up between Britain and France. As a reward for Italian support in the First World War, Britain gave Jubaland to Italy to form part of Italian Somalia, moving the border of Kenya westwards. Britain also took control of Dar Fur, an independent sultanate which had sided with the Ottomans, incorporating it into colonial Sudan.
Once the new colonial dispensation had been put in place, Africa resumed its role as an imperial backwater. The pace of development was slow. Colonial powers saw no need for more rapid progress. Colonial rule was expected to last for hundreds of years.