Anatomy of a Nigerian politician Theory of Education (XIV)
In the 1860s Hamed bin Muhammed (also known as Tippu Tip), a man of mixed coastal and Nyamwezi ancestry, established similar raiding and trading bases on the Lualaba River (the upper Congo River), west of Lake Tanganyika. Tippu Tip considered his “kingdom” an outpost of the sultanate of Zanzibar, by then Africa’s largest market for ivory and slaves. The activities of traders such as Tippu Tip and Msiri brought the full horrors of the slave trade to the remotest forest regions of the Congo River Basin, which had previously been little affected by the trade.
Lozi Kingdom
By the 19th century the Lozi Kingdom grew to dominate the savanna woodland region of the upper Zambezi River valley in what is now western Zambia. Lozi was a complex, centralized state. Its king delegated regional authority to aristocratic bureaucrats, who directed the seasonal cultivation of the Zambezi floodplains. In 1840 Lozi was overrun by Kololo raiders from what is now South Africa, but in the 1860s the Lozi dynasty and aristocracy were restored. In the second half of the 19th century, ivory hunting and cattle raiding accompanied an expanding Lozi state.
Southern Africa to the 1870s
In the 18th century Sotho and Tswana states emerged on the grasslands south of the Limpopo River. As was the case with the earlier Toutswe states of eastern Botswana, cattle were an important source of power and wealth, and conflict between peoples over cattle ownership was a regular feature of 18th-century life. Across much of southern Africa population was still relatively sparse. In this setting, political change was fluid and ongoing: Dynastic clashes and disputes over cattle often led to the breakup of states and the establishment of new ones.
In the Cape of Good Hope region, the spread of Dutch-speaking settlers known as Boers (ancestors of South Africa’s modern Afrikaners) had largely been halted in the east by effective resistance from Xhosa herders and farmers who were themselves eager to expand their chiefdoms westward. The strategic position of the Cape to world sea trade, however, was to draw it into inter-European conflicts. The British seized the Cape from the Dutch permanently in 1806 (after having first occupied it from 1795 to 1803), adding a new dimension to European influence in South Africa.
The Mfecane
From the 1810s to the 1830s southern Africa went through a period of violent turmoil and political upheaval in which many different chiefdoms and other states came into conflict with each other, spurring wars and large-scale migrations. This period, referred to as the mfecane (from a Nguni word meaning “the crushing”), has long been the subject of debate among historians. For years, historians generally believed that the violence was singularly the result of the emergence of an expanding Zulu kingdom under military leader Shaka. However, many historians now contend that this emphasis on Zulu expansion obscures the fact that, as we have seen, the rise and fall of similar states and conflict over the control of cattle were already very common in the region. It also ignores two important factors: Firstly, the rise in the demand for slaves along the southern Mozambique coast from the 1820s likely played a role in the emergence of some of these new states, particularly the Gaza Empire. Secondly, assaults by armed and mounted raiders from the Cape Colony region—searching for cattle and captives for sale in the colony—were also a major source of disruption among the peoples of the area.
Apart from the Zulu kingdom under Shaka and the Gaza Empire under Soshangane, other new states in the region included the Sotho kingdom under Moshoeshoe, the Swazi kingdom under Sobhuza, and numerous Tswana kingdoms of the western grasslands. The Ndebele, led by Mzilikazi, left the Zulu region in the early 1820s and settled briefly north of the Vaal River, absorbing local Sotho and Tswana into their ranks. Constantly harassed by Boer, Griqua, and Kora raiders, the Ndebele moved north and established a new kingdom in southern Zimbabwe in about 1840. By this time, groups of other migrants, who came to be known as the Ngoni, had already moved north through Zimbabwe to settle in the region of eastern Zambia, Malawi, and southern Tanzania. In the far south of the region the Xhosa held out against the increasingly violent challenge of the British-occupied Cape Colony, only finally going down to defeat and colonization in the 1870s.
Boer Trek and Boer Republics
In the late 1830s several thousand Boer families began migrating from British-ruled Cape Colony to the northeast, across the Orange and Vaal rivers. These migrants sought new expanses of land unclaimed by Europeans, as well as unrestricted access to African forced labor. Their further occupation of land in the colony had been limited by Xhosa resistance from the east, while their use of forced African labor had been restricted by the British abolition of slavery in the 1830s. These Boer trekkers established settlements in the lands north of the Orange River, farther north in the Transvaal, and in the eastern lowlands of Natal.
Later in the century Boers and other Dutch-speaking South Africans began calling themselves Afrikaners. As part of a cultural and political struggle against British domination, Afrikaner historians portrayed this Boer migration as a Biblical-style “Great Trek” into unoccupied wilderness. But the reality was very different. The early Boer intrusion was challenged throughout, and many Africans died at their hands. They fought bloody battles with Zulu in the east and with Sotho, Tswana, and Ndebele in the north.
The British intervened as well, annexing the colony of Natal in 1843, and seizing the land between the Orange and Vaal rivers in 1848. Eventually, however, the British recognized two independent Boer republics: the South African Republic (in Transvaal) in 1852, and the Orange Free State in 1854.
Discovery of Mineral Wealth
By 1867 large parts of what is now South Africa were still under independent African control. However, the discovery that year of diamonds near the confluence of the Orange and Vaal rivers, followed by the 1886 discovery of the world’s largest gold deposits in the Transvaal would ultimately transform the economic and political life of all southern Africans. As a vast and hugely lucrative industrial market opened up in the interior, conflict over land and labor heightened. Britain in particular was determined to bring the whole area under its imperial control.
The Scramble for Africa
In the final two decades of the 19th century European colonial powers took over virtually the whole continent of Africa, racing each other to claim territory to expand their colonial empires. This so-called Scramble for Africa marked an irreparable turning point in the history of the continent. Almost overnight, most Africans lost control of their own historical destinies. Nations and whole empires were swept aside as the political layout of the continent was reconfigured according to European dictate.
European Motivations
Historians have debated the questions of what sparked the Scramble, what Europe’s motives were, and why the takeover happened so rapidly and completely. In the early 20th century the colonizing powers set the terms of the debate, arguing that they came to Africa with a “civilizing” mission. Because it morally justified their actions, they unfairly portrayed Africa as a dark and primitive continent with no discernible record of historical achievement. European powers claimed they had come to suppress the slave trade, end endemic warfare, and establish their own right to trade freely in the continent without local interference. Attempts by African rulers to control and tax the trade within their own states were arrogantly dismissed by European traders, who accused them of interfering with the free flow of trade. Income from the taxation of trade had always been an essential source of government revenue in most African states and the removal of this rightful income deliberately and seriously weakened them in the face of the European challenge.
From the beginning, Europe’s presumed “moral justification” for imperialism was challenged by contemporary thinkers (including British social reformer John Hobson and, later, Russian Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin) who identified economics as the prime motivator underlying the European conquest of Africa. Industrial Europe needed Africa’s raw materials: palm oil, cotton, rubber, and minerals. Furthermore, while the ancient gold riches of West Africa and Zimbabwe had long been known, the 1870s and 1880s demonstrated the presence of spectacular diamond and gold wealth in southern Africa. But Africa was not only a source of raw materials for European factories, it was also a vast, untapped market for the overproduction of those same factories. African indigenous industry was unable to compete with European mass-produced cloth, metal tools, and liquor.
Conquest of a Continent
In 1877 Anglo-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley emerged at the mouth of the Congo River, completing an arduous, three-year transcontinental trek and proving the Congo’s navigability for thousands of kilometers above the rapids near its mouth. Ambitious Europeans, led by King Leopold II of Belgium, recognized the river as a major potential trading artery. By the early 1880s Belgium and France had competing claims to territories on either side of the lower Congo. Territorial acquisition quickly became competitive and strategic, as Europe’s major powers decided that their future economic prosperity depended on their seizing as much of the continent for themselves as possible. The biggest players were Britain, France, Belgium, and Germany, with Spain and Italy playing lesser roles, and Portugal maintaining its claims to its longstanding colonies. The process was already well under way by the time the European powers met at the Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884-1885 to lay down the ground rules of the Scramble. The principal of these was that European claimants to any part of Africa had to prove their presence in the area by getting the signed agreement of a local African ruler or—if that was not possible or convenient—by military conquest.
Europeans frequently tricked illiterate African rulers into signing documents under false pretences. For example, in 1888 Ndebele king Lobengula inadvertently gave British businessman Cecil Rhodes and his private mining company the right to take over the whole of what is now Zimbabwe. The British government ignored Lobengula’s subsequent protests and approved Rhodes’s colonization of the country. Some African rulers, more experienced in European ways, willingly agreed to “protection” before the arrival of European military forces, and in this way managed to obtain some concessions. Lozi king Lewanika achieved better treatment for Lozi than the rest of what is now Zambia by agreeing to an 1889 British treaty of protection which left him with some power and kept the British from seizing Lozi land.
European armies eventually occupied most of the continent, brutally conquering most African states that resisted. African powers lost virtually every conflict for two main reasons: the age-old principle of divide-and-conquer and the superior weaponry of the European armies. Europeans were able to play one African ruler against another because a ruler’s first duty to his people was to protect them from their traditional rivals or enemies. Up to this point, Europeans had been trading partners and not necessarily rivals or enemies, roles more likely to be played by neighboring African states. Therefore, neighbors of West African slave-trading states were often prepared to help Europeans overcome their traditional enemies, who had long raided them for captives to sell into slavery. Many African states even provided military support for European colonizing armies.
Despite trading firearms into Africa for more than a century, Europeans were much better armed. European armies had access to the latest weapons technology, which was developing rapidly in the final decades of the 19th century. Some African armies possessed breech-loading rifles (loaded through the rear of the barrel rather than through the muzzle), but none had the newly-developed machine gun and, with almost the sole exception of Ethiopia, none had artillery with explosive shells. African bravery and strategic skill resulted in a few memorable African victories, such as the Zulu victory over the British in the Battle of Isandlwana in 1879. However, with huge resources of equipment and soldiers at their disposal, European imperial victory was virtually inevitable. Often it was a very one-sided fight: In 1898 at Omdurman, Sudan, the British killed 20,000 Sudanese fighters in a matter of hours.
Some of the longest struggles for political survival occurred in what was to become French West Africa, where Samory Touré’s Mandinka state fought off French incursion from the early 1880s until 1898. Sudanese military leader Rabih al-Zubayr, using a disciplined and well-armed cavalry, waged a jihad in the Chad region and conquered Bornu in 1893. There he set up a militaristic empire that held up French conquest until 1900, when two French armies converging from north and the south finally overcame Rabih.
In many parts of Africa, rural people were initially unaware of the fact that European powers had, on paper, taken over. Rural resistance to European presence, when it came, was often small in scale but long in duration.
Victory at Adwa
Ethiopia stands as the exception to the rule in the Scramble. Menelik II became emperor in 1889 and proceeded to use the powerful, well-equipped Ethiopian army to expand south, east, and west, incorporating the territories of the Oromo, Sidama, and Somali peoples into his empire. Italy, which had taken Eritrea from the Ottoman Empire in the late 1880s, invaded Ethiopia in 1895, anticipating an easy victory. The Ethiopian army, using breech-loading rifles and artillery, annihilated the Italian force at the Battle of Adwa in 1896. With this victory, Ethiopia became the only indigenous African state to successfully resist European colonization during the Scramble for Africa.
Colonial Rule
By World War I (1914-1918) Ethiopia and Liberia were the only independent nations left in Africa. France and Britain held the most African territory: French colonies stretched across almost all of West Africa, while Britain held an almost unbroken string of colonies from Egypt to South Africa.
Colonial North Africa
European colonial control came earlier to North Africa than to most of the continent. As the British occupied Egypt in 1882, the French extended their control from Algeria to Tunisia. Morocco managed to resist the establishment of a French protectorate until 1912. Banding together in Islamic resistance forces, North Africans provided European colonists with their most persistent opposition. When the Italians invaded Libya in 1911 they faced formidable opposition from the Sanusi Brotherhood, who conducted a brilliant guerrilla campaign that lasted for 20 years. In the northern extent of Morocco in the early 1920s the Berbers of the Er Rif mountains almost expelled the Spanish from the region until the French came to their aid in 1926. In Algeria, Islamic brotherhoods had fought French rule for decades in the mid-19th century. However, by the 20th century French control was secure, and the French settler population rose rapidly.
In early-20th-century Egypt, anticolonial opposition, protests, and riots were commonplace, as were violent British reactions. The pressure on the British, compounded by the demands of World War I, led Britain to make political concessions. In 1922 Egyptians gained nominal independence and a parliament under King Fuad I, although Britain remained in control behind the scenes. The corruption and ineffectiveness of Fuad’s government undermined the parliamentary system as a viable form of government. In the 1930s an organization called the Muslim Brotherhood emerged in vehement opposition to parliamentary government as well as European culture and interference. This brotherhood inspired other movements throughout Islamic North Africa, and its impact is still felt in the region.
Colonial Sub-Saharan Africa
Across most of sub-Saharan Africa, colonial rule was accompanied by the exploitation of the continent’s raw materials by private European concessionary companies. The conduct of these companies was often brutal. The worst excesses were in the Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), which Belgian king Leopold II ruled as his personal fiefdom until it was taken over by the Belgian government in 1908. Leopold’s agents used forced African labor to collect rubber, and regularly tortured and mutilated African workers. Violence by concessionary companies was also experienced in British Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe); German East, West, and South-West Africa (now Tanzania, Cameroon, and Namibia); Portuguese Mozambique; and French Equatorial Africa (now several countries, including Gabon, Republic of the Congo, and Central African Republic).
In the early 20th century European colonists in Africa directed the building of new infrastructures, such as port facilities and numerous railways. Railways were built with African forced labor and the railway companies were often paid with vast grants of African land or mineral concessions. Almost exclusively, the railways linked the source of a colony’s agricultural or mineral wealth with ports. They were arteries by which colonizing powers extracted the continent’s raw materials to benefit themselves, with virtually no thought given to local African economies. Although Europeans would later claim that they had given Africa a modern infrastructure, Africans had paid for it and Europeans were the main beneficiaries. Furthermore, land along the railways became valuable commercial farmland because of the easy access to wider urban or international markets, and so it was often set aside for white settlement. In Kenya, a railway built to link Uganda with the coast provided the British with the incentive to seize the Kikuyu highlands of Kenya for exclusive white settlement.
Colonial taxation of Africans was an important method of control. Throughout much of the continent—but especially in countries with extensive white settlement, such as Kenya, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and South Africa—taxation was used as a deliberate tool to drive Africans into the labor market. In order to earn the money to pay the new taxes, Africans had to work European farms and mines. Colonists encouraged Africans to migrate from rural areas to work their various enterprises. They recruited men from rural areas and paid them minimal wages on short, fixed-term contracts. Colonists assumed that the workers’ wives who remained behind would be able to grow enough food to feed their families’ children and elderly. The reality was that rural areas became impoverished by the absence of male labor and insufficient income from wages to compensate. Women therefore often followed men to urban areas in search of casual employment, further impoverishing the rural areas. This migratory pattern would persist throughout the 20th century.