Turkish suzerainty), insolent beyond measure in his treatment of
Europeans, because hitherto all European states had failed to subdue
his pretensions, signalised some difference of opinion with the
French Consul by striking him in the face with a fly-whisk. France
brooded over the insult for three years, when the tottering
government of Charles X sought to prop up the Bourbon dynasty by a
successful military expedition, and in June 1830 landed 37,000
infantry, and a force of cavalry and artillery at Sidi Ferruj, near
Algiers. Considering their renown as fierce fighters, the Algerians
do not seem to have made a very sturdy resistance; though perhaps in
the lapse of time since their last war with a European power the
superiority of European artillery began to be felt. At any rate,
three weeks after the French landed they had taken the town of
Algiers and the Dey had surrendered. A week afterwards the Dey was
banished to Naples. Great Britain then asked for information as to
French projects, and was assured that within a very short time the
French forces would be withdrawn when reparation had been made. But
these assurances were as well meant and as valueless as Russian
assurances in Central Asia, and our own repeated and unsolicited
declarations that we hoped to be able to leave Egypt in six months.
The government of Charles X fell, and the new Orleanist dynasty
could hardly draw down on itself the odium of a withdrawal. But an
unwise policy nevertheless was pursued towards the Arabs, a policy
dictated by ignorance. The inhabitants of Algeria had not taken a
very strong part in the defence of the Dey, who in their eyes was a
Turk and a foreigner; but when they began to realize that their
country was about to be taken possession of by Christians, and
Christians who at that time did nothing to soothe their religious
susceptibilities, they found a leader in a princely man, Abd al
Kader[124]. From 1835 to 1837 the French sustained defeat after
defeat at his hands. In 1837 however a truce was made, by which Abd
al Kader was recognized by the French as Sultan over a large part of
western and central Algeria. Two years after war broke out again
between the French and Abd al Kader. An army under Marshal Bugeaud
attacked Abd al Kader with unwavering energy—perhaps with some
cruelty. In 1841 the national hero had lost nearly every point of
his kingdom, and fled into Morocco, from which country he afterwards
returned with a large army, only to be again and again defeated,
though he occasionally inflicted great losses on the French.
Finally, to save his own special district from ruin, he came to
terms with the French Governor-General, who gave him permission to
retire to Alexandria or Naples. But the French Government repudiated
the terms granted to Abd al Kader, and kept him a close prisoner for
some years in a French fortress. When Louis Napoleon became Emperor
he released him and allowed him to live at Damascus, where he died
in 1883.
At the time when the French invaded Algeria that country was by no
means under a homogeneous government. There were the Dey of Algiers,
the Dey of Oran, and on the east the Bey of Constantine (who ruled
over much of eastern Algeria); whilst the Berber tribes in the
mountains and on the verge of the desert were practically
independent. Constantine was an extremely strong place, and in their
first wars with its Bey the French failed to take it. It was not
finally captured till 1847. By this time France had warred against
Morocco, and had crushed any attempt on the part of the “Emperor of
the West” to interfere in the affairs of Algeria. They had overrun
and to some degree conquered all Algeria north of the Sahara desert.
Therefore, in 1848, the Government felt justified in declaring the
new African acquisition to be French territory, divided into three
departments, to be ruled as part of France, and to possess the right
of representation in the French parliament. Under the Second Empire
this constitutional government, which was quite unsuited to what
Napoleon III fitly termed ‘an Arab kingdom,’ was set aside in favour
of military government. But this was not organized on suitable
lines, and proved a failure. In 1858 an attempt was made to imitate
the change then taking place in the government of British India. An
Algerian ministry was formed in Paris with Prince Napoleon as
Minister; but this form of administration also was a failure, and
was abolished by the Emperor when he returned from his visit to
Algeria in 1863. The country was then governed by a military
governor, generally with absolute powers, and attempts were made to
conciliate the Kabail or Hill Berbers, whom utter mismanagement had
driven into revolt. The country nevertheless continued to be
afflicted with unrest; and in 1870, as the Empire was dying, a
commission sat to enquire into the state of the colony, and to
suggest remedies which might be applied to its misgovernment. By a
vote of the Chamber military government was again abolished in
favour of civil rule, but owing to an insurrection in Eastern
Algeria which followed on the Franco-German War, the recommendations
of this commission were not fully carried out till 1879, when the
first civil governor was appointed. One of the first acts of the new
French Republic at the end of 1870 was to bestow the franchise on
the Jews of Algeria, an action, which by discriminating between the
Jews and Arabs has since caused a great deal of trouble.
From 1848 to 1880 numerous attempts were made to induce French
people to settle in Algeria, nor were the colonists of other nations
discouraged. At one time young soldiers would be selected from the
army, would be married to poor girls dowered by the State, and sent
off to settle in Algeria, where they were given grants of land; but
often as soon as the dowry was spent the newly-wedded wife was
deserted by her husband, who made the best of his way back to
France. In 1871 nearly 11,000 natives of Alsace and Lorraine were
granted land in Algeria, and subsequently some 25,000 other French
colonists were settled in the country at a cost of 15,000,000
francs. But despite failures, frauds and fickleness, the French
settlers in Algeria increased in numbers by immigration and births,
so that by the beginning of the 20th century there was a French
element in the European population of Algeria of more than a quarter
of a million (298,000 in 1910). Meantime, the peace and security of
trade introduced by the French had attracted large numbers of
Italians and Maltese to the eastern part of Algeria, and still
larger numbers of Spaniards to the western department of Oran—so
much so, that even at the present day Spanish is the common language
of Oran, and Italian is as often heard as French at Bona,
Constantine, and even inland as far as Tebessa. Several thousands of
Maltese also settled in eastern Algeria, and became naturalized as
French subjects. It is probable that in this way Algeria will be
eventually colonized by Europe, not by the nations of the north, but
by those Mediterranean peoples who are so nearly akin in blood to
the Berber races of North Africa. The French type that prospers most
is that drawn from the south of France; yet the fair-haired
Alsatians are doing very well[125]. There has been a certain
intermixture between the French and the native races, and between
these again and other European settlers. It is the present writer’s
opinion, based on recent visits to Algeria, that a remarkable degree
of fusion between these elements is being brought about. The Arabs
and Berbers in the settled parts of the country are approximating
more and more in their costume and their mode of life to the
Europeans, while the latter are becoming to some extent Arabised.
There is scarcely an Algerian in any town who cannot talk French,
and there is scarcely a French settler in Algeria who cannot talk
Arabic, while among the lower classes an ugly jargon is springing
up, in which both languages are represented, mixed with Italian and
Spanish words.
In 1863 the Emperor Napoleon brought about the passing of a law
which exchanged for a tribal holding of land the recognition of the
indigenes as individual proprietors of the soil. This law has to
some extent broken up the tribal system, has corrected nomad
tendencies, and has done much to settle the Berbers on the soil with
loyalty to the existing government. Of course, outside the
relatively well-watered, fertile districts the nature of the country
induces a wandering, pastoral life amongst the sparse population;
and here a warlike spirit still shows itself from time to time in
revolts of ever diminishing extent. During the eighties of the 19th
century the French were obliged to bring large forces into the field
to suppress a serious insurrection under Bu Amama, a leader who
represented the more-or-less Arab tribes inhabiting the steppe
country, far to the south of Oran, on the borders of Morocco. Their
turbulence was only finally subdued by the building of a railway
into the heart of their country—a railway now reaching to
south-eastern Morocco and destined to be prolonged across the Sahara
to Timbuktu.
At the close of the 19th century the Jewish question gave rise to
disturbances. The Jews, equally with the Christians in Algeria, are
electors, while this privilege is granted to only a few Arab
proprietors. As in Tunis, the Jews are greatly given to usury, and
they were formerly disliked in Algeria with an intensity which is
but little understood in England, where the Jews are scarcely to be
distinguished from other subjects of the Crown in their demeanour or
practices. But the fact is that parliamentary government, so far as
Algeria and its connection with France are concerned is somewhat of
a farce. Algeria will demand in future fuller measures of
self-government, and less dependence on the selfish policy of French
manufacturers and distillers. But the country nevertheless owes an
immense debt of gratitude to France for its noble public works, its
security, tranquillity and its successful battles against the forces
of nature—drought, locusts and desert sands.
An example of a successful retention of native forms of government
is to be seen in the adjoining country of Tunis, which under the
ægis of a Turkish prince is governed despotically, ably, wisely, and
well by a single Frenchman. Tunis, which, like Algeria and Tripoli,
had since the close of the 16th century been more or less a Turkish
dependency—that is to say, a country governed at first by Turkish
officers, who finally became quasi-independent rulers, with a
recognized hereditary descent—soon began to feel the results of the
conquest of Algeria in an increase of interest felt by the French
regarding its condition. At first the relations between France and
Tunis were flattering to the latter country. The relatively
enlightened character of the Husseinite Beys[126] was recognized,
and when France was in difficulties with Abd al Kader and the Bey of
Constantine, proposals were even made to Tunis to supply from its
ruling family two or three princes who should be made Beys of
Constantine and Oran under French protection; but the idea was not
carried out. In 1863 the Bey of Tunis went in state to visit the
Emperor Napoleon at Algiers. Nevertheless, during the ’50’s and
’60’s Great Britain firmly maintained the independence of Tunis, at
whose court she was represented for many years by a sage
diplomatist, Sir Richard Wood. The disenchantment which Algeria
caused in the early sixties diminished the interest which France
felt in Tunis; and during this time, under the fostering care of Sir
Richard Wood, British enterprise had acquired so large a hold over
the Regency, that at the beginning of the seventies it would have
been reasonable to have extended British protection to the Bey. But
another factor had come into play—the newly-formed Power of United
Italy. The finances of Tunis had from the time of the Crimean War
onwards got into a disarray resembling in a minor degree the
condition of Egypt under Ismail. Not only was the Bey extravagant,
but still worse, his ministers, mostly of servile origin, robbed the
country shamelessly, and loans were obtained over and over again
merely to swell their ill-gotten gains. At last the Powers had to
intervene, and in 1869 the finances of Tunis were brought under the
control of a tripartite commission with representatives of England,
France, and Italy. During the early ’70’s, however, British
commercial interest waned, and the enterprise of France increased,
with the result that France obtained permission to erect telegraphs,
and took over an important railway concession which had been
accepted and then abandoned by a British firm. It was becoming
obvious that the native government of Tunis could not continue much
longer without a definite European protector. Whatever right England
may have had to assume such a position, she quietly surrendered it
to France through her official representatives at the Congress of
Berlin. The only other rival then was Italy; and Italy, though she
would have dearly liked to resume control in the name of Rome over
the Roman province of Africa, shrank from the danger of thus defying
France. A small British railway which had been made from the town of
Tunis to the port of Goletta was sold to an Italian company in
1881[127]. At the same time, a British subject, really acting as a
representative of the Tunisian Government, attempted on a point of
law to prevent a very large estate in the interior of Tunis from
falling into French hands. The French Government determined to delay
action no longer. Taking advantage of the very insufficient plea,
that a Tunisian tribe (the Khmirs or “Kroumirs”) had committed small
robberies across the Algerian frontier, a strong force invaded
Tunis, and wrung from the Bey in his suburban palace the treaty of
Kasr-es-Said, by which he placed his territories under French
protection. When the news spread into outlying districts there were
uprisings against the French or against the Bey’s government which
had placed the country under French control. The French troops had
practically to conquer much of the south of Tunis, but in a year’s
time tranquillity had been restored. In 1883 the treaty of
Kasr-es-Said was replaced by another agreement which brought the
Tunisian Government under complete French control. In this year the
other Powers surrendered their consular jurisdiction, and recognized
that of the French courts. By 1897 all former commercial treaties
with the Bey were abandoned in favour of fresh conventions made with
France. From the commencement of 1898, Tunis became emphatically an
integral portion of the French Empire.
Through accident or design—let us hope the latter—a succession of
able men was appointed to direct the affairs of France in Tunis.
Several of these had a relatively long tenure of power, and were
therefore able to carry out a continuous policy. Ablest amongst
these French residents have been M. Jules Cambon, and M. René
Millet. Tunis has been an example of almost unqualified success in
French colonial administration. Of late, however, the protectionist
policy which finds favour with the French Government has to some
extent striven to secure the commerce of the Regency for France, a
policy which may tend to qualify the praise which otherwise would be
bestowed on a remarkable development of the country under French
direction.
The extension of Senegal under General Faidherbe, and the occupation
by the French of oases in the Sahara, such as Wargla and Golea,
early suggested an overland connection between the two French
possessions, and the “Chemin de fer Trans-Saharien” was hinted at,
half in joke, during the sixties and became a subject of serious
consideration in the seventies. But in 1881 the massacre of the
Flatters expedition in the Sahara Desert, and the obvious hostility
of the Tawareq to any further advance of the French across the
desert temporarily discouraged the idea; though the main
discouragement no doubt arose from the thought of the enormous cost
of such a railway, and the unfruitful character of the country it
would traverse. Still France, when the word “hinterland” was
creeping into political terminology, began to feel anxious that no
other European Power should intervene between her North African
possessions and her empire on the Niger; and in 1890 she secured
from the British Government a recognition of this important point,
the British recognition carrying the French sphere of influence to
the north-western coast of Lake Chad as well as to the Niger. In
1898 it was resolved to take effective possession of all this
portion of the north-central Sudan, and three great expeditions
converged on it; one from Algeria under Commandant Lamy with Mons.
F. Foureau as political officer, one from French Congo (as to which
more will be written when that region is considered), and the third
from Senegal, under Captains Voulet and Chanoine. Unfortunately
these last-named officers belonged to a type which in the closing
years of the 19th century came into prominent notice in the French
and Belgian operations in Central Africa, while it was not entirely
unknown in the British and German records of that period, as
colonial and “Congo Atrocity” scandals testified—a type which became
recklessly cruel and immoral through the possession of unlimited
power and the belief that its doings would never be heard of in
Europe. But the mistreatment of the natives in the Niger Bend did
come to the knowledge of the French authorities in Senegal, and
Lieut.-Colonel Klobb was sent eastward to catch up with the
Voulet-Chanoine column and take command. Klobb overtook these
officers in the Sokoto country. Voulet ordered his men to fire on
the officer sent to supersede him. Klobb fell dead. Then Voulet and
Chanoine marched away with most of their troops to found an
independent state in the heart of Africa, leaving their junior
officers and the remnant of the negro soldiers to do as they
pleased. But their own Senegalese troops, on reflection, objected to
outlawry and permanent banishment from their homes. They held a
rough court martial, sentenced Voulet and Chanoine to die, shot
them, and then returned to the command of Lieut. Pallier, who had
succeeded Klobb in command of this mis-managed expedition. Pallier
bravely and adroitly (for the tragedy took place nominally on
British territory and the natives were arming to punish these
marauders) led the reorganized expedition to Zinder in northern
Hausaland (July, 1899) where four months afterwards Foureau and Lamy
arrived. From this time onwards the Sahara desert was occupied and
pacified and is now traversed by several lines of telegraph wires.
The Tawareq and Tibu have ceased to raid and devastate peaceful
agriculturists in the oases, or the long caravans of traders.
Between 1899 and 1903 French forces (chiefly native cavalry under
French officers, and the Foreign Legion) had occupied all the
prominent oases and centres of population in the Moroccan Sahara,
from Figig and Beshar on the north to Tuāt, Tidikelt, Gurara and
Insalah in the south.
The work of the 1890 and 1898 conventions between Britain and France
was completed by the Agreement of 1904, in which the British
Government acknowledged Morocco to be a sphere of exclusively French
political influence, with the exception of Tangier and the portions
which might be claimed by Spain on the Riff coast. But in 1905 the
German Government showed its displeasure at this agreement by an
ostentatious recognition of Moroccan independence. European
diplomacy arranged the compromise of the Algeciras Conference in the
spring of 1906, at which the thirteen assembled delegates drew up
some regulations of a stop-gap nature for the policing of the
Moroccan Atlantic ports, the re-establishment of Moroccan finances,
the position of foreigners, etc. In 1907 however the disorder in
Morocco became acute and French and English officials were captured
or killed by the natives. To mark her displeasure, France occupied
Ujda (Oudjda), a border town of north-east Morocco and advanced her
troops to the Muluya river (which will probably be fixed as the
theoretical boundary of “Morocco” in the north-east). Soon
afterwards the tribesmen round Casablanca (Dar-al-baida) attacked
and slew some European masons engaged on the harbour works. France
(after the plunder of the town by the Shawia tribesmen) finally
landed a force of 15,000 men and forcibly occupied the Shawia
country all round Casablanca. More fighting took place in South
Morocco (1907-8) and French expeditions traversed and occupied the
regions south of the High Atlas. In 1908 occurred the civil war
between the Sultans Abd-al-aziz and Mulai Hafid, which resulted in
the defeat of the former, in spite of his English military advisers
and non-commissioned officers[128]. Germany seemed rather to espouse
the cause of Mulai Hafid, but in any case the complication was
unravelled by the abdication of Abd-al-aziz and the recognition of
Mulai Hafid by France and the other signatory powers of the
Algeciras conference.
But in 1909 the temporary peace in Morocco was again rudely broken
by Spanish activity round Melilla—the building of a railway to
secure a new post, La Mar Chica, and to reach and work mineral
deposits. The Riff tribes attacked the Spaniards with results
already described in Chapter V. The ferment among the Moors against
European intervention next took the shape of attacking the Sultan
Mulai Hafid at Fez (1910). To save the Sultan and the Sultan’s
Government (the “Makhzen”) and the European residents from possible
destruction, the French Government sent an expeditionary force from
the Shawia coast region to reach and relieve Fez. This was
accomplished after some difficulty in the spring of 1911, and a
small army or government guard was organized for the Sultan under
French officers.
This and other actions once more aroused German resentment and
intervention on the grounds that France was creating a virtual
protectorate over Morocco without Germany’s consent, and without
compensation to Germany for the possible loss of a profitable field
of commercial development. So the German war vessel, the _Panther_,
was sent to Agadir in the Bay of Sūs to “protect German interests”;
these interests being the mineralogical researches and acquisition
of concessions of the firm of Mannesmann. If we brush aside
diplomatic fictions, the kernel of the matter was this. Germany had
long fixed her desires on the Bay of Sūs or Agadir, that
semi-circular bight of the Moroccan coast south of the Atlas range
and opposite the River and Country of Sūs which is the nearest
approach on the whole Atlantic coast of Morocco to a large and good
harbour protected from the north wind. It was believed in Germany
that Great Britain was too much involved in domestic agitation to be
prepared to go to war over Morocco; and that France would be willing
to stave off trouble with Germany and obtain her consent to the
acquisition of nearly all Morocco by agreeing to a German
protectorate over the Sūs country and Anti-Atlas, thus admitting
Germany as a territorial power in North Africa.
Spain gave Germany some encouragement in this intervention, having
already found the French very grudging in their allotment of Spanish
spheres of influence in the north of Morocco and opposite the Canary
Islands. But had Germany succeeded in her demand for the Sūs country
Spain would have been the first to suffer. The Cape-Jubi-Bojador
region and the Canary Islands might ere long have become German
also.
An attempt was made in Germany to enlist European sympathy on her
side by advancing the plea that this intervention at Agadir stood
for free trade in Morocco. But this important principle had already
been secured by the Anglo-French Convention of 1904 and the
Algeciras Act of 1906; moreover the whole of the bargaining between
France and Germany, since 1906, bore reference to the selfish
advantages which German concessionaires and traders were to obtain
in Morocco to the detriment of (let us say) British, American, or
Belgian competitors. Of course France, in the use she has made of
North, West, and Central Africa and of Madagascar, has been
inexcusably protectionist. She has adopted the thoroughly selfish
policy of colonial exploitation characteristic of Spain and Portugal
in the 16th-18th centuries and of Britain in the 17th to early 19th
centuries. Nevertheless she has spent blood and treasure without
stint in the redemption of North Africa; and in spite of her
protectionist tariff the non-French, European trade with Algeria and
Tunis is very considerable. But a question of even greater
importance than a selfish French use of Morocco rose before Great
Britain in 1911. Not to support France in this diplomatic struggle
meant the establishment of Germany on the Atlantic coast of Morocco,
meant that the Emperor Wilhelm’s half jesting description of himself
at that period as “Admiral of the Atlantic” would become a reality,
with all the consequences which might flow from such a position.
Germany realizing her false position shifted her ground, asked for
reasonable “compensations in Central Africa,” got them, and in
return recognized definitely a French Protectorate over Morocco.
With the exception of the Riff Coast, of Tangier, and of the region
opposite the Canary Islands (which with the exception of Tangier
will become Spanish) France will soon be mistress of Morocco in
name, but probably not in actuality and entirety till many years
have passed. No sensible person need regret this. The condition of
Algeria and Tunis under French direction are a sufficient guarantee
for the future prosperity and happiness of the most interesting
country in Africa—Morocco—under French guidance.
As already related, France, or rather—the State being then but the
king—Louis XIV, had become interested in the affairs of Abyssinia
early in the 18th century. This interest was reawakened in the
middle of the next century by the remarkable researches of the
brothers Antoine and Arnaud d’Abbadie, who though of partly Irish
origin were French subjects. The elder brother had explored Brazil,
the younger, Algeria; but both were attracted by the little-known
civilization of Ethiopia and started together in 1838 for Abyssinia.
Between 1838 and 1853 their researches were carried on from Masawa
in the north to the little-known country of Kaffa in the far south;
and, though the results were not entirely published until 1890 (the
publication began in 1860), they gave to France a legitimate claim
(together with the subsidized travels of Borelli in 1890) to an
interest in the affairs and the future of Abyssinia.
In 1857, jealous of the British establishment at Aden, France had
intended to seize the island of Perim, at the mouth of the Red Sea,
but was forestalled by the British. She therefore turned her
attention to the coast opposite Aden, and there purchased from a
native chief (in 1862) the Bay of Obok. This place was not
effectively occupied till 1883, after the break-up of the Egyptian
Sudan empire. France then rapidly pushed her possessions southward
to curtail as much as possible similar British operations in
Somaliland. She thus secured the important bay of Tajurra, French
territory now stretches inland to the vicinity of Harrar. On the
north it is bounded by the Italian colony of Eritrea and in the
interior by Abyssinia and British Somaliland. French Somaliland, as
this possession is called, is about 5,790 sq. miles in extent and is
chiefly important for the comparatively good harbour of Jibuti and
for the fact that it controls the easiest access to Abyssinia.
Indeed the only existing railway which enters Abyssinia and connects
that country with the sea coast starts from Jibuti and is
constructed to the Abyssinian capital, Adis Ababa (275 miles), with
a branch to the old Semitic city of Harrar (altogether about 192
miles of rail on French territory). It was an unfulfilled aspiration
of France in the last decade of the 19th century that a French
Empire should extend across broadest Africa from Senegal to
Abyssinia and the Red Sea or the Gulf of Aden. This project was to
be essayed in a tentative manner by an expedition organized in the
French Congo in 1894-5 (despite warnings from Great Britain that
such action would be regarded as unfriendly) and led by an officer
who had been very successful in the wars of Upper Nigeria, the brave
Major J. B. Marchand, who advanced (mainly along the course of the
Djur River) with a force of about 150 Senegalese and nine French
officers to Fashoda, on the White Nile. Here they were saved from
possible destruction at the hands of a large force of Dervishes by
Lord Kitchener’s victory at Omdurman. In consequence of the protests
of the British Government, Major Marchand in November 1898 was
instructed to leave Fashoda and retire through Abyssinia to French
Somaliland. This journey up the valley of the Sobat River was
successfully accomplished; and at the end of May 1899 Marchand and
his officers reached Paris, where they received a great ovation.
French interest in the Congo region began in the 18th century,
mainly because of the importance of the servile labour of Congoland
to the French West Indies and the desirability of preventing the
Portuguese from regaining their monopolist hold over the Kongo
kingdom and its commerce. The French Government contrived moreover
to have French Catholic missionaries sent to the Congo and Loango in
place of the Italian Capuchins. The Napoleonic Wars and the
abolition of the slave trade suspended further action; but the idea
of a French control over “Lower Guinea” revived in 1839, at the time
when the government of Louis Philippe was making half-hearted
efforts to found French settlements on the West Coast of Africa. At
this date King ‘Denis’ of the Gaboon, who had shown favour to Roman
Catholic missionaries and to French traders, was induced to transfer
his kingdom to France. The Gaboon, or country of the Mpongwe tribes,
lies to the south of the Cameroon region. Effective possession was
not however taken till 1844, and Libreville, the present capital,
was not founded till 1848, when a cargo of slaves was landed there
from a captured slaving vessel and set free to commence the
population of the new town. Attention was drawn to this French
settlement by the remarkable journeys of a French-American, Paul du
Chaillu, and his making definitely known the characteristics of the
largest known anthropoid ape, the gorilla. The existence of this ape
had been to some extent established by the American naturalist, Dr
Savage, from skulls sent home by American missionaries settled on
the Gaboon estuary; but the gorilla was scarcely made familiar to
the general public, until Du Chaillu came to England with his
specimens[129]. In the early sixties French explorers established
the lower half of the course of the important river Ogowé; and in
the seventies these explorations were extended by other travellers,
who carried the knowledge of the Ogowé to the limits of its
watershed, and passed beyond—unknowingly—to affluents of the Congo.
Among these explorers was the celebrated Savorgnan de Brazza, of
Dalmatian origin but born on a French ship off the coast of Brazil.
Political interest in the Gaboon languished so much on the part of
France that the country was once or twice offered to England in
exchange for the Gambia. However in 1880, the awakening desire to
found a great colonial empire urged France to extend her Gaboon
possessions up the coast, towards the Cameroons, and southward in
the direction of the mouth of that great river, the Congo, the
course of which the explorer H. M. Stanley had just succeeded in
tracing. Even before Stanley’s return, the King of the Belgians had
summoned a number of geographers to Brussels to discuss the
possibility of civilizing Africa by an International African
association. This conference brought about the creation of national
committees, which were to undertake on behalf of each participating
nation a section of African exploration. The French committee sent
De Brazza to explore the hinterland of the Gaboon. While Stanley was
commencing his second Congo expedition for the King of the Belgians
and slowly working his way up the lower river, De Brazza had made a
rapid journey overland to Stanley Pool and the upper Congo, making
treaties for France and planting the French flag wherever he went.
Soon afterwards an English missionary, George Grenfell, discovered
the lower course of the great Mubangi, and French explorers promptly
directed their steps thither. For some years there was keen and even
bitter rivalry between Stanley’s expedition, which gradually became
a Belgian enterprise, and the French explorers under De Brazza; and
when, at the Conference of Berlin in 1884-5, it was sought to create
the Congo Independent State under the sovereignty of the King of the
Belgians, the adhesion of France to this scheme could only be
obtained by handing over to her much of the western and northern
watershed of the Congo, besides giving her a promise that, if the
Congo State were ever to be transferred from the Belgian sovereign
to another Power, France should have the right of preemption. Before
the French had been many years on the Mubangi River (which is one of
the few means of communication between the southern, Bantu part of
Africa, and the northern regions, the “Sudan,” populated by
non-Bantu Negroes, Negroids, Hamites, and Semites[130]), they had
very naturally conceived the idea of pushing northwards to the Shari
river and Lake Chad. In 1890 Paul Crampel was the first European to
cross this mysterious Bantu boundary, to leave the forest regions of
the Congo and lower Mubangi, and enter the more open park-lands of
the central Sudan. But he was attacked and killed (1891) by
suspicious Muhammadan raiders on the river Shari. Another Frenchman,
of Polish descent, M. Dybowski, succeeded in chastising the
murderers of Crampel, and further exploring the Shari. A further
mission under Lieutenant Maistre continued the work of Dybowski, and
was in turn followed by a well-equipped expedition under the command
of the explorer Emile Gentil; which last succeeded in placing a
small armed steamer on the river Shari, and thence reached the
waters of Lake Chad.
By an agreement with Germany in 1892, France secured German
recognition of her sphere of influence over the river Shari, over
the Bagirmi country, and the southern shores of Lake Chad; while, by
a treaty made with the King of the Belgians in 1894, the Belgian
boundary line was drawn at the Mubangi, the Mbomu, and the Nile
watershed. Lastly, by the Anglo-French convention of June 1898,
Great Britain recognized the French sphere to the south and east of
Lake Chad. Thus France obtained European recognition for a
continuous empire stretching from Algiers to the Congo Coast, and
Oran to Dakar—a remarkable outcome of the landing of 37,000 troops
at the Bay of Sidi Ferruj, near Algiers, in the summer of 1830.
In the last decade of the 19th century, the French method of
administering the territories of the Gaboon, Loango and
Congo-Mubangi (grouped since 1888 in one government as “French
Congo”) was infected by the “concessionaire” spirit, which had
unhappily inspired King Leopold II about the same time in his
attitude towards the development of the Congo Independent State.
These monopolist, protectionist ideas were a heritage from the older
style of colonization in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. The
great Berlin Conference of 1884 on the Congo question was supposed
to have vetoed them and rendered their recurrence impossible. But no
sooner was this conference over than this monopolist policy was
revived by the Royal Niger Company on the Niger-Benue, by the infant
Congo State on the Congo above Stanley Pool, by the French in
Loango, and (though much more faintly) by the British South Africa
Company in Rhodesia. But it was mainly in the case of the Royal
Niger Company that the monopoly was one which completely crushed out
other trade. That association did not theoretically forbid the
natives to trade with any foreign merchants but itself; it merely
said to outside traders: “Sorry! but this place is ours, and so is
that—in fact the whole river-bank—and we cannot have you trading on
our private land.” The King of the Belgians copied this policy
pretty faithfully on the Congo, and so did the French. The whole of
French Congo, except two or three old-established towns on the
coast, was divided up into concessions, varying from 20 square miles
in extent to 54,000 square miles. The villages and plantations
actually occupied by the natives at the time were recognized as
native property, but this recognition did not necessarily confer on
the natives the right to trade with whom they pleased.
All the coast ports of the Gaboon and Loango had long been
frequented by British merchants doing a big trade with Liverpool;
and great was the indignation when they found their commerce with
the interior cut off by French concessionaires who, it may be, had
done nothing to develop the trade of the country. In spirit, of
course, this policy was in flagrant contradiction with the
commercial stipulations of the Berlin and Brussels Acts which
followed the Congo Conference of 1884-5. But the French government,
in reply to remonstrances, pointed to the monopoly of the Royal
Niger Company[131]; and the French courts of law gave decisions
adverse to British appellants.
It is only fair to quote the justification for this policy of
concessions, charters, and other documents conferring special
privileges. It is desired—in the interests of the native as well as
of the overruling European government—to attract capital to the
opening-up and the exploiting of the natural riches of Africa,
riches of which the native has remained in utter ignorance for
millenniums of years. To invite investments of capital some security
must be given that the immediate fruits of the investors’ labours
and expenditure will not be unfairly garnered by others who have not
run the like risks. No one questions the right of the native, in a
varying degree, to a fair proportion of the land; the area being
determined by his numbers, degree of civilization, energy,
intellectual capacity, and the extent to which he has already
developed its resources. It would be, for example, a ridiculous
proposition that the 322,450 square miles of German South-West
Africa should be the exclusive heritage of a few thousand nomad
Hottentot and Bushman hunters, or even of sixty thousand Bantu
cattle-keepers; that some Congo forest of ten thousand to thirty
thousand square miles should be assigned in perpetuity to a few
thousand wandering pygmies prowling over it in search of game and
wild bees’ nests; or that the whole of the Sahara with its
phosphates and salt-mines be allotted to the raiding Tawareq and
Tibu. On the other hand, to say in connection with a well-populated,
fairly well-known region like the Niger banks, the Gaboon and Loango
coasts, or the lower Ogowé river, that the natives shall only trade
with concessionaires or with the Government itself, or that one
nation shall be specially favoured in its commerce or trading
relations, is to impose a tyranny which the world at large and the
subject races will no longer tolerate quietly. It does not follow
from this that there is to be no interference with “native” rights,
that “freedom should be free to slay herself,” as has often been the
case in wild countries, where the unthinking inhabitants destroy the
resources of the country without thought for the morrow. It is quite
permissible ethically for the French, the British or any other
government to take possession of some thoroughly backward or very
sparsely populated country in a more or less savage condition, and
rule that country impartially for its own benefit and for its
general usefulness to humanity at large. Under such conditions they
certainly are not obliged by any moral law to attribute to the
nearest native community of savages some large area of uninhabited
forest or metalliferous rock. Such a source of future wealth they
are entitled to administer as a trustee might deal with an estate
for the benefit of a minor or of an imbecile; but only on the
condition of putting the profits derived therefrom into the treasury
of the state or country thus administered, not into the funds,
private or public, of a distant European nation. King Leopold II or
the French Republic were quite justified in declaring the
uninhabited, unexploited, uncultivated forests of French and Belgian
Congo to be “State domains”; but not with the sole purpose in the
one case of swelling the revenues of his own privy purse, and in the
other of enriching political partisans or public servants. The
wealth of these regions need not have gone to some native chief or
tribe dwelling in the vicinity who had had nothing whatever to do
with the getting of the wealth, but should have been attributed to
the whole community of the state or colony in which these forest or
mining areas were situated.
Another grave defect in the earlier administration of French Congo
was the handing over of thousands of natives as veritable serfs of
the glebe to these European concessionaires. This was a wicked
return for the trust they had placed in envoys of France like De
Brazza, who had obtained their adherence to French dominion by
treaty. The result of this policy was that gross abuses ensued,
followed by native risings. At length the French Government was
constrained by European opinion (largely awakened by Mr E. D. Morel)
to look into the affairs of French Congo; and in 1905 the virtual
creator of this dominion, De Brazza, was sent out as a commissioner
to investigate the charges brought against the officials and the
concessionaires. It is believed that De Brazza was horrified at much
of the devastation and depopulation which he saw, as were some other
high-minded French officials who had the courage to publish their
impressions. But De Brazza died at Dakar on his way home, and his
report was never published, though the French Government made
afterwards some changes in matters of administration.
In 1911 Germany, in return for acknowledging a French Protectorate
over Morocco, obtained from France important territorial advantages
in French Congo—about 107,000 square miles—giving Germany (1) a
strip on the south of Corisco Bay and a large piece of the Osheba
country, which permits her to surround the Spanish possession of Rio
Muni (she also acquired from France rights of pre-emption over the
Rio Muni); (2) a long strip down the valley of the river Sanga to
the main Congo River opposite Lukolela; (3) the Laka and Baya
countries east of the Cameroons watershed; and (4) a strip of land
communicating with the Mubangi river. In return, Germany ceded to
France a piece of land (6450 sq. miles) along the left bank of the
lower Shari. It was generally rumoured that Germany had asked for
the whole left bank of the Mubangi from Libenge down to the Congo,
and the whole of French Congo between the Mubangi, the Congo and the
Atlantic coast. If she did so, other circumstances caused her to
modify her demands. In any case she has succeeded in cutting off
French Congo from the Mubangi-Shari-Chad territories, so far as
uninterrupted land communication is concerned. She has ringed the
tree in the hope that it may some day fall to her. But if it does,
it will only be in return for an equivalent in some other direction,
perhaps a rectification of the Lorraine frontier.
Even with the loss of her Gaboon-West Congo territory, France would
still possess a magnificent and compact African Empire exceeding in
extent that of any other European Power, or at any rate superior in
continuous area—an empire of something like 3,100,000 square miles,
stretching from Senegal and Morocco to the frontiers of Egypt and
the Egyptian Sudan, from Algiers and Carthage to the Belgian Congo
and the vicinity of Uganda; besides her valuable foothold on the
Gulf of Aden, and the possession of Madagascar (presently to be
described), which compensates her for the want of colonies in South
and East Africa. In the regions north of the Mubangi-Wele—a river
which Germans, Englishmen and Belgians were the first to discover,
but the whole of the north bank of which from the Mbomu confluence
to the Congo confluence is now owned by France—Frenchmen have reason
to be proud of their country’s record. As already related, it was
French explorers who first solved the mystery of the passage from
the Congo watershed to that of the Shari-Chad; and several French
explorers paid with their lives for their temerity. To enquire into
and avenge the death of Paul Crampel, a French commissioner, Emile
Gentil (subsequently, until 1908, Governor of French Congo) had
penetrated down the Shari River, from the Congo basin, till he had
reached the far-famed country of Bagirmi. Here he induced the
much-harried native sultan to accept French protection, and placed a
French resident at his court. Bagirmi was then invaded by Rabah
Zobeir, who had made himself Sultan of Bornu. The Bagirmi sultan and
the French resident had to flee before the army of Rabah; but after
two years’ fighting, in which at first the French met with several
reverses, Rabah was defeated and slain in a great battle in which
the Foureau-Lamy[132] expedition, which had come from Algiers, were
joined by the remnant of the Voulet-Chanoine column from Senegal,
and a river flotilla from the Mubangi-Congo. For two years more,
however, the French forces in Bagirmi had to fight Rabah’s sons and
successors; but the last of these was defeated and slain (on the
borders of Bornu) in the early part of 1902.
The next enemy to be grappled with and overcome—the last, so far as
one can foresee, of the strong Mussulman states of Central
Africa—was the country of Wadai, situated to the north-east of
Bagirmi and a region which had been for a century or more the chief
focus of slave-raiding and trading in Central Africa, besides being
singular in that region for its secular hatred and distrust of the
white man, in whom the Arabized ruling classes of Wadai saw not only
the hated Christian infidel but the eventual opponent of the slave
trade, out of which Wadai had amassed wealth since the seventeenth
century. The French entered into relations with Wadai in 1900, and
interfered in its civil wars. But incited by the agents of the
Senussi sheikh[133], the Wadai ruler attacked the French outposts on
the Shari in 1904 and carried off many negro prisoners. Another
motive for their hostility was that France had given refuge to a
claimant for the Wadai throne—Asil, subsequently Sultan of Wadai.
Between 1904 and 1911 fighting between the French and a section of
the Wadaian peoples—mostly the Maba negroids and the Massalit
Arabs—continued until the French had conquered the whole country and
installed Asil on the throne of Wadai under the guidance of a French
resident who has since (1912) deposed him for cruelty. They
themselves took over the direct government of the southern
provinces, the negro countries of Dar Runga and Dar Sila, so long
the hunting-grounds for the slave-raiders; so much so, that their
once abundant negro population was reduced to a few thousand
miserable savages. In this long warfare against the strongest and
most fanatical of Muhammadan negro states, the French lost numerous
officers of note and displayed qualities of resource and heroism
that promise well for a nation which can produce at the present day
such officers and non-commissioned officers. As in the case of the
British, the rank and file of their armies on these campaigns were
Africans, mainly Senegalese.
The conquest of Bagirmi and Wadai naturally secured to the French
the more sparsely populated country of Kanem, inhabited mainly by
those Tibu negroids whose race extends right across the Sahara to
the hinterland of Tripoli. Now that Italy is in occupation of
Cyrenaica, and Turkey can no longer supply arms and ammunition to
Wadai for the campaign against the interfering white man, it is
unlikely that French rule will be seriously contested any more in
the heart of the Central Sudan; so long, that is, as Britain rules
to the eastward. Quite possibly a great strategic future may lie
before Kanem and Wadai, and the lands of the French Mubangi
province; for through these regions may pass the trunk line of
Trans-African railways, the route which will connect South Africa
with Tangier and with Alexandria. The conquest of Wadai by the
French has been the final and the most crushing blow directed at the
African slave trade of Islam, and it has been carried out with a
lavish expenditure of money and bravery at a distance of something
like 1,500 miles from the nearest civilized base, a feat almost
without parallel in African history. It may well serve as a pendant
and an effacement to that brief lapse from the policy of a civilized
Power during which something like a new form of slavery was
established by France in Western Congoland.
----------------------------------------------------------------
FRENCH AFRICA
Plate IV.
[Illustration]
W. & A.K. Johnston, Limited, Edinburgh & London.
EXPLANATORY NOTE
[gray] _Area of French Possessions in 1880_
[pink] ” ” ” _Colonies and Protectorates in 1912_
----------------------------------------------------------------
-----
Footnote 122:
It might be advisable at this juncture to explain clearly about
the Fula power in French Nigeria and Senegambia. The Ful or Fulbe
people appeared first in the 13th century in West African history
as peaceful cattle-keepers on the lower Senegal; but as a matter
of fact they had probably reached the Upper Niger and Senegal many
centuries before. The Western Fulbe had become Muhammadans at
quite an early date—between the 12th and 15th centuries. Those in
the more eastern part of Nigeria remained pagan in some
settlements down to the 19th century, and are pagan even still.
About the 16th century those of the Senegal began to emigrate as
cattle-keepers into the cooler highlands of Futa Jallon, and
became the ruling power on this upland two hundred years later. At
the same period—the beginning or middle of the 18th century—they
likewise founded dynasties of Muhammadan kings in Futa Toro and
Bondu (south of the Upper Senegal). In 1802, a Fula religious
mystic and _imam_ or religious preacher, Othman Dan Fodio, arose
like a Mahdi in Eastern Nigeria (Sokoto), called on the Muhammadan
Fulas of the central Sudan to join with him in a holy war, and in
a few years conquered a vast Fula Empire, which was almost
conterminous with the British (Northern) Nigeria of to-day. Fired
no doubt by this example another Fula ‘sheikh’ or holy man—Ahmadu
Lobo, in the country of Masina, between Timbuktu and Jenné—about
1813 attacked with his followers the vestiges of Moorish power on
the Upper Niger, the “Roumas” (as they were called, from their
having come originally from Andalusia—“Rome”) and took all power
from them, creating in Central Nigeria between Jenné and Gao the
powerful Fula kingdom of Masina, which lasted until about 1861,
when Ahmadu Ahmadu, the last Fula Emperor of Masina, was attacked
and killed by a rival Fula Mahdi from the west.
This personage was ’Omaru bin Saidi, a Fula of Futa Toro, who had
spent some years in Mekka and Medina, and had acquired the
reputation of a holy man and a doctor of religion. On his return
to West Africa he was received with great respect by the Fula
princes of Futa Jallon, and with their support he rallied to the
cause of Islam the Fula-negro peoples of Futa Toro and Bondu—the
Takrur, Torobe, or “Toucouleurs” as they came to be called. Al
Hajji ’Omaru (as he was called), after his return from the
pilgrimage (Al Hajj) to Mekka was unsuccessful in his attack on
the French (1857), and so turned his army against his fellow
Moslems of the Upper Niger. Two years after the defeat and death
of Ahmadu Ahmadu, the Fula Sultan of Masina, ’Omaru himself
perished at Bandiagara, in the Masina kingdom. The Toucouleur
power was, however, maintained by his sons and successors till it
finally fell in 1892 with the capture of Segu on the Niger by a
French force.
Footnote 123:
It is averred that this name is a contraction of Idolos. The
islands would appear to have been named by the early Portuguese
navigators Ilhas dos Idolos from the idols or fetishes which were
very prominently in use.
Footnote 124:
Of Arab descent, born near Maskara in Western Algeria.
Footnote 125:
In 1861, there were 112,229 French settlers in Algeria, and 80,517
Italians, Spaniards, Maltese, Germans, and Swiss; in all, 192,746
European colonists, as against about 650,000 in 1910. It is a
common mistake among British writers on political economy to
assert that the French are not good colonizers, though they have
Eastern Canada, Louisiana, Algeria and Tunis before their eyes.
There are now some 340,000 thriving French inhabitants of Northern
Africa between Morocco and Tripoli, who will play a considerable
part yet in Mediterranean politics.
Footnote 126:
This title arose of course from the Bey (Beg) or Colonel
commanding the Turkish army of occupation. The present dynasty was
founded in 1706 by the Bey, Hussein bin ’Ali, who was really a
renegade Cretan Greek.
Footnote 127:
This now forgotten bone of contention was, in the autumn of 1898,
sold by the Italian Company to the French Railway Company of
Bône-Guelma-et-Tunisie.
Footnote 128:
Some of the latter performed really gallant services, and
afterwards passed into the military and police forces organized by
the French.
Footnote 129:
Now in the British Museum of Natural History.
Footnote 130:
The Mubangi is the name given to the western and southern course
of the river which is known as the Wele in its upper waters, and
was discovered by Schweinfurth in 1871.
Footnote 131:
The invidious analogy of the Royal Niger Company was soon
afterwards disposed of by its charter being redeemed for £900,000,
and the Niger being thrown open to general trade.
Footnote 132:
Major Lamy was killed in the battle which also cost Rabah his
life.
Footnote 133:
At the end of the 18th century there was born at Mostaganem in
West Algeria from an Arab family in that place, Muhammad-bin-Ali,
further named As-Sanusi (Senussi), after a celebrated saint of
Tlemsan. He went as a young man to Mekka, and there achieved a
reputation for holiness and learning. Here also he made the
acquaintance of Muhammad Sharif, a negro prince from Wadai, who
afterwards became Sultan of that country. In the middle of the
19th century As-Sanusi returned to N. Africa and settled in the
Cyrenaica, but finding the Turks suspicious he changed his
head-quarters to Jaghbub in 1860, just inside the Egyptian
borders, thirty miles from Siwa. Here he died soon after his
arrival, and as a religious leader he was succeeded by his second
son, Al-Mahdi. Al-Mahdi Senussi II renewed the relations with
Wadai, where his father’s sect numbered many adherents, and in the
last quarter of the 19th century removed his head-quarters to Al
Jof in the Kufra oasis, midway between Cyrenaica and the Sudan.
Senussi refused to countenance the revolt of the Mahdi in the
Egyptian Sudan, but between 1899-1902 interfered strenuously in
the Central Sudan to prevent the advance of the French, especially
towards Kanem and Wadai. But his efforts were fruitless, and he
died in or near Wadai in 1902. His nephew and successor, Senussi
III, wandered about for some time in the borderland between Wadai
and Kordofan, and finally betook himself to the Kufra oasis in the
Libyan desert, where he now resides. The Senussiites profess a
purified form of the Muhammadan faith, are rigid abstainers from
alcohol and tobacco, but are above all an honest, industrious
folk, who have done much of late years to improve the conditions
of life in the Saharan and Libyan oases.
CHAPTER X
CHRISTIAN MISSIONS
If I were writing this book for dramatic effect and less with a view
to historical sequence, I should have been disposed to put this
chapter next to the one dealing with the slave trade, as an
effective pendant; for if Europe has dealt wickedly in enslaving
Africa, she has sent thither a high-minded army of men and women,
who, acting nearly always from noble and unselfish motives, have
raised the African from a callous ignorance to a distinctly higher
stage of civilization. And whether or not Britain was a greater
sinner than other white peoples in the thoroughness with which she
prosecuted the slave trade, she at any rate deserves credit for a
degree of missionary effort far surpassing that attributable to any
other nation.
The Portuguese were the first European nation to send missionaries
to Africa. Their zeal was great, and, with one or two exceptions,
wholly praiseworthy. Portuguese priests and Jesuit fathers
accompanied most of the early expeditions to Africa; in fact hardly
any explorer or conquistador sailed without chaplains in his
company, who raised the cross and preached Christianity as soon as
they set foot on shore. In the chapter on the Portuguese in Africa I
have touched upon the introduction of Christianity into Congoland in
1491. But any race of purely negro blood accepts and loses
Christianity with great facility. The Negro (unless he be
Muhammadanized) is easily converted, and as easily relapses into
gross superstition or a negation of all religion, including his
former simple but sound ideas of right and wrong. In order that
Christianity may become permanently rooted in a negro race it is
necessary for it to be maintained by a European power for a long
period as the religion of the State. If the negro kingdoms which
remained independent retained their Christianity it was in an
unrecognizable form. It is not so with Muhammadanism, the
explanation being that Muhammadanism as taught to the Negro demands
no sacrifice of his bodily lusts, whereas Christianity with its
restrictions ends by boring him, unless and until his general mental
condition, by individual genius or generations of transmitted
culture, reaches the average level of the European. As instances of
the former, one might mention some ten or a dozen individuals living
at the present time, who are priests and deacons of Christianity in
Africa; while for examples of permanently rooted Christianity as the
result of inheritance it is only necessary to point to the two or
three millions of really good negro men and women to be found in the
United States, the West Indies and Cape Colony. Portugal, however,
never attempted to rule the Kingdom of the Congo till the last
quarter of the 19th century; so after more than three centuries of
propaganda[134] the Ba-kongo fell away from Christianity, and in
less than a hundred years had absolutely relapsed into Heathenism,
when once more, against their wishes, missionaries returned to
Western Congoland.
Jesuit priests also accompanied Portuguese conquerors to the Zambezi
and the south-east of Africa. Here they met with relatively little
success, though they left their traces on Zambezia in the most
marked manner by founding a settlement at Zumbo high up the Zambezi
and even establishing stations beyond in the little known Batoka
country, where their presence is attested to this day by the groves
of fruit trees descended from those they introduced. Tete, the
modern capital of Portuguese Zambezi, also began as a missionary
station. Elsewhere, in Portuguese East Africa, the priests had very
little success, as Muhammadanism had already got a hold. Indeed the
first missionary explorer of Zambezia, who visited the court of the
King of Monomotapa, was martyred there at the instigation of the
Arabs[135].
Portuguese priests also travelled over Abyssinia during two
centuries after the Portuguese discovery of that country at the end
of the 15th century. Christian Abyssinia—the most probable origin of
the myth of the Kingdom of Prester John—attracted a good deal of
attention from Portugal since she commenced her exploration of the
outer world. But the Portuguese priests were quite unsuccessful in
converting the Abyssinians from their debased form of Greek
Christianity to the Roman Catholic Church; and after bitter quarrels
with the native clergy these missionaries had been either killed or
expelled from the country by 1633.
The French traders who frequented the Senegal coast between 1550 and
1650 nearly always took a missionary chaplain with them.
Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian priests vainly attempted at
different times to convert the Moors of North Africa. Finding this a
hopeless task, they directed their efforts towards relieving the
sufferings of the unfortunate Christian captives of the Barbary
pirates, and practically continued this work down to the French
occupation of Algeria.
The Protestant peoples did little in the way of missionary work in
Africa till quite the end of the 18th century; though the good
Huguenots, who went out to South Africa, endeavoured, somewhat to
the surprise of the Dutch, to treat the Hottentots as fellow men
fitted for baptism; and the Moravians, attracted by the Hottentots,
began evangelizing work at the Cape of Good Hope in 1732, but were
soon checked in their efforts by the Dutch Company.
Wesleyan missionary work was begun at Sierra Leone coincidently with
the establishment of that place as a settlement for freed slaves in
1787. The London Missionary Society was founded in 1795, and the
Edinburgh Missionary Society in 1796; the Glasgow Missionary Society
soon afterwards. By the end of the 18th century these three bodies
had sent out missionaries to Sierra Leone and the adjoining Susu
country. In 1821 the Glasgow Missionary Society sent the first
Presbyterian missionaries to South Africa. The Church Missionary
Society was founded in 1799. It furnished missionaries for Sierra
Leone, and after a long interval extended its operations to Lagos
and the Niger Delta, where it is still the leading Christian
mission. In 1830 this mission sent its first agents to teach
Protestant Christianity in Abyssinia, and began to consider the
possibility of evangelizing East Africa. In common with other
English missionary societies at that time, and for reasons not
altogether clear, it preferred to employ German evangelists, though
from the results achieved few can find fault with the choice made.
The Church Missionary Society introduced to us men of the stamp of
Krapf and Rebmann. Dr Ludwig Krapf is justly a great name in African
exploration, African philology, and African Christianity. Despatched
by the Church Missionary Society to prospect Abyssinia in 1834, he
was obliged to decide in 1842 (in Shoa), after disappointing
experiences, that there was no field there for Protestant
Christianity, and therefore directed his steps to the Zanzibar
coast. Being a tactful man, and meeting with kindness at the hands
of Sayyid Sa’id, the ‘Sultan’ of Zanzibar[136], he established
himself at Rabai, near Mombasa, and there founded the work of the
Church Missionary Society, which endures and prospers to this day.
Dr Krapf will also be referred to in the chapter on explorers. The
Church Missionary Society educated the first Protestant negro
bishop[137] in the person of Samuel Crowther of the Niger. Its work
met with some success on the West Coast of Africa as regards the
number of adherents; but, like most Christian missions, it has not
achieved rapid progress in more or less Muhammadanized East Africa.
This mission stands out conspicuous for the magnificent philological
work done by its agents in Africa; especially notable among whom
have been Dr S. W. Koelle, Mr Reichardt, the Rev. James Frederic
Schön, Bishop Crowther, Krapf, Rebmann, and J. T. Last.
The Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society was founded in 1813, and
devoted its first efforts to South Africa, Namakwaland, and
Kaffraria. The Primitive Methodist Society was started in 1843, and
continued the evangelization of Fernando Pô, which had been carried
on by the (British) Baptist mission from 1844 to 1859. They also
went at the same time to South Africa. The prospects of this mission
in Fernando Pô were affected by the resumption of the administration
of that island by the Spanish Government, which at that time
discountenanced Protestant missions in its territory. Some
arrangement was come to, however, and the mission still continues to
work there, and to work at the present time without any very marked
restriction.
The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel became a distinctly
missionary body in 1821, and worked chiefly in South Africa.
The British Baptists organized a missionary society early in the
19th century, and sent out missionaries as far back as 1840 to
Fernando Pô. Owing to their expulsion from the island by the Spanish
Government, they moved across to the Cameroons, where they
established the flourishing settlement of Ambas Bay, and made
English almost the second language of the Cameroons people. The
splendid work of this mission in the Cameroons was chiefly done
under the late Edward Saker, whose name is still venerated on the
Cameroons river for the great good that he did to the country by
spreading the knowledge of many useful arts and industries and
educating the Duala people to a remarkable degree. From the
Cameroons the mission, under the guidance of the Rev. Thomas Comber
and the Rev. Holman Bentley, moved on to the Congo[138], where this
Baptist mission now has numerous stations. One of its missionaries,
the Rev. George Grenfell, made himself famous by discovering the
great Mubangi river, the most important of the Congo tributaries,
and known in its upper waters as the Wele, besides making a
remarkable survey of the main Congo and several of its leading
tributaries, thus earning the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical
Society and a number of other distinctions. Though several times
offered posts of responsibility under the Congo Government he
preferred remaining a missionary till his death in 1906. The
linguistic work done by this Baptist mission was important, and
included an illustration of the language of Fernando Pô by Mr John
Clarke, a like service rendered to the Duala language of the
Cameroons by Mr Saker, a valuable Congo dictionary and grammar by
the Rev. Dr H. Bentley, and work of far-reaching interest and
importance by the Rev. W. H. Stapleton.
Roman Catholic missions entered North Africa soon after the conquest
of Algeria. Lyons, in France, became a great centre of missionary
activity. It is the head-quarters at the present day of a powerful
French Roman Catholic Missionary Society—that of the Holy Ghost and
of the Sacred Heart of Mary—which of recent years has been doing a
good work in Portuguese Angola and on the coast region of the Congo,
and also in Senegambia and German East Africa. In 1846 missionary
enterprise in Roman Catholic Austria decided to take advantage of
Muhammad Ali’s conquest of the Sudan to push its way into the heart
of Africa through Egypt. In 1846 these Austrian Catholic
missionaries chose Cairo as their starting point, and this mission
continued to work in the Egyptian Sudan until the uprising of the
Mahdists. Most of the readers of this book have heard of the
adventures of Father Ohrwalder and the nuns who escaped from the
clutches of the Khalifa in 1896. This mission, amongst other
philological studies, illustrated the interesting Bari language of
the upper White Nile, and did excellent work in countries so remote
as Kordofan and Sennār. Italian priests—before the disasters which
befell the colonial enterprise of Italy in 1896—worked amongst the
Galas of Abyssinia. Roman Catholic missions (French) had been begun
in Tigré (N. Abyssinia) about 1830. In 1847, at the request of the
Prince of Shoa, Pope Pius IX sent a Roman bishop-missionary,
Monsignor Massaia, to Shoa, who remained there some years, and may
be said to have started Italian mission work in that field.
In 1878 the late Cardinal Lavigerie having created the Mission of
the White Fathers, which was to convert the Sudan and all Congoland
to Christianity, Pope Leo XIII gave them a rescript directing them
to evangelize all Central Africa. They had settled in Tunis (as well
as in Algeria), on the Congo, on Tanganyika, and in West Africa
(Senegambia), and finally they directed their energies towards
Uganda shortly after the Church Missionary Society had established
itself in that country. Cardinal Lavigerie was a type of prelate
somewhat characteristic of the last quarter of the 19th century,
given to sonorous declamation, who posed as the denunciator of
slavery and the slave trade without ever making personal
acquaintance with its horrors. He endeavoured to obtain in the Roman
Catholic world the glory of a Livingstone without going through
Livingstone’s hardships. Moreover, hand in hand with his desire to
spread religion amongst Arabs, Berbers and Negroes was an equally
ardent desire to make them at the same time French or
French-protected subjects. His strong political bias has somewhat
discoloured his strenuous efforts for the evangelization of Africa,
since his work is now seen to have been by no means disinterested.
No doubt—as foreign critics point out—British missionaries often
come as precursors to British rule; but they do so unconsciously,
and indeed frequently prove inconvenient champions of native
independence. But the missionaries of Cardinal Lavigerie’s order
aimed in earlier days at advancing the political interests of France
almost before they had secured the conversion of their pupils; and
this somewhat detracted from their value as missionaries of
Christianity. The determined hostility shown by these men to the
British protectorate over Uganda provoked a terrible civil war;
though since 1898 (when a section of their work was taken up by a
British Roman Catholic mission) this political aspect of their work
has entirely ceased and they have won hearty commendation from
British, German and Belgian administrators. The White Fathers wear
an Arab costume—a red fez and a long white cassock tied round the
waist with a girdle. Their churches and schools were formerly built
in a Moorish style of architecture. It was Cardinal Lavigerie’s idea
that an approximation in dress and architecture to the Arabs might
induce that people to give a hearing to his propagandists.
About eighteen years ago the Jesuits decided to resume their work on
the Zambezi, which had been interrupted for more than a century by
native troubles and by the expulsion of the Jesuits from the
Portuguese dominions by the orders of the Marquez de Pombal. At
first the efforts of the Jesuits resulted in utter disaster. They
established themselves on the upper Zambezi, in the Batoka country,
near the Victoria Falls, and all those who did not die of fever were
massacred by the Batoka. Then they restricted their efforts to the
vicinity of the Portuguese settlements at Zumbo and Tete and at
Boroma. Near the last-named place they have a most prosperous and
well-conducted establishment where a good technical education is
given to the negroes of the Zambezi. At the invitation of the
Portuguese Government they directed their attention to Nyasaland,
but their establishment there being sacked and burned by Muhammadan
Yaos, they retired from work in that direction. They have
subsequently established mission stations in Mashonaland, besides
resuming work in Madagascar.
Roman Catholic missionaries met with but poor success in Madagascar
until French influence became dominant there a few years ago. The
priests who attempted repeatedly to establish themselves on the
coast of Madagascar in the early days of French colonial experiments
either died from fever or were killed by the natives. The Jesuits
who proceeded to the Hova Plateau during the sixties of the 19th
century, and who were maintained there by subsidies granted by the
French Imperial Government, met with so little success that they
almost abandoned their work. At the present time, however, being
strongly supported by the government of this French colony, they are
obtaining an ascendancy over the Protestants.
Protestant missionary work, chiefly conducted by the London
Missionary Society, and subsequently by the Quakers and the
Norwegians, began in Madagascar in 1818. The missionaries of the
London Missionary Society met with great success in converting the
natives of Madagascar to an undenominational form of Protestant
Christianity; but their efforts were suddenly checked by the
reactionary policy of Queen Ranavalona I, who persecuted and killed
the native Christians, and compelled the missionaries to leave the
island in 1836. After various attempts—which proved futile—to come
to an understanding with the old heathen queen, the Protestant
missionaries returned in full force at her death, and since that
time until the French annexation of the island they may be said to
have converted the mass of the Hovas to Christianity, and to have
established a strong Protestant native Church in friendly
co-operation with the Anglicans, who, under a Bishop of Madagascar,
became established in the island from 1863 onwards.
The London Missionary Society, which has done such striking work in
Madagascar, and was indeed the pioneer missionary society in South
Africa, was attracted to the open field of Tanganyika at the time
when the Church Missionary Society, stirred up by Stanley’s appeal,
sent its emissaries to Uganda. The first missionaries of the London
Missionary Society, crossing Tanganyika from east to west, made
their first establishment on the Kavala islet on the west coast. By
means of the African Lakes Company of Nyasa, they conveyed a steamer
in sections to the waters of Tanganyika, a steamer which has plied
successfully on the lake since it was launched in 1885.
Subsequently, however, the London Missionary Society retired from
those parts of Tanganyika which were under foreign flags, and
directed their attention to the south shore of the lake, which was
placed under British protection by the author of this book in 1889.
A Swiss Protestant mission was founded at Basel in 1815, and soon
afterwards commenced work on the Gold Coast, a work which produced
the most remarkable and beneficial results in the industrial
training of thousands of Gold Coast natives, enabling them thus to
earn good wages and to fulfil many of the tasks hitherto assigned to
Europeans. The Basel mission is now also established in the
adjoining German territories of Togoland. The Moravian Protestant
Missionary Society was founded as far back as 1732, and sent out the
first trained Christian missionaries to South Africa. At the present
day this mission has flourishing establishments in that part of the
continent. The Berlin Missionary Society was founded in 1823, the
Rhenish Missionary Society in 1829, and the North German (Bremen)
Society in 1836. The two first-named German Protestant missions
directed their attentions to Damaraland, and to the Hottentot
country in South-West Africa; the Bremen Mission sent its agents
chiefly to West Africa. Several of these societies, together with
the Moravians, have established mission stations in German
Nyasaland, to the north of Lake Nyasa. A Bavarian Roman Catholic
mission has commenced work in the coast regions of German East
Africa.
The French Evangelical Church began its important missionary work in
Africa as far back as 1829. Its agents—noted almost universally for
their single-minded earnestness and dissociation from all attempts
to procure political influence—have made remarkable progress in
Christianizing Basutoland and the adjoining Bechuana peoples in
South Africa. Following the Bechuana race movements, they were
gradually directed to the Upper Zambezi, and to the Barotse Kingdom.
Here, under the distinguished leadership of M. Coillard, they have
carried out a work of civilization amongst the Barotse deserving of
the highest praise, though they have suffered severe losses among
their agents by ill-health. Sweden, not to be behind other
Protestant states, founded a missionary society in the early part of
this century, which devoted itself to the still unoccupied field of
Galaland, attacking this country both from the Abyssinian side and
from British territory on the East Coast of Africa, whence it is
easier penetrated at the present day. Though the work of this
society has resulted in important additions to our philological
knowledge, its efforts to propagate Christianity amongst the
Galas—who were either obstinate Muhammadans or equally obstinate
Pagans—have been unsuccessful. The Swiss Calvinist Church has sent
missionaries among the Basuto in South Africa, and at a later date
into Angola. The Dutch Reformed Church has done a good deal of
missionary work in South Africa, and of late in Nyasaland. The
American Presbyterian Church started an African missionary society
in 1831 and sent its emissaries to Liberia, where it has many
adherents.
British Presbyterians have established several important missionary
bodies. The earliest (among existing societies) to commence work was
the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland, which established a
mission at Old Calabar, on the West Coast of Africa, in 1846, and
has since made great progress in converting the natives of Old
Calabar and the Cross River to Christianity and a certain degree of
civilization. It is mainly owing to the work of this mission that
Old Calabar has become an important centre for European enterprise,
and the capital of the eastern half of Southern Nigeria. The
Edinburgh and Glasgow Missionary Societies of the early part of this
century, which sent out missionaries to South Africa, were
dissolved, and took shape in other forms as the foreign missions of
the Free Church of Scotland and the Established Church of Scotland.
The former, which was organized in the fifties, established strong
missions in South Africa, and there founded the educational
establishment of Lovedale, whence many hundreds of South African
negroes have gone out into the world with a practical education.
When Livingstone had directed attention to the Zambezi, the Free
Church of Scotland thought of establishing a mission there, but
after the report of its commissioner decided that the time was not
come for such an enterprise. But in 1875, after Livingstone’s death,
the Free Kirk sent out an expedition to Nyasaland for the
establishment of a mission, which now has stations all along the
west coast of that lake[139]. The Established Church of Scotland
followed suit in 1876, when a settlement was made on the Shiré
Highlands, to the south of Lake Nyasa; and the headquarters of the
mission was styled “Blantyre” after the little town in Lanarkshire
were Livingstone was born. Blantyre is now in many respects the
principal town in the Nyasaland Protectorate. The Norwegian Church
sent out missionaries to Zululand (1842) and to Madagascar in later
years.
Besides the American Presbyterian mission in Liberia, other American
missionaries (Baptists, Episcopal Methodists, and undenominational)
settled in the Gaboon and on the coast between the Cameroons and the
French colony, on the Congo, in Angola, and, above all, on the
highlands of Bihé, behind Benguela. Among the agents of these
American missions, remarkable for the linguistic work they have done
in African languages, were the Rev. J. L. Wilson, who, together with
Preston and Best, wrote on the languages of the Gaboon coast; Dr
Sims, who compiled valuable vocabularies of Congo languages; Mr Héli
Chatelain, whose work in connection with the Angola language was of
exceptional value; and lastly, the Rev. W. M. Stover, who ably
illustrated the Bihé language.
Besides the Church Missionary Society, the Anglican Church has been
represented in Africa by the well-known “Universities’ Mission,”
founded in 1856 as the result of an appeal by Livingstone to the
universities of Oxford and Cambridge. While the Church Missionary
Society is mainly supported by the Evangelical side of the English
Church, the Universities’ Mission is the outcome of the missionary
enterprise of the High Church party. Its first establishment in
Nyasaland under Livingstone was unfortunate, and resulted in the
death of Bishop Mackenzie (the first missionary bishop of Central
Africa) and most of the missionaries with him. His successor, Bishop
Tozer, resolved to suspend work in Nyasaland, and concentrate the
efforts of the mission upon Zanzibar, which thenceforward became its
principal seat in Africa; but later on, when he was succeeded by
Bishop Steere, another and a successful effort was made to reach
Nyasa. From the beginning of the eighties to the present day, though
at times much harassed by the Muhammadan Yaos, this mission has
taken a firm hold in Nyasaland, besides establishing and maintaining
a number of mission stations in German East Africa. In Nyasaland it
occupies chiefly the east coast of the Lake, and has one station on
the west coast, having chosen to work mainly among those populations
which have been to some degree under Arab or Yao influence. To this
mission is due the erection of a fine cathedral at Zanzibar; and
much valuable linguistic work has been done by the late Bishop
Steere, Mr Madan, and the late Bishop of Likoma (better known as
Archdeacon Chauncey Maples[140]).
The Plymouth Brethren have established a mission in South-Central
Africa, across the Zambezi-Congo water-parting.
The Scotch Baptists began a mission to S.W. Nyasaland and also on
the Zambezi in 1895. There, also, is the Zambezi Industrial Mission
(undenominational), which was founded in 1893, and endeavours to be
self-supporting by its industrial work. A few American missionaries,
mostly under Bishop Hartzell of the American Episcopal Church, have
attempted settlement in the Portuguese possessions on the West and
the South-east coasts of Africa; and there are also unattached
American missionaries in the Congo basin carrying on work on their
own account, without being connected with any special society.
Finally, Plymouth Brethren and other English Protestants of
different denominations organized a Protestant missionary,
enterprise in North Africa as the “North African Mission,”
established in 1886. This mission has numerous representatives in
Morocco, Algeria, Tunis, Tripoli, and Egypt. As it devotes itself
mainly to the conversion of Muhammadans, it has had but slight
success at present from the propagandist’s point of view, but it has
achieved more than any other a preparation of the Moslem mind for
the consideration of Christian ethics, and its educational work of
late has been warmly appreciated by the French authorities. This
mission has numerous women members who visit the harims for
educational and for medical purposes. Its agents have been
remarkable for their thorough acquaintance with Arabic and even with
the Berber dialects of Morocco and Algeria.
The only Christian state which existed in Africa before the
beginning of European colonization was Abyssinia, which is to some
degree dependent on the Coptic Church in Egypt, and is in communion
with the Greek Church. Christianity is said to have been introduced
here in the 4th century. The Abyssinians have usually resented the
arrival of Roman Catholic missionaries, and have not shown much
greater encouragement to emissaries from Protestant Churches.
Abyssinian Christianity is, as might be imagined, so degraded and
mixed up with fetishism that it is difficult to recognise it as a
branch of the Christian faith which is the religion of so much of
Europe and America. Russia in the latter part of the 19th century
was much concerned at the spiritual darkness prevailing in
Abyssinia, and endeavoured to send thither missionaries from the
Greek Church, the domain of which she identifies with her own
empire. But these have been propagandists of a singularly military
type—wolves in sheep’s clothing, if one may commit oneself to rather
a strong metaphor—and hardly to be classed with the unarmed
emissaries of Christianity, who, on behalf of the Roman Catholic and
Protestant Churches of Europe and America, have striven usually with
single-minded motives, almost always with deep personal
unselfishness, ever with zeal, sometimes with indiscretion, and not
unfrequently with bitter disappointments and cruel sufferings to
evangelize Africa. The ultimate effect of their work on the history
of Africa will prove to be far-reaching, important, and (I believe)
highly beneficial.
-----
Footnote 134:
For the detailed history of the Portuguese, Italian, Flemish, and
French Catholic missionaries in the Kongo kingdom see my book,
_George Grenfell and the Congo_.
Footnote 135:
Gonçalo de Silveira; killed somewhere to the south-west of Tete
about 1565.
Footnote 136:
At that time the Arab viceroy of Zanzibar was only known as
‘Sayyid’ (Lord); not as Sultan.
Footnote 137:
The Portuguese Church had produced the first Roman Catholic negro
bishop, in the 16th century. He was Bishop of the Congo, was a
member of the royal family of Kongo, and was educated at Lisbon
and Rome. Samuel Crowther was an Egba slave-boy from Lagos, who by
education acquired the intellect and outlook of a European. He was
an upright, sensible man who wrote valuable works on African
philology, and did much towards founding British Nigeria and
exploring the Niger and the Benue.
Footnote 138:
It quitted the Cameroons altogether soon after the establishment
of the German colony, the German Government having expropriated
most of its establishments.
Footnote 139:
The same body also established an industrial mission (initiated by
Dr James Stewart, the founder of Lovedale) in British East Africa,
halfway to Uganda.
Footnote 140:
Who worked for many years in Nyasaland and in East Africa, and was
drowned in Like Nyasa in 1895.
CHAPTER XI
THE BRITISH IN AFRICA, II
(_South and South-Central._)
Towards the close of the 18th century Great Britain cast longing
eyes at the Cape of Good Hope, as a victualling station for her
ships on the way to India which could not remain much longer in the
weak grasp of a Dutch company and must not fall into the hands of
France. In 1795 the British Government despatched a strong
expedition with the authority of the Prince of Orange and took
possession of Cape Town, after a brief struggle with the local
authorities. Free trade, with some preference for British goods, at
once took the place of the grinding monopoly and vexatious
restrictions of the old Dutch company; and various other liberal
measures were enacted, which would have done much to reconcile the
Dutch colonists to British rule were it not that, when England at
the Peace of Amiens in 1803 restored the Cape of Good Hope to the
Dutch Republic, there followed three years of direct Dutch rule
under two most enlightened men, De Mist and Janssens, who did much
to efface from the settlers’ remembrance the justly hated
selfishness of the old Dutch East India Company. Therefore, when
Great Britain resumed, in a manner intended to be permanent, the
administration of Cape Colony in 1805, a still more decided
opposition was shown to her forces than before; and even after the
cession of this colony by Holland in 1814 there remained among the
Dutch settlers a certain lukewarmness, and a disposition to find
fault with the actions and motives of the Colonial Government and of
the British people. In 1806, when Cape Colony passed definitely
under British control, it had an area of about 125,000 square
miles[141]. The boundary on the East was the Great Fish river, and
thence a curving line which ended at Plettenberg’s Beacon, about
fifty miles south of the Orange river. The boundary on the north was
an irregular line from Plettenberg’s Beacon (dipping far south in
the middle) to the mouth of the Buffalo river (Little Namakwaland)
on the Atlantic Ocean. The population of the colony (not counting
the military forces) was about 26,000 Europeans (of whom 6,000 lived
in Cape Town), about 30,000 Malay and negro slaves, some hundred
thousand Hottentots and half-breeds, perhaps another hundred
thousand Kafirs and a few thousand Bushmen. The industries and
pursuits of the European settlers were limited to vine-growing, the
raising of grain, and the care of large herds of cattle and sheep.
The cattle were mostly the long-horned native cattle of the
Hottentots, and the sheep the hairy, fat-tailed, domestic sheep of
Africa. Ostrich farming was unknown, and although the Dutch
commissioners, De Mist and Janssens, had begun to introduce merino
sheep just before the expiration of their administration, wool had
not yet figured amongst the exports.
The first beneficial effect of British rule was felt in the stemming
of the tide of Kafir invasion. This race of Bantu negroes had during
the previous century been pressing closer and closer on the
extremity of South Africa from the northeast. The earliest branch of
the Bantu to reach South Africa were the Herero, who invaded what is
now known as Damaraland. But the desert and the Hottentots kept them
from either reaching the Atlantic coast or penetrating any further
south. Then came the Bechuana, who barely crossed the Orange river;
and then, overriding these latter, latest of all in the field, the
Zulu-Kafirs, who attempted to enter Cape Colony from the coast
region bordering on the Indian Ocean. The _first_ British-Kafir war
took place in 1811-12, and ended in the Kafirs being driven eastward
of the Sunday River, and further led to their expulsion from the
Zuurveld (the modern district of Albany), to the west of the Great
Fish river, which was then fixed as the Kafir boundary. In 1817 Lord
Charles Somerset, the Governor of the Cape, visited the Zuurveld,
and decided that the best obstacle in the way of repeated Kafir
invasions would be to settle that district with a stout race of
colonists. He therefore obtained a grant from the British Government
of £5,000 to promote emigration to the Cape; and in 1820-21, 5,000
British emigrants landed in South Africa, 4,000 of whom were settled
in the eastern districts, principally in the county of Albany. This
settlement was at first a failure. Few if any of the settlers were
skilled agriculturists; they were without any experience of life in
a semi-tropical country; the cost of land transport pressed heavily
on them; and the grants of land made to each individual were too
small. The first few years Nature played her usual tricks; for
Nature seems to hate the movement of species and the upsetting of
her arrangements. Therefore she sent blight during three years, then
floods for another season. The settlers fell into great distress,
but in time things righted themselves. Some immigrants moved to the
towns of the colony and obtained high wages as artisans; and others
who held on to the Zuurveld at last attained prosperity by extending
the area of land they occupied, and going in for sheep and cattle
runs in preference to corn-growing. The Kafirs however had poured
over the frontier in hordes under the leadership of Makana in
1817-18. They raided the Boer flocks and herds and attacked
Grahamstown; and the _second_ Kafir war which ensued ended in these
warlike negroes being driven back to the east of the Chumi or
Keiskamma river.
The immigrants of 1820 and 1821 created for the first time a strong
British element in the population of Cape Colony. They were
principally English in origin, but also included Scotch, Irish, and
Welsh, though the Irish immigrants, who had settled in the western
part of Cape Colony, did not prosper. Gradually, owing to the
distribution of the new settlers, the eastern part of Cape Colony
became English in race and language, as compared to the western and
central parts, which remained principally Dutch. The X̓osa[142]
Kafir boundary having been shifted to the Keiskamma, the frontier
district between that stream and the Great Fish river was at first
regarded as a neutral land to be possessed by neither Kafir nor
white man. Gradually, however, this system became impossible, and at
last, in 1831, the Colonial Office gave its assent to grants of land
being made in the ceded territory to respectable settlers.
Unfortunately in this despatch a distinction was drawn between
Englishmen and Hottentots on the one hand and the Dutch Boers on the
other, and the latter were not permitted to obtain land in the new
frontier district. This tactless and unjustified announcement,
together with the attacks made on the Boers by the British
missionaries, and the knowledge that the abolition of slavery was
near at hand, made many of the Dutch settlers profoundly
dissatisfied with the British Government and anxious to move beyond
its control.
An unhappy incident had occurred sixteen years previously which left
bitter memories behind. The British Governor had enrolled about 1811
a regiment of Hottentot soldiers under British officers. The
Hottentots had many grievances to avenge, dating from the former
rule of the Dutchmen; and these soldiers comported themselves with
arrogance towards their former masters. Most unwisely they were used
as policemen and sent now and again to arrest Dutch settlers who had
broken the law. From one such incident arose in 1815 the riot over
the arrest and death of the Bezuidenhout brothers in northern
Albany, and the hanging at “Slagter’s Nek” of five of the rioters—an
excessively severe punishment for which some writers have condemned
Lord Charles Somerset as the originator of a race quarrel which
lasted nearly a hundred years.
Till 1825 the Cape had been governed despotically by the Governor,
but in that year an executive council of six members, all Government
officials, was appointed to advise the Governor in his legislation.
In 1828 two colonists were introduced into this council in place of
two official members. But in 1833 the Cape received a regular
constitution as a Crown colony with a legislative council in which
the unofficial element was fairly represented. In 1827 the English
language had been substituted for Dutch in courts of law (an
additional cause of dissatisfaction to the Boers); but the
administration of justice in that year was greatly improved by the
appointment of a supreme court with judges appointed directly by the
Crown, while the lower courts were entirely remodelled, and civil
commissioners and resident magistrates were appointed. In 1822 the
number of Europeans settled in South Africa was about 60,000. In
1828, owing to the growing importance of the Albany settlement, Cape
Colony was divided into two provinces, the western and the eastern;
and the latter was for a time governed with some degree of
independence. By 1824 Cape Colony had taken what is now the southern
limit of the Orange Free State as its northern boundary.
At this time there was a slave population in British South Africa of
about 60,000, of whom less than half were Hottentots (who were
rather serfs than slaves), and the remainder Malays introduced by
the Dutch, and black negroes brought from Moçambique and from
Angola. The British Government having abolished the slave trade in
1807, the further importation of slaves ceased; but there came into
the colony a certain number of free negroes, who were rescued from
the slave ships by cruisers, and landed in South Africa. In 1833
slavery was abolished. It was however enacted that, although the
emancipation should come into effect on December 1st, 1834[143],
complete freedom should not be given to the slaves till December
1st, 1838; further, that the Imperial Government should pay
compensation to the extent of 1¼ million pounds. As this
compensation was saddled with various deductions and drawbacks, the
slave-owners—chiefly Dutchmen—did not get fair value for their
slaves, and therefore had further cause for grumbling.
At the end of 1834, shortly after one of the most distinguished of
South African Governors, Sir Benjamin d’Urban, had arrived to take
up his appointment, 12,000 armed Kafirs crossed the eastern border
into the colony with a determined resolve to oust the Europeans from
the newly settled districts. For nearly a fortnight the X̓osa clans
under Makoma and Chali had it all their own way from Somerset East
to Algoa Bay, killing many of the white men, burning their houses,
destroying or carrying off their property, and turning a beautiful
province into a desert. This raid was absolutely unprovoked, except
in so far that for years the Kafirs had been nursing a grievance on
account of their expulsion from the country west of the Keiskamma,
which they themselves had not long before taken from the Hottentots.
Prompt measures (the _third_ Kafir war) were taken to repel this
invasion and punish the X̓osa tribe. Colonel Smith—afterwards
Governor Sir Harry Smith—mustered what forces were available, and
drove the X̓osa Kafirs beyond the Keiskamma. Early in 1835 the
British forces had reached the Kei river on a counter invasion of
Kafirland. Sir Benjamin D’Urban dealt mercifully with the conquered
Kafirs; very few even of the enemy were dispossessed of their homes,
while those natives who had remained friendly were rewarded by
grants of land. Beyond the Kei river Kareli the son and heir of
Hintsa, chief of the Galeka clan (who had been killed while
attempting to escape from imprisonment), was recognized as ruler
over a section of the X̓osas; while in the new province, afterwards
to be known as British Kaffraria, British residents were placed with
the Kafir chiefs to advise them, and missionaries were encouraged to
return to their work. Yet this settlement (statesmanlike and
far-sighted in its details—which there is not space to give—as in
its general outlines) was upset, and the prosperity of South Africa
seriously damaged by the Secretary of War and the Colonies, Lord
Glenelg[144]; a sentimental doctrinaire, who had evolved from his
inner consciousness an unreal South Africa in which Kafir raiders of
oxen were noble-minded black kings, whom a harsh pro-consul was
dispossessing from their ancestral territories. He not only upset
all that was new in Sir Benjamin D’Urban’s arrangement, but even
compelled the retrocession to the Kafirs of land which had long been
occupied by white settlers, and further damaged the authority of the
popular Governor of the Cape by erecting the eastern province into a
separate governorship, over which he placed a Boer named Andries
Stockenstrom. The immediate result of this reversal of Sir Benjamin
D’Urban’s policy was ten years of intermittent war with the Kafirs
(who took generosity of treatment for weakness), and grave
dissatisfaction among those colonists of Dutch origin who had
suffered from the Kafir raids. In fact, Lord Glenelg’s blunder
proved the last straw that broke the back of Dutch tolerance of
British rule; and in 1836 a number of the Dutch colonists (who had
come to be known as the “Boers,” or farmers) trekked away from the
limits of Cape Colony across the Orange river and the Vaal river,
and south-eastwards into Natal. So far back as 1815 the Dutch
farmers, as already related, had risen against the government of
Lord Charles Somerset because it interfered with their summary
treatment of the natives, and their rising had ended in the hanging
of five of the rioters at Slagter’s Nek; but in modern historical
works dealing with Cape Colony it is reiterated that the main cause
of the shaking-off of British citizenship by so many Boer farmers
was not the resentment over the Slagter’s Nek execution so much as
Lord Glenelg’s reversal of D’Urban’s frontier settlement. The
adventures of these Boers after leaving British territory I have
dealt with in the chapter on Dutch Africa.
In 1823 a small enterprise under the leadership of Farewell and
King, officers in the Royal Navy, started from Cape Town to explore
the coast of Natal. They landed at Port Natal (now Durban), visited
the Zulu king Chaka, and obtained from him in 1824 a grant of the
port of Natal with 100 square miles of territory inland, and a
coast-line of 35 miles. Other territories in what is now the modern
colony of Natal were also obtained later on from the Zulu chief. The
purchasers of these lands proclaimed them to be British territory.
Although these adventurers were occasionally driven away by the
violent wars and disturbances going on amongst the Zulus and Kafirs,
they held on to their possessions; and in June 1834 Sir Benjamin
D’Urban forwarded to the Colonial Office a petition from Cape Colony
for the establishment of a definite government in Natal. This
petition the fatuous Lord Glenelg declined on the score of expense.
In 1835 the white element in Natal was increased by missionaries
from America, and by Captain Allen Gardiner, a pioneer of missionary
enterprise on behalf of the Church of England. These settlers drew
up the plans of a regular township, built a church, christened their
territory Victoria (in honour of the heir to the British throne),
and proposed to call the town they were laying out Durban, after the
energetic Governor of Cape Colony. In 1835 they petitioned that
their territory might be made a colony, but again the Imperial
Government refused, then, as for many years afterwards, preferring
to postpone action until it was costly and fraught with bloodshed.
The Dutch immigrants were allowed to form a republic in the interior
of Natal. In July 1838 General Napier, acting no doubt on
instructions from home, invited the British settlers in Natal to
return to Cape Colony; but a few months afterwards he sent a small
detachment of troops to keep order at the port, and again pressed
the Home Government to declare Natal a British colony, though the
following year the soldiers were withdrawn. This was taken by the
Boers to be a tacit consent to the establishment of a vassal
republic under British suzerainty. They would probably have had
their way but for imprudent dealings on their part with natives
placed under British protection. At the same time, a feeling began
to grow that the United States of America were going to have
political dealings with the territory of Natal (as another
“Liberia”); while a vessel had come out from Holland, sent, it is
true, by private persons, but seeming to convey a promise of Dutch
alliance to the Burghers of Natal. British troops had again occupied
Durban. In 1842 they were attacked by the Boers, who were eventually
repulsed, and afterwards tendered their submission to the Queen’s
authority. At length, in 1843, a Conservative ministry being in
power, it was intimated that the settlers on the coast of Natal
might be taken under British protection, with the eventual object of
constituting Natal a self-governing colony, in which the Boers were
to have a share proportionate to their numbers. After much
negotiation, Natal became a British colony with a legislative
council in 1843. The fighting Boers left the country and retired
beyond the Orange river under a somewhat indefinite assurance that
British rule would not follow them. The king of the Zulus received a
recognition of his independence, and in return recognized the Tugela
as the boundary of the British colony on the north-east. To the
south, the territory of Natal was somewhat restricted, and the
portion cut off from it became known as Pondoland, which remained an
independent Kafir state till 1884; it was finally annexed to Cape
Colony in 1894. In 1847 the mistake of Lord Glenelg was to some
extent repaired under Governor Sir Harry Smith; and the eastern
boundary of Cape Colony was once more advanced to the Kei river.
This step was taken after a very serious Kafir war (the _fourth_, or
“War of the Axe”) which broke out in 1846. In 1850, however, a war
began again (the _fifth_, or “Sandile” war) with the restless X̓osa
Kafirs. It extended far and wide, and was marked by not a few
disasters; one being the loss at sea off Simon’s Bay of the
troopship _Birkenhead_, which foundered with large reinforcements of
troops on board, 400 soldiers and seamen being drowned. At length,
in 1853, General Cathcart, who had succeeded Sir Harry Smith,
captured all the strongholds of the Kafirs in the Amatola Mountains,
and deported the Kafirs from that district, which subsequently
became (from its settlement by Hottentot half-breeds) Grikwaland
East[145]. In this native uprising the Kafirs had been joined by
over a thousand pure-blood Hottentots, dissatisfied with British
treatment and wanting to create a “Hottentot republic.”
In 1852 the Sand River Convention was concluded, by which the
independence of the Transvaal Boers was recognized; but the Orange
River Sovereignty still remained under British control, and its
difficulties with the Basuto compelled an intervention of the
British forces. The invasion of mountainous Basutoland began with a
drawn battle in which the Basuto held their own. They afterwards
secured favourable terms of peace by sending in their submission.
This incident discouraged the British Government, who decided to
abandon the Orange River Sovereignty rather than be under any
responsibility for its defence. Accordingly, independence was forced
on the settlers, many of whom were Englishmen. Basutoland, after
having frequently engaged in wars with the Orange Free State, and
having to cede a portion of its territory to them, was finally taken
under British protection in 1868. In 1871 it was annexed to the
Cape, but, owing to the turbulence of its people and the
mismanagement of the Colonial Government, it was transferred to
direct Imperial administration in 1883.
During several years prior to 1849 the Imperial Government had been
endeavouring to arrange for the despatch of British convicts to
South Africa, as it was becoming inconvenient to maintain the penal
establishments in Australia. Whenever the question came up the Cape
Colonists protested against the idea. Nevertheless, in September
1849, a ship brought over from Bermuda a number of ticket-of-leave
men to be landed at the Cape. The ship anchored in Simon’s Bay, but
the colonists took strong measures to prevent the landing of the
convicts. All were united to this end. The Governor met the
dangerous situation with great wisdom. He kept the convicts on board
ship until the order could be reconsidered in England. The Home
Government, for a wonder, did not push the point to the raising of
rebellion; the convicts were sent on to Van Diemen’s Land, while an
Order-in-Council authorizing transportation to the Cape was revoked.
By 1850 the prosperity of Cape Colony had become established. Its
population, white and coloured, at that time reached a total of
220,000. The revenue at the same period stood at about £220,000 per
annum, while the value of the colonial produce exported during that
year was approximately £800,000. Wine was no longer the principal
export, and even the export of grain had diminished; wool had taken
the first place. In 1850 it represented 53 per cent. of the total
exports. Hair from Angora goats, which had been introduced during
the thirties, was beginning to take an important place in the list
of exported products; and ostrich feathers (chiefly derived from the
wild bird, however) were also an important item. Ostrich farming,
which has now placed the ostrich—happily—on the list of
inextinguishable domestic birds, did not come into vogue till the
sixties, though the emigrant Boers at a much earlier date had been
accustomed to hatch and rear young ostriches about their farms.
On the 23rd of May, 1850, the Government and Council of Cape Colony
were authorized to prepare for the establishment of a representative
government; and three years later this was established, a Colonial
legislature being formed; but the ministry was to be responsible
only to the Governor. Responsible government, similar in many
respects to that which obtains in the daughter nations of Canada and
Australasia, was brought into force in 1872.
In 1854 the great Sir George Grey became Governor of the Cape. He,
even more than his predecessors, was anxious to build up against
Kafir invasion on the East a wall of military colonists, who should
be able to defend their flocks from raids without continually
calling on the Colonial Government for intervention. After the
Crimean War a means presented itself in the disbanding of the
Foreign Legion, which Great Britain had recruited, and which
consisted of German, Swiss, and Italian soldiers. After the
conclusion of peace it was necessary to disband this force, and they
were invited to volunteer for African colonization. The result was
that 2300 Germans accepted the terms offered, and started for South
Africa. They were settled in the Eastern Province. But trouble then
began to arise from their being unmarried men, and Sir George Grey
sought to remedy the defect by importing a large number of German
women. The Imperial Government, however, thought that this would not
be a politic step to take, to create a little Germany in British
Africa. Finally the Cape Government sent on 1000 of the German
bachelors to India, and the 1300 who remained behind found wives in
the colony, and merged their own nationality in that of British
subjects. Nevertheless, the introduction of these German settlers
led to the going out of many emigrants from Germany for some years
afterwards, and these settled in such numbers in independent
Kaffraria that there seemed a danger at one time of their invoking
German intervention.
In 1856 a terrible delusion took hold on the X̓osa Kafirs. They had
endured a good deal of misery from the destruction of much of their
cattle by an epidemic of rinderpest, and were in a mood to be
influenced by the wild sayings of their witch doctors. One of these
wizards, Umhlakazi, who had received a smattering of education at a
mission school, arose and proclaimed a strange gospel. He announced
that the dead and gone Kafir chiefs would return to earth with their
followers, and bring with them a new race of cattle exempt from
disease, and that following on this resurrection would come the
triumph of the black man over the white. The prophet had heard of
the Crimean War, and announced that the dead Kafir chiefs would
bring with them many Russian soldiers and attack the British. But
one thing was necessary to secure this millennium—the existing
cattle and crops must be destroyed. A portion of the Kafir tribes
believed this rubbish. Some of the chiefs even who knew better, and
who smiled at the imposture, encouraged it, thinking that after
taking these desperate measures their men would stick at nothing,
and would really break down the British power. Therefore, most of
the X̓osa Kafirs of the Galeka and Gaika clans, set to work to
slaughter their oxen and cut down their corn; and all looked forward
eagerly to the dawning of February 18, 1857, on which date the
resurrection was to take place. Nothing happened, however; and the
consequences of this hateful imposture were terrible. It is stated
that 25,000 Kafirs died of starvation, and nearly 100,000 others
left British Kaffraria and the territories beyond the Kei to seek
another home. Some 40,000 of these Kafirs settled in Cape Colony,
being taken into service there through the intervention of the
Government; and from them, mixed with Hottentots and emancipated
slaves, are descended the “Cape Boys,” who have since attracted
attention by their value as soldiers in suppressing the Matebele
revolt. Sir George Grey in 1858 was obliged to send a military force
(the _sixth_ Kafir war) against some of the Kafir tribes rendered
desperate by destitution, and they were driven for a time into
Pondoland; British Kaffraria being annexed to Cape Colony, and the
Transkei being taken under British protection. This Transkei
territory was subsequently repeopled, partly with Fingo[146] Kafirs,
and partly by the descendants of the Kafir tribes who were ruined by
the teaching of the false prophets. In 1877 the Galeka, a clan of
the X̓osa tribe, commenced fighting the Fingos. They were joined
later by the Gaika, another X̕osa people, who had long been dwelling
peaceably in the Eastern province, and during 1877 and 1878 the
_seventh_ and last Kafir war raged, ending inevitably in conquest
and submission.
The British had taken from the Dutch in 1651 the little island of St
Helena[147] (in the Atlantic Ocean), the Dutch having previously
occupied it in 1645. This island became of some value as a place of
call for ships passing to and from India round the Cape. In 1815 it
was selected as the place of banishment for the deposed Napoleon
Bonaparte; and to make security doubly sure, the islands of
Ascension, to the north, and Tristan d’Acunha, to the extreme
south[148], were occupied also about the same time, and have
remained British ever since. Whereas Ascension has always been
managed directly by the British Admiralty, St Helena was from 1673
until 1815, and from 1821 to 1834, governed by the East India
Company. In 1834 it became a Crown Colony. Tristan d’Acunha was
occupied by a British garrison from 1815 to 1821, of which three men
remained behind voluntarily and with some shipwrecked sailors
started the existing colony, which is a self-governing community.
St Helena was profoundly affected by the opening of the Suez Canal
in 1869. She lost nearly all the shipping which formerly sought her
harbour, and three-quarters of her trade; but she is now beginning
to recover prosperity to some degree as a valuable health resort,
especially for the ships of the West African Squadron, and as a
possible coaling station in time of war.
Cape Colony might also have suffered from the opening of the Suez
Canal but that she was already beginning to build up an importance
of her own, due to her exports of wool, hides, wine, and ostrich
feathers. Moreover a happy discovery intervened which effectually
guarded against any waning of interest in South Africa. In 1867
the first diamond was discovered near the Orange river, but it was
not until 1870 that a large find of these precious stones was made
near the site of modern Kimberley. This discovery of diamonds to
the north of the Orange river, and in country of doubtful
ownership, but claimed by the Orange Free State, drove the now
awakened British Government to rather sharp practice. The
diamond-bearing land was claimed by a Grikwa (Hottentot
half-caste) chief named Waterboer. On the other hand, the Orange
Free State asserted that it had acquired the greater part of the
country from the original Grikwa owners; and the northern part of
Diamondland was claimed by the Transvaal. This last claim was
submitted to the arbitration of the Lieutenant-Governor of Natal,
who awarded most of the diamond country to the Grikwa and Bechuana
chiefs. These latter had really become the men of straw hiding the
hand of the British Government. Finally, in 1871 Waterboer and
other Grikwa chiefs ceded their rights to the British Government,
who promptly erected the diamond country into a province under the
name of Grikwaland West. The Orange Free State protested, and no
doubt the action of the British Government was rather high-handed,
and in rare contrast to the abnegatory policy usually pursued.
Finally, the claims of the Orange Free State were settled by Lord
Carnarvon, who in 1876 awarded to its government the sum of
£90,000 in consideration of the abandonment of their contention.
In 1845 Natal had been annexed to Cape Colony, but later on in the
same year it was given a separate administration, consisting of a
Lieutenant-Governor and an executive Council; though in legal
matters it still remained dependent on Cape Town. In 1848 a local
Legislative Council was created, and finally in 1856 the colony was
entirely severed from the Cape, and was endowed with a partially
representative government. Some years previously the Governor of
Cape Colony had been also created H.M. High Commissioner in South
Africa, so that he might have power to represent the British
Government outside the limits of Cape Colony. In this capacity
therefore he continued to retain some authority over the government
of Natal and its relations with the adjoining states. (The influence
of the High Commissioner now extends over all South and Central
Africa under the British flag, except, at present, the Protectorate
of Nyasaland; in other words, over Rhodesia, the South African
Union, Bechuanaland, Basutoland, and Swaziland.) The territory of
Natal was not capable for some time of any great extension, being
girt about with Boer states and negro tribes whose independence was
to some extent guaranteed by the Imperial Government. But in 1866 it
received back a small territory on the south (the county of Alfred),
which was within the original limits claimed by the founders of
Natal, but had been for a time handed over to a Pondo chief. The
settled government of Natal and the kindly attitude of the British
Colonial Government brought about the repeopling of that fertile
country by Kafir tribes.
This “Garden of South Africa” had been almost depopulated by the
Zulu kings, who had slaughtered something like 1,000,000 natives
from first to last. Before the rise of the Zulu tribe, Natal or
“Embo[149]” had been a thickly populated country. Under white rule
the native immigration and population increased so rapidly that when
the colony was only nine years old it contained 113,000 Kafirs. The
white colonists were of mixed origin, about one-third being the
original Dutch settlers, while the remainder were either emigrants
from Great Britain, Cape Colonials, or Germans. The German families
mainly came from Bremen. At first the principal article of export
was ivory, obtained from Zululand, where elephants still rioted in
great numbers; but this was not to last long, for what with British
sportsmen and Dutch hunters and the introduction of firearms amongst
the natives, big game was rapidly exterminated. Then, during the
fifties, the sugar cane and the cotton plant were introduced[150],
the export of sugar rising in 1872 to an annual value of £154,000.
These semi-tropical plantations brought about a fresh want—that of
patient, cheap, agricultural labourers. Unhappily, the black man,
though so strong in body and so unaspiring in ideals, has as a rule
a strong objection to continuous agricultural labour. His own needs
are amply supplied by a few weeks’ tillage scattered throughout the
year; and even this is generally performed by the women of the
tribe, the men being free to fight, hunt, fish, tend cattle, and
loaf. Therefore, the 100,000 odd black men of Natal[151], though
they made useful domestic servants and police, were of but little
use in the plantations. As sugar cultivation was introduced from
Mauritius, so with this introduction came naturally the idea of
employing Indian kulis, already taking the place in the Mascarene
Islands which was formerly occupied by negro slaves. In 1860 the
first indentured kulis reached Natal from India, and by the end of
1875 12,000 natives of British India were established in Natal. A
number of these had passed out of their indentures, and had become
free settlers and petty traders. Nowadays the Indian population of
Natal has risen to something like 142,000. From Natal these British
Indians have crept into the Transvaal, into the Orange Free State,
and even into Bechuanaland and Rhodesia. Many of them are employed
on the Natal railways, and in the towns they form a thriving class
of petty traders. Here and there they have mingled with the Kafirs,
producing a rather fine-looking hybrid, similar in appearance to the
black Portuguese on the Zambezi, who are descended from a cross
between natives of Goa, in Portuguese India, and Zambezi Negroes.
Added to the ordinary Kuli class are traders who belong partly to
Tamul and other Dravidian races of South India and partly to coast
tribes from Western India, mostly professing the Khoja faith. The
Khojas are in a far-off way Muhammadans. The inhabitants of Natal
have with great inaccuracy taken to calling these West Coast Indians
“Arabs.”
This Indian element—already about 150,000 in number—is likely to
have its effect on the history of Natal. It is strongly unpopular
amongst the white colonists for selfish reasons. On the whole, it is
not unpopular among the blacks, but the idea of an eventual fusion
between Negro and Indian is not an agreeable one to contemplate from
the colonist’s point of view, as it would create a race strong both
mentally and physically, far outnumbering the whites, and likely to
make a dangerous struggle for supremacy. On the other hand, from the
Imperial point of view,—from what may be called the policy of the
Black, White, and Yellow—it seems unjust that the King-Emperor’s
Indian subjects should not be allowed to circulate as freely as
those of his lieges who can claim European descent. Perhaps on the
whole the solution which has been initiated in the British
protectorates north of the Zambezi is the best—namely, that Indian
immigration should be drawn rather to those countries which are
administered on the same lines as India, than to the temperate
regions south of the Zambezi, where the white man might be allowed
to expand without let or hindrance.
The first railway worked in South Africa is said to have been a line
connecting the town of Durban with the landing-place of its harbour,
which was opened in 1860. But soon afterwards a railway began to
start northwards from Cape Town to Paarl; and this was directed,
with many zigzags and with a seeming aimlessness, towards the Karoo.
The discovery of the diamond fields gave railway extension an
objective, and Kimberley became the goal which was finally reached
in 1885[152]. In 1872 the Cape Government by Act of Parliament took
over the existing railways in Cape Colony, which then only consisted
of a total length of 64 miles. Soon afterwards an expenditure on
railway extension of £5,000,000 was authorized. In Natal a
Government railway was commenced in 1876 connecting Durban with the
capital, Pietermaritzburg. This line now traverses the Colony to the
Transvaal border and in another direction enters the Orange Free
State.
The history of Natal has been comparatively peaceful and prosperous,
as compared with the weary Kafir warfare of the Eastern Province of
Cape Colony. But in 1873 the natives of Natal required a lesson. On
its north-western frontier the Hlubi refugees from Zululand had been
allowed to establish themselves under a chief of great importance,
Langalibalele. His young men had gone to work in the Diamond fields
of Kimberley, and had returned with guns, the introduction of which
into the colony without registration was prohibited. Langalibalele,
taking no notice of a summons to answer for this breach of the law,
fled into Basutoland. Fortunately the Basuto gave him no support,
and he was eventually captured and exiled for a time to Cape Colony.
But this outbreak called attention to the great increase of the
native population of Natal, and the unwisdom of allowing it any
longer to remain under the government of irresponsible Kafir chiefs.
Accordingly in 1875 Sir Garnet, afterwards Viscount, Wolseley was
sent to Natal to report on the native question, and initiated
changes which had the effect of bringing the natives more completely
under the control of the Executive, and approximating them more
towards the position of citizens of the colony.
All this time diamonds had been attracting many emigrants to South
Africa, chiefly from Great Britain, but also from France and
Germany. Among these emigrants were numerous Jews[153] belonging to
all three nationalities, who were naturally attracted to the diamond
trade. The growing interest taken in South Africa owing to the
discovery of diamonds had not only tended to make the British
Government very particular as to the exact rights it possessed in
the vicinity of the Dutch republics, but also led it to revive its
claims to the south shore of Delagoa Bay. The Portuguese Government,
foreseeing this, had commenced to reassert its right to that harbour
in its boundary treaty with the Transvaal in 1869. In 1870-71 the
British Government raised its claim in the manner I have already
described in the chapter on Portuguese Africa. In 1872 Great Britain
agreed to submit the question at issue to the arbitration of Marshal
MacMahon, whose award, delivered in 1875, was wholly in favour of
the Portuguese. But Great Britain had already secured from Portugal
a promise, confirmed by a more recent convention, that she should be
allowed the right of pre-emption over Delagoa Bay[154]. During the
fifties and sixties missionaries and traders had pushed due north
across the Orange river, through Bechuanaland, to the Zambezi, and
westward to Lake Ngami and Damaraland. In the sixties a good deal of
trade was done in the last-mentioned country in ostrich feathers and
ivory; and the Damara, who should more properly be known as the
Ova-herero[155], came under European influence. Wars arising between
the Damara and the Hottentot Namakwa, and the complaints of the
German missionaries at work in these countries, brought about the
despatch of a commissioner (Mr W. C. Palgrave) to Damaraland by the
Cape Government. He reported in 1876 in favour of extending British
protection over Damaraland; but all that Downing Street would
concede was the annexation of Walfish Bay. (Twelve little islets off
the S. W. coast had been annexed in 1867, because they were leased
to a guano-collecting company.) A little later another commissioner
was despatched from the Cape to settle the intertribal quarrels
north of the Orange river, and a further recommendation was sent
home by the Governor; but Lord Kimberley, the new Colonial
Secretary, definitely forbade the extension of any British influence
over Namakwaland or Damaraland. In 1883 Germany directly questioned
England as to whether she laid claim to territory north of the
Orange river. An evasive reply was sent, in which delay was asked
for so that the Cape Government could be consulted. Eventually the
Germans were told that England laid claim to Walfish Bay and the
Guano Islands only, but that the intervention of another Power
between the Portuguese frontier and the Orange river would infringe
legitimate British rights. The inaction of the British Government on
this occasion seems in the present day, and by our modern lights,
inconceivable. Literally the only reason they had in not politely
declaring that South-West Africa was under British protection was
the remote dread that they would have to protect German missionaries
and traders.
Yet not only Downing Street in the greater degree but the Cape
Government in the lesser was to blame for this inactivity. The Cape
Government at that time was directed by ministers who were much
under purely colonial influence, and who, discouraged by their
failure to administer Basutoland, had no very strong desire to spend
the money of the colony in annexing and administering a vast
territory mainly desert. Besides, the idea of Germany becoming a
colonial power was laughed at in those days in Government circles as
an impossibility. At length all doubts were ended by the declaration
of a German protectorate over South-West Africa in 1884.
In 1882 measures were passed in the Cape Parliament which gave equal
rights throughout Cape Colony to the Dutch language. In the same
year the “Afrikander Bond” was established, an institution with the
avowed object of building up an Afrikander Dutch-speaking nation
which should eventually be independent of the British flag. Its
principal creators and supporters were Mr J. H. Hofmeyr of Cape
Town, Mr Borckenhager of the Orange State, and Mr Reitz of the
Transvaal. Measures for bringing about a federation of the British
and Dutch states had failed (as will be subsequently narrated), and
an annexation of the Transvaal had been reversed. British influence
in South Africa seemed on the wane and the Dutch element in the
ascendant.
British missionaries during the thirties and forties had crossed the
Orange river and settled in Bechuanaland, a sterile plateau between
the Namakwa and Kalahari deserts on the one hand, and the relatively
well-watered regions of the Transvaal and Matebeleland on the other.
By 1851, British sportsmen, roving afield after big game, and the
great missionary-explorer Livingstone had reached the Zambezi, which
till then was only known from the sea upwards for about 500 miles
inland. Livingstone’s exploration of the Zambezi attracted the
attention of the British Government, which at that time was more
interested (from philanthropic motives) in acquiring territories in
Tropical Africa than in extending its influence over more valuable
regions enjoying a temperate climate. Livingstone was sent back as a
consul to the mouth of the Zambezi in 1858 with a well-equipped
expedition to explore Zambezia and discover the reported Lake Nyasa,
then known as Lake Maravi. For five years his expedition traversed
these countries, adding immensely to our geographical knowledge; but
its members suffered terribly from ill-health. Although the
Portuguese treated them with kindness and put no obstacle in their
way, still Portuguese political susceptibilities were aroused. For
this and other reasons, Livingstone was recalled, and his proposals
in regard to Lake Nyasa quashed. Nevertheless, the seed had been
sown, and produced a sparse crop of adventurers, elephant hunters,
missionaries and traders, who found their way to Nyasaland.
Livingstone himself resumed his explorations there (in 1866); and an
expedition, under Lieutenant Edward Young, R.N., which was sent to
obtain news of him (1868), kept the British in favourable
remembrance amongst the natives. Finally, Livingstone’s death
revived missionary enthusiasm; and two strong Scotch missions in
1875-6 occupied the Shiré Highlands and the west coast of Lake
Nyasa, putting a steamer on that lake. Two years later the African
Lakes Trading Company sprang from missionary loins, and the
Universities’ Mission in 1881 advanced overland from Zanzibar to the
east shore of Lake Nyasa.
In consequence of the increase of British interests in this quarter
the British Government decided to establish a consulate for Lake
Nyasa in 1883. Portuguese susceptibilities again became ruffled.
Although no attempt had ever been made by Portugal to establish
herself anywhere near Lake Nyasa, or even on the river Shiré, which
connects that lake with the Zambezi and the sea, it was felt in
Portugal that the growing British settlements in Nyasaland should be
made to contribute to the revenue of Portuguese East Africa; and
that, since through further extension they might force a way to the
coast, it would be better that they should be brought under
Portuguese control. Although the British Government was absolutely
determined if possible not to assume direct responsibilities in
Nyasaland, it was equally anxious that its subjects should be left a
free hand, and not be fettered by Portuguese control. Therefore an
attempt was made by Lord Granville (in the projected Congo Treaty of
1884) to define the sphere of Portuguese influence on the Shiré, so
as to leave the greater part of that river and all Nyasaland outside
the Portuguese dominions. Had that Congo Treaty been ratified, there
would probably never have arisen the Nyasa Question with the
Portuguese. But it was not ratified, and therefore Portugal was
equally free with Great Britain to make the best use of her
opportunities, which she did by means of several expeditions in the
manner already described in Chapter IV. But nevertheless Nyasaland,
including the Shiré Highlands, was declared to be a British
Protectorate, based on treaties with native chiefs concluded by two
consuls, (Sir) H. H. Johnston and John Buchanan; and the former,
assisted by (Sir) Alfred Sharpe, further brought within the British
sphere of influence the rest of “British Central Africa” from the
central Zambezi to Lakes Tanganyika and Mweru and the frontier of
the Congo Independent State. To this sphere of influence was shortly
afterwards added the Barotse Kingdom, made known to us by Dr
Livingstone and by the French Protestant missionaries. Treaties with
Germany (1890) and Portugal (1891) having sanctioned these
acquisitions north of the Zambezi, the administration of the new
territory was divided between the Imperial Government—which decided
to control the more organized territories round Lake Nyasa—and the
newly-founded British South Africa Chartered Company. After 1895 the
Chartered Company assumed the direct administration of its North
Zambezian territories which are now known as Northern Rhodesia.
Since 1890 much has been effected in developing and making known
these territories of British Central Africa, which are perhaps not
sufficiently healthy in all parts or void of an indigenous
population to permit of more than a restricted European
colonization, though they are already becoming of great value as
tropical “plantation” colonies and as mining districts, and will
support an abundant native population. During the seven years of the
existence of this British sphere north of the Zambezi the slave
trade had to be met and conquered. Numerous Arabs from Zanzibar had
established themselves in Nyasaland as sultans, and had
Muhammadanized some of the tribes and infused into them a dislike to
European domination. The countries west of Lake Nyasa were ravaged
by the Angoni, a people of more or less Zulu descent, the remains of
former Zulu invasions of Central Zambezia. In seven years, however,
these enemies were all subdued by means of Sikh soldiers lent by the
Indian Government, by the native levies that were drilled by the
Sikhs, and by five gunboats, which were placed on the Zambezi, the
Shiré, and on Lake Nyasa. The Right Hon. Cecil Rhodes began in 1893
his great scheme of connecting Cape Town with Cairo by a telegraph
line. In five years he had at any rate connected Cape Town with
Tanganyika through British Central Africa. The Shiré Highlands and
much else of Nyasaland and Eastern Northern Rhodesia proved
moderately favourable to the cultivation of coffee (which was
originally introduced by Scottish missionaries and planters); but
the product which will probably make the fortune of this part of
Africa is cotton—as Livingstone predicted more than half a century
ago. These countries possess other valuable resources in tobacco,
maize, and timber, in minerals, and in ivory; and are well adapted
for the growth of certain kinds of rubber. Through the middle of
Northern Rhodesia the “Cape to Cairo” railway is now built with
several branch lines; and regions unmapped and unknown when the
first edition of this work was published are now familiar to many a
sightseer and tourist, brought within a few days’ railway journey
(across the Victoria Falls of the Zambezi) of Cape Town. The Shiré
Highlands are connected by a railway with the Lower Zambezi, a line
which will before long terminate at the port of Beira in South-East
Africa and be extended northwards to Lake Nyasa. Large towns have
sprung into existence in Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia; the native
population has nearly doubled in numbers since 1890; and “British
Central Africa” is well on the way to becoming one of the most
prosperous portions of the British Empire.
During the 4th Earl of Carnarvon’s presence at the Colonial Office
between 1874 and 1878 that statesman endeavoured to repeat in South
Africa the success which had attended his consolidation of the North
American colonies into one confederated Dominion. He sent out the
historian Froude to represent him at the proposed conference of
South African states. Already, Sir George Grey had tried hard to
bring about this unification of South Africa under the British flag
during the fifties; and in 1858 had pressed strongly upon the
Imperial Parliament a scheme which would have well effected this
desired end. For his pains he was recalled and sharply reprimanded,
but, mainly owing to the influence of Queen Victoria, he was sent
back to his governorship, though he was not allowed to carry out the
far-reaching policy he had formulated. In Cape Colony the Federation
Commission was appointed in 1872. But the always present, more or
less bitter divergence of sympathies between the English and the
Dutch-speaking settlers—a discord constantly discernible in the
debates of the Cape Parliament—prevented any ripening of the
federation idea; and Lord Carnarvon’s commissioner, Mr J. A. Froude,
was snubbed for his pains by the Cape Dutch. Foiled in one
direction, Lord Carnarvon sought to effect his end in another way.
He sent out Sir Bartle Frere to be Governor and High Commissioner at
the Cape. He had been chosen by Lord Carnarvon six months before as
the statesman most capable of consolidating the South African
Empire; “within two years it was hoped that he would be the first
Governor-General of the South African Dominion.” The second step in
what seemed to Lord Carnarvon to be the right direction was the
annexation of the Transvaal. With this territory of about 120,000
square miles in extent, in British hands, there would only remain
the Orange Free State as an obstacle to the unification of South
Africa. The Transvaal as an independent state had between 1853 and
1877 come to grief. It was bankrupt, and it was powerless to subdue
the powerful native tribes within its borders, some of whom had real
wrongs to avenge. Moreover, it was threatened by Zulu invasion. It
was therefore annexed by the British Commissioner, Sir Theophilus
Shepstone, in the beginning of 1877.
Unfortunately, Sir Bartle Frere’s administration, after two and a
half years of excellent work, was clouded by unmerited misfortune.
The Zulu power to the east of Natal had been growing threateningly
strong. At the beginning of the 19th century an obscure tribe of
Kafirs known as the Ama-zulu rose into prominence under a chief
named Chaka, who became a kind of negro Napoleon, and a bloodthirsty
slaughterer of all who stood in his way[156]. He and his chiefs
included in their conquests all modern Natal and Zululand, much of
the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, and Amatongaland up to
Delagoa Bay[157]. Chaka’s son, Dingane, though he most treacherously
attacked the Boers, was fairly friendly in his relations with the
British, and tolerated their establishment in Natal. In fact he
seems to have allowed them to reorganize the territory of Natal
which his father had almost depopulated. Owing to the founding of
the Transvaal Republic and the Orange River Sovereignty in addition
to the colony of Natal, the Zulus were henceforth shut up in a
relatively small tract of South-east Africa represented by modern
Zululand and Amatongaland; though the Amatonga were practically
another people. Dingane was succeeded by Panda, and Panda by
C̓echwayo (Cetewayo). The last-named chief perfected the system of a
standing army of well-drilled bachelors. Anxious to find an outlet
for his energies, he openly menaced the Transvaal, and was one of
the causes of British intervention in the affairs of that republic.
Shut off from this outlet, he seemed becoming dangerous; and,
thinking it best to prick the boil before it burst, Sir Bartle Frere
forced war on him by an ultimatum. The invasion of Zululand at the
outset was not very wisely conducted, and led to a terrible disaster
in which 800 British and over 400 native soldiers were cut to pieces
at Isandhlwana; and subsequently, through mismanagement, the Prince
Imperial of France, who had come out as a volunteer, was allowed to
stray into danger, and be killed by the Zulus. After a time,
however, Lord Chelmsford succeeded in completely conquering the
country, and C̓echwayo was taken prisoner. Although Sir Bartle Frere
was in no way answerable for these mistakes in a campaign which was
eventually successful, his prestige was dimmed; and as the Liberal
Government of 1880 was inclined to pursue a reactionary policy in
Africa, Sir Bartle Frere was recalled.
The Boers, taking advantage of British discouragement and the change
of government in England, rose and demanded their independence. It
was refused by Mr Gladstone’s Administration, and troops were
hastily sent out to subdue them, with the results detailed in
Chapter VI. As to the after-history of Zululand, it may be briefly
summarized as follows. The Boers were allowed to add a large slice
of the country (“Vryheid” or the New Republic) to their reorganized
State. C̓echwayo was reinstated as king, but soon died. The country
was then divided into various native principalities; but Dinizulu,
C̓echwayo’s son, fomented an insurrection and was exiled to St
Helena. The country was then governed more or less as a British
protectorate by Sir Marshall Clarke and in connection with the
colony of Natal, the Governor of which was also made Governor of
Zululand. In 1897 Zululand was incorporated with the colony of
Natal. In 1887 British protection was extended over Amatongaland up
to the Portuguese boundary, and in 1895 this strip of coast
territory was taken under more direct administration. In 1902 the
Vryheid territory of northern Zululand was withdrawn from the
Transvaal and united once more with Zululand.
As was related in Chapter VI, the Dutch South African Republic, soon
after recovering its independence, sought to invade and absorb
Bechuanaland; but the expedition under Sir Charles Warren (1884-5)
put an end to their hopes in that direction, and a clear path was
made for the British northwards to the Zambezi. In the early
seventies, explorations of men like Thomas Baines and Karl Mauch (a
German explorer) had revealed the existence of gold in the countries
between the Limpopo and the Zambezi, countries which had come under
the sway of a Zulu king, Lobengula, son of Umsilikazi[158]. Mr Cecil
John Rhodes, an Englishman who had brought about the consolidation
of the mines of Kimberley and had acquired great wealth and a
position of political importance at the Cape, had interested himself
firstly in the settlement of the Bechuana question with the Boers;
and when Bechuanaland had been declared a British protectorate, his
thoughts turned to the possibility of gold beyond; for the gold
discoveries in the Transvaal were beginning to make a golden South
Africa dawn on men’s imaginations. He despatched envoys to
Lobengula, and secured from him the right to mine. Other individuals
or syndicates had secured mining rights in that direction, but Mr
Rhodes with patience and fair dealing bought up or absorbed these
rights, and in 1888 began to think of obtaining a charter from the
Imperial Government which would enable the Company he intended
forming to govern South-Central Africa. At one time he seems to have
thought that the De Beers diamond mining company should receive this
charter and perform these functions; for, when he had framed the
articles of association of the De Beers shareholders, he had
inserted clauses enabling the Company to take up such an enterprise.
But there were many reasons why this would not have worked well; and
it was resolved to constitute an independent company to work
Lobengula’s concession first, and to create another South African
state afterwards. Already in 1888 the High Commissioner, Sir
Hercules Robinson, had somewhat reluctantly extended a vague form of
protection over Lobengula’s country; and it had been made clear to
Germany that Great Britain would not submit to be cut off from the
Zambezi. In the early summer of 1889 a charter was granted to the
British South Africa Company, of which Mr Rhodes became and remained
the practical administrator. Mr Rhodes’ ambitions then crossed the
Zambezi, and he co-operated with Sir Harry Johnston in establishing
British influence up to Tanganyika. For several years his Company
afforded a subsidy to the administration of the British Central
Africa Protectorate as well as to the territories under the
Chartered Company’s own control. The African Lakes Trading
Company[159] was given financial support, and enabled to extend its
operations to Tanganyika.
In 1891 Mr Rhodes commenced the organization of the East coast route
from Mashonaland to the sea, and he and his friends practically
subscribed the capital for the Beira Railway. Fort Salisbury and
other settlements in Mashonaland and on the east of Matebeleland
were founded between 1891 and 1893. In the last-named year the
Matebele made an entirely unprovoked attack on the Company’s forces,
but a counter-invasion, most ably directed by Dr (afterwards Sir
Starr) Jameson, achieved a complete victory over the Matebele. King
Lobengula fled, and died soon after he had crossed the Zambezi. His
capital, Buluwayo, became the administrative capital of the
Company’s possessions, to which the inclusive name of Rhodesia
(Northern and Southern) was subsequently given. The development of
Rhodesia proceeded apace. Mr Rhodes had since 1890 been Premier of
Cape Colony; he was high in favour with the Dutch Party in South
Africa; and he was fast becoming the actual, if not nominal Dictator
of Africa, south of the Zambezi, when he made the fatal mistake of
organizing a raid into the Transvaal (see page 287).
In the general disturbance which followed, the government of
Southern Rhodesia became disorganized by a revolt of the Matebele in
the spring of 1896. They were soon joined by their former slaves,
the Mashona. The revolt was suppressed partly by hard fighting, and
partly by direct negotiation between Mr Rhodes and the Matebele
chiefs, Rhodes and a few companions going unarmed to meet the
_induna_ in the Matopo hills. But the Mashona continued fighting
until 1897. Rhodes did much to atone for his one mistake by the
enormous pecuniary sacrifices he made in pushing on the railways
from Southern Rhodesia to Beira and the Zambezi, and in constructing
the telegraph line from Mafeking to Tanganyika. There were signs
that he was recovering to a considerable extent his influence in
Cape Colony, and that he might yet play a great part in South
Africa; but the terrible events of the great South African War of
1899-1902 interrupted the great work of development on which he had
set his heart and ultimately caused his death.