The first traders from overseas who were interested in neither slaves nor ivory had been American merchants from ports in New England and New York. By 1805, forty-eight trading ships from Salem, Massachusetts, were reported to have sailed around the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean, and the first American vessel is believed to have reached Zanzibar in 1817. The United States dominated the East African trade until the Civil War, when the country lost its preeminent trading position to British, German, and Indian traders. However, trade in the region was generally slow, and by the middle of the nineteenth century East Africa was still a backwater.
Livingstone’s emotional reports about the Arab slave trade, which touched the public mood back home, provided the great stimulus in Victorian Britain to opening up East Africa. In particular, his last journey to Africa and his subsequent death in 1873 fired the imagination of missionaries to come and work in Africa. In the mid-1870s, Anglican missionaries began establishing new mission stations deep in the interior. A missionary who arrived with a few dozen porters to establish a mission in a native village had to set up what amounted to a small independent state, where he was recognized as a kind of chief by the other local headmen.16 By 1885 most of the nearly three hundred Europeans living in East Africa were Catholic or Anglican missionaries.17 Initially they won few converts. Islam had long been established on the coast, and the Arab traders had helped bring it into the interior. After 1880, however, Christian missionaries made significant inroads in the Buganda region, and by the end of the century Christianity was beginning to spread quickly throughout the region.
Around the middle part of the nineteenth century, the perceived wisdom in London held that African territories were too expensive to run and the potential yields too low to make a profit. As Europe’s foremost imperial power, Britain was keen to maintain an influence in the region, but it was not really interested in exercising any real power.18 Instead, Britain had three priorities on the continent, none of which required direct governance: closing the slave trade with the Middle East, encouraging the expansion of Christianity, and allowing legitimate trade to flourish. Missionaries tried to encourage British merchants and ship owners to establish a commercial presence in East Africa, but the response was mostly limited to Scottish entrepreneurs inspired by their countryman David Livingstone. William Mackinnon, a Glaswegian ship owner and member of the Free Church of Scotland, was one such businessman; he started out in life as a grocer’s assistant and rose to become one of the wealthiest men in Britain, running vessels from his British India Steam Navigation Company to and from Zanzibar from 1872 onward.
Up until the 1880s, 80 percent of the African continent remained under traditional and local control, with foreign interests confined almost entirely to the coastal areas. Then in 1885, in one of the most cynical and avaricious moves ever undertaken by colonial powers, outsiders superimposed a new map of the continent over more than a thousand indigenous cultures and regions. This unseemly scramble by European nations to seize vast areas of the continent—most of which was still largely unknown to them—would bring far-reaching consequences for every single individual living in Africa.
5
THE NEW IMPERIALISM
KIK ILAW WINY ARIYO
Don’t chase two birds at once
THE INDIVIDUAL responsible for changing much of the face of East Africa in 1885 was a reckless, hot-headed young German student called Karl Peters. The son of a Lutheran minister, Peters was born in the small north German village of Neuhaus, on the banks of the river Elbe. In 1879 he left Berlin University with a degree in history and moved to London, where he stayed with a wealthy uncle. During his four years in London, Peters studied British history and its colonial policies, developing a deep contempt and loathing for the British; at the same time he became passionate about the new opportunities for German imperialist expansion. In 1884 his uncle committed suicide and Peters returned to Germany. Fired up with nationalistic zeal, and supported by like-minded contemporaries, the twenty-eight-year-old established the Gesellschaft für Deutsche Kolonisation—the Society for German Colonization. At its first executive committee meeting, the group clearly defined its objectives: “the founding of German plantation and commercial colonies by securing adequate capital for colonisation, by finding and securing possession of regions suitable for colonisation, and by attracting German immigrants to those regions.”1
The express aim of their society was to propel Germany headlong into rivalry with the two leading imperial nations in Europe—Britain and France—and it did not take long for them to realize their ambitions. By 1884, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck of Germany had reversed his previous declaration that he had no wish to acquire overseas colonies.2 That year, Germany made its first real bid for membership in the colonial club when it announced territorial claims in South West Africa, in Togoland and Cameroon, as well as part of the East African coast opposite Zanzibar. Germany was joined by Belgium and Italy—two small European nations with no previous colonial ambitions—which declared an interest in Congo and the Red Sea region, respectively. Even Portugal and Spain once again became interested in claiming bits of African territory.
Fearing that the stampede to claim African territories could easily get out of hand and lead to military confrontation, Bismarck readily agreed when the Portuguese asked the Germans to convene a meeting of European powers to resolve their interests in Africa. The conference opened in Berlin on November 15, 1884, and a plethora of ambassadors and politicians attended from fourteen European countries. Few of the participants, if indeed any at all, had ever set foot in Africa. For a full three months the European nations haggled over the partition of the continent, completely ignoring any of the cultural or linguistic boundaries already established by the indigenous populations.
By the end of February 1885, Africa had been carved up into fifty irregular countries. In this new “imperial” map of Africa, borders were often drawn arbitrarily, with little or no regard for ethnic unity, regional economic ties, migratory patterns of people, or even natural boundaries. The only logic or reason that applied to the map was that of political expediency around the conference table in Berlin, and the boundaries established there have created tribal tension and conflict in Africa ever since.
On November 4, 1884—just two weeks before the negotiations began in Berlin—Karl Peters and his two companions, Karl Ludwig Jühlke and Count Joachim von Pfeil, arrived in Zanzibar intent on realizing their imperial ambitions. All three were still under the age of thirty. Their trip had not been sanctioned by the German government, and the German consul in Zanzibar showed Peters a communication from the German Foreign Office stating that Peters could expect from the government “neither Imperial protection nor any guarantees for his safety.”3 Undeterred, they disguised themselves as mechanics and crossed over to the mainland at Bagamoyo, where they began to establish a German colonial presence in East Africa. Within days, they succeeded in negotiating their first treaty with an African chief on behalf of the Gesellschaft für Deutsche Kolonisation. Encouraged by their first audacious success, the three young Germans pushed on and made several more treaties with neighboring tribes. Msovero, a local chief in Usagara, agreed to offer “all his territories with all its civil and public appurtenances to Dr. Karl Peters … for all time,” while in return, Peters agreed to “give special attention to Msovero when colonising Usagara.”4 Peters later wrote about this initiative:
As the Gesellschaft wanted to found independent German colonies under the German flag, its activity naturally was limited to those areas which at that time had not yet been taken. In fact, only Africa was suitable.… Already in November 1884 this task basically had been fulfilled by the expedition sent via Zanzibar. On December 14th 1884 I found myself, as representative of the Society for German Colonisation, as the rightful owner of 2,500 square miles of very lush tropical land, located to the west of Zanzibar.5
By the middle of December—after just six weeks in East Africa—Pet
ers had signed a total of twelve agreements with the “sultans” of four inland regions, which gave him theoretical control of more than sixty thousand square miles of the East African mainland. In practice, of course, these treaties were hardly worth the paper they were written on, as it is unlikely that the Africans had any idea of what they were actually ceding; their real value, however, was to demonstrate to other colonial powers that Germany had prior claim to the region. The young German had achieved exactly what he needed.
Peters returned to Germany as quickly as possible, and on February 12, 1885, two weeks before the conclusion of the Berlin Conference, he founded the Deutsche Ost-Afrika Gesellschaft—the German East Africa Company—to which he assigned all his African territories. With the Berlin Conference coming to a close, Bismarck refused at first to accept responsibility for the new acquisitions in Africa. But Peters had a very strong fallback position: he threatened to cede the land to King Leopold II of Belgium. On February 17 Bismarck agreed to issue an imperial charter—a Schutzbrief—that placed all the territories acquired by the German East Africa Company under the protection of the emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm I. This impudent but brilliant move by the young German adventurer inevitably provoked vociferous complaints from established overseas interests in the region. The British had previously acquired treaties inland around the foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro, and a group of entrepreneurs had ambitious plans to build a railway between the coast and Lake Victoria. Now they had some real competition.
In response to Karl Peters’ inspired initiative and the creation of a German protectorate, the British formed the British East Africa Association (BEAA). After several months of saber-rattling in London and Berlin, the Anglo-German Agreement was signed in 1886, followed by a second treaty in 1890 that consolidated the arrangements. With these two treaties, Britain and Germany agreed on their spheres of influence in East Africa. The dividing line ran from the coast south of Mombasa to a point on the eastern shore of Lake Victoria, cutting straight across East Africa in a northwesterly direction, except in one place where it kinked around Mount Kilimanjaro. (Queen Victoria wanted her grandson, the German kaiser, to have his own “big mountain” in Africa.) Everywhere north of the border became the Protectorate of British East Africa, and Germany took the area south of the line. This left the Luo who lived around Winam Gulf under British rule, although a small number of Luo living farther south fell under German control.
In 1891 Peters was made Reichskommissar (imperial high commissioner) to German East Africa, but within a few years rumors began to reach Berlin of his cruel and inhumane treatment of Africans. He is said to have used local girls as concubines, and when he discovered that one of his lovers had had an affair with his manservant, he had them both hanged and their home villages destroyed. This earned him the name mukono wa damu—“the man with blood on his hands.” He was recalled to Berlin, where a judicial hearing officially condemned him for his violent attacks on African natives; he was dismissed from government service and deprived of his government pension. Ironically, Peters sought refuge in London, where he continued to develop further interests elsewhere in Africa. Back home in Germany many people still considered him to be a national hero; Kaiser Wilhelm II later reinstated him as imperial commissioner and awarded him a pension from his own private budget. Twenty years after his death in 1918, Peters was officially rehabilitated by the personal decree of Adolf Hitler, who feted him as an ideological hero, even commissioning a Nazi propaganda film in 1941 about Peters’ life. He remains a controversial figure to this day.
The creation of British East Africa took place on two levels. The first, on paper, had already been hammered out in diplomatic meetings in London and Berlin. Now the second stage was about to begin, as Britain came to terms with taking control of an area that was bigger than metropolitan France and nearly twice the size of German East Africa.6 In 1888, with an investment of £240,000, the British East Africa Association received a royal charter and was renamed the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEAC). The ambitions of IBEAC were impressive—at least superficially; the company would act as both a trading and a development agency with a special emphasis on improving the well-being of ordinary Africans. However, neither the British nor the German government had any intention of spending state funds on colonial administration. Rather, the British government hoped to devolve responsibility for governance to a chartered company.
Like the Deutsche Ost-Afrika Gesellschaft, the Imperial British East Africa Company started badly. In German East Africa, Karl Peters’ personal misconduct focused attention on German arrogance and overbearing contempt toward Africans. In British East Africa, the problems were incompetent management and lack of business acumen. William Mackinnon—the Scottish ship owner who had been inspired by Livingstone to open trade in Zanzibar in 1872—was made chairman of the IBEAC, and he was blamed for the company’s mismanagement. Every visitor to Mombasa seemed to comment on the disorganization of his administration. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Salisbury (who never had much faith in Mackinnon), once commented that he “had no quality for pushing an enterprise which depends on decision and smartness.”7 By 1890, even his fellow directors had lost faith in Mackinnon’s unrealistic ideas and had become frustrated with his poor planning.
That year a young man called Charles William Hobley arrived in Mombasa to begin work on the coast as an IBEAC transport superintendent. First-Class Assistant Hobley would later join the colonial government and become the provincial commissioner of the Kavirondo region near Lake Victoria, the homeland of the Luo, but he came to Africa in 1890 as an inexperienced twenty-three-year-old. His memoirs give a fascinating insight into what Mombasa was like toward the end of the nineteenth century:
It could not have been healthy, for it was surrounded on three sides by the native town, and the mosquitoes were very trying to a newcomer. A mosque stood about fifty yards away, and the frequent calls to prayer, by the muezzin, were at first a novelty, but soon became tiresome monotony. Shortly before my arrival it was said that the wailing tones of the call to the faithful so frayed the nerves of a young assistant who was confined to bed with fever that he hurled a bottle at the muezzin, an injudicious act which took much explaining.8
Mombasa had long been a strategically important harbor on the East African coast. Its local name, Kisiwa M’vita, means “island of war”—a reference to centuries of bloody battles between the Portuguese, Arabs, and Africans—and the old town appears on a map by Ptolemy dated AD 150. Now that the British government had decided to keep strategic control over the Upper Nile valley, it was essential to maintain the lines of communication from Uganda to the coast. The government and the IBEAC were both mainly interested in Buganda (now part of central Uganda) rather than Kenya. But with Zanzibar ceded to the Germans, Mombasa became the gateway to East Africa for the British, and the city was placed under colonial rule on July 1, 1895.
The old town is still a maze of narrow coral-pink streets with whitewashed houses on either side, each with a traditional heavily carved wooden front door and a balcony overhead; it is little changed from Hobley’s time, except for the unsightly power lines that festoon the alleyways. The old town’s narrow streets give some relief from the sun, and it is here that the traders set up their stalls, selling anything from fruit to carpets to brassware—forerunners to the tourist curio shops that continue to turn a profit for their Muslim owners today. In 1895 countless dhows from Oman, Arabia, Somaliland, and India jostled for position in the old harbor, ready to take on their cargoes of ivory, gold, frankincense, mangrove poles, and slaves. The modern port still serves Kenya and Uganda, with shipping containers stacked high, waiting to be dispatched inland.
As the nineteenth century came to a close, the IBEAC had two major objectives: to organize trading caravans into the interior and to collect customs revenues from a string of seven company agents stationed along the coast from Vanga in the south to Lamu in the north. It also faced two major obstacles: the lack of profi
table mineral resources and the absence of large navigable rivers reaching inland. Not much had changed in terms of infrastructure since Krapf had penetrated the interior fifty years before, and a round-trip from Mombasa to Lake Victoria remained a perilous, six-month-long undertaking. Human porterage was expensive here at £250 a ton, and with the abolition of the slave trade in the region, the only financially viable export from the interior was ivory.9 It was a recipe for economic disaster.
During the 1890s, the IBEAC made several attempts to find cost-effective alternatives to the Zanzibari porters who brought goods out from the interior. Donkeys and camels were brought in from the Middle East and used as pack animals, and Cape oxen were imported from South Africa to pull carts. Construction began on a few roads, and a steamer was chartered for use on the small rivers that were navigable for a short distance inland. In one particularly pathetic attempt to open up the interior, workers even laid a few miles of narrow-gauge tramway from the port of Mombasa, the wagons pushed by Africans. The tramway never served any useful purpose other than what one visitor referred to as carrying “occasional picnic parties.”
Increasingly desperate about the financial viability of British East Africa, the directors of the IBEAC began to lobby the British Tory government for a subsidy to build a proper railway. Political resistance to this “gigantic folly” arose immediately, with opponents claiming that the railway “started from nowhere” and “went nowhere.” Furthermore, Liberal politicians argued that the British government had no right to build a railway through land owned by African tribes. In response to objections that the venture would also be a monumental waste of taxpayers’ money, the IBEAC found support from an old ally; in an article published in September 1891 the Times of London declared: “It is not, after all, a very serious matter to build four or five hundred miles of railway over land that costs nothing.”10 The editorial could not have been more misguided, but the IBEAC won the day. Agreeing to fund the enterprise, the minority Tory government contended that it would bring an end to the East African slave trade, secure British control over the headwaters of the White Nile, and advance “the cause of civilisation throughout the interior of the continent.”
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