The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour

by Martin Meredith

  One by one, el-Kader’s strongholds in the interior fell to the French. Tribes which had pledged their loyalty to him submitted to French rule. All vestiges of his Islamic state vanished. His capital became a mobile tent city harbouring tens of thousands of followers with their families. But in May 1843, that too was captured. Retreating across the border, el-Kader used Moroccan territory as a base from which to continue his struggle, making long forays back into Algeria. Sporadic resistance in the interior flared up again and again. In 1845, Bugeaud was obliged to call for reinforcements, bringing his forces to a total of 106,000 men, a third of the French army. With only the remnant of his following still intact, el-Kader surrendered to a French column in December 1847 and was taken into exile.

  The end of the war opened the way for further European immigration. By 1841, the number of colons, or pieds-noirs as they came to be called, had reached about 37,000. Only about half came from France, the rest arriving mainly from Spain, Malta and Italy, but most immigrants soon regarded French Algeria as their permanent home. During the 1850s, their numbers soared to 130,000. They were treated by the French authorities as a superior group deserving privileges, classified as citizens of France and granted many of the same legal and constitutional rights as the population of metropolitan France. Most settlers lived in coastal towns, but the area of agricultural land under white control steadily grew, acquired in part through expropriation or bought at minimal cost. French expertise was used to transform the mosquito-ridden marshes of the Mitidja, inland from Algiers, into Algeria’s richest farming land. A new class of grands colons emerged, owning large estates and successful businesses.

  The indigenous population, numbering about three million, was meanwhile accorded an inferior status. Muslims were treated not as citizens of France but as French subjects, with limited rights and bound by a different set of laws, rules and regulations. If Muslims wanted to become full citizens, they had to accept the full jurisdiction of the French legal code, including laws affecting marriage and inheritance, and reject the competence of religious courts. In effect, they were required to renounce aspects of their religion in order to gain equality. In the interior, Muslims were governed by Bureaux Arabes, run by an elite corps of Arabic-speaking army officers, assisted by a small technical staff and detachments of native troops. With military support, the boundaries of Algeria were extended to the northern edge of the Sahara.

  One final surge of resistance against French rule surfaced in 1871 in the mountainous region of Kabylia, east of Algiers. A Berber religious leader, Mohamed el-Mokrani, inspired a popular uprising which spread south to the Hodna Mountains and the Saharan provinces, but ended in defeat. As a reprisal, the French confiscated 1.5 million acres of Kabyle land. So much land became available that the authorities offered a free farm to any European settler prepared to take up residence.

  As the pied-noir population continued to grow – by 1870, it had reached about 250,000 – so did their demands for greater control over their own affairs. Since the beginning of the présence française, Algeria had remained chiefly in the hands of the military. But in 1870, piednoir agitation forced the Paris government to give way.

  The solution the French devised for Algeria was to govern it as an integral part of France. Its three northern provinces of Algiers, Oran and Constantine, where most of the white population lived, became départements with the same status as the départements of mainland France. French citizens were entitled to send senators and deputies to the parliament in Paris. Initially, only the pied-noir population enjoyed the right to vote for three representatives; subsequently, a complex electoral college system permitted Muslim involvement but left white hegemony untouched. In effect Algeria became the property of the pieds-noirs.

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  BIBLES, PLOUGHS AND BULLETS

  The discovery that the mouth of the Niger was to be found among the maze of rivers, creeks and mangrove swamps on the coast of the Bight of Benin prompted a British shipbuilding entrepreneur, Macgregor Laird, to mount a private expedition to the Delta region. Laird had a keen interest in developing the paddle steamer as a means of oceanic travel. He also believed that legitimate trade with west Africa could be used as a means of supplanting the slave trade there. Joining forces with a group of Liverpool merchants, he formed ‘The African Inland Commercial Company’ and commissioned the construction of two ships for the venture: one, the Quorra, was a paddle steamer of 145 tons; the other, the 55-ton Alburkha, named after the Hausa word for ‘blessing’, was the world’s first ocean-going iron steamship. The crew of the Quorra, when setting sail from Milford Haven in June 1832, numbered twenty-six men, that of the Alburkha, fourteen. Laird himself led the expedition and invited Richard Lander, whose pioneering trip in 1830 had solved the riddle of the Niger’s course, to join it.

  Leaving from Brass town on the estuary of the Niger, Laird’s expedition took two months to reach the confluence of the Niger with the Benue, its main eastern tributary. Malaria took a heavy toll. Only nine of the forty-eight Europeans on the expedition survived. Lander died of wounds after being attacked on a trading trip. Despite such a disastrous outcome, Laird, on his return to England, remained optimistic about the potential for trade and spoke of ‘new and boundless markets’ ready to be exploited.

  Another British expedition up the Niger River followed in 1841. It was mainly a missionary enterprise, led by the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade and for the Civilization of Africa, but it had the full support of the British government, which agreed to bear the cost and provide three iron-hulled, flat-bottomed paddle steamers. The expedition formed part of a new missionary initiative, known as ‘Bible and Plough’, that was intended to spread Christianity and commerce in west Africa. Its members included two linguists from the Church Missionary Society base in Sierra Leone, the German missionary James Schön and the Yoruba catechist Samuel Ajayi Crowther.

  The outcome was the same. European members were once more struck down by malaria. Of the total complement of 145 Europeans, 49 died within two months – 43 from fever. A tract of land purchased from the Ata of Idah with the aim of establishing a model agricultural farm that would serve as an ‘exhibition centre’ for the surrounding population had to be abandoned. On his return, Schön advised that since Europeans could not easily survive the climate, the task of evangelisation should be carried out by Africans themselves. Large numbers of Christian recaptives in the Sierra Leone settlement, he said, were ready to offer their services.

  African Christians consequently were given a leading role in missionary activity in west Africa. Impressed by the ability that Crowther had shown during the expedition, the Church Missionary Society recalled him to London for training and ordination as a priest. On his return to Sierra Leone, he became a member of a small CMS team sent into the interior to Yorubaland to establish a missionary outpost at Abeokuta. Abeokuta had been founded in the 1830s by Yoruba refugees fleeing from a series of civil wars that followed the disintegration of the Oyo empire. It had also become a destination for hundreds of Yoruba recaptives based in Sierra Leone who wanted to return to Yorubaland and appealed to the CMS to join them there. Once the Abeokuta mission station had been established in 1846, the CMS looked on it as an inland centre from which Christianity and civilisation would radiate across Africa. Crowther devoted much of his time there to translating the Bible into Yoruba and compiling a vocabulary for a Yoruba-English dictionary.

  The missionaries in Abeokuta, however, were soon caught up in one of the interminable wars that afflicted the region. In 1851, Gezo, the king of neighbouring Dahomey, set out to conquer Abeokuta, demonstrating his military prowess with a parade of an army of 16,000 through the streets of his capital Abomey. Among the troops on display was a contingent of 6,000 female soldiers, known to Europeans as Amazons. Dahomey’s kings had used female soldiers as a royal bodyguard since the eighteenth century, but Gezo had expanded their role, turning them into a formidable fighting force. The parade in Abomey wa
s witnessed by a visiting British consul, John Beecroft, who had arrived there on a mission to persuade Gezo to give up slaving. Beecroft duly alerted Abeokuta to the impending attack and, with the cooperation of the mission station, ensured that its Egba residents were well armed in advance with stores of ammunition. With Amazons in the vanguard, the Dahomeyan assault on Abeokuta was subsequently repelled and the Christian missionaries gained widespread credit for the result.

  With much foreboding about the likely outcome, the British government organised a third British expedition up the Niger in 1854, commissioning the construction of a 260-ton steamer, the Pleiad. The expedition was led by a thirty-year-old Scottish doctor, William Baikie, and included Samuel Crowther, who was given the task of scouting for suitable sites for mission stations. The Pleiad sailed a record distance of 700 miles upstream in eleven weeks. As a commercial venture, the expedition was a failure. But its main significance was that not one of the twelve Europeans nor any of the fifty-four Africans on board the Pleiad died of malaria. At Baikie’s insistence, his crew had been required to take daily doses of quinine as a prophylactic against fever; five grams was administered every morning to every man. Though Baikie did not understand what caused malaria, he had found a way of averting its deadly effects. The consequences were profound. For the use of quinine showed that life was possible for Europeans in the tropical interior. By the 1860s and 1870s, quinine was in regular use by European missionaries, merchants and soldiers.

  The campaign to supplant the slave trade with legitimate commerce, meanwhile, slowly gathered momentum. As well as slaves, the coastal ports of west Africa started to export increasing quantities of palm-oil. European traders had hitherto purchased palm-oil for use as cooking or lamp oil. But since the end of the eighteenth century, it had become an essential ingredient for Europe’s industrial expansion, used as a lubricant for machinery and for the manufacture of candles and soap, producing a surge in demand. Even before the British ban on slave-trading in 1807, the old slave-trading Efik state of Calabar in the Cross River Valley had begun to develop palm-oil plantations using slave labour. In the Niger Delta, old trading organisations built up to handle the slave trade soon adapted to handling palm-oil. Ijo traders who had long used their war canoes for transporting Igbo captives from upriver locations for sale on the coast turned to transporting palm-oil purchased from Igbo producers. Oil exports from the Bights of Benin and Biafra increased from 200 tons in 1803 to 14,000 tons in 1834. A coastal strip running for 300 miles from the east of Lagos to the Niger Delta and Calabar, all the way to the Cameroon River, soon became known as the Oil Rivers. By mid-century, west Africa’s palm-oil exports were worth more than slave exports. But domestic slavery was still commonplace. Slaves were used as plantation labourers and as porters of palm-oil.

  Britain’s growing trading interests in the Niger region, together with its continuing commitment to stamp out the slave trade, led the British government into a policy of direct intervention in local politics. In 1837, the Royal Navy’s Anti-Slavery patrol deposed the ruler of Bonny on the grounds of his persistent involvement in the slave trade and replaced him with a local rival thought to be more amenable to Britain’s trading interests. In the 1840s, the Royal Navy became increasingly involved in obtaining treaties from coastal chiefs requiring them to suppress the slave trade and making clear the consequences of any violation. In 1851, the British government intervened in a dynastic dispute in Lagos, forcing the king, Kosoko, from his throne and handing it to his uncle, Akitoye. When Akitoye died in 1853, the British consul in Lagos arranged for the installation of a compliant successor, Dosunmu, before any of the other local chiefs even knew of Akitoye’s death. In 1861, when the Lagos hinterland was plagued by further outbreaks of Yoruba warfare, the British government stepped in to secure control of Lagos by annexing it as a colony, paying off Dosunmu with a pension of £1,000 a year. The handing-over ceremony was concluded by the singing of the British national anthem by a choir of 300 local schoolchildren, conducted by two missionaries.

  The British government was also active in supporting the activities of British traders. In 1857, as a result of the success of the 1854 expedition, it awarded a contract to Macgregor Laird to maintain a steamer service on the Niger River for five years, providing an initial annual subsidy of £8,000 a year. British traders used it to move inland, setting up factories and trading posts that enabled them to undercut African middlemen. Oil on the coast cost £24 a ton; further upriver it could be obtained for £13 a ton.

  Missionaries too came in greater numbers. In 1846, the Church of Scotland established a mission station in Calabar, staffed mainly by a group of former slaves from Jamaica. Among the tasks they set themselves was persuading local chiefs to abandon various indigenous practices, notably the sacrifice of large numbers of slaves to mark the event of a chief’s death. In 1850, at the mission station in Creek Town, ten ship’s captains, three surgeons and two missionaries met to form ‘A Society for the Suppression of Human Sacrifices in Calabar’. King Eyo Honesty duly agreed to discontinue the practice. When Eyo died in 1858, not one man was sacrificed.

  Further inland, Samuel Crowther founded a mission station at Igbobi on the Niger River in 1857 and used his linguistic skills to produce primers for the Igbo and Nupe languages. In 1864, he was called once more to England to be consecrated bishop of ‘Western Equatorial Africa beyond the Queen’s Dominions’, or, as it later became known, the Niger Mission, an all-African enterprise. By 1880, the Niger Mission had established eleven stations inland.

  The Niger River proved to be a profitable highway. A host of British companies competed vigorously to hold a position there. In some small trading stations as many as five firms were engaged in cutthroat rivalry. But competition had the effect of driving up prices and involving high costs for companies maintaining identical trading networks. During the 1870s, an English entrepreneur, George Goldie, began a campaign to persuade rival companies that the only cure for over-competition was amalgamation; and in 1879, he succeeded in welding together the main British competitors into a United African Company in which they agreed to pool ships, stores and staff.

  But Goldie was concerned not just with commercial profit. A staunch advocate of Britain’s imperial role, he was alert to a new threat posed by rival European traders. Until the 1870s, British traders had held a virtual monopoly over trade in both the Delta and its hinterland. But they now faced competition from trading firms from France and Germany. To ward off the threat, Goldie used his amalgamated company, now known as the National African Company, to sign treaties with scores of local rulers in the Niger region, reaching as far north as the Sokoto Caliphate, giving it exclusive rights. He also assembled a fleet of twenty gunboats to protect his trading interests. But when he asked the British government to enhance his status further by granting him a royal charter, he was turned down.

  Even though the British government was prepared to give assistance to British traders and missionaries in their endeavours in west Africa, it held a deep-seated aversion towards colonial ventures there. For decades its involvement in west Africa had been strictly limited. Its most important commitment was to Sierra Leone, the peninsular colony it used to suppress the slave trade. It also possessed a string of forts and coastal territory on the Gold Coast; a base at Bathurst on St Mary’s Island at the mouth of the Gambia River; and a small colony at Lagos and neighbouring Badagry. But even this number of footholds on the coast aroused strong opposition in London. In 1865, parliament’s Select Committee on West Africa recommended a gradual reduction of commitments there and made clear its opposition to any further territorial expansion. Above all, the government was wary of the expense it might incur in colonial ventures and of the risks of being caught up in local wars. When presenting his case for a royal charter in 1881, Goldie argued that it would be his chartered company that would bear the cost of administering the Niger region and securing British interests there. But it was to no avail. When Edward Hewett, the Br
itish consul based in Bonny, proposed in 1882 that Britain should form a protectorate over the whole district of the Oil Rivers, the idea was dismissed out of hand. ‘The coast is pestilential; the natives numerous and unmanageable,’ wrote the colonial secretary. A group of chiefs on the Cameroon River wrote to London pleading for Britain to take over their region, but received no reply for three years. Only when other European powers threatened to stake claims did the British government change its mind.

  Preoccupied with Algeria, France showed little interest at first in the trading prospects of west Africa. Its own industrial revolution, lagging behind that of Britain, did not take off until the 1840s, so its need for raw materials such as palm-oil was not so pressing. Its main base at Saint Louis, a garrison town at the mouth of the Senegal River, served as the headquarters for several trading posts upriver dealing mainly in gum arabic. During the 1840s, Saint Louis also began exporting groundnuts. France’s other main base in the area was the island of Gorée off the Cape Verde peninsula, once a slaving port. Further south along the coast, the French maintained a handful of trading posts with the approval of local chiefs. During the 1840s, a French naval officer, Louis Bouët-Willaumez, signed treaties with chiefs in Assini, Grand Bassam and Dabou on the coast of modern Côte d’Ivoire; in 1851, he followed up with a treaty with Gezo, king of Dahomey.