Mutesa expressed keen interest in the firearms that Speke had brought him as presents – a Whitworth’s rifle, a revolver and three carbines. In a subsequent meeting, he asked Speke to demonstrate the use of the revolver by shooting dead four cows that were walking about the court. ‘Great applause followed this wonderful feat,’ wrote Speke. But he was horrified by what then occurred.
The king now loaded one of the carbines I had given him with his own hands, and giving it full-cock to a page told him to go out and shoot a man in the outer court: which was no sooner accomplished than the little urchin returned to announce his success, with a look of glee such as one would see in the face of a boy who had robbed a bird’s nest, caught a trout, or done any other boyish trick.
The incident, Speke noted, created hardly any interest. ‘There appeared no curiosity to know, what individual human being the urchin had deprived of life.’ Speke witnessed many other examples of arbitrary violence and cruelty at court. ‘Nearly every day,’ he wrote, ‘one, two or three of the wretched palace women’ were ‘led away to execution, tied by the hand, and dragged along by one of the bodyguard, crying out as she went to premature death “Hai Minangé!” [“O my lord!”] at the top of her voice in utmost despair.’
Although Mutesa was accustomed to using violence to underpin his rule, he was also open to new ideas and ways of thinking. During the 1860s, influenced by Muslim merchants, he took an increasing interest in Islam. He appointed two Arab scribes to his court, asked to be taught to read the Koran and required senior chiefs and officials to join him in his lessons. He began to observe the Ramadan fast, built a mosque in his enclosure, reformed the calendar, introduced dietary restrictions and issued orders that he should be saluted with Islamic greetings. He regularly tested chiefs on their ability to ‘read Islam’ by asking how they greeted each other. He also made a more general call for the Baganda ‘to read Islam’ and learn Arabic and Swahili. In 1875, he went further, ordering that all those who refused to learn Arabic greetings should be arrested or executed; hundreds were killed. But despite his new-found zeal, Mutesa did not entirely abandon Buganda’s traditional religion. While diminishing the rule of balubale mediums, he continued to observe customary rituals. When Muslim pages in court questioned the seriousness of his own Muslim beliefs, he ordered seventy of them to be executed.
The arrival of Henry Stanley in 1875 resulted in further complications. Stanley was shocked to find that Arab-Swahili merchants from Zanzibar had turned Buganda into what he called ‘the northern source of the slave trade’. In his discussions at the kabaka’s palace at Rubaga, he sought to counter the influence of the merchants by recommending the virtues of Christianity and suggested that Buganda would benefit from the presence of Christian missionaries. Impressed above all by the quality of Stanley’s firearms, Mutesa readily gave his assent, arranged for the Ten Commandments to be translated into Luganda and agreed ‘to observe the Christian Sabbath as well as the Moslem Sabbath’. His main hope was that the Christian connection would secure for him a new source of firearms.
Stanley lost no time in sending a dispatch to the New York Herald and to the Daily Telegraph, appealing for missionary involvement in Buganda and stressing the need for a practical approach.
It is not the mere preacher that is wanted here . . . It is the practical Christian tutor, who can teach people how to become Christians, cure their diseases, construct dwellings, understands agriculture and can turn his hand to anything . . . He must be tied to no Church or sect, but . . . be inspired by liberal principles, charity to all men, and devout faith in God . . . Such a man or men Mtesa, King of Uganda . . . invites to come to him.
In subsequent writings, Stanley referred to ‘Uganda’ as ‘the Pearl of Africa’.
The first Christian missionaries arrived in Buganda in 1877, after struggling along the 800-mile caravan track from the coast. A disparate group, they had been assembled for the task by the Church Missionary Society in London. Their leader, Alexander Mackay, a professional engineer trained at Edinburgh University, was a Calvinist Scot of the Free Church, with an uncompromising nature. Other members included a builder, a carpenter, a doctor and a sailor. Only two of the sixteen initially selected to travel to Buganda were ordained ministers. They had little in common with each other and were often at odds.
They also quickly gained a reputation for arrogance and intolerance. While Mackay proved his usefulness as a practical engineer, he made abundantly clear his loathing for prominent aspects of Ganda society such as polygamy, witchcraft, slavery and traditional religious practices. He was frequently given a cool reception at Mutesa’s court. After Mackay remonstrated with the kabaka for inviting to his palace the female medium representing the god Mukasa, to help him overcome illness, he was virtually banished from court. Mutesa continued to tolerate his presence only because he was the sole missionary who agreed to repair rifles, build artillery and help with other public works.
No sooner had Protestant missionaries established their headquarters at Natete, three miles from Mutesa’s palace on Mengo Hill, than French Catholics arrived. The French mission consisted of four members of the White Fathers, a religious society founded by Charles Lavigerie, an ambitious French bishop based in Algiers. Stymied by the strength of Islam in north Africa, Lavigerie turned his attention to other areas of Africa, selecting Buganda as a promising prospect. In 1878, he chose Siméon Lourdel, a 24-year-old priest, to lead a delegation there.
The White Fathers adapted to the realities of Buganda more easily than the Anglicans. The rules of their society required them to adopt local customs, speak the local language, eat the same food and wear similar clothes. Through long periods of training, they had been enjoined to undertake a life of ‘poverty, mortification and obedience’. Père Lourdel, in particular, managed to strike up a cordial relationship with the kabaka, becoming known affectionately as Mapera.
Competition between the two groups of missionaries soon became intense. Mackay found it hard to conceal his abiding hatred of ‘Romanists’. Mutesa enjoyed the rivalry and would summon Mackay and Lourdel together to the court to provoke them into argument. Mackay recorded in his journal:
Prayers being over, I was asked to read the Scriptures as usual. I opened the book and commenced. The first sentence – ‘Ye know that after two days the Son of Man is delivered up to be crucified’ – struck them by its accuracy of prediction, and hence its testimony to the divinity of the ‘Son of Man’. I never got farther. Mutesa, in his abrupt style, said to Toli (one of the courtiers), ‘Ask the Frenchman, if they believe in Jesus Christ, why don’t they kneel down with us when we worship Him every Sabbath? Don’t they worship Him?’
M. Lourdel was spokesman. He became all at once very excited, and said, ‘We do not join that religion, because it is not true; we do not know that book, because it is all lies. If we joined in that it would mean that we were not Catholics, but Protestants, who have rejected the truth. For hundreds of years they were with us, but now they believe and teach only lies.’ Such was the drift of his excited talk, in a mixture of bad Arabic, Swahili, Luganda and French.
Arabs would then be brought in to put the case for Islam, causing Mackay further grief. ‘Terrific conflict with the Mussulmans again,’ he wrote. ‘They blasphemed terribly against the assertion that our Saviour was Divine.’
Mutesa tended to take an eclectic approach, instructing his chief in charge of reading, the ekizigiti, to gather people in the mosque to teach them to read the Gospel, the Catechism and the Koran.
Yet his own grip on power was beginning to slip. For much of his reign, he had suffered from a degenerative venereal disease. By 1878, it had reached a chronic state. Seeking a cure, Mutesa turned from one religious group to the next. Traditional healers tried charms and herbal remedies and appealed to powerful mediums from the Ssese Islands who recommended kiwendo – human sacrifices. Muslims chanted special prayers, applied Koranic charms and brought European medicines from the coast. Christian
s turned to the common Europeans cures of the day: mild antiseptics, and the internal administration of mercury, together with prayers for divine grace, and Catechism lessons.
In the succession of kiwendos that followed, as many as 2,000 people were sacrificed in a single day. Aghast at the ‘wanton slaughter’, Mackay denounced Mutesa in an entry in his journal as ‘this monster’ and ‘this murderous maniac’, adding, ‘All is self, self, self. Uganda [Buganda] exists for him alone.’
Not only did Mutesa’s health continue to deteriorate, but his kingdom too was in decline. In the waning years of his reign, his armies were repulsed by the forces of neighbouring Bunyoro, Busoga and Bukedi. Buganda was also afflicted by outbreaks of smallpox, cholera, typhoid and plague. A disastrous drought in 1880, virtually unprecedented, resulted in famine for two years.
When Mutesa died in 1884, at the age of forty-eight, he left behind a kingdom that was deeply divided. Provincial chiefs had become autonomous warlords during his reign, trading independently with Muslim merchants for guns in exchange for war captives and ivory, in defiance of Mutesa’s demands for a royal monopoly. In addition to the numerous factions competing for power at court, there were now three rival religious camps: a Muslim group; a Protestant, pro-English group known as the Wa-Ingleza; and a Catholic, pro-French group known as the Wa-Fransa.
The son whom Mutesa chose to succeed him, Mwanga, was a callow youth of eighteen. An English missionary described him as having a ‘weak and undisciplined mind’. He was addicted to smoking hemp and to sodomy. He proved unable to exert authority over chiefs and their armed followers. Moreover, Mwanga had to contend with rumours at court that Europeans were advancing on his kingdom intending to ‘eat’ it.
29
A GAME OF THRONES
For a period of a hundred years, from 1755 to 1855, the highlands of Abyssinia remained the battleground of provincial warlords competing for power. The emperors of Abyssinia still reigned from the capital at Gondar, but as puppets, presiding over crumbling palaces and empty rituals. A succession of twenty-eight emperors was put on the throne, some of them more than once. Tekle Giorgis was installed on no less than six occasions. One emperor fell into such abject poverty that, when he died, there was not enough money in the treasury to pay for a coffin. In the provinces, plundering armies left devastation in their wake. The idea of the empire, with its traditions of Christianity, survived, but the prevailing mood was one of despair. ‘How is it that the kingdom is a laughing stock to the uncircumcised from the very beginning?’ asked one chronicler. ‘How is it that the kingdom is the image of a worthless flower that children pluck in the autumn rains?’ Historians referred to the period as Zamana Mesafent – ‘The Time of Judges’ – because of its resemblance to an era mentioned in the Old Testament’s Book of Judges when ‘there is no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.’
The Mesafent came to an end in 1855 when Kassa Hailu, a provincial warlord from the north-western frontier district of Qwara, fought his way to the throne and managed to reintegrate under his rule the provinces of Shoa, Gojjam, Wollo, Begemder, Gondar, Simien and Tigray. At his coronation as ‘king of kings’ he chose the name of Tewodros, hoping that his reign would be as prosperous as that of Tewodros I, a revered fifteenth-century monarch.
A British consul, William Plowden, who visited Tewodros shortly after his coronation, was impressed by his physical and intellectual prowess. Tewodros, he wrote, ‘is young in years, vigorous in all manly exercises, of a striking countenance, peculiarly polite and engaging when pleased, and mostly displaying great tact and delicacy’. Plowden remarked on his high level of energy. ‘Indefatigable in business, he takes little repose night or day; his ideas and language are clear and precise; hesitation is not known to him; and he has neither counsellors nor go-betweens.’ His ambition seemed limitless. ‘He is persuaded that he is destined to restore the glories of the Ethiopian Empire, and to achieve great conquests.’ Plowden also noted serious flaws. ‘The worst points in his character are, his violent anger at times, his unyielding pride as regards his kingly and divine right, and his fanatical religious zeal.’
Tewodros planned to transform Abyssinia into a modern state by implementing a series of radical reforms. But his reforms encountered strong resistance. He tried to convert his own military regiments into a disciplined national army but lost massive public support by requiring the peasantry, already heavily taxed, to supply provisions for a nationwide system of garrisons. He sought to curb the power of provincial warlords, appointing in their place district governors and judges paid by central government. He endeavoured too to limit the role of the Church, proposing reductions to the number of clergy and a limit to their landholdings to allow surplus land to be given to farmers who paid taxes. He even spoke of abolishing slavery.
The provincial nobility, the clergy and the peasantry all turned against him. Tewodros spent his time marching across the highlands from one district to another putting down rebellions and mutinies. His conduct became increasingly volatile and violent. After capturing 7,000 prisoners in a battle in Gojjam, he ordered all of them to be killed. On discovering a plot against him by high-ranking officers in his own army, he arranged an agonising death for them by having a hand and a foot cut off from each of them. After falling out with the Coptic Patriarch, he ordered his detention. Short of food and money, he allowed his troops to loot and pillage at will.
His dealings with a group of European missionaries whom he had invited to work in Abyssinia also became more abrasive. The missionaries, mainly from Germany and Switzerland, had established a thriving technical school at Gefat, a small hill north of Tewodros’s headquarters at Debre Tabor, where they instructed students in artisan skills. But Tewodros began to insist that they devote more time to producing armaments for him.
The plight of the missionaries worsened when they became the butt of Tewodros’s anger over the failure of the British government to respond expeditiously to a letter he had sent to Queen Victoria in October 1862 expressing his friendship and requesting aid. By October 1863, no reply had been received. In retaliation, a British missionary, Howard Stern, who was seeking to leave Abyssinia, was savagely beaten and held in chains. Stern was singled out because he had written an account of his journeys in Abyssinia in which he had mentioned the low status of Tewodros’s mother and depicted him as a brutal tyrant. When the British consul, Charles Cameron, attempted to gain Stern’s release and explain the delay in reply to the letter, he too was imprisoned in January 1864, and held in chains along with six more missionaries. In a note he managed to smuggle out to the coast, Cameron wrote: ‘No release until civil answer to King’s letter arrives.’
The king’s letter was eventually traced to files in the India Office where it had lain unnoticed for a year. A curt reply was drafted, signed by Queen Victoria in May 1864 and taken to Massawa by a special emissary, Hormuzd Rassam, an Iraqi Christian employed by the British Resident at Aden. Rassam languished in the stifling heat of Massawa for more than a year, waiting to receive Tewodros’s permission to enter Abyssinia. It was not until October 1865 that he set out for the highlands accompanied by a British doctor, Henry Blanc, and an army officer, Lieutenant William Prideaux.
Rassam reached Tewodros’s encampment near Lake Tana in January 1866. Sitting on a divan surrounded by his ministers, Tewodros was in a fractious mood. He recited a list of grievances that he claimed had led him to imprison Cameron and the missionaries and he berated his own people, describing them as ‘wicked’, always ready to revolt. ‘If I go to the south my people rebel in the north; and when I go to the west, they rebel in the east.’ But on the following day his mood had improved and he agreed to release the prisoners – ‘for the sake of my friend, the queen, and in return for the trouble you have taken in the matter of Mr Cameron’.
The prisoners were being held at the time at a mountain stronghold above the Beshilo River named Magdala that Tewodros used as a fortress to store his treas
ures and to hold a variety of opponents, dissidents and disgraced officials. Among them were the Patriarch, Abuna Selama, and a young prince from Shoa, Sahle Maryam, destined to become emperor as Menelik II. ‘Half the aristocracy is here,’ wrote Cameron. When Sahle escaped from Magdala in June 1865, Tewodros took revenge by ordering the execution of some forty dignitaries. Some were slashed with swords and thrown off the cliff edge; others were beaten to death with bamboo rods. The European prisoners at Magdala were treated harshly, held in chains that prevented them from standing upright; as a result Cameron and Stern developed severe spinal pains.
In March, a group of twenty-three hostages, including two wives and three children, hobbled into Rassam’s camp at Korata on the shore of Lake Tana. But as they prepared to leave for the coast, Tewodros changed his mind. When Rassam and his two companions went to bid the emperor farewell, they were accused of treachery and detained; the missionaries too were held once more. Tewodros now demanded that the British government should send him gunsmiths and equipment to help him build up his arms industry. One of the missionaries from Gefat, Martin Flad, was allowed to leave to convey the demand to London, but his wife and three children were kept as hostages. In July the foreign prisoners were taken to Magdala and held in chains.
As he sought to maintain his grip on his shrinking domain, Tewodros became ever more destructive. In November, he led a punitive expedition to the old capital of Gondar, burning churches and seizing holy books, sacramental robes, sacred drums and gold and other artefacts. Priests who protested were thrown into the flames. In 1867, when the imperial garrison in Gojjam defected, he ordered the slaughter of 800 soldiers in Wallo, fearing that they too might desert him.
In London, the British government recognised how perilous the position of the Magdala prisoners was. Any threat of intervention seemed likely to result in their execution. Flad was sent back to Abyssinia with a letter agreeing to provide gunsmiths and equipment but only after the hostages had safely left the country. Flad also conveyed to Tewodros a verbal message: ‘If you do not at once send out of your country all those detained so long against their will, you have no right to expect any further friendship.’ For month after month, the stalemate dragged on. But with no compromise in sight and with British prestige at stake, the British government eventually decided to prepare for a military expedition. A letter was sent to Tewodros in August 1867 warning that unless the hostages were released forthwith, military measures would be taken.
The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour Page 31