The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  It has been said by one of its liveliest historians that ‘the scramble for Africa bewildered everyone, from the humblest African peasant to the master statesmen of the age, Lord Salisbury and Prince Bismarck’.5 In a speech in May 1886, Salisbury stated that when he left the Foreign Office in 1880 ‘nobody thought about Africa’, but when he returned to it five years later ‘the nations of Europe were almost quarrelling with each other as to the various portions of Africa which they could obtain. I do not exactly know the cause of this sudden revolution.’6

  Hannington, making his great missionary journey, clearly imagined himself to be bringing to the Africans salvation and the Word of God, with their inestimable concomitants, commerce and what he would have imagined to be civilization. King Mwanga and his Masai warriors would have seen in the young bishop’s caravan an embodiment of the Modern World on the March. Like the peasant farmers of Ireland who wanted to be allowed a life of independence in which to practise an ancient faith and pre-eighteenth-century methods of agriculture; like the Ottoman sultans, ruling a dusty old empire in which clocks were forbidden; like the popes who, as the custodians of the oldest and most durable monarchy in Europe, had wanted to hold on to their temporal rights and lands; and like the young sepoy officers who dreaded much more than what had passed into their mouths when they bit the new-fangled cartridges; like the Polish gentry holding out against Russian intrusion and the Boer farmers of the Transvaal who now found themselves annexed by British soldiers, King Mwanga was confronting the nineteenth century in all its unstoppable energy. It was an energy which took the physical form of territorial conquest. But it was something more than this. The ‘Scramble for Africa’7 (a journalese phrase coined by The Times in September 1884) was the Victorian equivalent of the penetration of outer space for the superpowers of the twentieth century. It was of a piece with the Benthamite desire to control human groups and societies, and with the scientific desire to systematize, to classify, to museumize. To stick a label on something and to give it a Latin name is to comprehend it, to understand, to master.

  Africa sat defiantly in the middle of the world throughout the Industrial Revolution, refusing to be classified, penetrated or understood. The extraordinary significance, for the Victorians, of David Livingstone, patron saint of missionary explorers, and of his St Paul, the American journalist Henry Morton Stanley, is that they had been where no white man had trod, and done it in a scientific spirit. Livingstone had died in May 1873 at a village in the county of Ilala, the very heart of the continent. They had sun-dried his body and brought it back for burial in the national Valhalla, Westminster Abbey. Stanley – the illegitimate son of Welsh-speakers who had been brought up in the local workhouse, St Asaph’s near Denbigh, before going to America aged seventeen – saw Africa, as many explorers and missionaries did, as the metaphor for the uncharted territory of their own personal ‘struggle’.8 At Livingstone’s grave in the Abbey, he voted to be, ‘if God willed it, the next martyr to geographical science, or if my life is spared, to clear up not only the secrets of the Great River throughout its course, but also all that remained problematical and incomplete of the discoveries of Burton and Speke and Speke and Grant’.9

  The Scramble for Africa was not a plot. It was something which happened because of the nature of the times in which it happened. The restlessness and scientific curiosity and by their lights the wish to be helpful of some travellers and explorers went hand in hand with the commercial greed and appetite for power in others. Then again, these explorations took place at the time of growth in European nationalisms. Livingstone penetrated the Congo, but in so doing he found a world in which cannibalism, slavery and rampant sexual promiscuity were waiting to be abolished, tidied away and disapproved of. The King of the Belgians, Leopold II, was the first to give voice to the idea that ‘Il faut à la Belgique une colonie’, Belgium must have a colony,10 but it was not long before the other European countries were wanting what he called ‘a slice of this magnificent cake’.11 The Times saw Central Africa as a land of ‘unspeakable richness’ only waiting for an ‘enterprising capitalist’. Once on African soil, however, even some of the greediest Europeans felt the itch not merely to plunder but to improve the African.

  No one can say that the post-colonial problems faced by Africans in the twenty-first century do not grow out of the preoccupations of the nineteenth-century conquerors. The artificial boundaries imposed on mapless tribal lands by analogy with European borders, the deliberate shattering of traditional sociopolitical structures among African peoples, and their exploitation by Western commerce continue to cause and to highlight the difficulty. But which Western observer confronted by child slavery in an East African cocoa plantation, or female circumcision, or rampant AIDS, does not feel the impulses of benevolent Victorian missionaries to ‘improve’ and to ‘civilize’ the continent? The United Nations and the Commonwealth of Nations continue to assert the moral imperative of democracy for the new African states. Their fervour on the subject recalls the energy with which early missionaries attempted, with only limited success, to recommend monogamy.

  None of us can entirely detach ourselves from the Imperial experiment and its consequences. At the same time, we cannot fail to wonder at the speed with which the European nations discovered Africa, mapped it, carved it up among themselves. France took the largest share geographically: the French Congo was a larger area than all Germany’s African colonies put together.12 By 1890 Salisbury and Bismarck had brokered deals with the other European powers and the ‘map of Africa’ was drawn – with Italian Somaliland looking out over the Indian Ocean, neighboured by British East Africa (Kenya), German East Africa (Tanganyika) and Portuguese Mozambique. The real and unresolved area was in Southern Africa, where the Boers had been annexed against their will by the British – and this would escalate into a major war at the end of the century. France had meanwhile taken over a large area of the Congo and established Tunis and Algeria as French territories, as well as establishing the vast territories of French West Africa beside which the German Cameroons or Portuguese Angola look small.

  One of the most vigorous historians of the British Empire, Lawrence James, has rightly pointed out that there were two scrambles for Africa during the 1880s and 1890s: on the one hand there was the diplomatic game in which de Brazza, Salisbury or Bismarck pored over maps. The other was the ‘more robust business in which individuals ventured into largely unknown hostile regions and cajoled or coerced their inhabitants into accepting new masters and new laws’.13

  Of these individuals, Frederick Lugard DSO (1858–1945) – later 1st Baron Lugard – was one of the most extraordinary. The whole colonial experiment – from the discoveries of the first missionary-explorers to the two world wars and to the beginnings of change in Africa – was contained within the period of Lugard’s lifetime. Within twenty years of his death, the countries he helped to colonize and administer – Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda – had become independent.

  Lugard was a Sandhurst-educated professional soldier, both of whose parents were missionaries. His father had been senior chaplain on the Madras establishment, and Lugard’s early service was in India, where he developed a taste for big game-hunting. He was a slight, trim figure with enormous moustaches – ‘exceptionally extravagant at a time when no self-respecting fighting man went bare-lipped in the tropics’.14 Having fallen in love with a beautiful divorcee called ‘Clytie’, while campaigning in Burma he heard news that she was close to death after overturning her carriage at Lucknow. By the time he came back to India she had sailed for London, and when he pursued her there, Lugard had the shocking experience of finding her in bed with another man. It was a turning-point in his life. He lost his religious faith. He was prostrate with exhaustion.15 He abandoned the Indian army and put himself at the service of the missionary African Lakes Company, waging war against slavers around the shores of Lake Nyasa. The Arabs and the Swahilis were the slave-traders making regular swoops in Nyasaland. Lugard had only limit
ed success in fighting them and was severely wounded in 1888.

  After a brief return to England in 1889, Lugard was commissioned by the Imperial British East Africa Company to establish their interest in Uganda, and to open up a new route from Mombasa to the interior by the Sabaki river. Since murdering Bishop Hannington in 1885, partly to gratify the Muslim slave-traders who had occupied his capital of Mengo, King Mwanga had fallen under the influence of the French White Fathers missionaries. Uganda was in a state of near civil war, with Muslims, Catholics and Protestants all at odds, and the pagans, devotees of witchcraft, hashish or bhang and polygamy, representing the forces of conservatism. Lugard made his first appeal to the pro-English Protestants (the Wa-Ingleza) and seemed to find the French missionaries themselves more inimical than the Wa-Bangi or pagans. The French bishop out there, Monsignor Hirth, ‘would not look you in the face when speaking’.16 Back in England Lugard tried to enlist the help of the Roman Catholic bishop of Emmaus, who was staying in Cadogan Street and with whom he was on ‘cordial terms’, but the bishop would not be drawn. It was beyond Lugard’s comprehension that the Duke of Norfolk could support the French missionaries, who openly favoured handing Uganda over to the Germans.

  With great expedition, Lugard got Mwanga to sign a treaty giving the British East Africa Company the right to intervene in the affairs of Uganda. He then went on an adventurous journey up-country through the Ruwenzori mountains as far as the Albert Nyanza, where he enlisted 600 Sudanese soldiers and marched back to the capital Mengo. He found (it is now 1892) fighting between Catholics and Protestants, and the Catholics attacked his headquarters in Kampala. Lugard possessed two Maxim guns in a somewhat battered state, and with these he defended his position at Kampala. About a week after the so-called battle of Mengo, the king took refuge on an island sanctuary – the island of Bulingugwe. Lugard pursued him and started firing the Maxim guns across the water at the considerable crowds of men, women and children. ‘A crowd of women and children fled with us. How many fell! We had soon gained the other shore of the island; the bullets could no longer reach us. But what a sight! Just a few canoes, and a crowd of 3,000 or 4,000 throwing themselves into the water to cling to them; it was heart-breaking. What shrieks! What a fusillade! What deaths by drowning.’ The account comes from the Church Missionary Society’s Intelligences.17

  There is no record of this atrocity in Lugard’s copious Diaries, and in his book The Rise of Our East African Empire he dismisses the notion that ‘hundreds, if not thousands’ had been killed. His estimate is about twenty-five dead on the island, and no more than sixty in the water.18 A fortnight before the massacre was alleged to take place, he noted:

  It is not for us to say that all Islam, or all Rome, will be damned. Let us hear all sides, and select what our reason and conviction teach us to be the best form of worship … If missionaries would preach Charity, Charity, Charity, ‘which thinketh no evil, suffereth long and is kind’ – I am convinced that they would do more to reclaim Africa, than most subtle distinctions between Catholic and Protestant and Islam. Teach them civilization too – raise them in their own self-respect.19

  Elsewhere he says, ‘the curse of Africa and of Uganda in especial is guns’, and ‘the curse of this poor country is that every man in it is a liar, and one can never get at the truth of things’.20

  Lugard was almost certainly not a partaker in the atrocities,21 at the end of which 50,000 Catholics had, it was claimed, been sold into slavery, their cathedral and several schools destroyed.22 Throughout his long career as a colonial administrator – as high commissioner in Nigeria (1900–7), as governor of Hong Kong (1907–11) and once again in Nigeria – he believed in a system of ‘dual control’ by which the traditional institutions of native peoples provided the best foundation on which to progress. By his old age, he had come to see that African self-government was not only inevitable but desirable.23 He considered the prime reason for military intervention to be the liberation of slaves. He abhorred the moral cowardice of having an ‘active and pushing’ anti-slavery policy ‘so long as the whole difficulties of the matter fell on the shoulders of a native ruler’, but a lukewarm or even retrogressive policy ‘from the day it devolved upon us to carry out these measures ourselves’.24 His ideal was a politics of ‘self-development’ for the African colonies with the minimum of interference from Europeans except to correct abuse.25 To this extent Lugard was very different, in his conception of the Imperial role, from Cecil Rhodes, who made himself a fortune out of diamonds and whose first military–political coup was the annexation of Bechuanaland in 1884–5. He really did dream of an unbroken chain of British territory from the Cape to Cairo: but these dreams and their consequences belong a little later in the story.

  34

  Kipling’s India

  THE CONFIDENCE WITH which white Europeans assumed racial superiority over the African or the Indian is one of the most shocking aspects of the Victorian sensibility. Bogus notions of racial stereotype, and fervour for the salvation of souls, sometimes combined in the same individual to produce an alarming cocktail of imperialistic motivation. The story of Gordon all but alone in Khartoum with his bible and his self-belief, or Livingstone penetrating the unknown territories of the Congo, or Bishop Hannington, with fifty bearers, confronting the angry warriors of King Mwanga, are all stories which suggest a primeval and physically equal struggle in which the white man’s superiority to the black is demonstrated in moral terms. The truth is that the expansion of the Empire took place at a time of rapid technological advance. The new inventions changed everything, both in Europe and in the Imperial world: changed the pattern of trade, disrupted the normal pattern of political relationships both within and between nations, created a global economy, a global technological world with which politicians could only partially come to terms.

  Technology is the vital factor in the Imperial story. We have already alluded to the fact that the British possession of the telegraph played a vital role in defeating the sepoy uprisings of 1857–8 in India. At the same time, Speke and Burton were setting out to discover the sources of the Nile, Livingstone to explore the Zambezi. Shallow-draft steamers were an essential part of the enterprise. Having begun his unlocking of the African mystery, Livingstone could also produce the bestselling book which would publicize it. Steam printing enabled him to roll off 70,000 copies of Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa. Before its invention, 10,000 books sold would have been a prodigy.

  Travel speeds, thanks to railroads and steamships, had now been reduced. Jules Verne sent the fictional Phileas Fogg around the world in eighty days; in 1889–90 the American journalist, Elizabeth Cochrane – ‘Nellie Bly’ – accomplished the round trip in a little over seventy-two. This was the era when the world was divided into twenty-four time zones one hour apart, because it was now technologically possible ‘to put a girdle around the earth’, like Shakespeare’s Ariel. Steel had replaced iron as the preferred material for boiler and hull construction, with purpose-built ships bringing frozen meat or petroleum across the ocean.1

  Petroleum fuelled the newly developed twin-cylindered engine developed by Gottlieb Daimler (1834–1900) of Württemberg.2 In 1885 he devised his surface carburettor; and while he was designing his high-speed vertical engine, Karl Benz (1844–1929) of Mannheim was developing his first motor-vehicle3 (his first four-wheeled car was constructed in 1893), though Daimler can take the credit or blame for inventing the internal combustion engine itself.

  Joseph Swan, familiar since the late 1840s with primitive filament lamps and arc-lamps, demonstrated his electric glow-lamp, the first carbon-filament incandescent light bulb, on 18 December 1878. We have already alluded to his lighting the house of Sir William Armstrong. The House of Commons was lit with incandescent electric light by 1881; Peterhouse, Cambridge, was the first institution to follow suit in 1884.4

  At the same time, wireless telegraphy was being developed by Heinrich Hertz (1857–94). Sir Oliver Lodge (1851–1940
) pioneered the use of an induction coil as a means of tuning an electric resonator – a system he perfected in 1897, and whose commercial possibilities were almost instantly exploited by Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937). Before that, Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922), basing his experiments on the work of the German physicist Hermann Helmholtz (1821–94), had pioneered the telephone. The first telephone exchange was established in London in 1879.

  The Home Insurance Company in Chicago in 1883 commissioned William Le Baron Jenney (1832–1907) to build them a 10-storey office block – since demolished – which would be fireproof and would let in as much light as possible.5 The lower stories were constructed with wrought-iron beams and girders. Wrought-iron was also used by Gustave Eiffel (1832–1923) when he designed a 985 ft tower for the Paris Exhibition of 1889, its masonry piers bedded in huge pits of concrete 50 feet deep, its swooping heights attainable by means of mechanical elevators.6 (Jenney’s Home Insurance Building used Bessemer steel for its upper storeys.)

  The world of King Mwanga, of the Turkish sultans, or of the Reverend William Barnes in Dorset, with his long beard and his knowledge of a vanishing dialect of rural Dorset, was now to be replaced by another world altogether – petroleum-fuelled, steel-girdered, telephonically-connected, electric-lit.