Empire

by Jeremy Paxman

  Of course, the evangelical impulse was born out of a conviction that the missionaries’ beliefs were superior: it could not be otherwise. It is also true that a special kind of casuistry rooted itself in the minds of the imperial clergy, that the empire was something which had been spread not by exploration, trade or force of arms, but by Providence. One especially overexcited clergyman proclaimed that ‘the flag which is always unfurled over every land and every sea’ was merely ‘the Cross three times’. In 1902, the secretary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, Henry Hutchinson Montgomery, declared that ‘the clergy are officers in an imperial army’, serving both England and Christ. Yet, even at the time they went about their work, British missionaries could be sneered at by members of the imperial establishment. It was not merely that they took the flag to places which had no immediately obvious benefit to the empire, but that they didn’t act the part. Members of the Universities Mission to Central Africa – which had been established to respond to Livingstone’s appeal to spread the word in Nyasaland – lived as near to the Africans as they could, celibate, eating native food, paid almost nothing and sleeping in mud huts. They died of malaria and blackwater fever in great numbers, but where others might have seen courage and conviction, they often earned only contempt. The first colonial proconsul in the area, Sir Harry Johnston (said to have been the inspiration for Edgar Wallace’s imperialist potboiler Sanders of the River), thought it ‘pathetic … to see highly educated men from Oxford and Cambridge hollow-eyed and fever-stricken, crouching in little huts which no native chief would deign to occupy’. But they were people who practised what they preached. When Bishop Hine, for example, discovered that the (white) church council at the new church of St Andrew’s in the town of Livingstone (named after the explorer) planned to reserve it for white use, he simply refused to consecrate the place until they recognized the principle of racial equality. ‘I am better among native races than pushing bigoted colonists,’ said the Bishop.

  The lasting memorial to these men and women is the array of schools they established. Without them, great swathes of the developing world would simply have had no education. Blantyre in Malawi (named after Livingstone’s birthplace), for example, became a fiefdom of the Church of Scotland, and even today the Synod is associated with dozens of Malawian primary schools. The town’s church of St Michael and All Angels, which claimed to be the first permanent Christian church between the Nile and the Zambezi, is an extraordinary piece of architecture, built to no preordained plan from over eighty different types of brick, all made by local people. At Nkoloti primary school, a much more modest collection of single-storey tin-roofed buildings on the outskirts of the town, the roll has grown so enormously that it now numbers almost 8,000 children, who have to be accommodated in two separate shifts.

  By the twentieth century, the missionaries had justified the enmity of some of the empire-builders, for they preached freedom and the mission schools educated many of the heroes of the independence struggle. The man whose face adorns Malawian banknotes, for example, the Reverend John Chilembwe – still celebrated as the first Malawian freedom fighter – was an alumnus of the missions in Blantyre.*

  In a sense, all empire-builders were missionaries. How else was a chap to justify to himself the suffering he experienced in his moments of loneliness, sickness and introspection than that it was all being endured in the name of some greater cause? The most eminent claim in the moral justification of empire was the fact that the British had made the trading and keeping of slaves illegal. Frederick Lugard, who was later to become the splendidly moustached governor general of Nigeria, had begun his African career in 1888 fighting Arab slave traders, saying, ‘I can think of no juster cause in which a soldier may draw his sword.’ Even those, like the young Winston Churchill, who considered that the British might as well continue to pile up colonies, if only because everyone else was at it, talked up the moral justice of the cause. In The River War, his account of how Kitchener’s machine guns made short work of poorly armed Sudanese, Churchill justified the imperial mission in characteristically rolling sentences. ‘To give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains from the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to plant the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain – what more beautiful ideal or more valuable reward can inspire human effort?’ In the eyes of people like that, the entire imperial purpose was a vocation to civilize the world, an enterprise in salvation.

  It rested on a conviction not merely that different races had different characteristics, but that the qualities of the British were superior to all others. The belief is anathema in the twenty-first century, both because it is offensive and because it is scientific nonsense. Yet it is illuminating to see how willing even the most enlightened Victorians were to entertain the idea of some hierarchy of races. Mid-century Britain was transfixed, for example, by the return from the Arctic of the explorer John Rae in 1854. He had set out to discover what had become of the expedition led by Sir John Franklin which had attempted to establish whether a north-west passage to China might exist through the ice floes of northern Canada. Nine years had passed since Franklin – a decent, reliable, if overweight man of fifty-nine – and his carefully chosen crew had set sail. Common sense decreed that all 129 of them must be dead. But, chivvied along by Franklin’s widow, expedition after expedition set forth to discover their fate. Rae returned to England with relics from Franklin’s expedition which he had acquired from Inuits he had met in the Arctic. In a dispatch to the Admiralty he related how the Inuit had described bodies and graves, from which Dr Rae concluded beyond doubt that the expedition had all perished. The imagined spectacle of a hand-picked Royal Navy team freezing to death in pursuit of knowledge, commerce and the spread of civilization was a noble tableau in the great imperial tradition. But the day after his arrival in London, Rae’s report for the Admiralty was published in The Times and, in a single subversive sentence, questioned the entire ‘civilizing’ purpose of the empire. ‘From the mutilated state of many of the corpses and the contents of the kettles,’ he wrote, ‘it is evident that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last resource – cannibalism – as a means of prolonging existence.’ The suggestion that British explorers might have engaged in a practice from which the empire was liberating the inhabitants of lands it colonized was simply too shocking to be believed.

  Charles Dickens, for example, found the accusation intolerable, and argued that it could not possibly be true. There was the question of the reliability of hearsay evidence in a foreign language to start with. There was the example of other Englishmen enduring extreme hunger without eating one another – Captain Bligh, for example, cast adrift by the mutineers on the Bounty. And could the corpses not have been disfigured by bears or wolves? But the most telling argument he advanced in his tuppenny magazine, Household Words, was that it was simply against the natural order of things. Without a shred of evidence he asserted that it was much more likely that the sailors had been attacked and killed by ‘Esquimaux’. Experience showed that ‘savages’ were all very well, and perfectly deferential when the white man was strong. But the moment he appeared weak or vulnerable, ‘the savage has changed and sprung upon him’. British explorers would never resort to cannibalism. But ‘we believe’, he wrote, ‘every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel; and we have yet to learn what knowledge the white man – lost, houseless, shipless, apparently forgotten by his race, plainly famine-stricken, weak, frozen, helpless, and dying – has of the gentleness of Esquimaux nature’. This was the antithesis of the idea of the ‘noble savage’, for nobility was the product of civilization. ‘The better educated the man, the better disciplined the habits, the more reflective and religious the tone of thought, the more gigantically improbable the “last resource” [cannibalism] becomes.’ The myth of the twenty-first century is
of a Brotherhood of Man. The myth of the imperial age was of a sort of league table of humanity, with the Europeans permanently at the top.

  And then along came Darwin. At first glance, a theory about the common origins of humanity might be expected to undermine a belief in European superiority. Instead, the imperial mentality found comfort in the revolutionary doctrine of evolution. The anxiety which racked the Church on discovering that, in Darwin’s resonant sentence, ‘Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin’ did not shake the conviction of superiority very much. Indeed, in The Descent of Man, Darwin appeared to offer an evolutionary justification for European colonialism. Starting from the premise that ‘the western nations of Europe … now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors, [that they] stand at the summit of civilization’, he determined that ‘the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races through the world’. Indeed, perhaps the most curious thing of all was the superiority he claimed in seeing descent from a ‘heroic little monkey’ or ‘an old baboon’ instead of from ‘a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practises infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions’.

  For every clergyman who denounced Darwin, a crank or polemicist embraced him. But The Descent of Man offered a philosophy which comforted the imperially minded. Within a decade or so, Darwin’s conjecture had been reconciled with the practice of planting the flag in other parts of the world. In 1876, a writer in the Melbourne Review put it succinctly: ‘Survival of the fittest means that might – wisely used – is right.’ From this beginning he went on to assert that ‘the inexorable law of natural selection’ led to ‘exterminating the inferior Australian and Maori races … The world is better for it.’ Indeed, the whole world would be much improved if the same theory was applied everywhere, preserving the better specimens of humanity, instead of ‘actually promoting the non-survival of the fittest, protecting the propagation of the imprudent, the diseased, the defective, and the criminal’. In a country initially settled as a penal colony this was pretty rich.

  The question of the relationship between colonizer and colonized was most acute in Africa, which Europeans were busy appropriating for different foreign flags. Explorers like Richard Burton returned from their travels to tell the Royal Geographical Society of strange places where the women tilled the ground while the menfolk sat and span cotton; of cannibals and concubines; of chiefs who were ready to offer travellers the enjoyment of their wives, sisters and daughters; of a king who for amusement had chopped off the hands of an irritating wife and then commanded her to use her stumps to search his head for lice; of enemies enslaved and flogged; of children murdered. Burton understood the appetite for exotic stories, shrugged his shoulders and concluded that the only way to govern in Africa was by ‘an iron-handed and lion-hearted despotism’. Africans were examined, anatomized, weighed and measured. The existence of human beings so visibly different from Europeans both worried and intrigued them. Anthropologists and scientists from the colonial powers set about answering the question ‘What are they?’

  The anti-slavery campaign had run on the slogan ‘Am I Not a Man and Brother?’, which might perhaps have been answer enough in itself. But the slogan had been intended to change the behaviour of the perpetrators – other Europeans, African tribes which sold their victims into slavery, and the Arabs who used religion to justify the practice. Any suggestion that Africans really were brothers and sisters would have raised all sorts of issues about the legitimacy of the whole imperial exercise, so the question of defining an African amounted to a definition of a European. Scientists and pseudo-scientists tried to tackle the issue. In 1863, for example, a speech-therapist and amateur anthropologist, James Hunt, presented a paper – On the Negro’s Place in Nature – to promote his belief in polygenesis, the theory that different human races had had different origins. He dedicated his paper to Richard Burton, then serving as British consul at Fernando Po, a pestilential island off the west African coast (‘the very abomination of desolation’, Burton called it), because the ‘outer barbarians’ of the general public lacked the explorer’s understanding of the continent. Hunt’s theory ruled out any possibility of a brotherhood of man. He proposed instead a natural hierarchy, in which the white man was at the top: Africa had had the ‘benefit’ of Egyptian, Carthaginian and Roman colonization, but none had properly ‘civilised’ its inhabitants. ‘Except some knowledge of metallurgy they possess no art … The reflective faculties hardly appear to be at all developed.’ He added the footnote: ‘It is said that when the Negro has been with other races, he has always been a slave. This is quite true.’

  From physical examination he observed that, while their bodies were better suited to African weather than those of white men, black people were shorter, less stable, with ‘inferior eyesight, cruder tastes and less developed sensibilities’. Yet at birth there was hardly any difference: ‘young Negro children are nearly as intelligent as European children; but the older they grow the less intelligent they become. They exhibit when young, an animal liveliness for play and tricks far surpassing the European child.’ Hunt then leaped to the conclusion that the ‘incapacity’ of Africans was the consequence of puberty – the African’s brain simply stopped growing earlier than the brain of a European. As the skull settled and assumed recognizably African characteristics, the space available for the development of the brain shrank. ‘This premature union of the bones of the skull may give a clue to much of the mental inferiority which is seen in the Negro race.’ This did not put the African right at the bottom of the heap, for in slavery he had demonstrated a tremendous capacity for work, which made him not entirely beyond the possibility of redemption. But ‘the analogies are far more numerous between the Negro and apes than between the European and apes … the Negro is inferior intellectually to the European … [and] can only be humanised and civilised by Europeans’.

  When Hunt delivered his crackpot confection to a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, ‘my statement of the simple facts was received with such loud hisses that you would have thought the room had nearly been filled with a quantity of Eve’s tempters instead of her amiable descendants’. What had especially incited the abuse was his defence of slavery. ‘Our Bristol and Liverpool merchants’, he said, had, ‘perhaps, helped to benefit the race when they transplanted some of them to America’. He insisted he was not suggesting a restoration of the slave trade, which was plainly evil. But it was evil only because it was indiscriminate. What, he wanted to know, was wrong with giving Africa the opportunity to export ‘her worthless or surplus population’? The catcalls and hisses demonstrate the depth of popular commitment to a more humane set of values. Hunt’s pernicious nonsense struck at Britain’s main moral cause in the world, did not gain widespread support and is interesting only for the light it throws on how thoughtful Britons struggled to find a way of comprehending the moral justification for the empire. Much more common was a belief within missionary organizations of a ‘hierarchy of civilisation’ which acknowledged that some foreign cultures – notably in countries like Japan – although different from Britain’s, were nonetheless of ‘the highest international rank’. Next on the ladder came comparatively sophisticated societies ‘under Christian rule or influence’, like India. The indigenous peoples of ‘low civilisation’ which had not yet been brought under European rule or influence were at the bottom of the tree.

  Yet a genuine affection for Africa and Africans could be seen in the Church of Scotland missionary who built the extraordinary church in Blantyre, David Clement Scott. He preferred, he said, to think of Christ taking upon himself ‘the form of Africa [which] bears the sins of the world’s rulers’, and asked, ‘How long are we as a nation going to lay our selfishness, our meanness, our falsehoods, our lusts, yea, and the whole burden of ou
r sins upon this Lamb of God?’ Often this concern for indigenous peoples expressed itself in a conviction that Africans were ‘child-like’. The term is repugnant to modern ears, but it was not intentionally malicious, for many of the missionaries saw their role as protecting indigenous people. ‘Watching that the interests of the native, in the days of his immaturity, are neither overlooked by the Empire authorities, nor overborne by white settlers or traders, without a protest being raised’, was the way one of their number put it. Give or take a few words, it could sound like the campaigning talk of a modern pressure group working in the developing world.

  Chapter Seven

  ‘Producing capital meals with three bricks and a baking pot’

  The Handbook for Girl Guides, or How Girls Can Help Build up the Empire, 1912

  In H. Rider Haggard’s late-Victorian adventure yarn She, two Englishmen set off for darkest Africa to discover the origins of a legend. Intrepid, level-headed chaps in Norfolk jackets, they carry the conventional prejudices about primitive peoples, the dangers of polluting the blood by intermarriage between races, and so on. But, instead of the usual imperial spoils, the two men fall among a cave-dwelling tribe ruled over by ‘She-who-must-be-obeyed’, the queen Ayesha, one of the greatest femmes fatales ever invented. Although the novel was published – and an instant best-seller – in the year of Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee, Ayesha is a different sort of monarch altogether. When the Englishmen first enter her kingdom, a kindly native explains how it works: ‘In this country the women do what they please. We worship them, and give them their way, because without them the world could not go on; they are the source of life.’ This is a bit of a tricky one for our flannelled heroes; the narrator replies, ‘Ah,’ adding that ‘the matter [had] never struck me quite in that light before.’