Heaven’s Command

by Jan Morris

  Lord Carnarvon, Disraeli’s Colonial Secretary, was nicknamed ‘Twitters’ and at first found it difficult to understand what imperialism meant. Later he sorted it out in his mind, and cogently explained it to others. There were two kinds of imperialism, he said. There was the false kind—Caesarism, despotism—and there was the British kind—a world-wide trust, keeping the peace, elevating the savage, relieving the hungry, and uniting in loyalty all the British peoples overseas. Imperialism certainly entailed expansion, but it was not bullying expansion, it was merely the extension of British institutions and wholesome influences, if necessary by force. This conception proved irresistible. It became the great popular movement of the late nineteenth century, displacing humanitarianism in the universal approval. It seized in its enthusiasm all classes of the British, and eventually all parties too. Queen Victoria loved it; Lord Salisbury, the greatest of the aristocrats, gave it the sanction of the patricians; chambers of commerce voted in its favour; family generations devoted themselves to its service; churchmen raised collections for it; soldiers and sailors revelled in it; children collected biscuit lids stamped with its emblems; the poor looked to its gaudy stimulations and sang its rumbustious rhythms in music-halls; the rich looked to its dividends, and remembered the blessings of Rand or Broken Hill as they sang the national anthem. ‘The British People’, Disraeli once wrote, ‘being subject to fogs and possessing a powerful Middle Class, require grave statesmen’: but they also required excitement. Imperialism gave them, in the last twenty-five years of Victoria’s reign, the most exciting, the most astonishing, perhaps, for better or for worse, the most satisfying quarter century in all their modern history.

  4

  On the surface it was just an urge to glory. ‘A nation without glory’, wrote Garnet Wolseley once, ‘is like a man without courage, a woman without virtue. Those who in youth learn to value it as a holy possession are, as life goes on, inspired by its influence. It becomes eventually a sort of national religion….’ The long success of the British, proceeding from triumph to triumph since the end of the Napoleonic wars, had gone to their heads, and given them a new taste for supremacy: like many another nation at the summit of its power, Great Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century was an image of conceit, and brazenly equated glory with strength, wealth and size.

  But the sense of duty, too, powerfully contributed to the passions of Empire. It was less a missionary duty now: the idea that the world’s natives could be converted to Christian Britishness had lost some of its conviction. But it was still, in its austere way, a philanthropic mission. Justice, security, communications, opportunity—these were the advantages of civilization which the British now diligently if aloofly distributed among their subjects. Indian school textbooks, in the second half of the century, included a short chapter entitled Angrezi Raj Ki Barkaten—Blessings of the English Raj. It enumerated law and order, schools, canals, roads and bridges, railways, telegraphs and public health, but made no reference to the ending of evil custom, the reform of society, or the benefits of Christian example. The British had no doubts about the merits of their own civilization, or qualms about their mission to distribute it across the world: but they had come to suppose that not all aspects of it were transplantable.

  The profit motive, too, had subtly shifted its emphasis. It was still potent, of course, perhaps preeminent among the imperial urges, but now it had undertones of disquiet. Great Britain was still the supreme industrial, financial and commercial Power of the world, but only just. Rivals were catching up. Economically the 1870s were difficult years for the British, and the financiers of the City of London, the industrialists of the north, began to feel that their preeminence might not last for ever. Germany and America would soon be producing more steel than Britain; most European countries had now completed their own industrial revolutions; in a whole range of new products, chemical dyes to breech-loading guns, British designers and manufacturers lagged behind. The penalties of easy success were beginning to show—complacency, conservatism, even laziness—and the old panacea of Free Trade was losing its effect. Only Empire, it seemed to many businessmen, could restore the proper status quo: with new markets, with new sources of raw material, and with convenient barriers, actual if not explicit, against foreign competition.

  Strategically the impulses of the new imperialism were also largely defensive. If the London military planners wished to acquire new territory, it was generally to prevent foreigners acquiring it first, or to protect some existing possession, or guard a threatened trade route. The grand assurance of Waterloo and Trafalgar had waned rather with the years. The Britain of the 1870s was no longer beyond challenge. The Americans, in their civil war, had shown themselves capable of immense military exertion, and had for a few years possessed not merely the most experienced, but actually the largest armies in the world. The Germans, newly federated, proved by their victory over France in 1870 that they were the most formidable military nation in Europe, unlikely to leave the British Empire indefinitely sacrosanct. The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Americans were all building battle fleets. The world was far more complex than it had been in 1837, and Britain’s place in it was so much the less serene. Once again, imperialism seemed to provide an answer: not only the means of strategic insurance, but good practice for the armed forces too, and the most awesome possible instrument of warning. Across the world the flag flew, and everywhere it seemed to say ‘Hands off!’

  5

  But to keep its momentum the Empire must grow. By now the British had almost filled the available empty spaces of the world. The half-hearted Empire of 1837 had doubled in population, and tripled in area. The empty wilderness of Canada had been tamed, the desolations of Australia had been explored, Burma, New Guinea, New Zealand, Natal, Hong Kong had all been acquired, since Victoria came to the throne. Flushed with the magnitude of their success, eager to find new outlets for their energy, apprehensive, if only subconsciously, about their future, during the last years of Victoria’s reign the British turned to the last unexploited continent. The first part of this book was dominated by India: the last will take us time and again to Africa, for it was there, in a new, headier and seamier series of adventures, that the idea of Empire would find its obsessive fulfilment.

  1 Whose 2,183 West Indian slaves brought him, upon the abolition of slavery, £85,600 in compensation—perhaps £800,000 today.

  1 ‘Terrifying’, Lloyd George found it, perhaps with reason.

  1 Hawarden is still the home of Gladstones, but Hughenden Manor, Disraeli’s house, is now the property of the National Trust, and there pilgrims may inspect such beguiling imperial curios as the Silver Seal of Nana Sahib, or the necklace of King Theodore of Abyssinia, presented to Disraeli by Lord Napier after the latter’s punitive expedition to Magdala in 1868.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Ashanti

  IN Africa stood Ashanti-land. There on a Friday near the beginning of the eighteenth century the sage Okomfu Anokye, fetish priest to Osei Tutu the Asantahene, had received from Heaven the Golden Stool: a mysterious gold-encrusted throne, hung as the centuries passed with talismanic emblems—golden handcuffs, human masks, bells, thongs, images—never to be used as a seat or even allowed to touch the ground, but to be cherished for ever as the dwelling-place of the sunsum or national spirit. So, according to legend, the Empire of the Ashanti was born, to become by the middle of the Victorian era one of the most remarkable of the myriad black Powers of Africa.

  Until Osei Tutu’s time the Ashanti had been no more than a tribe. Their original home was the country around Lake Bosomtwe, a sinister tree-infested mere which intermittently belched gas and mud from its recesses, and was thought by some Africans to be the hole out of which the human race first crawled. It was in the seventeenth century that they first entered history. They then began to display a talent for organization, both civic and military, exceptional in West Africa. Gradually they imposed their suzerainty upon their neighbours un
til the hereditary Asantahene, the king of the Ashanti, became the most powerful indigenous ruler of the entire region, his writ running in one degree or another from the Black Volta to the sea.

  The revelation of the Golden Stool had consolidated this power, providing a supernatural focus of loyalty. Where it really came from, nobody knows. It was a wooden tripod partly sheathed in gold, and according to legend it first appeared from the skies during an assembly of chiefs and people at Kumasi, the Ashanti capital, floating down from the sky in a cloud of dust, to the sound of thunder and the flash of lightning. The Ashanti revered it as the embodiment of their nationhood. So long as it was safe, the kingdom would flourish in unity. The Stool took precedence over the Asantahene himself. It reclined upon its own Chair of State, shaded by its own palanquin and attended by its own acolytes. It provided a constant in the amoebic structure of the Ashanti State, and upon its mystique there rested the whole fabric of Ashanti custom. There can have been few other nations whose soul was embodied in a thing: but one might perhaps fancy a similar arcane identification among the jumbled urns and effigies, the hushed inscriptions and the allusive references of Westminster Abbey.

  2

  Not, however, the Victorian empire-builders, to whom such a suggestion would have seemed not merely ludicrous, but probably sacrilegious. Africa in mid-century appealed to their instinct more than their reason, and brought out the best and worst in them. The best was the long and passionate struggle against the slave trade, still an inspiration to idealism. ‘I go back to Africa,’ Livingstone told an audience of Cambridge undergraduates in 1857, ‘to try to make an open path for commerce and Christianity. Do you carry out the work which I have begun! I leave it with you!’ The worst was a crude contempt which, in the last decades of Victoria’s rule, was progressively to taint the spirit of Empire.

  In the common British view Africa possessed no worth-while values of its own. Its people, mostly pagan and almost all illiterate, seemed not far removed from beasts in the Darwinian scale. Its customs sounded childish, meaningless or repulsive. Its languages were so useless or obscure that until the end of the eighteenth century no European bothered to learn any of them. Its art, expressed in the ambiguities of Obo legend, or the stylized grotesqueries of Ife art, appeared downright debased. The imperialists were at once horrified and fascinated by the cruelty of Africa, the sensuality, the shamelessness. It was, they thought, a continent congenitally inferior, a slate upon which the Empire might scrawl what it pleased, compassionate text or raw obscenity.

  In Africa white faced black, strangers to each other, and in the confrontation between these two elemental forces no conflict was more telling than that between the empires of Britain and Ashanti—a conflict of fits and starts, in which the white power pressed inexorably upon the frontiers of the black, sometimes by guile, sometimes by force, until in the end it burst into the heart of the black kingdom to violate the Golden Stool itself. This was, to both sides, a conflict of destinies. The Ashanti regarded it as divinely ordered, and so did the British: as Hope Grant wrote in 1874, as he prepared to invade the Ashanti homeland, ‘I cannot help thinking that it is willed by the all-powerful Ruler above that Africa shall be opened, and that these savage and inhuman tribes will be brought to reason, and their horrible iniquities put an end to. The poor wretched creatures at present know no better….’

  3

  By African standards the Ashanti civilization was urbane. Its polytheistic observances were intricate and devout. Its social forms were liberal. The Ashanti were excellent craftsmen in gold, silver and wood, and they had developed an architectural style all their own, with projecting eaves, high-pitched thatched roofs, complicated plaster fretwork and curious ornaments of animals and birds. Early British visitors to Kumasi, in the first years of the nineteenth century, found the capital unexpectedly impressive. In 1817 Edward Bowdich reported a reception by bands of flutes, horns and drums, and by vast companies of warriors, resplendently accoutred with horns, feathers, bells, shells and leopard tails. The city he found well-planned and scrupulously clean, with wide named streets and carefully planted trees. Each house had its lavatory, flushed with boiling water, and rubbish was burnt daily. The royal palace, in the centre of the capital, was a group of interconnecting courtyards covering some five acres, and when Sir William Winniett was entertained to dinner there in 1848 he was given roast sheep, turkey, plum pudding, nuts, ale and wine—‘really very nicely served up’.

  But the root of Ashanti policy was a lust for power. ‘If power is for sale,’ ran an Ashanti proverb, ‘sell your mother to buy it—you can always buy her back again.’ Ashanti nationalism was aggressive and self-confident, and the Ashanti national practice of human sacrifice was ruthless in its scope. When an Asantahene died, scores, sometimes hundreds of people were slaughtered to provide a ghostly retinue for the king. Most of the victims were criminals or war prisoners whose lives had been saved for the occasion, but others were senior officials or royal relatives who had sworn to die with their ruler. Every Ashanti generation knew this communal rededication by death, and at times of war or crisis there were often ad hoc sacrifices too, of victims doomed on the spur of the moment. Like the Golden Stool, the practice gave cohesion to the nation, binding the past with the present, fate with free will, the decrees of gods with the destinies of humans.

  All this the Ashanti veiled in a web of mysticism. They were people of secretive tastes, and their minds worked in elusive bounds and side-steps, very difficult for Europeans to grasp. Ashanti folktales, for example, were extraordinarily opaque. When the duiker told the man called Hate-to-be-Contradicted that his palm nuts were ripe, this is how Hate-to-be-Contradicted replied: ‘That is the nature of the palm nut. When they are ripe, three bunches ripen at once. When they are ripe, I cut them down, and when I boil them to extract the oil, they make three water-pots full of oil. Then I take the oil to Akase to buy an Akase old woman. The Akase old woman comes and gives birth to my grandmother who bears my mother, who, in turn, bears me. When Mother bears me, I am already standing there’.

  This was unnatural stuff, to readers of Samuel Smiles or Marcus Aurelius. The British Empire had no taste for the avant garde. Glimpsed by the imperialists through the screen of their surrounding forests, the Ashanti seemed a disconcerting people; murderous, queer, alarming, with their fearful orgies of sacrifice, their weird fetish shrines among the trees, their dark sacred lake upon which no boat could sail, their central enigma of the Golden Stool, and this topsy-turvy manner of thought.

  4

  The British had been on the Gold Coast, the foreshore of Ashanti, for 250 years. Together with the traders of eight other European countries, they had built themselves fortresses on the coast to act first as slave stations, later as entrepôts of more general trade. At first they did not aspire to sovereignty, but when one by one the rival European Powers withdrew from the coast, so their own interest in the country became more political. They were no longer content to be respectful traders on a foreign shore, but wished to control the trade themselves. As the Victorian years passed their trading forts became imperial outposts, the coastal tribes became their wards, and their headquarters at Cape Coast Castle acquired a pro-consular air. It had been built by the Dutch and embellished by the Portuguese, but by the middle of the nineteenth century the British had made it all their own. Its sea-gate gave entrance to a parade ground within the walls; its double staircase led ceremonially to gubernatorial quarters above; bugles sounded from its ramparts; prisoners languished in its gaol. Around its walls an African vassal village had arisen, woodsmoke rising from its mud huts, dried fish stinking in its yards, and the castle stood there like a royal palace above the hovels, gleaming whitewashed in the sun, while the surf beat against its foundations, and the black fishermen paddled their canoes beneath its ramparts.1

  From this imposing base the British looked inland towards the mysterious recesses of Ashanti. Though they had no coastline of their own, the Ashanti exerted a
compelling influence over the Fanti tribes along the shore, and their presence astride the trade routes from the interior powerfully affected prices and supplies. The British had opened relations with them in the 1820s, but never made friends with them. Both sides really wanted mastery of the coast, however circumlocutory their diplomacy or nicely served up their plum puddings. There were constant misunderstandings, and intermittent skirmishes. At one time the Ashanti army threatened Cape Coast Castle itself, and in 1824 the British Governor, Sir Charles McCarthy suffered so ignominious a defeat that he killed himself: the Ashanti sent his skull triumphantly to Kumasi, where for years the Asantahene used it as a drinking cup, parading it before the people on ceremonial occasions, and sometimes swearing oaths upon it.

  These were sparring contests. It was only in the 1870s, when the British Empire turned its attention to the future of Africa, that the Ashanti learnt the meaning of modern imperialism. In hindsight it appears an unequal conflict, between a European empire approaching the apogee of its power, and an unlettered kingdom of the bush. To the Ashanti at the time it did not seem so unbalanced. If the British were an imperial people, so were they. The Ashanti military record was as proud as the British. The British generals might have their Gatling guns and rocket batteries, but the King of Ashanti went into battle hung all over, head to foot, with infallible ju-jus, forming a kind of spiritual chain mail, and fastened so thickly to his person that his face scarcely showed through the magic tufts and fragments, and when he moved the whole silhouette of his presence menacingly rippled.