Heaven’s Command

by Jan Morris

  Africa and the New Imperialism tainted this conception. There were still visionaries genuinely concerned with the betterment of the Africans, who saw the humiliation of tribes and ancient kingdoms only as sad means towards honourable ends. Generally, though, the African scramble was a chronicle of squalor—chiefs gulled, tribes dispossessed, vast inheritances signed away with a thumb-print or a shaky cross. One by one the African nations were absorbed: after the Zulus the Matabele, the Mashonas, the kingdoms of Niger, the Islamic principalities of Kano and Zanzibar, the Dinkas and the Masai, the Sudanese Muslims, Benin and Bechuana—all, one by one, in one measure or another, deprived of their sovereignty and made subject to the Great White Queen across the oceans. We see tawdry scenes of this enthusiasm: officers of the Royal Horse Guards, for instance, swaggering in full dress uniform into the kraal of King Lobengula of Matabeleland, to prepare him in the Queen’s name for his swift and utter dispossession; or Charles Goldie of the Niger Company, in his rooms off the Strand, sighting his newly-acquired Gatling gun across the Thames in preparation for trade expansion in West Africa. There was no style to it all. It was second-rate glory.

  African expansionism was not the deliberate intention of power-crazed British Governments. ‘Terribly have I been puzzled and perplexed’, wrote poor Mr Gladstone once, ‘on finding a group of the soberest men among us to have concocted a scheme such as that touching the mountain country behind Zanzibar with an unrememberable name. There must somewhere or other be reasons for it which have not come before me.’ During the most competitive years of the African scramble the conservative Lord Salisbury was both Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, and he was by no means a frenzied imperialist—indeed he was debatably an imperialist at all. It was he who defined British policy as drifting lazily downstream, occasionally putting out a boathook to prevent a collision, and he viewed the African imbroglio with fastidious detachment. Behind him, though, forces more strident and grasping were forcing the imperial frontiers deeper into the continent. Once the barriers were breached, the process was inevitable, so great was the gulf between the technically advanced countries, whose exemplar was Britain, and the pre-industrial societies of Africa. Many kinds of Briton urged it on. There were merchants looking for new customers, and industrialists looking for raw materials, and financiers looking for investments, and strategists arguing about India or the Nile, and soldiers coveting glory of one kind, and missionaries hoping for glory of another, and Chambers of Commerce in Liverpool or Bristol, and patriotic newspapers, and behind them all, like an intoxicated crowd at an immense spectator sport, the British public itself, now insatiably imperialist. In 1895 Joseph Chamberlain joined Salisbury’s administration: he was given a choice of portfolios, and nobody was surprised when, astute politician that he was—‘the Peopled Joe’—he chose the Colonial Office.

  Avarice was the most obvious motive of the scramble, and it was only proper that as an instrument of their Empire in Africa the British should revive the idea of the Chartered Company, dormant since the abolition of the East India Company and the dispossession of Hudson’s Bay. A Chartered Company, incorporated by the Queen’s authority, could raise its own armies, devise its own administrations, build its own cities, settle its own pioneers, not merely without a charge upon Treasury funds, but with luck actually at a profit for its shareholders. The new examples seemed to the British a satisfying return to form, for they combined business enterprise and political loyalty with a detectable element of swashbuckle—like the Honourable Adventurers of old, the newspapers thought, or the fighting traders who created the Indian Empire. Goldie’s Niger Company conquered, ruled and successfully developed the Niger Basin in the west, and hoped to expand eastward to the Indian Ocean.1 Rhodes’s British South Africa Company was the constituted Government of Rhodesia, and hoped to expand northwards to Egypt. The Imperial East Africa Company brought Kenya and Uganda under the Crown, and hoped chiefly to make money. It was like farming out an Empire to private industry, or handing over the care of several million souls to a board of company directors, and it reduced the imperial mission to something less than Rhodes’s cynical formula—‘philanthropy plus five per cent’. As a perceptive West African chieftain once observed, ‘One time we tink Englishman almost same as God Almighty. Now we tink he be same as other white men—all same as we.’

  4

  To observe the New Imperialism in the field let us station ourselves one day in December, 1890, upon a hilltop in Uganda called Kampala, almost within sight of Lake Victoria. The hill is scarcely more than a grassy knoll, with a flat summit and a few trees, but the prospect from it is splendid, and is full of meaning: for it overlooks the ancient capital of the kings of Buganda, the Kabakas, whose incumbent thirty years before Speke had found walking tiptoe like a lion. His palace stands there still on the hill called Mengo about a mile to the south, and a fine sight it is. The slopes of Mengo are covered with neatly compounded thatched huts, large and well-kept, separated by walls of grass thatch, and busy all day with the movements of men, women and animals—tethered dogs, wandering goats, cattle, armed guards, turbanned page-boys hastening from hut to hut, clutching their long skin robes around them. At the top stands the royal audience chamber, a superb round hut of intricate construction, and from it a fine broad avenue runs like a king’s command down the hill to the town below.

  There is a small market on the west side of Kampala hill, all white-robed bustle and bargaining, and half-hidden among the foliage are the huts and places of worship of the religious missions to Buganda—the mosque, the Roman Catholic church, the thatched Anglican cathedral. But the scene is dominated by the presence of the Kabaka, Mwanga. Strange sounds drift across the banana groves from his palace, the beating of drums, the firing of random shots, the tinkling of harps, the blare of sudden trumpets. Sometimes bands of armed men can be seen marching down the avenue into town. Fires burn at night all over the flank of Mengo, and around the corner may be seen the dark and eerie expanse of the Kabaka’s sacred lake, which dries up when the king is in danger, and is loud with the screeching of egrets, and haunted by flickering black dragon-flies, and infested by bilharzia snails.

  Astonishing African things have been happening in Buganda during the past few years. Plot has succeeded plot. The Catholic missions have conspired against the Anglicans. The Muslims have fought against the Christians. Mwanga has been deposed, and fought his way back to the throne again. Karl Peters, the German explorer, has made a treaty with the Kabaka later repudiated by his own Government. James Hannington, sent from London to be the first Anglican bishop in East Africa, has been murdered at Mwanga’s command. Scores of Christian converts, refusing to recant their faith, have been burnt alive on pyres outside the city. Bewildered by coup and counter-coup, torn by religious dissension, presided over by the half-mad sodomite Kabaka, Buganda seems to exist in a state of nightmare uncertainty, liable at any moment to burst into bloodshed.

  Yet for the British, into whose agreed sphere of influence it falls, it is the key to East Africa. To the Imperial East Africa Company, with its headquarters at Mombasa on the coast, it seems a promising field for trade and perhaps settlement. To the evangelists it is a paradigm of the African misery, only awaiting redemption. To the stragetists it promises command of the Nile headwaters, and would form a vital link in the cherished chain of British properties from Cairo to the Cape. The Company, as the agent of British power in East Africa, has already tried unsuccessfully to conclude a treaty with Mwanga. Now, in the last month of 1890, it has sent to Buganda the most promising of its adventurous young men, Frederick Lugard, to settle the matter.

  Lugard is a former Indian Army officer, and seems on the face of it the antithesis of your New Imperialist—small, sensitive, erect, alert like a bantam cock, he is always good to his Africans, generally treats the tribal chiefs with respect, and views the imperial mission with an idealist fervour. Yet he is, in 1890, the agent of a simple grab. He may not think it himself, but he is: for thoug
h the Company is more interested in trade than conquest, and is at one level genuinely concerned with African welfare, still the deeper truth is that history is compelling the British inexorably towards the control of Uganda, and Lugard is its agent. No niceties of protocol or morality will deter him. He is caught up in the standards of his time, and he behaves accordingly. Here he comes now through the bush, his bright eyes blazing, his long moustaches drooped with sweat, leading a raggle-taggle army from the coast—a couple of British officers, seventy Sudanese askaris, a few Somali scouts and the usual muddle of porters. They are armed with elderly Snider rifles and with a solitary Maxim gun—which, having already crossed Africa with Henry Stanley, is no longer at its best; and led by the askaris in their best blue jerseys and white pants, on December 3, 1890, they march into the Kabaka’s capital pursued by jostling crowds of sightseers.

  Lugard has not been invited, and he behaves more like a conqueror than a guest. He refuses two proffered camping sites (‘damp and dirty’) and instead, climbing to the top of Kampala Hill, with its commanding prospect all around, he pitches his camp upon its summit. ‘I have since heard that it is not etiquette to camp on top of a hill, only the King does that … but my own idea is that it is better to show Mwanga that we do not intend to be fooled, and that we come like men that are not afraid.’

  ‘Men that are not afraid.’ Lugard’s position is precarious. His intentions are strictly dishonourable, and there are many people in Buganda all too willing to murder him and his little army. Yet he is utterly brazen. When, next day, he marches over to Mengo to see the Kabaka, he does so arrogantly. He wears a flannel pyjama jacket with brass buttons, and takes his own chair—for he has heard that European supplicants at the Kabaka’s court are normally expected to kneel upon the ground. He takes a stalwart Sudanese bodyguard, too, and when, at the door of the royal hut, the Kabaka’s minstrels strike up a welcome, beating their drums, blowing their flutes and ivory trumpets, and strumming violently upon their xylophones, the askaris reply with a fanfare of bugles. ‘I was my own master, and of course tho’ I have taken this somewhat independent attitude, I have been at great pains to show that it does not arise from insolence, disrespect, or a wish to wound the sensibilities of the king, but merely that I am an officer of the English army, and an accredited Envoy from the Company and do not mean to be ordered about, and treated as an inferior at the beck and call of Mwanga.’

  In no time at all Lugard’s status in Buganda is properly imperial. Up on the hill his newly-washed tents gleam white above the town. The more tents the better is Lugard’s view—‘I don’t want it to look small here’. The track through the camp is hoed and trim, the soldiers are kept busy with spit and polish, and when Lugard goes through the town he is escorted by his huge Sudanese with fixed bayonets. A constant crowd of Baganda comes to stare at these arrangements, or wonder at the Maxim gun greased and gleaming upon its tripod, and though the whole country is still in a condition of imminent catastrophe, nobody dares challenge this magnificent affront (though once the atmosphere is so ominous, Lugard admits in his diary, ‘that I looked up the book about the Maxim gun, and looked over the gun too’).

  So with seventy soldiers and the effrontery of the New Imperialism, Lugard conquers a nation without a shot. By Christmas he is ready to present a draft treaty to the Kabaka. ‘Much discussion and even uproar arose at times but I scowled and looked as fierce as I could and insisted on reading it right through.’ In return for the Company’s benevolent protection, it demands that British jurisdictional rights in Buganda shall be exerted by a Resident—in other words, as the Kabaka will shortly discover, that the British shall have complete authority over the affairs of his country. Mwanga, lying on a mat, stalls for a few moments, but Lugard thrusts the treaty paper before him, and insists that he make his mark. ‘He did it with a bad grace, just dashing the pen at the paper and making a blot, but I made him go at it again and make a cross, and on the 2nd copy he made a proper cross.’ The thing is done. Lugard signs as ‘an officer of the army of Her Majesty Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, Empress of India, etc’, and the marks are appended of Apollo the Chief Minister, Kimbugwe the Chief Admiral of Canoes, Mjusi the Head of the Army and Kauta the Lord Chief Cook. The Kabaka of Buganda signs away his independence, and the British Empire acquires a promising new Protectorate (another up-to-date term, devised in its imperial context at the Berlin Conference).

  5

  Such was the Scramble, which brought out the bully in most imperialists, and lent itself fatally to double-dealing and self-delusion. It was a patchwork process, a muddle of aims good and bad, a huge charade of Mwangas and Lugards, Sniders and ceremonial xylophones, exchange quotations and diplomatic initiatives, and one man more than any other summed it up in his person: Cecil Rhodes, the Colossus of the Cape.

  Rhodes was an enigma because he seemed to embrace within himself such widely disparate standards and motives. He was all contradictions. He was a vicar’s son from Bishop’s Stortford‚ but he looked like a Jewish millionaire of sporting habits. He adored Oxford and all it stood for, yet his abiding passion was the pursuit of material power. In some ways his notion of Empire was crass, in others it was truly noble, in others again half-crazy: ‘I walked between earth and sky and when I looked down I said—“this earth shall be English” and when I looked up I said—“the English shall rule this earth”.’ It was less than twenty years since, with some unlovely financial partners, he had made his fortune on the Kimberley diamond field, yet by 1895 he was the most powerful man in Africa, and one of the richest in the world. He was Premier of the Cape, he was virtual dictator of Rhodesia, and his British South Africa Company was much the most powerful of the new chartered companies. When Queen Victoria once asked him conversationally what he had been doing lately, he replied with perfect truth ‘Adding two provinces to your Majesty’s dominions’.

  If the official view of Africa seemed diffuse, as Lord Salisbury drifted so urbanely down the stream of time, Rhodes had a more exact vision of the Empire’s African destiny. He saw the entire continent dominated by British authority. Financed by the limitless treasures of South Africa, British power would extend in a spinal column north and south through the continent, from Egypt to the Cape. Along the central corridor a railway would run the entire length of Africa, its windows consecrated by the spray of the Victoria Falls,1 and feeder lines would link it to British colonies on both coasts of the continent, like rivers from a watershed. Other Powers might have footholds here and there in Africa, but this over-riding pattern of suzerainty and communication would mean that in effect the continent would be as British as India. It would be a complete organism. The cycle would begin with the digging of wealth from the seams of the Witwatersrand, and it would end with the imposition of British civilized standards upon the whole African world—‘equal rights’, as Rhodes saw it, ‘for all civilized men’.2

  Step by step towards fin de siècle the British Empire approached the fulfilment of this dream. From the south British suzerainty advanced from South Africa across the Limpopo to the Zambezi. From the north, as General Kitchener embarked at last upon the reconquest of the Sudan, conveniently financed by the Egyptians, the Empire marched towards the headwaters of the Nile. The Cape-Cairo railway had readied Wadi Halfa in the north, Rhodesia in the south, and the first of the feeder lines was already being built between Uganda and the coast. Only a narrow strip of German territory in Tanganyika interrupted the all-British corridor from Egypt to South Africa. On the African flanks Nigeria, the Gold Coast, the Gambia, Sierra Leone, Somaliland, Uganda, Kenya and Zanzibar were all safely under the flag, importing their guns, cloths and iron goods from Manchester and Birmingham, sending to Britain their cloves, cocoa, ivory, coconuts and coffee. It was not yet a very profitable estate, but it had great promise, and to the imperial seers it seemed almost a new empire, the India of the coming century.1

  Yet like an infuriating particle of grit in the gears of this great machine, the infinit
esimal republic of the Transvaal still resisted the British Empire. Now that it possessed within its frontiers the world’s principal source of gold, its independence seemed more than ever an impertinence to history. Never did a destiny seem more manifest, than the Transvaal’s eventual inclusion within the British pattern for Africa. It is true that to the east the republic was bordered by Portuguese Mozambique, and that a railway line now linked Johannesburg with the Portuguese port of Delagoa Bay, enabling the Boers to send their exports abroad without crossing British territory at all. But with the Empire north, south and west of them, with British capital financing their industries, and British expertise extracting their gold, with Queen Victoria still hazily suzerain to their State, the extinction of the republic appeared inevitable in the end. This was the last decade of the nineteenth century: no time for anachronisms.

  Even in the 1890s the British were not prepared to indulge in naked aggression against white people, and once more they approached the Transvaal problem deviously. A kind of half-tacit conspiracy was fostered. It was well-known that the Reform Movement in Johannesburg was fitfully considering an armed rising. Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary in London, now authorized Sir Hercules Robinson, British High Commissioner in the Cape,1 to intervene in Johannesburg if such a rising occurred—not of course to seize the country, but merely to restore order as representative of the suzerain Power. At the same time Rhodes, Premier of the Cape, and Jameson his chief assistant, went a stage further, and conspired with the Reformers to support their revolution: the moment the word came, they would send in a force to overthrow Kruger and establish a new Government, either independently British, or as a colony of the Empire. How far all the conspirators knew each other’s minds has never been made clear. Perhaps they did not want to know. It was an unwritten, unspecified arrangement. Nothing was spelt out. Much was left, in the true spirit of the African Scramble, to a wink and a crooked nod.