Ghosts of Empire

by Kwasi Kwarteng

  By the standards of the time, Flora Shaw was a minor celebrity. Like many writers of the late Victorian era, influenced as they often were by the writings of Thomas Carlyle, she worshipped strong, heroic men. This was the age of popular Darwinism. It was the age in which an obscure German philosopher called Friedrich Nietzsche spoke of the ‘superman’, a being ‘beyond good and evil’, whose destiny was to impose his will on weaker specimens of humanity. In the world of the 1890s, the ‘superman’, at least as far as the British could conceive the idea, was more often than not a colonial administrator, who usually took the form of a soldier versatile enough to turn his hand to administration and give law to the natives, a strongman who could speak native languages and write clear, ‘manly’ accounts of his achievements for his desk-bound political masters at home.

  The other woman strongly associated with the beginning of British colonial rule in Nigeria was Mary Kingsley. She would have recognized and applauded the description of the ‘superman’. She was another strong female who had been born into the middle class–into a family of academics and clergymen–in 1862. Her uncle was the famous novelist Charles Kingsley, author of the children’s classic The Water Babies, who died in his fifties in 1875. Mary’s parents had neglected her education, so she had been compelled to absorb scraps of information from her father’s library. Both her parents died in 1892, when she was thirty, and, with the small inheritance she had been bequeathed, she reinvented herself by packing her bags and setting off for West Africa. There she considered herself an explorer and anthropologist but paid her way by trading, obtaining food by selling fish-hooks and matches, and even engaging in the rubber trade.3

  Mary Kingsley was striking, if not conventionally beautiful. Tall, slim and blonde, she had big blue eyes, a large mouth and weak chin. Her smile was described as ‘crooked’. It was when she opened her mouth, however, that the full power of her extraordinary personality revealed itself. With her deep voice and cultivated speech, she made a strong first impression. Her interlocutors would then be rather surprised, even charmed, by her dropped aitches and her very individual way of expressing herself, as she frequently used slang and other seemingly uncouth terms she had picked up from sailors and West African traders. As a child she had, like many toddlers before and since, shocked her father by picking up and repeating his large stock of swear-words. Rudyard Kipling met her at a tea party in South Kensington in the 1890s. Afterwards they left the house together and were clearly fascinated with each other, talking for hours. She spoke of witch doctors, of rubber and oil trading, of cannibal preferences in ‘joints of human flesh’. Any further association, however, was strictly curtailed by the social constraints of the time. Kipling said to her, ‘Come to my rooms and we’ll talk it out there.’ She agreed, then suddenly said, ‘Oh I forgot I was a woman. ’Fraid I mustn’t.’4

  Both Mary Kingsley and Flora Shaw were committed imperialists. Kingsley died tragically young, succumbing to typhoid at the age of thirty-eight, while working as a nurse in a prisoner-of-war camp in South Africa in 1900. Yet in her short life she articulated as well as Kipling himself the unapologetic imperialism of the 1890s, the decade of her brief career and fame. For Kingsley, imperialism was a ‘good and honest thing’, which sought a world ‘wherein just, honourable, respectable men of all races, all colours, all religions, can live, worship, trade, labour, or live quietly, unhampered by a lot of pettifogging arbitrary rules and regulations and persecutions’.

  For imperialists like Kingsley, the British Empire was an ideal; it was not primarily about glory or money. England had seen ‘Venice rolling in riches’ and then ‘Spain magnificent’, but had also witnessed the decay of both those once mighty empires. The English ‘must have the world, a free and open world’. Having welcomed the prospect of a world where all colours and races could live freely, Kingsley acknowledged that only the Northern European could make the world free. ‘We know from centuries of experience that the ideal of making freedom for the world is not to be expected from any race save the Teuton.’ According to Kingsley, there was nothing wrong with this kind of imperialism, which would free Africans and Asians from their superstitions and despotic rulers. In the same address, Kingsley asserted that this ‘Imperialism, our Imperialism, is the thing that is not ashamed of wanting all the world to rule over’.5

  This aggressive imperialism was what brought Nigeria into the colonial fold in the first place, and it is no surprise that the single individual who did more than anyone else to bring this about was a hero to both Mary Kingsley and Flora Shaw. George Goldie was a volatile, tempestuous man, who had been a soldier before becoming a trader. To Mary Kingsley, Goldie was ‘one of that make of men who gave Britain India–namely a soldier-statesman’. It was unfortunate that in Africa those men had not been so attracted to founding empires. Goldie was the exception. In Kingsley’s opinion, the empire needed more people like him. ‘Had we but had a line of these men in Africa acting in conjunction with our great solid under-staff–the Merchant Adventurers–our African record would be both cleaner and more glorious than it is.’6 For Flora Shaw, who had hoped to marry Goldie after his first wife had died in 1898, his exertions alone had prevented a territory passing ‘into the possession of France and Germany’ which was ‘no less than half the size of British India’.7

  George Goldie, or George Taubman-Goldie, had been born on the Isle of Man in 1846 and had been spared the usual treadmill of public school. This contributed perhaps to his eccentric, aloof and highly private manner. He was arrogant, but his arrogance was not of the sort that wanted monuments to be erected in his honour, or long biographies to be written about him. Indeed his ‘wish to remain unrecognised amounted almost to a mania’. He had, in addition to this wariness of publicity, no ‘literary ambition, no desire for popularity, no desire whatever to make money’.8 In this he stood in stark contrast to Cecil Rhodes, who desired, and achieved, fame, immortality and a colossal fortune. The suggestion that Nigeria be called ‘Goldesia’, in recognition of George Goldie’s achievements, and along the same lines as Rhodesia’s celebration of Cecil Rhodes’s achievements, met with a flat refusal from Goldie himself.

  Yet, despite his seeming self-denial, Goldie’s ambition was as intense as that of Rhodes. Dorothy Wellesley, who later wrote a book about Goldie, remembered her childhood friend fondly, particularly as Goldie himself was well into his seventies when she met him. As a small girl, she had called him ‘Rameses’ because his old, wizened face reminded her of the mummies in the British Museum. ‘Rameses, will you tell me the story of your life?’ asked the little girl. Goldie stared into the fire and laughed. After a couple of minutes, he replied, ‘All achievement begins with a dream. My dream, as a child, was to colour the map red.’9 He had taken a rather bizarre route to fulfil his boyhood dream. Starting out in a way typical of the late Victorian empire-builder, he had attended Woolwich, from which in 1865 he passed into the Royal Engineers. He was a wild man, claiming to be blind drunk when he passed his final examination. Two years later, as he himself recounted, a rich relation died, leaving him a fortune. Excited by his new freedom, he left the Engineers and all his belongings, heading straight for Egypt, where he fell in love with an Arab girl who taught him ‘fluent colloquial Arabic’.10

  He lived in the desert for three years, but he ordered books from England, which he picked up in the local town, Suakin. It was while spending time with his Arab girlfriend, in what he termed the ‘Garden of Allah’, that he obtained and digested Barth’s Travels, five hefty volumes packed with historical and geographical information on the western Sudan.11 Still only in his early twenties, Goldie returned to England, after setting up a trust fund based in Cairo to provide for his Arab companion. He was restless and turbulent, and plunged into another passionate affair, this time with his family governess, Mathilda Catherine Elliott. The couple ran away to Paris in 1870, where they were caught up in the Franco-Prussian War and had to live in very straitened circumstances, as the city was b
esieged for four months. In February 1871, Goldie returned with his new mistress to London, where they were married in July of that year. 12

  From the adventures he had enjoyed when only in his teens and early twenties, it was clear that Goldie was going to lead an eventful life. In the early 1870s, however, it was still uncertain how he would make his mark in the empire. His opportunity came when Holland Jaques, a small trading company that operated around the River Niger, ran into trouble in the 1870s. The company was run by the father-in-law of one of Goldie’s brothers, and it was agreed to send George Goldie himself to West Africa, where his formidable energy would be employed. After taking over the company, the then thirty-three-year-old Goldie re-formed it as the United Africa Trading Company on 20 November 1879 and, from the beginning, set his heart on obtaining a Royal Charter for it. This would allow the company a monopoly of trade in the region of the Niger delta and further up-river.13

  This development was an instance of the British Empire following trade. Even in the high imperialistic days of the late nineteenth century, it was British business and enterprise which so often forged a path that was only later followed by the bureaucrats and pith-helmet-wearing district commissioners. British commentators of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries commonly referred with pride to the commercial origins of their empire. The belief in the ‘superiority of the Teuton’ accompanied an aggressive free-trade ideology. Before Joseph Chamberlain’s entry into the Colonial Office in 1895, the ‘merchant was expected to create empire’.14 Far from being something despised in official circles, business and trade were revered by the leaders of the British Empire in London. In the Jubilee year of 1897, the British Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, the third Marquess of Salisbury, used his speech at the Guildhall to launch a paean of praise for British business, playing down strategic motives or motives of sheer glory-seeking behind the growth of empire. The colonial mission in Africa, according to the Prime Minister, was about money and commerce:The objects we have in our view are strictly business objects. We wish to extend the commerce, the trade, the industry and the civilization of mankind. We wish to throw open as many markets as possible, to bring as many consumers and producers into contact as possible; to throw open the great natural highways, the great waterways of this great continent. We wish that trade should pursue its unchecked and unhindered course upon the Niger, the Nile, and the Zambesi.15

  For Goldie, although money was not a primary motivation, ‘the opening up of Tropical Africa’ was a significant achievement of the Victorian age. The empire, he noted in 1898, was dependent ‘on the condition of the national fibre’. From the library of the Naval and Military Club, in London’s Piccadilly, he wrote that ‘although it may be that the British Empire has now reached its zenith, and must gradually decline to the position of a second-rate power, we are not bound to accept such assertions without the production of more valid evidence’.16

  To men like Goldie, imperialism was a highly businesslike matter. Although he did much to suppress slavery in West Africa, where Arab and Fulani raiders were still trafficking in human slaves at the end of the nineteenth century, Goldie was pragmatic even about this evil trade. As early as 1886, he wrote to the Foreign Secretary, the Conservative Earl of Iddesleigh, formerly Stafford Northcote, arguing that even ‘domestic slavery, repugnant as it is to modern European ideas, cannot safely be repressed by force at present . . . intertwined as it is with the whole social system of Central Africa’.17 Goldie’s flexibility was shown by how in the early to mid-1880s he managed to grow the National African Company (which had taken over the assets of the United Africa Trading Company), finally acquiring a Royal Charter for it in July 1886, at which point it became known as the Royal Niger Company. During this period, he persuaded local chiefs to sign away many of their rights over their country in a series of treaties which, it seems, were often imperfectly understood by the chiefs themselves.

  Between December 1884 and October 1886, a period just short of two years, the company had signed 237 separate treaties with local chiefs. The treaties followed a typical formula: ‘We the undersigned King and Chiefs of Sengana, with a view to the bettering of the condition of our country and people, do this day cede to the National African Company (Limited) for ever the whole of our territory extending from the boundary of Akassa territory to Kolama territory.’ Not only would land be signed over in this way, but legal authority was likewise handed over. ‘We also give to the said National African Company . . . full power to settle all native disputes arising from any cause whatsoever.’18 In return for this generous concession, the company would allow the chiefs considerable autonomy. It would be given ‘full power to mine, farm, and build in any portion of our territory’, while it would promise not ‘to interfere with any of the native laws or customs of the country, consistent with the maintenance of order and good government’. The treaties were always signed by interpreters like James Broom Walker Apre, native of Akassa, who would solemnly declare that they were ‘well acquainted with the language of the King and people of the country . . . [and had] truly and faithfully explained the above Agreement, and that they understood its meaning’.19

  These treaties were resented by the French and the Germans, who were involved in empire-building and trading of their own. The Germans protested to the British Foreign Office about the treaties. The case of the King of Nupé rumbled on for years. In 1888, the Germans wrote to the British Foreign Office, complaining that the ‘King of Nupé emphatically denies having sold his kingdom to the company’. The company had imposed duties and taxes on other merchants trading in this area, but it had no right to do this, as far as the Germans were concerned. They argued that the King of Nupé had ‘never ceded to the Royal Niger Company nor to anybody else any of his lands or territories’. They added that the King ‘alone as Sovereign King of Nupé [had] a right to levy duties’. Goldie fired back to the Foreign Office his riposte that the Germans had long been a nuisance to the company. The dispute had been the outcome of the ‘German intrigues which have given the Company so much trouble during the past few years’. The Germans, Goldie believed, had poisoned the ‘minds of the native rulers, especially as rumours pass rapidly in Central Africa from district to district and acquire strength by repetition’.

  In the wake of the international Conference of Berlin in 1885, which precipitated the controversial ‘Scramble for Africa’, the Germans, the French and the British were all vying for trade and dominance in West Africa. Goldie complained to his political masters in the Foreign Office in London that the Germans had claimed that ‘wherever the English went they subjugated and oppressed the populations, that the native laws and customs would be overthrown, and that the power of the Chiefs would be abolished’.20 The company, as far as Goldie was concerned, had no ‘desire to interfere more than is absolutely necessary with the internal arrangements of the Chiefs of Central Africa’.

  Goldie’s shrewd dealings with the chiefs secured the Royal Niger Company’s position as the dominant force in the commercial affairs of the region round the Niger delta and the banks of the river further inland. He not only blamed foreigners, the French and the Germans for interfering in the company’s business. The native chiefs often relapsed into their ‘old uncommercial pursuits of slave-hunting and inter-tribal war’. This problem was aggravated by the fact that, in every tribe, there were ‘almost invariably to be found the influence of the numerous semi-civilized negroes–subjects of Great Britain or a British Protectorate’. These ‘semi-civilized negroes’ had been educated by missionaries or had picked up some literacy and knowledge of English by commerce. It was Goldie’s view that, despite their ‘very limited education’, they exercised a ‘deplorable influence over the native tribes’. ‘These foreign negroes have persistently endeavoured, and will doubtless continue to endeavour, to shake the influence of the company with the natives.’21

  Goldie’s Royal Niger Company was beset by enemies and rivals. The monopoly of trade he wa
s trying to establish not only opposed the interests of natives and Germans, it also aroused the anger of British merchants who had been trading in the Niger delta area for years. As the North German Gazette complained in July 1888, ‘It is well known . . . here that the merchants who are established in the Niger Territory . . . Germans and English, irrespective of nationality, have for a considerable time made bitter complaints about the conduct of the Royal Niger Company.’ The company was ‘trying to monopolize trade in those parts’.22 The merchants of Liverpool, some of whom had been trading in West Africa since the 1850s, objected to the dominance the Royal Niger Company sought to establish over commerce in this part of the world. Like the Germans, the Liverpool traders lobbied the British government, and their local Members of Parliament, to curtail the company’s powers. The Liverpool firm Messrs Stuart and Douglas had written to their MP, W. F. Lawrence, at the end of 1886 to complain about the company’s monopolistic practices: ‘Healthy competition does not suit the policy of the Niger Company, hence the monopoly they have set up.’ The Liverpool traders objected to the level of duty the company charged other traders. They also argued that ‘The action of the Niger Company is no benefit to the natives, not to the civilization they so much vaunt nor to European merchants, but is intended to crush native traders . . . and English merchants who have hitherto so long dealt with the natives, to the great benefit of this country . . .’23

  What they wanted was to ‘induce the Foreign Secretary to either greatly modify the powers of monopoly conferred upon the Niger Company by the Royal Charter, or to revoke the Charter; the latter course being, according to the general opinion, the most desirable’. Lawrence, a dutiful MP, continued to lobby hard for his constituents. He wrote to the Foreign Office, on behalf of the Liverpool Africa Association, urging the ‘revocation of the Charter’. The Foreign Office replied that the company was fulfilling its mission and that the Liverpool merchants had not ‘given due consideration to the altered circumstances of the African continent, under which the whole of the West Coast, with a few unimportant exceptions, is now under the Protectorate of European Powers’. This new reality meant that the ‘old unchecked licence of trade is a thing of the past’. The company was simply doing the job of the British government at a much less burdensome cost to the British taxpayer: ‘the Royal Niger Company in offering to undertake the administration of the vast and hitherto almost inaccessible districts adjoining the Niger . . . has rendered good service by relieving the Imperial revenues of the heavy expense of direct administration’.24 This was empire on the cheap.