4
Revolts in Africa
For four centuries the African in Africa had had to suffer from the raids of the slave dealers and the dislocation of African civilization that had been caused thereby. America continued with the slave-trade until the end of the Civil War, but whereas in 1789 San Domingo alone was taking 40,000 slaves a year, between 1808 and 1860, the Southern states of North America took only 200,000. Other nations of Europe and the Arabs on the East coast continued the trade. Actual colonies, however, were comparatively few in Africa. There was, of course. Cape Colony and the districts beyond, and colonies in West Africa which were on the whole little more than trading stations. In the middle of the nineteenth century Disraeli referred to colonies as damned millstones around the necks of the British people. As we have said it is unlikely that more than one-tenth of Africa was in European hands. But in the 1880s began the intensive rivalry of European imperialisms for colonies as the sources of raw materials, for markets and spheres of influence. By the end of the nineteenth century, less than one-tenth of Africa remained in the hands of Africans themselves. This rapid change could not fail to produce a series of revolts, which have never ceased.
Before we consider the actual revolts, it is necessary to see, briefly, what the Negro is revolting against. European colonization is broadly speaking of two types, the first, as in South Africa, the two Rhodesias and Kenya, where it is possible for Europeans to settle and remain; the second in British West Africa, where the European is for the most part official and trader, does not look upon the colony as his home and does not settle there in large numbers.
In areas like the Union of South Africa, the Rhodesias and Kenya, the white settlers have to force the native to leave his own work and interests in order to labor for them in mine or plantation. The method they adopt is to tax him by means of a poll tax. The Negro, though perhaps quite comfortably placed according to his own wishes and needs, must have money to pay this tax, which compels him therefore to seek employment with European masters, on whatever conditions these choose to lay down. Hence the wages of four pence a day in Kenya and 15 shillings a month in the copper mines of Rhodesia. The Europeans also take the best land and herd the natives in areas which are not only difficult to cultivate but too small for their most elementary needs. In the Union of South Africa, for instance, about 2,000,000 whites own about eighty percent of the land, while over 6,000,000 natives own ten percent. The rest is Crown land, that is to say, at the disposal of the white government. Obviously this state of affairs can only be maintained by a social and political regime based on terror.
The natives are made to carry passes which they must produce on request; a pass if they are out later than nine o’clock, a pass to show that their tax has been paid, a pass from their employer, fingerprints for identification—in the Union of South Africa there are a dozen passes of one kind or another which the Negro may have to carry. A Negro who has a profession is given an exemption pass, which absolves him from the necessity of carrying these other passes. But any native policeman is able to ask him for this exemption pass, and arrest him on the spot if it is not produced at once. Negroes, whatever their status, whatever their appearance, are debarred from frequenting all public places of business or entertainment frequented by whites. In places like the post office, there are two counters, one for whites and one for blacks.
What does the native get in return? After four hundred years of European occupation, there are not half-a-dozen native doctors in South Africa. Over three-quarters of the native population are almost entirely without education. The education supplied to the rest is officially admitted to be of the poorest quality. Far from making a gradual, if slow, political progress, the natives of the Cape have recently been deprived of the franchise, a relic of more liberal days. They are debarred by law from being even skilled laborers, as tyrannical and demoralizing a piece of legislation as has been passed in any country during the last hundred years.
In the mines they receive one-eighth of the wages of the white miner. In ancient territories like the Union of South Africa, or in more modern areas as Rhodesia and Kenya, the method is exactly the same, with slight local variations. While politicians in Britain speak of trusteeship, South African white leaders and officials in Rhodesia and Kenya periodically state quite unequivocally that Africa is to be run for the benefit of the whites and the Negro must make up his mind to know his place and keep it.
In West Africa the situation is somewhat different. There, over large areas, the Negroes were guaranteed their land by law, at a time when it seemed unlikely that Europeans would ever need it. European capital, of course, dominates. But the racial discrimination is not nearly so acute as in the South and in the East of Africa, and the conflict between the Negroes and their rulers is more strictly economic and political than it is in the Cape or Kenya.
French Equatorial Africa and the Belgian Congo form two areas to some degree different from those described above. In a French colony, a Negro who by education or military service becomes a French citizen, is given all privileges, and is governed by the laws which apply to white men. He can become a high official in the government service, or a general in the French army. During the war Petain’s Chief of Staff at Verdun was a Negro. Commandant Avenol, who was in charge of the air defense of Paris from 1914 to 1918 with ten thousand men under him, including British and white American aviators, was a Martinique Negro. At the present moment the Governor of Guadeloupe is a black man. These men, it is true, are from the old West Indian colonies. But there are Africans in the service, and it is admitted that promotion is open to them on practically the same terms as whites. There have been Africans, deputies in the Chamber, who have become Cabinet Ministers. After the war the French issued a serious warning to Americans in Paris who tried to introduce American race prejudice, and it is noteworthy that these Americans who cannot tolerate the sight of a Negro in an American restaurant, learned in Paris to admit him and his white girl friends into an American bar: Briand told them that he would close down the bar if they didn’t. This is a valuable feature of French civilization and disposes of many illusions, carefully cultivated in America and Britain, about Negro incapacity and racial incompatibility. But imperialism remains imperialism. During the last twenty years the population of French Congo has declined by more than six millions, and the French have as black a record in Africa as any other imperialist nation.
In the Belgian Congo the Negro has certain privileges; for example, he is allowed to occupy important posts on the railways, which is forbidden to him in South Africa. Thus Negroes run trains to the border of the Belgian colonies where South African whites take them over. Yet the Belgian attitude is less liberal than the French. No African who has spent more than six months abroad is allowed to return to the Congo, and the severity of the forced labor regulations is such that when the company which owns the sugar plantations of Moabeke built a railway, almost the entire male population of the district was worked to death. This is in no way exceptional. French and Belgians have an evil reputation in the Congo for cold-blooded cruelty. As in the days of slavery in the West Indian colonies, the European colonizing nations claim superiority to each other. But an African in Eritrea is no worse off under Italian Fascism than an African in the Congo under democratic Belgium, or a Rhodesian copper miner.
The Old Colonies
Let us begin with revolts in one of the oldest colonies on the West Coast, Sierra Leone. The Negroes in the actual colony are some of the most advanced in education and should be grouped with those of the West Indies rather than with those in Central or Eastern Africa. Freetown, the capital, for instance, was until recent years a municipality. The hinterland is, however, a protectorate where the less developed Africans are governed by the method of indirect rule.
At the end of the last century there were two Negro communities, one with its own press, barristers-at-law, doctors and other intelligentsia, and on the other hand the natives in the interior, the new A
frica and the old. These two communities were divided. Those with generations of British education had an outlook similar to that of the majority of Negroes in the West Indies: they regarded the African tribes as barbarous and uncivilized. The African tribes looked upon these Europeanized blacks as black white men. In 1898 a revolt burst in the protectorate. The natives resented the paying of the poll tax and the Mendi, a famous fighting tribe, had a special grievance of their own: they objected to corporal punishment. So much did they oppose it, that they would not send their children to the missionary schools where the missionaries sometimes beat them. The tribes completely wiped out some battalions of West Indian blacks who were sent against them, and it is claimed by Negroes who were in Sierra Leone at the time that certain white battalions were also completely destroyed. The great massacres of government soldiers took place at Sherbro and Mofeno. The revolt was of course put down, many hundreds of natives being killed. The insurgents killed not only white and black soldiers and every missionary they could put their hands on, but also certain of the Europeanized blacks as well. They looked upon all of these as members of one exploiting, arrogant group. The war, however, has marked the beginning of a change.
The conflict of capital and labor is intensified by the fact that capital is usually white and labor black; this in a continent where the whites have always sought to justify their economic exploitation and social privilege by the mere fact of difference of color. The class conflict, bitter enough in countries where the population is homogeneous in color, has an added bitterness in Africa, which has been strengthened by the growth of nationalism among the post-war intelligentsia. The politically conscious minority increasingly realize that their future is with the developing Africans rather than with the European traders. Further, they are Africans in Africa—not the descendants of Africans, as in the West Indies. The result is a growing solidarity between the blacks, chiefly workers in the colony and the more untutored Africans in the protectorate. Black politicians in the colony attribute the ill-feeling in 1898 to white propaganda aimed at dividing potential allies, and they have common ground in that they are Negroes in a continent where to be black is to be inferior. It is against this background that we must see more recent movements in Sierra Leone and Gambia.
In 1919, there was a railway strike in Sierra Leone. The railway workers attempted to get other workers to join with them and were joined by over 2,000 police striking for higher wages. In 1926 there was another railway strike and the workers again attempted to make the strike general and to win over the police. The strikers showed an extraordinary militancy. They removed the rails in front of the manager’s train. They attacked it with sticks. They removed or loosened the rails on curves or steep banks and at the approach to a bridge, pulled down telegraph poles and cut wires to prevent telegraphic communication with the protectorate. In the words of the Governor, “it was a revolt against the state by its servants.” The municipality supported the strike and the native press hinted at rebellion, whereupon the Governor suppressed the municipality. We have here a very sharp division between the African laborers and the employers in industry, mostly white.
In Gambia, a colony that is usually grouped with Sierra Leone, the seamen are organized and in 1929 a sailors’ strike lasted forty days and then grew into a general strike. At the same time, the farmers, hostile over the low prices paid for their products, carried on strenuous agitation. The people were fired upon and nearly fifty were wounded. After three weeks of the general strike, the Colonial Secretary addressed a letter to the Union seeking arbitration. The Government finally combined with the employers to defeat the strike. This was not a revolt, but shows the capacity for organized action which has developed in these older colonies, while an outbreak which took place in Sierra Leone in February 1931, shows the possibility of revolts infinitely more dangerous than any that have hitherto taken place. Hundreds of Negroes from the protectorate, led by an armed battalion of fifty men, invaded the Kambia district. The leader was Hahilara, a Negro Muslim leader who had converted thousands of natives to Mohammedanism, with which he united anti-imperialism. Hahilara called upon the peasants to refuse to pay taxes and to drive away the British officials. He demanded that all Crown lands in the protectorate should be confiscated and divided among the landless peasants. This was social revolution. Hahilara’s agitation had widespread support. The Government attempted to arrest him, but the Negroes threatened to kill all Europeans who entered their territory. Government soldiers invaded the territory, and Hahilara was defeated and killed. But Captain H. J. Holmes, the officer commanding the British troops, was also killed. Hundreds of native huts were burnt to the ground and the rising was suppressed.
Yet perhaps the most significant feature of the revolt was the attitude of the Negro press in the colony, which emphasized the grievances of the insurgents in the protectorate. Sympathy among the intellectuals of Sierra Leone for the natives was widespread and the Sierra Leone workers were solid with the tribesmen. Should there be at any time a movement of the organized and educated blacks in the colony with a widespread peasant revolt in the protectorate, it would be difficult to prevent the Negroes of Sierra Leone and Gambia from gaining possession of the colony, though whether they would be able to keep it would depend upon events in other and wider spheres.
In Nigeria, a colony similar in social structure to Sierre Leone and Gambia, the crisis which began in 1929 produced the extraordinary women’s revolt in which over fifty women were killed and over fifty wounded. The fall of prices for agrarian commodities placed the finances of the colony in difficulties, and the Government attempted to recuperate its falling revenues by an increase in direct taxation. Indirect rule works for the most part through chiefs, many of whom are merely instruments of the British Government. The chiefs were instructed to impose a tax upon the women whereupon the slumbering discontent broke out. Thousands of women organized protest demonstrations against the Government and its chiefs and at Aba, the capital of the Eastern Province, the women who sold in the market, faced with the possibility of a tax which would destroy their small profits, organized a revolt. The writer is informed by Africans from Nigeria that the actual happenings in Aba have been suppressed in all official reports. The women seized public buildings and held them for days. The servants refused to cook for their white masters and mistresses and some of them made the attempt to bring the European women by force into the markets to give them some experience of what work was like. These saved themselves only by precipitate flight, some of them with only the clothes they had on their backs. A detachment of soldiers suppressed the revolt, shooting at the black women as they tried to escape across the river. Martial law was proclaimed and the Governor called a meeting of the African editors in Lagos and threatened them with imprisonment if they published news of what was happening at Aba. That is why written evidence is confined to the official reports. A local committee of investigation was appointed and issued a report which was approved by the Legislative Council. Mr. Drummond Shiels, the labor Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, in answer to a question in the House of Commons replied that “the Colonial Office was satisfied that the officials on the spot acted in the best interest of the country.” But the publication of the report was the signal for a widespread agitation throughout the colony. Mass meetings denounced it. The workers threatened to refuse to pay taxes; demanded a new commission, and redress of their economic and political grievances. The Government was forced to appoint another commission. The Negroes threatened to boycott it unless Africans were appointed and the Government was forced to appoint two. This commission admitted economic grievances and suggested measures of reform. The Governor, however, imposed a fine of £850 on the town of Aba. Such was the resentment aroused that the political officers appealed to the Governor to withdraw the fine, and again the Governor had to capitulate.
The strength and vigor of the movement were a shock to the Europeans. Sir Frank Baddeley, the Colonial Secretary of Nigeria, found th
at the revolt was the work of the agents of Moscow. The Times Correspondent, however, gave a more sober estimate:
The trouble was of a nature and extent unprecedented in Nigeria. In a country where the women throughout the centuries have remained in subjection to the men, this was eventually a women’s movement, organized, developed and carried out by the women, without either the help or commission of their menfolk, though probably with their tacit sympathy.
Religious Revolts in New Colonies
The risings in Sierra Leone and Gambia are of a dual type. While the Negroes in the protectorates when driven to action think in terms of social revolution, those in the towns, like the majority of workers in Europe or America, aim at redress of immediate grievances, violent though their methods may be. Trade unions, the municipalities, the African press, have all given the movement its organized force, but of necessity make it more conservative.
In Eastern and Central Africa, more primitive territories, we have had during the last thirty years a series of risings of an entirely different type. In the years before the war, the tribes simply threw themselves at the government troops and suffered the inevitable defeat. Such risings could not go on. They were too obviously suicidal. In 1915, however, we have a new type—a rising led not by a tribal chief but by a Negro who has had some education. Such education as the African is given is nearly always religious, so that the leader often translated the insurrection into religious terms.
The Chilembwe rising in Nyasaland in 1915 was of this character. The first Europeans to arrive in Nyasaland were missionaries sent out by the Church of Scotland. Soon after, many of them left the mission for the land which they had acquired from the native chiefs. They set up as coffee planters, converting the natives jointly to Christianity and to cheap labor. By 1915, these plantations had passed into the hands of syndicates whose sole object was to make the maximum profit. Within these plantations which covered an area of 300 square miles and employed tens of thousands of Negroes, the companies permitted no school, no hospital and no missions.
A History of Pan-African Revolt (The Charles H. Kerr Library) Page 8