The Xenophile Historian

Chapter 7: THE DARK CONTINENT PARTITIONED

1795 to 1914

	Great Britain Comes to South Africa
	The Napoleonic Gambit
	The Fulani Jihads
	"To the Shores of Tripoli"
	The Golden Age of African Exploration Begins
	Shaka Zulu
	Madagascar: The Merina Monarchy
	Mohammed Ali Modernizes Egypt
	The Abolitionist Triumph
	France Invades Algeria
	Aftershocks of the Mfecane
	The Great Trek
	David Livingstone
	The Quest for the Source of the Nile
	Egypt in Bondage
	The Mahdist Revolt
	Abyssinia Regenerates
	The Zulu War
	The "Scramble for Africa," Part I
	From the Cape to Cairo
	"Heart of Darkness"
	From Dakar to Djibouti
	The Boer War
	Libya and Morocco: The Last Unturned Stones
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This changed with the long, on-and-off conflict that lasted from 1789 to 1815, known in European history textbooks as the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. As France conquered first the Netherlands, and then Spain and Portugal, Britain began using the Royal Navy to pick off the overseas colonies of those nations, lest their resources be used in what London feared the most, a cross-channel invasion of England. The results were dramatic on opposite ends of the African continent, in South Africa and Egypt. Britain got involved in South Africa when Prince William, the exiled Dutch leader, asked the British to take over the administration of the Cape Colony before it fell into the hands of the French, so the Royal Navy sailed in and occupied Cape Town in 1795. They gave it back during a cease-fire between Britain and France in 1803, but soon after that the war started up again, so in 1806 the British sent sixty-three ships and 6,700 men to overwhelm Cape Town's defending militia of Dutch burghers and Hottentots. This time the occupation was more permanent; after the war Britain kept South Africa, half of Guyana, Sri Lanka and the Malayan outposts of Malacca and Penang, while returning Java to the Dutch and giving them Belgium and £6,000,000 as compensation.

In Britain's new colony, relations between the Boers and the Xhosa remained poor. The population of the Xhosa and Nguni tribes was still rapidly growing in the Natal region, and when a new conflict over pastureland and cattle broke out (the Third Kaffir War, 1799-1802), the Xhosa crossed the Great Fish River and found allies among the Hottentots, who deserted their Boer masters and brought guns and horses with them. Great Britain was too busy with the Napoleonic Wars to act effectively in South Africa, so it made concessions to the Hottentots that brought them back over to their side, and for the time being the British ignored the Xhosa squatters on the Zuurveld, an eighty-mile-wide stretch of land west of the Great Fish River.

Maybe the Boer farmers resented Dutch authorities telling them what to do, but soon they decided they liked the British even less. The British governor would have preferred to leave South African society alone--he even kept several middle-level Dutch officials in their jobs--because anything else would have meant more work to do. Instead, missionaries with Abolitionist sympathies came to the colony, and they called for treating the natives more fairly than they had been treated up to this point. By this time, the Boers had come to see Hottentots, Bushmen and Xhosas as inferior beings, created by God to be their servants, and lost many of their Hottentot workers when they took refuge in mission stations (the missionaries treated the natives better, and thus were viewed by the farmers as troublemakers who stole their help). When London outlawed the slave trade in 1807, and started arming Hottentot soldiers to enforce its rule, the Boers thought Britain was going to destroy their way of life completely.

The truth was that the governor of Cape Town, Sir John Craddock, wanted more than anything else to keep the peace. Instead, he got thousands of Xhosa swarming across the Great Fish River to find new pastures on the Zuurveld. In response, he ordered Lieutenant Colonel John Graham to do whatever was necessary to drive the Xhosa back. The resulting conflict, the Fourth Kaffir War (1811), was a complete success; by destroying their villages and crops wholesale, Graham forced the Xhosa to leave, going back across the Great Fish to face almost certain starvation. Then he tried to secure the frontier with a string of forts and two new villages named Craddock and Grahamstown. Even so, the Xhosa, now more desperate than ever, could still raid the Zuurveld, and in the Fifth Kaffir War (1818-19), they almost captured Grahamstown before they were defeated again. This time the British declared the territory between the Great Fish and Great Kei Rivers to be "no man's land," but this policy was doomed to failure, because it declared off-limits a piece of land that both sides badly wanted. In fact, British settlers started moving into this neutral zone before long.

In 1820, a fleet of ships carrying 3,500 British settlers arrived at Algoa Bay, a spot on the coast nearly a hundred miles west of the Great Fish River's mouth. Follow-up expeditions increased this number to 5,000. These were unemployed, desperately poor people, who had been lured to leave Britain by an economic depression at home, and a promise of free passage and 100 acres of land to each of those who went. This was really a continuation of the policy London had used to colonize North America and Australia--get rid of those it didn't want by relocating them overseas. What the colonists didn't know that their destination was a war zone (the author of the advertisements had only written about a "misunderstanding" between previous settlers and the Africans), and the government expected them to pacify it. Thus, they were ill-prepared, inexperienced, and ridiculously optimistic about their new homes. They tried to grow crops on land better suited for herding, and failed (even the Boers called this land "sour country"); most of them eventually sold their land and moved to the towns, where they either ended up working for someone else if they had useful skills, or sank into wretched poverty if they didn't. Nevertheless, their presence tipped the balance of power in favor of the Europeans; the number of Europeans on the Zuurveld had increased by 50%, and the total number of English-speakers in the colony had doubled. They also were the first to successfully breed Merino sheep, something the Boers had refused to try, giving the colony an important new export.⁽¹⁾

The Napoleonic Gambit

Nobody seems to have thought much about what to do next, except for Admiral Nelson, who in August sailed into Aboukir Bay and blew the French fleet to bits.⁽²⁾ Bonaparte tried marching into Asia, got as far as Acre in Israel before a lack of supplies and a determined defense forced him to return, and hung around in Egypt until October 1799, when he saw an opportunity to sneak back to France on a frigate. His soldiers surrendered to the British, and two years later they were allowed to go home under a truce.

Though the military campaign was a fiasco, the "wise men" who accompanied the soldiers scored a real success, by rekindling the world's interest in Egypt's ancient civilization. They drew pictures of nearly everything they saw, and brought back many artifacts, the most important being the Rosetta Stone (see Chapter 2). Knowledge of what the Egyptians had accomplished had been forgotten over the millennia, to the point that by 1800 little was known about Egypt, aside from what travelers could see on top of the sands and from what had been written in ancient works like the Bible and The Histories of Herodotus. One thing neoclassical scholars were certain about was that Egypt was old, perhaps older than any other nation. Bonaparte was remarkably close to the truth when he pointed to the pyramids of Giza and told his men, "Soldiers! From the summit of yonder pyramids forty centuries look down upon you." With the translation of hieroglyphics a generation later, an important chapter in mankind's early history was restored.

The Fulani Jihads

The most successful Fulani leader, Usman dan Fodio (1754-1817), was born in the Hausa state of Gobir, in what is now northern Nigeria. A member of the Qadiriyya, a Tuareg brotherhood, he went to the oasis of Agades to complete his education, and when he returned he became tutor to Yunfa, the son and heir of Nafata, Gobir's ruler. From that position he called for religious reform, and promised that the Mahdi would be coming soon after him, but when Yunfa succeeded his father in 1801, he lost whatever interest he had in dan Fodio's ideas. Shortly after that, Yunfa summoned dan Fodio and tried to shoot him, but the pistol backfired and he wounded his own hand. The disappointed teacher withdrew to his native village, and so many followers went with him that Yunfa threatened military action. In response, Usman dan Fodio retreated even further, to the Gudu district (1804), announced that he was re-enacting Mohammed's hegira or flight from Mecca to Medina, and gained still more followers, until he had a formidable army. With this he declared a jihad, and enjoyed rapid success, as all who disliked the half-pagan Hausa rulers joined the movement. In 1808 he killed Yunfa in battle, and captured Ngazargamu, the capital of Bornu; by 1809 he had conquered not only all of Hausaland (a Fulani emir now replaced the Hausa king in each city), but also much of the surrounding territory, reaching as far as Adamawa in the Cameroon mts. His only defeat was in the east, where he was driven out of Bornu in 1811 by Muhammad al-Kanemi, the cleric-turned-warrior who currently ran that country.⁽³⁾

In the forest zone, the Fulani empire included Ilorin, the northern half of the Oyo kingdom. This was not a conquest so much as an annexation; Fulani agents and their ideas infiltrated Oyo until many of its citizens decided they would like to see a change of masters. In 1817 several Oyo chiefs, led by Afonja of Ilorin, sent an empty calabash to Aole, the king of Oyo, signifying that they would no longer pay tribute. Aole cursed his former vassals before committing suicide, and the kingdom quickly disintegrated. Ibadan arose to become the most important Yoruba city after this, but it never completely replaced Oyo, so neighbors like Dahomey and Benin saw these events as the elimination of a rival.

Usman dan Fodio eventually grew tired of conquering, being more of a scholar than a king or general, so he built a new capital at Sokoto and settled down. His son and heir, Muhammad Bello (1817-37), enjoyed a peaceful reign, because the Fulani lost their religious zeal after they became a new ruling class. However, by this time they had also planted a successful missionary enterprise in the west. In 1810 Hamadu Bari (also known as Ahmadu Lobo), one of dan Fodio's early followers, led an army to his homeland on the middle Niger, and drove the Bambara out of the area between Jenné and Timbuktu; this became a new Fulani kingdom, known as Masina.

The fiercest jihad of all came from the Fulani homeland of Senegal, and was led by a cleric named Umar (1797-1864), a native of the state of Futa Toro. At the age of 29, he made his pilgrimage to Mecca, joined the Tijaniyya brotherhood before returning, spent a considerable amount of time on the way back in Bornu, Sokoto, and Masina, and even married the sister of Muhammad Bello. Now called Al-Hajj Umar (Umar the Pilgrim), he finally settled in Futa Jallon in 1837, gathered a number of followers, and armed them with European-made guns. In 1849 he was forced to leave, so he moved to the Tukulor tribe, turned their state into a theocracy, and three years later he launched his jihad, first attacking the two Bambara kingdoms because they were still pagan. Over the course of the following decade, he built an empire on the upper reaches of the Niger and Senegal Rivers, called the Tukulor empire. He also conquered Khasso, and would have taken Futa Toro next, but his advance to the west ran into the French advancing east.⁽⁴⁾ The troops of Umar and the French governor of St. Louis, Louis Faidherbe, clashed in 1857, and while the Fulani stopped the French from going any farther, they failed to take Medine, the newest French fort, and Futa Toro fell to the French. Then Umar negotiated a treaty with Faidherbe, and turned his attention back eastward. He finished off the Bambara by taking Segu in 1861, and overran Masina a year later. By 1863 he had also captured Timbuktu, but there he reached his limits; the local Tuaregs joined the Fulani of Masina in a revolt, and Umar was killed defending Hamdallahi, his capital, from the rebels, in February 1864. His son, Ahmadu, spent the next ten years just establishing his right to rule the entire empire. And because the French now had Futa Toro, the ancestral home of the Tukulor rulers and many of their warriors, an observer could expect a rematch between the French and Tukulors, since their first conflict hadn't really settled anything.

"To the Shores of Tripoli"

We also noted previously that the Barbary pirates, who had once provided a major source of income for all of the Maghreb states, stopped being a threat to European shipping in the eighteenth century. However, they were still dangerous to the infant United States, which at this stage didn't have a navy strong enough to protect American ships in the Mediterranean. Before 1776, American ships were safe because they flew the Union Jack of Great Britain, and the French navy provided protection during the American Revolution. That all ended, however, when Britain recognized the independence of its former Atlantic seaboard colonies in 1783. One year later the United States Congress authorized the payment of tribute to the pirates. This protection scheme lasted for fifteen years; US payments in tribute and ransom money reached as much as $1 million per year, 20 percent of the US government's annual revenue in 1800.

Thomas Jefferson had always opposed these payments, arguing that they encouraged the Barbary pirates and their patrons to go for bigger prizes. His opinion was put to the test as soon as he became president in 1801; Yusuf Qaramanli demanded a new payment of $225,000, and showed he meant business by chopping down the flagstaff of the US Consulate. Jefferson refused, and all four of the Barbary states, led by Tripoli, declared war. This conflict, known either as the First Barbary War or the Tripolitan War (1801-05), would be the first time that United States forces saw overseas activity; in fact, the Americans were motivated by some of the same factors that would cause them to wage war against terrorism in the twenty-first century.

Algiers and Tunis backed down when a squadron of American frigates appeared off their shores, but Tripoli and Morocco remained committed to the conflict. The Americans were never seriously challenged at sea, and the fleet commander, Commodore Edward Preble, blockaded the Barbary ports and raided the enemy fleets. The Tripolitans enjoyed one victory in October 1803, when a storm drove an American ship, the Philadelphia, aground in Tripoli's harbor; the locals captured it, held its crew hostage, and began converting the ship for their own use. Four months later the Americans retaliated in a daring raid; a disguised ship, the Intrepid, sneaked into the harbor with a group of sailors, led by Lieutenant Stephen Decatur, and they burned the Philadelphia before the Tripolitans could use it against them. In July 1804 Preble sent the Intrepid back to Tripoli, this time as a fire ship full of explosives. The plan was to blow up the Intrepid in the middle of the enemy fleet, but it was destroyed, either by accident or by enemy guns, before it reached its target.

In March 1805, the American consul William Eaton launched a land campaign against Tripoli, marching from Alexandria with eight United States Marines, 38 Greeks, 300 Berber mercenaries, and Yusuf Qaramanli's brother Hamed, who would become the new pasha if the little army succeeded. They advanced 600 miles, captured the port of Derna, and got as far as Benghazi before they received news that the war was over.⁽⁵⁾ The expedition was technically a failure, but it earned immortality in the opening line of the US Marines' Hymn: "From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli."

Jefferson and the pasha of Tripoli signed a treaty ending the war in June 1805; the US Senate delayed ratification of the treaty for a year, because it still required that the United States pay ransom for sailors taken hostage by Algiers. In fact, many Christian nations continued to pay tribute to Tripoli, though the Americans no longer did. All that the First Barbary War did was show that the United States was able and willing to protect its interests, even thousands of miles from home. In 1807, the Algerians resumed the practice of capturing American ships and holding them and their crews for ransom. By this time, the Americans were distracted by deteriorating relations with both the French and the British, culminating in the War of 1812, so Algiers was put on the back burner for the time being. After the War of 1812 began, the British navy expelled American ships from the Mediterranean, and the dey of Algiers declared war on the United States for failing to pay its required tribute.

America couldn't do anything about the Barbary challenge until 1815, after the War of 1812 had ended. The Second Barbary War went much quicker than the first, lasting only three months. A force of ten ships, under the command of two heroes from the first war, Commodore Stephen Decatur and Commodore William Bainbridge (the captain of the Philadelphia), battered the Algerian fleet and killed its admiral off the coast of Spain, and captured hundreds of prisoners in an attack on Algiers itself. This was all the North Africans could take, and in June Decatur bargained for a treaty where Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli agreed to pay $81,000 in reparations, and to stop demanding any future bribes, whether or not they were called tribute. There was a tense moment when the dey's officials begged Decatur to keep on sending a small amount of gunpowder as tribute, and Decatur warned that it would come to them from a cannon: "If you insist on receiving powder as tribute, you must expect to receive BALLS with it."

The Barbary pirates would not give the Americans any more trouble, but as soon as Decatur left, the dey renounced the treaty. This prompted an Anglo-Dutch fleet to come to Algiers in the following year, and nine hours of bombardment was enough to cripple the dey's corsairs and extract from him a second treaty, in which British tribute payments were reduced to an annual £600 fee for consular privileges, and the dey agreed to stop enslaving Christians. However, this would not end European interest in North Africa; in the case of the French, European involvement was just beginning.

The Golden Age of African Exploration Begins

". . . geographers, in Afric-maps,
With savage-pictures fill their gaps,
And o'er uninhabitable downs
Place elephants for want of towns."

They had a very good reason to stay away--Africa's diseases and parasites, especially malaria. Mortality was worst in West Africa, where typically malaria killed half of the Europeans who came ashore every year. Going inland didn't increase your chances, either--once you got past the disease-ridden jungles on the coast, there were fierce Moslem tribes, most of them implacably hostile to Christians. Europeans came to call West Africa the "White Man's Grave," and warned of the danger with verses like this:

"Beware, beware, the Bight of Benin,
For few come out, though many go in."

The main exception to this rule was the Anglo-Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope, which was far enough below the tropics to allow a European-style settlement to grow and prosper. The Portuguese were also doing fairly well in Angola and Mozambique; after living there for three hundred years, they had produced a disease-resistant mulatto community that numbered 3,000 by the mid-nineteenth century. However, they kept to the coast, because the Portuguese government discouraged travel in the interior, feeling that this should be left to the pombeiros, black and mulatto agents who knew how to get along with the natives. Typically, the pombeiros in both Angola and Mozambique would lead caravans 300 to 400 miles inland, to a garrisoned marketplace called a feira, where Africans would bring their goods to trade with the Portuguese. Then when finished, everyone returned to their homes. What this meant was that there were still 800 miles of completely unexplored territory between the innermost feiras. One of the first to try crossing the gap was Francisco de Lacerda, who had previously explored the Cunene River, in southern Angola (1787). In 1798 he went up the Zambezi from Mozambique; he made it to the capital of Mwata Kazembe, the most important of the interior kingdoms that Portugal traded with, but then died near Lake Mweru, and his expedition turned back. It was two pombeiros, Pedra Baptista and Amaro Jose', who succeeded in making the crossing by going in the opposite direction, from the Bihe' Plateau of Angola to the Zambezi (1814).

Just how dangerous Africa could be was shown by the British explorers who tried to map the Niger River. It wasn't only the Zambezi whose course was largely unknown; Europeans didn't know much about any major rivers in Africa. Consequently, one of the goals of the early explorers was to find out where the Niger went, and where the Nile and Congo came from. In 1791 Daniel Houghton followed the Gambia River to its source, crossed the Senegal River, and was lured into the desert by the local tribesmen; they stole his possessions and left him there to die. Four years later, the Scotsman Mungo Park arrived. He followed Houghton's trail to the place where the natives disposed of him, and at nearby Benown he was captured. After being held prisoner for three months, he escaped and made his way southeast. He found the Niger River at Segu in 1796, traveled 80 miles downstream to Silla, and returned to Europe because his supplies were exhausted. Back in Great Britain, Park published an account of his trip, Travels in the Interior of Africa (1799), which is still in print.

In 1805 Park tried again. This time he brought a platoon of British soldiers, knowing that he would be killed if the Moslems captured him again. The soldiers brought boat-building supplies, and the plan was to buy or build a boat at Segu, get it into the middle of the Niger, and follow the stream all the way to the sea without going ashore; the forty-six muskets of the soldiers would be enough firepower to deal with anyone who tried to stop them. The only problem with the plan was that Park's companions had not been in Africa long enough to acquire the resistance to malaria that he had. Most of the soldiers died on the march to Segu; by the time Park got his boat, he did not need a large one, because only four soldiers were still alive. Still, once the boat was launched, they managed to navigate the river for a thousand miles, until Park and his company drowned in the Bussa rapids of Nigeria, while escaping a native attack. Ironically, the attackers were a non-Moslem tribe that mistook him for a Moslem invader. His journal from the first part of the second expedition was published in 1815, with a postscript from his African servant Isaaco, but he had not reached the end of the Niger River, so people still speculated about that. Did it keep on going east until it reached the Nile, as medieval Arabs had believed? Did it go into the large delta on the Slave Coast that contemporary Europeans called the Oil Rivers? Did it curve south through Cameroon to join the Congo (Park's view)? Or did it flow into Lake Chad, without its waters reaching the ocean at all?

Four subsequent expeditions to the Sahel failed to trace the rest of the Niger's course. A fifth one, led by Richard and John Lander, finally succeeded (1830-32). Landing at the Bight of Benin, they marched due north until they reached the Niger at the Bussa rapids. Then they followed the river all the way to the sea. This proved once and for all that the Niger wasn't a tributary for any other river, and that the Niger and the Oil Rivers were the same stream. There were a few questions about a river the Lander brothers discovered, the Benue, which flows into the lower Niger from the east; to some it looked like it came out of Lake Chad. This was solved by two other explorers, an Englishman named James Richardson and a German named Heinrich Barth. Starting from Tripoli in 1849, they headed south across the Sahara until they reached Lake Chad, where Richardson died. Taking command, Barth led an excursion south to find the source of the Benue, then moved westward, exploring the middle section of the Niger as far as Timbuktu (1852-53). This showed that no river flowed out of Lake Chad, and the Chari was the only significant river flowing in.

By this time, a solution had been found for the malaria problem. In 1847 a British naval surgeon discovered that a daily dose of quinine reduced the effects of sub-tertial malaria, the deadliest type of that disease. The effectiveness of this drug was shown in 1854, when a twelve-man team sailed up the Niger and Benue Rivers and back without losing anybody, something that would have been impossible previously. When Europeans began to routinely equip themselves with medikits containing quinine, Africa lost its first line of defense.

Shaka Zulu

At the center of the storm was the Nguni tribe. To protect themselves and their cattle, the Nguni united under a single chief, Dingiswayo of the Mthethwa clan. Dingiswayo rose to the top because he was a skilled and innovative leader, who organized his warriors into impis (regiments), and gave each impi distinctive clothing with matching shields. However, one of his officers was even better at those skills--Shaka, who came from a minor clan called the Zulus.

The son of Senzangakhona, the Zulu chief, Shaka was expelled from the clan, along with his mother Nandi, when the marriage between Senzangakhona and Nandi failed. They went to live with the Langeni, Nandi's clan, but there they were less welcome than with the Zulus. Shaka grew up bitter and lonely among people who despised and tormented both the single mom and the fatherless child. When he got the chance, he left to become a herder for the Mthethwa, and later joined Dingiswayo's army. Here he found an outlet for his frustrations, and did so well in fighting that he rose rapidly in the ranks. Dingiswayo liked Shaka, so when Shaka's father died in 1816, Dingiswayo ordered the assassination of Sigujana, Senzangakhona's chosen heir, and made Shaka chief of the Zulus. The first thing Shaka did as chief was get revenge on those responsible for his tough childhood, ordering the massacre of many Langeni. Two years later, Dingiswayo was in turn killed by a tribe that refused to submit to his authority, and in the civil war that followed, Shaka first seized control of the Mthethwa, then eliminated the ruling families of most of the other clans, and added their people and resources to his own. As a result, the tables were completely turned; the Nguni became part of the Zulu tribe, and have remained so ever since.

Military innovations were the key to Shaka's success. He imposed far more discipline on his impis then Dingiswayo had, forcing warriors to march barefoot (in land that is often thorny) most of the time, and forbidding them to marry until they had distinguished themselves in battle or their term of service ended. Each regiment was divided into four formations, named after the parts of a bull: the main body of troops was called the "chest," two bodies called the left and right "horns" ran ahead to outflank the enemy, and a reserve force called the "loins" was under orders to hold back until the other three were engaged in combat. Up to this point, African warfare was mainly a matter of getting close enough to an enemy to throw spears; casualties tended to be light, with most of those on the losing side living to fight another day. Shaka thought this way of fighting was ridiculous, and replaced the assegai with a short, wide-bladed spear which couldn't be thrown, forcing warriors to charge and stab an enemy in hand-to-hand combat. He called the new weapon an iKlwa, after the sound it made when pulled from a corpse, and added a larger shield, which the warriors could use to knock an opponent off balance. Putting all this together turned the Zulu army into an efficient killing machine, which no other tribe could beat; soon the non-Zulu tribes were fleeing the Natal region, trying to put as much distance between them and the Zulus as possible.⁽⁶⁾

As Shaka's power grew, so did his cruelty. Rarely a day went by when he didn't show how little regard he had for human life; to sneeze in his presence or give him a dirty look ran the risk of getting killed on the spot. Once he ordered two thousand warriors to prove their loyalty by marching into the sea; they feared him so much that they obeyed--and were drowned. Nor was he much kinder to women. He never had a child, out of fear that an heir would someday turn against him, but he kept a harem of as many as 1,200 women, and on one occasion he came back unexpectedly early from a journey and had 170 young men and women put to death on a suspicion of adultery.

The only people he felt generous toward were the Europeans, since at this stage they could not be a threat to his kingdom. In 1824 he allowed a small group of Englishmen and Hottentots to build a settlement at Port Natal. They were soon joined by "coloreds," renegade Zulus, and refugees from the Mfecane. The settlement was too far away to receive help from the Cape Colony, so it only existed at Shaka's pleasure, and the settlers did whatever they could to stay on the Zulu king's good side. Shaka didn't fear the single-shot muskets and rifles currently used by white hunters and soldiers; in the time it took a European to reload his gun, he reasoned, a Zulu warrior could easily run up and dispatch him with a spear. Still they were useful in finishing off his enemies, so Shaka used the Europeans as mercenaries, and gave them grants of land and cattle in return. Most of what we now know about Shaka, in fact, comes from the accounts of two white adventurers who learned to speak the Zulu language fluently, Henry Francis Fynn and Nathaniel Isaacs.

While on a hunt with some Europeans in 1827, Shaka received news that his mother was dying. Nandi's death caused him to become completely unhinged. To be sure that there would be mourning, he ordered a general massacre that didn't stop until 7,000 were dead. Then for a year he wouldn't allow the planting of crops, and banned the consumption of milk, as if he was trying to starve his own people. All pregnant women were slain with their husbands, and even a considerable number of cows were killed, so that calves might know what it was like to lose a mother.

After that, Shaka had made so many enemies that things could only go downhill from there. A diplomatic mission to the British at the Cape, with Nathaniel Isaacs as the Zulu ambassador, was an embarrassing failure; London didn't want anything to do with a chap who had caused so much trouble. In 1828 he sent the impis on a raid that went south all the way to the borders of the Cape Colony, and when they returned, he sent them on another raid just as far to the north, instead of giving them the rest they expected. This was two much for the warriors, and on September 24, 1828, two of Shaka's half-brothers, Dingane and Mhlangana, assassinated the king, threw his body into empty grain storage pit, and filled it with stones.

Dingane now seized the throne, but neither him nor any subsequent Zulu kings ruled as effectively as Shaka did. According to one story, Shaka's last words were directed to his murderers: "You will not rule this country, the white people have already arrived."⁽⁷⁾ It took another fifty years for Europeans to take over the Natal region, but otherwise Shaka was right.

Madagascar: The Merina Monarchy

Adrianampoinimerina, the founder of Madagascar's dominant state, commanded his son Radama to "take the sea as frontier for your kingdom." Radama worked hard to do just that, conquering the Antaimoro kingdom on the east coast and winning the submission of his main rival, Betsileo. By the end of Radama's short reign (1810-28), two thirds of Madagascar was under Merina control, the exceptions being the southern coastal region, which is the most barren part of the island, and the Boina kingdom in the northwest. In 1817 he signed two treaties with Great Britain, accepting British money and arms in exchange for abolishing the slave trade on Madagascar. He also allowed British missionaries to come into the country, who had the side benefit of introducing the Latin alphabet when they translated the Bible into the Malagasy language, making modern education possible.

Those who hadn't converted to Christianity, especially the pagan priests and much of the upper class, felt threatened by the new religion and the young educated men it produced, so when Radama was succeeded by his wife Ranavalona I (1828-61), the first of several Malagasy matriarchs, a reactionary trend set in. She cancelled the treaties with Great Britain, ended trade with the French, and ordered the missionaries to leave; many Christians were killed in the persecution that followed.

Naturally the British and the French were upset at being locked out. To show they weren't going to go away quietly, the French bombarded and occupied the eastern port of Tamatave in 1829; in 1841 they took Mayotte in the Comoros (which had been conquered a few years earlier by Boina's King Adriansouli), and the offshore island of Nosy Bé. Queen Ranavalona wouldn't yield, and suspended all overseas commerce, except with the United States. However, she wasn't a total xenophobe, and kept a few foreign advisors around to modernize the country. The most remarkable of these was a Frenchman, Jean Laborde, who built a center for manufacturing and agricultural research at Mantasoa, near Antananarivo; eventually it employed 20,000 workers producing guns, glass, soap, silk, tools and cement.

In 1853 the Europeans paid Ranavalona $15,000 in compensation, and she lifted the trade ban, only to see foreigners, local Christians and others plot a coup against her. Ranavalona headed them off by stepping down in 1857, naming her son Radama II as her successor. However, Radama was too peaceful and pro-European; he only lasted two years after his mother's death in 1861. He signed treaties with the British and French that gave them exemptions from tariffs and other duties, and promised perpetual friendship with France. Then he tried to remove the leaders of two prominent clans, but instead the nobility strangled him, and crowned his wife, Rasoherina, in his place.

The new ruler, however, was a queen in name only; real power went to the pro-European majority in her council, especially the prime minister, who promptly married her. One year later, he was overthrown by his brother, the army commander Rainilaiarivony, who became the next prime minister, and secured his position by marrying the queen, and both of the queens that came after her, Ranavalona II (1868-83) and Ranavalona III (1883-97). The missionaries returned, and Rainilaiarivony became a Protestant Christian in 1868, followed by the queen a year later. By the 1880s Roman Catholic missionaries from France were also active, there were more than 150,000 Christians in Madagascar, and the percentage of children attending school in Madagascar was almost as high as in Europe. But the old pagan beliefs and customs, like the Merina festival of Famadihana (the digging up, rewrapping, and reburial of the bones of the dead), survived, and are still practiced even today.

Mohammed Ali

Mohammed Ali made sure that the mostly Albanian soldiers were more loyal to him than to the distant sultan, and used them to make himself the most powerful man in Cairo. In 1805 he won the sultan's recognition as viceroy or governor of Egypt, but his position was still threatened by the previous rulers, the Mamelukes. In 1811 the sultan, Mahmud II, called for his help in putting down a rebellion on the other side of the Red Sea, that of the Wahhabis. Mohammed Ali couldn't send troops until he solved the Mameluke problem, so he did it in a characteristically ruthless fashion, eliminating them as a social class; he invited 470 Mameluke leaders to a banquet, and had his soldiers massacre them after they ate.⁽⁸⁾ In Arabia, Mohammed Ali's troops proved to be better than those of the sultan; first they secured the holy cities, Mecca and Medina, then they invaded the Wahhabi home base in the interior. By 1818 most of Arabia was under their control, the main exceptions being the Rub al-Khali ("Empty Quarter") and Oman.

Next on Mohammed Ali's busy agenda was the conquest of the Sudan. In 1820 his son Ismail led a small force of 4,000 men up the Nile, which captured Dongola (see the previous footnote), and went on to overthrow the Sultanate of Funj in 1821.⁽⁹⁾ At the junction of the Blue and White Niles, they founded the city of Khartoum, which became Egypt's base of operations in the new territories. Nearly 400 miles south of Khartoum, further progress was delayed by the Shilluk, a small tribe with a centralized kingdom. The Shilluk were finally overcome in a series of expeditions between 1839 and 1841, led by a Turkish sea captain named Selim. The next obstacle after that was the Sudd, Africa's greatest swamp. Up to this point no boats had gotten through the Sudd; it is a place infested with crocodiles and hippopotami, where the White Nile splits into various small streams and lagoons, and masses of vegetation form floating islands that change the course of the waterways every year. Still, persistence paid off, and in 1842 Mohammed Ali's men succeeded in penetrating the Sudd. From here they passed through the country of the Dinka and Nuer tribes, and were finally forced to stop at Gondokoro, near modern Juba and a thousand miles upstream from Khartoum; past this point the White Nile was no longer navigable (some maps call it the Mountain Nile here). Together, the Arabian and Sudanese campaigns gave Mohammed Ali a larger empire than those the rulers of ancient Egypt and Nubia ruled, even in the best of times.

To replace the losses the army had suffered in these campaigns, Mohammed Ali began conscripting Egyptian peasants in 1822. During the past 2,000 years, the rulers of Egypt did not think the fellahin were useful for anything but working the fields; they controlled and defended the country with non-Egyptian troops (Greeks, Romans, Bedouins, Mamelukes, etc.). Equipping the fellahin as a modern army, and bringing in European (mostly French) military experts to train them, was the most revolutionary thing he did; this caused the first stirrings of nationalism among the Egyptians since pharaonic times. It's no coincidence that 140 years later, the leaders who overthrew the monarchy and established the government of modern Egypt would come from the army.

Along with the creation of the new army came a number of civil reforms to match. The amount of irrigated land was greatly increased, cash crops like cotton were introduced to increase revenue, and modern factories and schools were built. Despite all this, Mohammed Ali never really found a way to pay for his activities. Egypt still got most of its income from agriculture, in a time when products made in factories earned a bigger profit. This meant that industrialized nations had a definite economic advantage. Britain had already industrialized, France industrialized during Mohammed Ali's reign, and other Westerners like the Americans and the Dutch were beginning to industrialize. Unlike Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, these countries had the resources to send out unprofitable expeditions, and wage unprofitable wars. In fact, the main reason why Mohammed Ali invaded the Sudan was to make up for the growing trade deficit, via Sudanese gold, ivory and slaves. He kept telling his troops to look for the source of the gold that went into the treasure hoards of the pharaohs, but they never found it, and hunting for elephants and slaves did more harm than good to the Sudanese.⁽¹⁰⁾ In the end none of the newly won territories brought in enough revenue to pay for the cost of their conquest. Furthermore, because all power was concentrated in Mohammed Ali's hands, he couldn't blame his failures on anyone else. We'll see later on how that led to trouble for Egypt, after Mohammed Ali bequeathed his job to less capable successors.

By the early 1820s, Mohammed Ali was clearly more powerful than his Ottoman overlord, an excellent example of the tail wagging the dog. In 1821 he began building an Egyptian navy at great expense, because he realized that sea power was just as important to European success as industrial power; without ships, Westerners wouldn't be able to meddle in Africa at all. The same year saw a major revolt break out in Greece, forcing Sultan Mahmud II to call for help again. The Greeks were no match for the force led by Ibrahim Pasha, another son of Mohammed Ali, but Britain, France and Russia teamed up to support the Greeks, giving Mohammed Ali his first defeat.⁽¹¹⁾

Mohammed Ali had expected Constantinople to at least pay his expenses, and originally the sultan had promised him Syria, but he reneged on this when the war ended in a Greek-European victory. In response, Mohammed Ali launched a campaign to conquer the rest of the Ottoman Empire, starting with Ibrahim Pasha landing the Egyptian army and navy at Jaffa (next to modern Tel Aviv) in 1831. Over the course of 1832 Ibrahim won one victory after another, at Acre, Damascus, Aleppo, and Konya. He finally halted his march at Kutaya, just 150 miles from Constantinople, when European pressure and a letter from his father compelled him to stop. All involved parties signed a treaty in May 1833, which gave the entire Levant over to Ibrahim and made him tax collector for the Turkish city of Adana, while Egypt continued to pay an annual tribute to Constantinople. Ibrahim tolerated the religious minorities in his new domain, especially the Christians, but was heavy-handed when it came to conscriptions and tax collecting, leading to many desertions and a revolt in Syria.

A second war between Mohammed Ali and Sultan Mahmud broke out in 1839, when the sultan ordered Egypt to get rid of its fleet and reduce its army. Mohammed Ali refused, a Turkish army marched into Syria, and at Nizib, on the banks of the Euphrates, Ibrahim Pasha won his last great victory. Within a matter of days the sultan died, and the Ottoman navy sailed to Alexandria and went over to the Egyptians. The new sultan was only sixteen years old, and it looked like a golden opportunity to take over the whole empire. Instead, the European powers intervened again, sending diplomats who stated in no uncertain terms that they weren't going to let Mohammed Ali do it. The British in particular didn't want to see control of the entire Middle East pass from a weak power like Turkey to a strong power like Mohammed Ali's Egypt, because Great Britain was now heavily involved in India, and the Middle East was on the most direct path between India and Europe. In 1840 a British squadron came to Beirut and demanded that the Levant be evacuated. Ibrahim led his army back to Egypt, and in 1841 Mohammed Ali accepted a new treaty that set the maximum size of the Egyptian army at 18,000 men; it also set Egypt's annual tribute at 9 million French francs and prohibited the building of warships without the sultan's permission. The treaty also forced Mohammed Ali to give back the Levant, but his rule over the Sudan was officially recognized, and--what he had wanted most of all--the governorship of Egypt, and the title of khedive (viceroy) would remain permanently in his family.

The Abolitionist Triumph

Now, passing new laws is useless if you aren't going to enforce them. In 1808 the British showed they meant what they said by sending ships to patrol the Atlantic coast of Africa, with orders to stop and search any ship, no matter what flag it was flying, if they suspected those ships were carrying slaves. However, the number of slaves transported from Africa continued to rise for a while (in fact, the slavers could charge a higher price, now that they had to smuggle their cargo to their customers); the peak came in the 1830s, when 135,000 slaves were being shipped every year. The trade routes changed, too; instead of taking the "Middle Passage" from Nigeria to the West Indies, most slave ships now went from Angola to Brazil. On a positive note, slave owners in the New World began treating their slaves better, once they realized that they would be harder to replace if they died.

Three new cities and one new nation were created as part of the anti-slavery campaign. The first of the former was Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. Both the Americans and the British had recruited and armed slaves during the American Revolution, usually by promising to free them when they completed their term of service. After the war those ex-slaves who had fought for the British ended up in Canada, where the climate was too cold for them to prosper. Britain founded Freetown for them in 1787, but a disease epidemic wiped out the first community, so it was reestablished in 1792. Then the organization in charge, the Sierra Leone Company, went bankrupt, so only a thousand Canadian unfortunates were relocated by 1808. Things turned around in that year when the British government took over, setting up a naval base and anti-slave trade courts in Freetown. Over the course of the next fifty years, the Royal Navy rescued about 100,000 slaves, who were called "recaptives,"and dropped off 80 percent of them at Freetown. Of these, half tried to go home again, but very few of them made it; it was the 40,000 who stayed that made Freetown a successful colony. And because the Abolitionist movement was founded and led by church leaders, the former slaves became enthusiastic converts to Christianity; that would give a boost to the efforts of Christian missionaries in West Africa.

It was a similar story with Liberia, Africa's American colony. In 1816 the American Colonization Society was founded to resettle freed slaves who wanted to return to Africa. This organization got a grant of land from the tribe ruling the mouth of the Saint Paul River in 1821, and here they built Monrovia, named after US President James Monroe. The colony grew steadily, but the settlers had trouble getting along with their sponsors in the United States, so in 1841 Joseph Jenkins Roberts became the first black governor; then in 1847 Liberia became an independent republic, with Roberts as its first president. Britain recognized Liberia in 1848, and France did in 1852, but paradoxically, the United States delayed recognition until 1862.

At the time of independence, Liberia had 80,000 natives (from the tribes that had lived there originally), 15,000 former slaves from the Americas, and 6,000 unwilling immigrants, slaves rescued by US anti-slavery patrols like the British ones that operated out of Freetown. Only 5 percent of today's Liberians claim American descent (call them Americo-Liberians or American-Africans), but they had a firm grip on the country for more than 130 years, which did not begin to loosen until 1980 (see Chapter 9).

France abolished slavery in 1848, and a year later established a community for freed slaves, Libreville ("Freetown" in French), near the spot where Africa's Atlantic coast crosses the equator. It didn't serve this purpose very well, because by then the number of slaves rescued or returned was falling. In the end Libreville served better as the first French outpost in equatorial Africa, and as the capital of present-day Gabon.

Meanwhile on the Gold Coast, the British were pulling ahead of their rivals, though not entirely through their own choice. By selling gold dust to the Dutch for firearms, the Ashanti had become strong enough to conquer the Fante, the tribe on the coast, in 1807, and now they were a major threat to the European forts as well. The local British governor, Sir Charles M'Carthy, started a war in 1824 to liberate the Fante, but was defeated and killed. Britain sent reinforcements, the Ashanti were defeated in 1827, and in 1831 they agreed to abandon the coast. As for the forts, the British bought the Danish and Portuguese ones in 1850, and the Dutch ones in 1871, bringing the entire Gold Coast under British control. On the former Slave Coast, the British resolved a dispute between Benin and Dahomey over the island of Lagos by taking it for themselves in 1861.

As they increased their activities in the south Atlantic, the Royal Navy required an increased presence south of Freetown. In 1827 Britain leased the island of Fernando Póo from Spain, and turned it into a naval base. They gave it back in 1858, when an end to the trafficking of human beings across the Atlantic was in sight. The last slavers were black Brazilians, because Europeans and white Americans had gotten out of the slave business, leaving behind those who were less likely to arose suspicion. By this time, only three countries remained in the western hemisphere where slavery was legal. With the abolition of slavery in those countries (the United States in 1863, Cuba in 1886, and Brazil in 1888), the Atlantic market for slaves finally disappeared.

It took longer to grind down the slave market in the Indian Ocean. One reason for this was increased economic activity--the Swahili wanted more ivory and slaves, while the tribes of the interior wanted more guns. Another was an Arab revival under Oman's greatest ruler, Sayyid Said (1806-56). Between 1817 and 1828, a series of expeditions across the Arabian sea reestablished Omani rule over most of the Swahili coast, from Warsheikh in Somalia to Lindi in southern Tanzania. It took a few more years to subjugate the area, but when this was done Sayyid Said decided that his new territories were nicer than the old ones, so he moved his capital from Muscat to Zanzibar (1840). He also introduced clove trees from Indonesia, and this venture did so well that soon East Africa was producing more cloves than Southeast Asia. However, the clove plantations required workers, so Oman bought and sold as many as 100,000 East African slaves every year; Atkins Hamerton, a British consul, estimated in 1850 that 450,000 slaves were working just on the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba. Consequently, after 1840 British anti-slavery patrols spent more time on Africa's east coast; early in his reign Sayyid Said had signed a treaty promising to end Oman's involvement in the slave trade, and obviously he wasn't enforcing it.

When Sayyid Said died in 1856 his realm was split in two; one son, Majid, ruled from Zanzibar and another son, Thuwain, ruled from Muscat. Britain made Zanzibar a protectorate, by giving it the aid it needed to prevent Thuwain from reconquering it. With the British as the power behind Zanzibar's throne, the number of slaves trafficked on the Swahili coast finally declined. In 1873 Sir John Kirk, the British consul-general at Zanzibar, got Majid's brother and successor, Sayyid Barghash ibn Said, to sign a treaty banning the slave trade by sea and promising to protect all liberated slaves within the area he controlled. Finally in 1897, the legal status of slavery in Tanzania was abolished. There were some violations in various parts of the continent after that date (the Portuguese didn't suppress slavery in Mozambique until 1912), but for all practical purposes the enslavement of Africans had ended. Today only the Arabs of Mauritania still openly practice black slavery, though technically it is illegal there, like it is everywhere else.⁽¹²⁾

This may sound strange to modern ears, but only the blacks already overseas benefited from emancipation. All African kingdoms that had made a living selling slaves suffered an economic slump, even if they had tried to diversify their income with industries like palm oil and cloves.⁽¹³⁾ The port of Mombasa, for example, didn't recover until after 1900, when the British built a railroad from there to Uganda. Nor were the primary victims of the slave trade better off; the slavers now had to get rid of a lot of unwanted human beings. They ended up doing the same things that they had done in the past when they could not sell their slaves; they had them executed if they were accused of a crime, or sacrificed if they weren't. Consequently, visitors to slaver states like Dahomey in the second half of the nineteenth century reported horrifying spectacles, convincing many humanitarians that Europe needed to conquer Africa before the Africans destroyed themselves. It was a bloodcurdling epilogue to one of the saddest stories in human history.

France Invades Algeria

This was too much for French pride, so they sent 37,000 soldiers across the Mediterranean and landed them just west of Algiers. The French government claimed it was suppressing piracy, but the Barbary pirates had stopped being a menace fifteen years earlier. And the French people didn't support this overseas venture; in fact, they overthrew King Charles X after the army left Paris. However, the military phase of the campaign was a complete success; three weeks after the French arrived, the dey surrendered Algiers. The French commander promised to respect local customs and keep his troops out of mosques, but before long they were turning mosques into churches, as the first step in a program to turn Algeria into another France.

Once the French decided to keep Algiers, they realized they couldn't do so while the surrounding countryside was against them. The locals resisted violently when land was taken away from them, and while the French managed to conquer most of Algeria's coast by the end of the 1830s, the Algerians found a charismatic leader in Abd el-Kader, the son of a holy man; in 1832 he launched a guerrilla war from the Atlas mountains. To deal with him, France eventually committed a third of the French army to Algeria, and put a ruthless general, Thomas Bugeaud, in charge of it. As Abd el-Kader drew the French into the interior, they inflicted a series of atrocities that could only be justified because they weren't happening in Europe. Bugeaud put it this way in 1846: "We have burnt a great deal and destroyed a great deal. It may be that I shall be called a barbarian, but I have the conviction that I have done something useful for my country. I consider myself above the reproaches of the press." Abd el-Kader was captured in 1847, but resistance continued to smolder for a generation. Not until 1879 was all of Algeria declared safe for tourists, at which time a civilian government replaced the military one. Still, the French required 100,000 troops to keep the country pacified, whereas the deys had managed to do it with 15,000.⁽¹⁴⁾

Behind the soldiers came colonists from southern Europe--Italians, Spaniards and Maltese as well as French. Most were attracted by the prospect of doing business with the Algerians, or they simply wanted to find better jobs. By the mid-1850s they numbered 170,000, almost as many as the white settlers in South Africa; by 1880 there were 350,000. The French among them kept in touch with friends and relatives back in France, and in the twentieth century they had far more influence on French politics than their numbers would suggest.

As time went on, Algeria became France's most cherished colony; the French regarded it the same way as the British regarded India. For that reason, the French began to look covetously at surrounding territories like Tunisia and Morocco, as buffer states to defend Algeria with. In 1878, an international conference was held in Berlin to deal with the latest Balkan crisis, the Russo-Turkish War, and in the thinking of that time, every European nation except the German hosts felt they had to have a piece of the Turkish empire whose future they were discussing; the Russians got part of Armenia, and the British took Cyprus. The French put forth a claim to Tunisia, which they made into a protectorate in 1881.

Meanwhile to the east, a power struggle arose in Libya following Yusuf Qaramanli's death in 1830, and the Bedouins of the Fezzan declared their independence from Tripoli. The Ottoman government decided that this would be a good time to reassert its authority, before Mohammed Ali beat the sultan to it. In 1835 a new governor arrived from Constantinople, and he declared that the Qaramanid dynasty was now deposed. However, it took until 1842 to reconquer the Fezzan.

In the end the interior was stabilized not by a ruler in Tripoli, but by a new fundamentalist movement, the Sanussi Brotherhood. Founded in 1843 by Muhammad al-Sanussi (1790-1859), it called for a return to the primitive Islam of the seventh century, and became very popular among the nomads because al-Sanussi was an excellent leader and diplomat. The first school of the order was established in Cyrenaica, and within a generation there were followers as far south as Bornu and Wadai, and as far west as Timbuktu. Sanussi members promoted agriculture and commerce as well as religious propaganda, so the caravan routes to Bornu and Wadai, which were badly disrupted following the death of Bornu's Muhammad al-Kanemi in 1837, soon became the busiest in the whole Sahara. The Ottoman Empire was forced to recognize Sanussi authority in the Fezzan because those caravan routes were the region's prime asset.

Under attack first from the Fulani in the west, and then from the kingdom of Wadai in the east, the old kingdom of Bornu declined rapidly. A civil war broke out in 1846, with the last mai, 'Ali V Dalatumi, on one side, and al-Kanemi's son Umar on the other side. Wadai intervened on behalf of the mai, but Umar won, ending the reign of one of the longest-lived dynasties in history. Umar discarded the pre-Islamic title of mai for the humbler title of shehu (from the Arabic shaykh or sheikh), but he didn't rule with the vigor of his father; his advisors came to run everyday affairs, and Umar's sons were just as much puppet kings as the last Saifawa mais had been.

Aftershocks of the Mfecane

Another group that headed west, the Kololo, went all the way to Botswana, throwing that area into disorder when they defeated the people who had lived there previously. They were enemies of the Ndebele, and had an ongoing struggle with them. When the Kololo got the worst of a battle in 1823, their leader, Sebetwane, took them north into what is now Zambia, and conquered Barotse, a small kingdom belonging to the Lozi tribe, on the upper Zambezi River (1840).

Areas affected by the Mfecane.

Other refugees headed south, and ran into the zone Europeans were settling; the only tribe that succeeded in finding a new home here was the Sotho. They had a superb leader named Moshoeshoe (1815-68), who was brilliant both as a warrior and as a diplomat. From his location in the western Drakensberg, he had to deal with raids from both Shaka and Mzilikazi. First he took his people to the mountain of Butha-Buthe, but after several battles he found a better location on top of another mountain, Thaba Bosiu, and led the tribe there in 1824. This flat-topped mountain was 300 feet high, with a good spring on the summit and surrounded by 150 acres of pastureland and a deep valley. Only three narrow trails went up the slopes, and the people living there spread a rumor that at night the mountain grew so high that climbing it was impossible, until it returned to its regular size the next morning. In other words, it was a perfect place for a fortified settlement, and the one built there became Maseru, the capital of modern Lesotho. From here, Moshoeshoe beat off all attacks by others, and like Mzilikazi, he increased the strength of the tribe by accepting any Mfecane refugees that came in his direction. But unlike his rivals, he always tried to negotiate before he had to fight, and was so good at it that his kingdom, now called Basutoland, became an island of peace in the Mfecane storm. When the Boers and the British became new threats in the 1830s, Moshoeshoe also realized that he would have to modernize, so he began buying guns and horses for his men. Then in 1842 he "purchased" (invited) French missionaries from the Paris Evangelical Fraternity. The French were impressed; one wrote, "I felt at once that I had to do with a superior man, trained to think, to command others, and above all himself." In the same year Moshoeshoe requested a treaty of protection from the Cape Colony, but it was not granted at this time.

The lands north of Natal offered fewer opportunities than the lands to the west and south, but at least there weren't any Europeans blocking the way. One of the first to try the north was the Dlamini tribe, which in 1815 migrated to a small area between the Pongola River and Delegoa Bay (the site of Lourenço Marques, Portugal's southernmost settlement in Mozambique). Their king, Sobhuza I, adopted the military strategy of the Zulus, and defeated a Zulu invasion in 1836. He was succeeded by his son Mswazi (1839-68), who gave his name to the tribe (Swazi) and the kingdom (Swaziland).

Most of the migrations northward, however, involved Nguni clans whose leaders quarreled with Shaka, and thus saw no future for their people if they joined the Zulus. Soshangane took one group, the Gaza, and settled them in central Mozambique. An even larger group, led by Zwangendaba and Nxaba, also entered Mozambique, was defeated by the Gaza, turned west and destroyed the Urozwi kingdom, the current rulers of Zimbabwe (1834). Then the two chiefs had a falling out; Nxaba stayed near the Zambezi River, where he was killed in another battle with the Gaza a year later, while Zwangendaba took his followers north again. When they reached Lake Nyasa, the Nguni split up and settled on both the east and west sides of the lake, after inflicting further defeats on the Shona and Maravi tribes, and recruiting survivors from the defeated tribes into their ranks. In the 1840s, individual impis raided Tanzania and the upper Congo basin, campaigning as far north as the southern shore of Lake Victoria (stopping just short of the equator) and as far east as the Indian Ocean. When Zwangendaba died in 1848, his Nguni nation split into five clans; three settled down in Zambia and Malawi, while the other two chose to stay in Tanzania.

The Great Trek

While they were away, the Sixth Kaffir War (1834-35) erupted between European settlers and Africans. The population of both groups along the frontier had swelled, raising tensions to the boiling point, and the Xhosa, suffering from another bad famine, were particularly mad at a law that permitted Boer commandos to follow footprints to Xhosa villages (kraals) and take cattle if they believed the cattle were stolen. This time 12,000 Xhosa burst into the Cape Colony, and while superior British firepower eventually drove them back, it was the most costly war yet; the Europeans lost 456 farms and both sides lost thousands of animals. On top of this, the foremost Xhosa chief had been captured, and shot while trying to escape; British soldiers cut off his ears for souvenirs, and tried to gouge out his teeth with bayonets. The Xhosa never forgave the British for this atrocity. The British commander, Colonel Harry Smith, announced the annexation of the land between the Great Fish and Great Kei Rivers, calling the territory Queen Adelaide Province, but the Xhosa simply refused to get out; eventually Cape Town's governor gave the land back.

For the Boers, winning a war and having nothing to show for it was too much. They knew what to do when their exploration parties returned. One group went to what is now Namibia, and found only deserts. The second had explored the High Veld and reported finding almost unlimited grazing land, but neglected to add that the Ndebele already lived there. The third group had the most glowing report of all; they had entered Natal and their leader declared that, "only heaven could be more beautiful." Thus, from 1836 to 1839, about 6,000 Boers and their servants crossed the Orange River and headed for the High Veld, in a migration now known as the Great Trek.

A group moves at the speed of its slowest member, and because they were encumbered by their families, sheep and cattle, the voortrekkers and their covered wagons could only go about five or six miles a day. In addition, they always stopped to rest on the Sabbath day, even if they weren't sure which day of the week it was. Andres Hendrik Potgieter led the first party of about 200, while the main party began its journey a year later under Piet Retief. Fighting broke out immediately when they met the Ndebele, and the Europeans had all the advantages; Potgieter found out quickly enough that the natives had little chance of bringing down a mounted gunman, and by circling the wagons and filling in the gaps with thorn bushes, they could build a laager, a makeshift fort that was too tough for the Africans to capture. In the end the Ndebele suffered 3,000 casualties and were driven across the Limpopo river, into what is now Zimbabwe (1838). Here Mzilikazi conquered the western kingdom of the Shona tribe, Butua, and established a new one for himself. The result was a three-tiered caste society, with the original Nguni refugees from the Mfecane at the top, the (mostly Sotho-speaking) followers they had collected on their journeys in the middle, and their new Shona subjects at the bottom. As for the Boers, they suffered no casualties; one Boer leader simply said, "What was theirs is now ours."

The High Veld was good enough for Potgieter, but Retief wanted a piece of land with access to the sea, and he remembered the reports of the explorers, so he took his Boers across the Drakensberg into Natal. Thanks to the Mfecane, it was a depopulated area, except where the Zulus lived. Retief went to Umgungundhlovu, the Zulu capital, and asked Dingane for land to settle on. The Zulu king acted friendly enough, but he distrusted the whites, having just heard frightening reports of what Potgieter had done on the High Veld. He agreed to give the Boers southern Natal if they helped him recover some stolen cattle from a nearby chief. Retief and his party found and brought back 300 missing animals, but at the banquet held in their honor, Dingane suddenly ordered them seized and killed; seventy Europeans, including Retief, and thirty Hottentots perished in that act of treachery. Then Dingane sent a raid to massacre the rest of Retief's followers, killing 300 Boers (including 185 children) and 200 servants.

Those voortrekkers who survived circled their wagons and sent out a call for reinforcements. They arrived nine months later, led by a landowner named Andries Pretorius. On December 14, 1838, the Zulu army attacked the laager Pretorius had formed from sixty-four wagons and 600 men on the banks of the Ncome River. The battle lasted half a day, and left 3,000 out of 12,000 Zulus dead, while the only casualties suffered by the Boers were three wounded. The waters of the nearby river were stained red from all the corpses in it, prompting the Boers to rename it Blood River.

Next the Boers went on the offensive; they declared southern Natal an independent state, with Pretorius as president and the capital at Pietermaritzburg. To get rid of Dingane, they joined forces with his half brother Mpande; together they drove Dingane into exile, and Mpande became king of a reduced Zulu state that held only northern Natal. But it was one thing to defeat the Zulus, and another thing to escape the long arm of Great Britain, which was growing increasingly concerned about Boer activities. On the same day as the battle of Blood River, eighty British soldiers landed at Port Natal, renamed it Durban, and annexed it to the Cape Colony. In 1843 they extended their annexation to include all of Natal except Zululand, and started setting parts of it aside as autonomous districts to resettle the last African refugees from the Mfecane. The Xhosa between Natal and the Cape Colony were still independent, but that would soon change as well. Following the Seventh Kaffir War (1846-47), which like most of the others began with a Xhosa attack and ended with a British counterattack, Harry Smith, now Sir Harry Smith, became governor of the Cape Colony. Within days of his appointment he rushed to the eastern frontier, and there gave a graphic demonstration of how different things were going to be; he summoned the local chiefs and told them all land west of the Great Kei River would become a new British colony. Then he pointed to a covered wagon and shouted, "Do you see that wagon, I say?" On cue, the wagon, which was full of gunpowder, exploded, and Smith announced, "There go the treaties. Do you hear? No more treaties!"

Since the Boers had made the Great Trek to get away from the British in the first place, they staged a reverse trek in 1848, hiking back over the Drakensberg to rejoin their companions on the High Veld. In response, Smith led an army into the territory on the north bank of the Orange River, an area settled by an unstable mixture of Boers, Africans and Griquas (see Chapter 6). He managed to occupy the zone quickly enough, but the Boers, led by Pretorius, continued to resist, and because the Xhosa were revolting again (the Eighth Kaffir War, 1850-53), the British government soon lost the will to wage a conflict that could drag on indefinitely. In 1852 Britain recognized the Boers living between the Vaal and Limpopo Rivers as an independent state, the Transvaal, and replaced Smith with a less aggressive governor, George Cathcart. Two years later, Cathcart gave up the land between the Orange and Vaal, which became a second Boer republic, the Orange Free State.

A failed prophecy ended Xhosa resistance. In 1856, a fourteen-year-old girl named Nongqawuse saw a vision; the faces of her ancestors appeared in a river and told her that they would rise from the dead and drive the Europeans out of Africa, if the Xhosa would show their faith by destroying all their cattle and possessions by February 18, 1857. If they did this, the sun would move backwards across the sky, as a sign that help from the spirit world was on the way. Nongqawuse convinced the elders of the tribe that her vision was true, and the Xhosa spent nearly a year burning their crops and slaughtering their livestock. They met the deadline, but on February 18 the sun failed to change direction, and the ancestors never showed up. As a result, 25,000 Xhosa starved to death, and the rest, including Nongqawuse, were forced to submit to British rule and seek British employment, no doubt wondering what had gone wrong for the rest of their lives.

David Livingstone

In 1849, with two European sportsmen and an African guide, Livingstone went forth again. They crossed the Kalahari and discovered Lake Ngami, a promising body of water surrounded by fertile land in northern Botswana. Next, Livingstone wanted to find the upper Zambezi River and the Kololo people, who he believed would be receptive to Christianity. He failed in his first attempt (1850), but succeeded in reaching both a year later. The Kololo chief was indeed friendly, and Livingstone saw the Zambezi as a suitable highway for further exploration.

Livingstone returned to Cape Town in 1852, and immediately prepared for his next expedition. First he revisited Kololo country, and from there he looked for a water route to the Atlantic. There wasn't one in that part of Angola, so he went all the way to the coast at Luanda, just to be sure, and then went back to the Zambezi, to try following it in the opposite direction. While traveling downstream, he suffered from repeated episodes of malaria, dysentery, and hunger, but still managed to keep careful records of everything he saw, revealing a huge area Europeans had known nothing about previously. In 1855 his journey was interrupted by the discovery of Africa's most spectacular waterfall, which locals called Mosi-oa-Tunya, the "Smoke That Thunders"; he called it Victoria Falls. Livingstone reached the Indian Ocean at Quelimane in May 1856, and went back to England. His crossing of the continent from Angola to Mozambique wasn't the first, but the story of Pedra Baptista and Amaro Jose' had never been translated into English, so it instantly made Livingstone a national hero; his book, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857), sold 700,000 copies.

In England, Livingstone's speeches revealed an Africa that had far more to it than savage-infested jungles. As the London Journal reported in December 1856, "Europe had always heard that the central regions of southern Africa were burning solitudes, bleak and barren, heated by poisonous winds, infested by snakes, and only roamed over by a few scattered tribes of untamable barbarians. . . . But Livingstone found himself in a high country, full of fruit trees, abounding in shade, watered by a perfect network of rivers." He also found a land that was rapidly changing, for European and Arab civilization had finally reached the tribes of the interior. The old kingdoms of Luba, Mwata Yamvo and Mwata Kazembe were declining, and they lost power to the new, better-organized states that sprang up around them, like the Kololo kingdom. Trade routes changed, too; now that the slave trade was almost gone, it was no longer feasible for the interior kingdoms to trade with Luanda. Instead, they used a new trade route that went through southern Angola, because this region was a good source of ivory, and had two tribes that worked together, the Chokwe and the Ovimbundu. The Chokwe had enough guns, and the skill in using them, to create an efficient elephant-hunting industry (too efficient, in fact, because they killed all the elephants in some areas). They also became more ferocious, pillaging villages, enslaving captives and adding them to their war bands, stealing the ivory stockpiles of others, etc. Behind them came the Ovimbundu traders, who bought ivory from the Chokwe in exchange for more firearms, and delivered ivory and other merchandise to the Europeans in the port of Benguela.⁽¹⁷⁾ Over the course of the nineteenth century the Chokwe conquered southeastern Angola and the southwest part of the Congo basin, eliminating Mwata Yamvo in 1885.

To the east, the Arab-Swahili traders were visiting the interior more often, especially after Oman retook Zanzibar. They regularly traveled from Zanzibar to Ujiji, a port on the east shore of Lake Tanganyika, to pick up slaves, and the most daring among them went even farther. One merchant named Msiri (the Mosquito) decided to use the knowledge he had gained from several trips to the Katanga region, to make himself a king; in 1856 he took several armed men and made himself lord of everything between Luba and Mwata Kazembe, taking land from both of the older states in the process. By taxing the chiefs who had previously paid tribute to Luba or Mwata Kazembe, he made himself rich with ivory, copper and salt. The kingdom Msiri founded lasted until 1891, when he was shot in a fight with a Belgian officer. Another merchant, named Muhammed bin Hamed but more commonly called Tippu Tib, arrived on the Lualaba River in the late 1860s, and proclaimed himself the sultan of Utetera; he was the most powerful man in the eastern Congo basin until the Belgians arrived, twenty years later.

The Quest for the Source of the Nile

To find out, the Royal Geographical Society sent two more explorers, Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke. Both were veterans of the British army in India. A talented writer and linguist, Burton spoke forty languages and dialects, and had made the first translations into English of such Oriental classics as The Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra. He also wrote travel accounts about several places supposedly off-limits to outsiders, like Kandahar, Mecca, Dahomey and Salt Lake City--and disturbed Victorian England by "going native" in all of them. By contrast, Speke, an experienced hunter who had seen adventure in Tibet, had a one-track mind: finding the source of the Nile was the only thing that interested him.

Their first attempt to explore the lakes started from Somalia in 1854. Burton became the first European to visit Harar, another city that non-Moslems were not permitted to enter. But right after Harar, the expedition came to a quick end, when Somali tribesmen attacked and seriously wounded both of them; Burton suffered a spear wound to the jaw that left him scarred for life. Neither was willing to give up, though. After recovering and serving in the Crimean War, they returned to Africa for another expedition (1857). This time they followed the slavers' route from Zanzibar to Ujiji, becoming the first Europeans to see Lake Tanganyika. However, they couldn't find any outlet to the lake, and its elevation was a bit too low to make it a credible candidate for the Nile's source. After inspecting the eastern shore, they headed north to check out rumors that another major lake existed, Lake Ukerewe. Halfway there Burton fell ill with a fever, and his legs swelled to the point that he couldn't walk. While he recuperated, Speke continued without him, found Ukerewe, and was instantly convinced that this was the source of the Nile. He stayed by the lake for three days, named it Lake Victoria in honor of Britain's queen, and rushed back to tell Burton. Burton, however, was not impressed; he still favored Lake Tanganyika as the source, and argued that Speke had not seen the Nile; in fact, he hadn't proven anything except that Lake Victoria was larger than expected. They quarreled about this all the way back to Zanzibar, and never got along well after that.

In England, Lake Victoria generated more excitement than Lake Tanganyika, so Speke was put in charge of a follow-up expedition. This time, instead of taking Burton, he brought another British army officer, James Augustus Grant. Returning to Africa in 1860, they explored the western shore of Lake Victoria, and ended up getting detained for four and a half months at the court of Buganda's King Mutesa. The young king admired Speke, loved to see him shoot, and made Speke teach him how to use firearms. Later Speke gave Mutesa a gun for a present, and the king responded with a shocking act of cruelty; first he tested it by shooting some cows, and then, as Speke described it in his journal: "The king now loaded one of the carbines I had given him with his own hands, and giving it full-cock to a page, told him to go out and shoot a man in the outer court." When not involved in demonstrations of marksmanship, Speke tried to convince Mutesa that he was not a full-blooded African but a descendant of King David through the royal family of Abyssinia, hoping that this would make Mutesa invite some missionaries to answer the spiritual questions this idea would generate.

Finally Speke and Grant left, and upon returning to Lake Victoria, they discovered an outlet to the lake, Ripon Falls. Speke was delighted; Lake Victoria was as big as he said it was, and he had no doubt that the river formed by the waterfall was the world's most famous river. All he had to do was follow the river north to a part of the Nile other Europeans had already seen, and he would be vindicated. Unfortunately he didn't keep good records as he did this--his sloppy numerical calculations suggested that the river actually flowed uphill--and he took a shortcut overland for several miles before returning to the Nile, leaving question marks around one part of the river's course. He hadn't even explored enough of Lake Victoria to be sure that the Nile didn't flow into it as well as out of it.

He reached known territory at Gondokoro, where he met Samuel and Henrietta Baker, two other explorers who had been tracing the White Nile by going upstream from Khartoum. He told the Bakers what he had seen, continued on to Cairo, and sent home a telegram that simply said, "The Nile is settled." Since it looked like Speke had taken care of the Nile for them, the Bakers explored the area west of Lake Victoria, where Speke had heard of another lake, Luta Ngize. They found this lake in 1864, renamed it Lake Albert, and found that Speke's Nile went through it, entering the lake from the northeast and leaving from the lake's northern tip. The Bakers didn't see the opposite shore of the lake, so if it ran farther south than Lake Victoria, and if other rivers flowed into it, Lake Albert would have a better claim as the source of the Nile. Too bad for Speke; his dispute with Burton wasn't over, and not long after that, he died in a hunting accident.

At Quelimane in the south, Livingstone showed up in 1858 with steamships and half a dozen British assistants, and this time he explored Lake Nyasa, until he concluded that it had nothing to do with other East African lakes, and that it was the same lake the Portuguese called Lake Maravi. He also went up the Zambezi to call on his Kololo friends again, and explored two small rivers near Lake Nyasa, the Shire and Ruvuma, only to find they were useless for transportation. The expedition ended when the British government recalled him in 1864, due to a lack of useful discoveries.

Back in England, however, the debates by Burton and Speke over the merits of Lakes Tanganyika and Victoria had raised the public's interest in Africa to an all-time high, so all Livingstone had to do to fund another expedition was announce that his goal would be to finish mapping the sources of the Nile. Arriving at Lake Nyasa in 1866, he had another look at that area before turning north to go to Lake Tanganyika. At Ujiji he found that the supplies left for him there had been stolen, so he went to the area west of the lake and inspected a northward-flowing river, the Lualaba, which he thought could be the uppermost stretch of the White Nile on its way to Lake Albert. In doing so he lost contact with civilization, and nothing was heard from him for years. Had Africa claimed him, or had he solved the continent's oldest mystery? The newspapers had to know.

The New York Herald met this challenge by sending a reporter, Henry Morton Stanley. At the head of 2,000 men, he set out from Zanzibar toward Livingstone's suspected whereabouts in March 1871. On the way Stanley ruthlessly crushed all opposition from the natives; he believed this was critical to his success, but the practice also tainted his reputation. After eight months he found Livingstone at Ujiji, resting from the cumulative effect of years of hardship and illness, and Stanley greeted him with one of history's most famous one-liners: "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"

"Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"

Together, Stanley and Livingstone explored Lake Tanganyika and found that it only had one outlet, a seasonal river called the Lukuga, which flowed west to join the Lualaba. After that Stanley was ready to go home, and returned to Zanzibar; Livingstone wouldn't go with him, because that meant leaving his beloved Africa. Instead, he headed to the upper reaches of the Lualaba basin; he now believed that the Lualaba was the Congo, not the Nile, but he still wanted to find the source of it. It was among the small lakes southwest of Lake Tanganyika, at a spot not far from the present-day Congo-Zambia border, where he died (May 1, 1873). His African servants cut out his heart and buried it under a tree, and later sent the rest of his body to England, where it was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Stanley didn't feel the same way about Africa as Livingstone did; once he wrote, "I detest the land most heartily." Still, he had made a career of exploring it, and Livingstone was his hero, so he committed himself to finish what Livingstone had started. One year after Livingstone's death, Stanley returned with the organization, resources and determination to solve all problems. Starting with 359 men, he circumnavigated Lakes Victoria and Tanganyika, finding no other outlets to those lakes besides Ripon Falls and the Lukuga, and discovering the Kagera River and Lake Edward in the process. Again Stanley employed brutal methods of dealing with African resistance, killing or wounding many natives with modern firepower. However, he was better behaved when he visited Buganda's King Mutesa. Mutesa was just as friendly to Stanley as he had been to Speke--but for different reasons. The Egyptians were getting closer (see the next section), and he feared that their ultimate goal was to come to Buganda and "eat the country." Mutesa wisely guessed that the only way he could stop the Baturki (his name for the Egyptians, meaning "Turks") was to increase the presence of non-Egyptians in his kingdom, and play the foreigners off against each other. For that reason, he told Stanley that he would like to see Christian missionaries settle in the country. Accordingly, Britain sent missionaries from the Church of England in 1877, and France sent Catholic missionaries in 1879; this was how the West got its foot in the door in the Interlacustrine region.

Next, in November 1876, Stanley began an adventure that boggles the imagination: he marched to the Lualaba River, launched his steel boat, the Lady Alice, and toiled and fought his way downstream, through nearly 2,000 miles of jungle and uncharted waters. On the way they had to deal with disease, desertions, a shortage of food, and attacks from unfriendly Africans, including an ambush by a tribe of cannibals. Twice they found their course interrupted by rapids. The first was a series of seven cataracts in Tippu Tib's territory, which Stanley named Stanley Falls. Then the river widened to form a lake called Stanley Pool, before meeting the second interruption, a string of thirty-two cataracts that Stanley named Livingstone Falls. They had to make a laborious portage around each obstacle. Finally, Stanley and 108 survivors reached the Atlantic in August 1877. This proved to all skeptics that Speke had been right about Lake Victoria, and Livingstone had been right about the Lualaba being part of the Congo.

Egypt in Bondage

The idea of digging a canal from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea had been bouncing around at least since Napoleon's day; Mohammed Ali refused to allow it because he correctly guessed that if such a canal was dug, a European power with a strong navy would try to take control of it. The job of digging it took ten years (1859-69), and was one of the greatest engineering achievements of the nineteenth century. For more details on the project, see Chapter 14 of my Near Eastern history.

By the time the Suez Canal was finished, Ismail, a son of the late Ibrahim Pasha, had succeeded Sa'id as khedive. Ismail had Mohammed Ali's vision but not his discipline or judgment. He wanted Egypt to catch up with the West, and had all kinds of ideas on how to do that: schools, telegraph lines, factories, etc. For example, he let the British build the first railway in Africa, from Cairo to Alexandria.

The building of the Suez Canal greatly increased European interest in the Red Sea, a part of the world they had not given much attention to since 1500. For a start, now that Western ships would be regularly sailing here, they would need places to refuel. The British built a coaling station for this purpose when they occupied Aden in 1839; now the other European powers needed them too, so the French built one at Obok, near the southern entrance to the Red Sea (1862), and the Italians built one at Aseb, in Eritrea (1869). What the West didn't realize was that the canal also speeded up the development of Asian nationalism, from India to the Philippines, now that it became feasible for well-to-do families in Asian colonies to send their sons to Europe to complete their education.

Thousands of Europeans came to Egypt in the wake of the Suez Canal's opening. Most were looking for opportunities to open businesses, while Thomas Cook, the owner of luxury steamers, launched Egypt's modern tourist industry by taking Westerners up the Nile to places like Luxor. In fact, the canal was such a success that Ismail proudly declared, "My country is no longer in Africa; we are now part of Europe."

Ismail's most ambitious plan was to resume the expansion into equatorial Africa. With a fleet of steamships in the Nile, and railroad tracks to carry cargoes around the cataracts, he reasoned, all the ivory currently going to Zanzibar would be sent to Cairo instead, because transport in that direction would be faster and cheaper. The land beyond the Sudd (southern Sudan and northern Uganda) was organized into a new province called Equatoria, and Samuel Baker, the explorer, was hired to be its first governor in 1869. In the Red Sea, he annexed the Turkish ports at Suakin on the Sudanese coast, and Massawa in Eritrea (1865).⁽¹⁸⁾ Five years later the Egyptian flag went up at Bulhar and Berbera, on the Somali side of the Gulf of Aden; in 1875 Ismail established garrisons at Zeila and Harar. To the west, Ismail made a deal with Zubayr Rahama Pasha, an Egyptian slaver who had just conquered Darfur with a private army, allowing him to add Darfur to the Egyptian empire (1874). Then in 1875 and 1876 Ismail launched three invasions of Abyssinia, two from Sudan and one from Somalia, the goal being to conquer the rest of the Horn of Africa. Instead, to his surprise, Abyssinia's King John IV defeated all of them, and Egypt's winning streak, now seventy years old, came to a sudden, crashing end.

Africa before the "scramble" (see below). The purple area includes Mohammed Ali's Egypt-based empire.
Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2003. © 1993-2002 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

What happened? Ismail had been an irresponsible spender, driving into the ground a government that had been running on deficit spending since Mohammed Ali's day. He seemed to think that you could solve any problem by throwing enough money at it; this may work if you're a rich man and the problems involve your family and friends, but it's no way to run a country (that's why governments have budgets). Whenever he got a new idea, which as we saw happened very often, he spent ridiculous sums on it; for example, he paid Baker a salary of £10,000 a year, more than half of what the president of the United States was earning at that time. To make the payments on his debts in 1875, he had to sell his controlling share of stock in the company controlling his best moneymaking idea, the Suez Canal, just as the canal was beginning to bring in a profit. Benjamin Disraeli, the British prime minister, was the one who bought the stock, so in one stroke Britain got control of the canal.

Selling out only proved to be a short-term solution to the problem. By 1879 the Egyptian treasury was bankrupt, to the point that the Europeans felt that they had to get involved if they were ever going to get back the money they lent. At their suggestion, the Ottoman sultan, Abdul Hamid II, intervened to remove Ismail and replace him with his son, Tewfik; a European-run committee was set up to run Egypt's finances, and European financial experts took seats in Tewfik's cabinet.

The measures introduced by the advisors to straighten out the economy forced Tewfik to tighten his belt, but the group most affected was the army; many officers saw their pay cut in half. They joined forces with liberal politicians to form a nationalist movement, and forced the khedive to set up a new government, which made the nationalist leader, Colonel Ahmed Arabi, war minister and concentrated political power in his hands. In 1882 Britain and France sent warships to protect European interests (which mainly involved fears that Arabi would stop making payments on the national debt); a violent anti-European riot broke out in Alexandria, and Britain responded with an invasion that quickly defeated the nationalists and occupied both Alexandria and Cairo. France was supposed to send troops as well, but at the moment when they needed to be in Egypt, the French were busy dealing with crises in Tunisia and Vietnam. Thus, the British became the sole occupying power, and ended up staying in Egypt for more than seventy years, to keep the Suez Canal out of the hands of the nationalists. The family of Mohammed Ali continued to sit on a throne in Cairo, but they saw the queen of England replace the Turkish sultan as their ultimate overlord. Of course the French, who had expected Egypt to eventually become part of France, were furious, but since the British were no longer their enemies, there wasn't really anything they could do about it.

The Mahdist Revolt

Charles "Chinese" Gordon, a British general who served in China before coming to Africa, had replaced Baker as governor of Equatoria in 1873. Four years later the khedive had promoted him to manage all of the Sudan, and he used this position to mend relations between Egypt and Abyssinia, improve communications and exploitation of natural resources, and to do what he could to stop the slave trade. However, the population did not appreciate having a European in charge; many, in fact, saw Gordon as a latter-day Crusader, trying to use good works to convert them to Christianity. Of course the Mahdi's followers played on this resentment. Realizing that most of the northern Sudan had gone over to the Mahdi, London ordered Gordon to first fall back on Khartoum, and then evacuate the Sudan completely. Instead, Khartoum came under siege; Gordon requested permission to use the forces of Zubayr Rahama Pasha, but the British government refused, seeing the ex-slaver's involvement as too controversial. Finally an expeditionary force was sent to rescue Gordon, but it arrived too late; two days before it reached Khartoum, the Mahdi captured the city and killed all the defenders, including Gordon (January 26, 1885).⁽¹⁹⁾ In June the Mahdi himself died of typhus, and was succeeded by his general, Abdullah ibn Muhammad (Abdallahi for short). Abdallahi ruled for thirteen years, called himself the khalifa (caliph, from the Arabic word for successor), and set up a secular government, rather than create the spiritual society the Mahdi had in mind. The British stayed away at this stage, because they felt they must first put Egypt's financial house in order, and while they defeated an invasion from the south in 1889, they didn't want to overextend themselves by going into the Sudan without the Egyptians.

Abyssinia Regenerates

In the first half of the century, the Abyssinian monarchs tried to keep up with the West, buying firearms and permitting trade when they weren't busy fighting rivals. Reunification began under Kassa Haylu, a usurper from a northwestern tribe who became ruler of Tigre in 1853, defeated Amhara, Shoa and the Galla, captured Gonder, and persuaded the Church to crown him emperor at Axum, the ancient capital, in 1855. From that time onward he called himself Tewoderos (Theodore) II, in order to fulfill a prophecy that a ruler by that name would start a golden age. Being both ruthless and pious, he devoted his reign to restoring the Abyssinian nation; he invited European craftsmen to help modernize the country, and did much to reduce the power of the local barons, but he was also subject to fits of madness, and that eventually led to his undoing. In 1867 he sent a letter to Queen Victoria, asking for a military alliance. The letter went unanswered, and when the local British consul, Captain Charles Cameron, returned from a trip to Egypt, the enraged Theodore locked him up in the fortress at Magdala, his capital, and declared: "Your queen can give you orders to visit my enemies, and then to return to Massawa, but she cannot return a civil answer to my letter to her. You shall not leave till that answer comes."

Theodore got a reaction, but not the kind he expected. When the British press published Captain Cameron's letters, and reported that women and children were also being held hostage, it caused too much of a sensation to ignore. A force of 13,000 soldiers, plus laborers, camels and even elephants, was dispatched from Bombay, India, and it arrived at Massawa in January 1868. It took two and a half months for them to march across 400 miles of very rugged terrain, building a railway as they went, to reach Magdala. On the approach road to the fortress, Theodore attacked the intruders, and was beaten badly; the British casualties were none killed and only 29 wounded. Then Theodore released the hostages unarmed, and shot himself to avoid surrendering; ironically, the weapon he committed suicide with was a pistol Queen Victoria had sent him as a gift!

Abyssinia descended into chaos as the British returned to India. The next king, Takla Giyorgis (George) II, lasted only three years (1868-71) before he was deposed by another lord of Tigre, Kassai. As King Yohannes (John) IV, he resumed the unification policy of Theodore, just in time to stop the Egyptian invasions mentioned previously. However, Egypt was able to put a blockade on Abyssinia because it still controlled most of the nearby ports, and John faced a tough challenge in the kingdom of Shoa. Two previous kings, Sahle Selassie and Haile Malakot, had likewise armed their soldiers with whatever Western armaments they could get, and started expanding out of the Abyssinian highlands. Haile Malakot was succeeded by his son Menelik in 1855, and he gave John such a hard time that in 1878 they reached an agreement that gave the daughter of Menelik to John's son, and declared Menelik to be John's successor. Still, the two barely got along after that, until 1889, when John defeated the Mahdists at Gallabat, only to die the following night from a stray bullet that hit him in the battle. Menelik proclaimed himself emperor immediately, and this time he didn't have to fight to keep his throne; the other provinces, including Gonder, submitted willingly. The capital of Shoa, Addis Ababa, now became the capital of all Abyssinia.

Menelik II (1889-1913) completed the tasks his predecessors had started, so now we regard him as the founder of modern Ethiopia. When he got done uniting the provinces, he expanded Abyssinia's borders south and east, into lands belonging to the pagan Galla and Moslem Somali.⁽²⁰⁾ This more than doubled the size of the country, and gave him access to more ivory, allowing him to buy more arms from the West (usually France and Italy at this point). Thus, he not only modernized the country in time to save it from the partition of Africa; he even took part in it.

His reasons for doing this were obvious, for the Italians had picked the Horn of Africa to be their sphere of influence. Not united as a nation in Europe until 1860, the Italians were well behind Britain and France in the race for overseas colonies, so they took care to pick their targets in places where the British and French were not yet active. In the early 1880s they completed the conquest of Eritrea, and threw back a Mahdist invasion from Sudan in 1893; in 1889 the British gave them permission to take the part of Somalia between Cape Gardafui and the Juba river, territory previously claimed by Zanzibar; this became Italian Somaliland, with its capital at Mogadishu. In 1888 an army of 20,000 Italians came into contact with an Abyssinian army, but they chose to negotiate instead of fight. The result was the Treaty of Wichale in 1889, in which Menelik recognized Italy's "special interest" in his country.

By this time the "scramble for Africa" (see below) was underway; the British claimed the part of Somalia facing the Gulf of Aden, since this had been most recently held by Egypt, and the French founded the port of Djibouti, right at the Bab el Mandeb. No longer satisfied with just Eritrea and Italian Somaliland, the Italians decided they wanted the land in-between, too. About this time, Menelik renounced the treaty when he found out there were two differently worded versions of it; the version written in Italian placed Abyssinia under Italian domination, while the version written in Amharic did not. The Italians declared war and invaded Abyssinia in 1896, but only got as far as Adowa before Menelik defeated them. Instead of a backward rabble of warriors with spears, they met the most modern army in Africa, more up-to-date than even the Zulus. It was also almost three times larger; Menelik was able to mobilize 100,000 men to oppose 17,000 Italians and an equal number of Eritrean auxiliaries. Finally, the Italians tried to gain surprise by attacking early on a Sunday morning, without realizing that their opponents got up to attend a Coptic mass at 4:00 A.M.! As a result, Menelik was ready first, and he attacked at 5:30 A.M.. 70 percent of the Italians were killed, wounded or captured, and Italy was forced to give up its claim to be Abyssinia's protecting power. Menelik's astonishing victory meant that Abyssinia would be the only country in Africa besides Liberia to keep its independence in the early twentieth century.

Menelik II was the first African head of state to be photographed.

Before we go on, it is worth remembering that nobody is perfect, and Menelik had two amusing quirks. First, when he heard about the invention of the electric chair in 1890, Menelik decided that he could use it in his modernization program, and ordered three electric chairs from the American manufacturer. When the chairs arrived and were unpacked, Menelik was horrified to learn they wouldn't work, because his country did not yet have electricity. Not one to waste an investment, he converted one of the chairs to use as his throne (and no, his reign didn't end when somebody threw the switch!).

The other idiosyncrasy was that Menelik took an Old Testament verse about eating scriptures literally, and would tear out and eat a page of the Bible whenever he felt sick.⁽²¹⁾ One day he choked to death from trying to eat both 1 and 2 Kings in one sitting.

The Zulu War

Several factors motivated them to do this. First and foremost was Western confidence. The 99 years between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I (1815-1914) were a time of rapid progress, in industry, science, and just about everything else. Never before--and never again--were Europeans and Americans as optimistic about the future as they were at this time. Achievements like the Suez Canal, the 1851 World's Fair, and the Eiffel Tower convinced many that some day they would learn how to do anything. In the field of medicine, the causes of most infectious and deficiency-related diseases had been discovered (not to mention cures for several), so while Africa's diseases were still dangerous, visitors no longer had to be in mortal fear of them. In addition, the factories of the West needed raw materials that only undeveloped countries could supply, and increasing concern for human rights persuaded enlightened Westerners that abolishing slavery was not enough; they needed to rule the rest of the world long enough to teach its inhabitants how to rule themselves (the so-called "White Man's Burden"). This combination of idealism and imperialism would produce very different results from what early humanitarians like David Livingstone had in mind.

Imperialist activity took place in southernmost Africa before it did in the rest of the continent, because there the British found ways to make easy money, and the temptation to change existing borders became irresistible. In 1867 the world's largest source of diamonds was discovered in a volcanic plug at Kimberley, in Griqualand. Since Kimberley was on the border between the Cape Colony and the Orange Free State, the British simply moved in and took it, in 1873. Nearby, King Moshoeshoe's Basutoland had a border dispute with the Orange Free State, and wasn't doing very well, so in 1868 Moshoeshoe submitted to the British to keep from losing the land he had left. Becoming a British protectorate may sound bad, but even here Moshoeshoe lucked out; his people would do better than those Africans who came under direct British rule, escaping the official discrimination that marked South Africa in the twentieth century. In 1878 Britain annexed Walvis Bay, on the otherwise barren coast of Southwest Africa.

In 1877 the Transvaal submitted to British rule as well, because their government was bankrupt and unstable. But by taking the Boers under wing, the British also acquired their feud with the nearest tribes. The Xhosa had recovered enough to stage one more rebellion (the Ninth Kaffir War, 1877-78), but this was put down without too much fuss. Far more threatening, however, were the Zulus. When the current Zulu king, Cetshwayo, rejected a British demand to stop arming, a British expeditionary force marched into northern Natal, in January 1879.

The British commander, Lord Chelmsford, had the supreme confidence of Victorian-era England, and obviously had not learned anything from the experiences of other Europeans who had faced the Zulus. The force was split into small units that could be easily isolated, they did not prepare a defensive laager properly when they heard the Zulus were coming, and the men were armed with Martini-Henry rifles. The Martini-Henry had a range of 1,500 yards, and its large caliber bullets did fearful damage (targets that weren't killed were always maimed for life), but it was also a single-shot weapon, no longer appropriate for use against a more numerous opponent. At Isandhlwana a Zulu force of 20,000 enveloped 1,800 British soldiers, using the charging-bull formation that had worked so well for Shaka, and once the defenders ran out of ammunition, the Zulus killed them all. It was the most publicized defeat in British colonial history, but the Zulus had also suffered 2,000 killed and 2,000 wounded, more than they could afford. For the Zulus, Isandhlwana plays the same role as Custer's Last Stand played for the American Indian--a final victory before the downfall.

4,000 men--the "loins" of Cetshwayo's impi--continued on from Isandhlwana to Rorke's Drift, six miles away. Here the British had converted two farmhouses into a hospital and supply station. There were 139 soldiers here, and of the hundred that were able to fight, only eighty were trained riflemen. Logically, they should have been slaughtered like their comrades at Isandhlwana. But because they couldn't run away, they spent the few hours they had building two barricades between the buildings with biscuit boxes and mealie bags. Remarkably, the defenders, led by two inexperienced junior officers, did everything right. When the Zulus showed up, they fired with a discipline and accuracy that kept most of them from scaling the makeshift barriers, and stayed close enough together to prevent any Zulus from sneaking in between them. The siege went on for sixteen hours (2:30 P.M. on January 22 to 7:00 A.M. on January 23) before the exhausted Zulus withdrew. The British had lost fifteen dead and twelve wounded, none of them casualties of Zulu spears (the Zulus had captured plenty of rifles and ammunition at Isandhlwana, but couldn't train themselves to use them effectively in less than one day). Estimates of Zulu casualties were 400 to 800 dead, and that is not counting those who may have died more than a few miles from Rorke's Drift.

After Rorke's Drift everything favored the British. Reinforcements arrived at Durban, and British technology and military training prevailed over native numbers and courage. Apparently Cetshwayo seemed to think that the British were just another tribe, and they would make peace after suffering a defeat on the battlefield. He never realized that Durban (and for that matter Cape Town) were mere outposts of a vast empire that when aroused, could send another army in a few weeks. Lord Chelmsford partially redeemed himself by winning every subsequent battle, the main ones being at Kambula (March 29), Gingindhlovu (April 2), and finally Ulundi (the Zulu capital, July 4).⁽²²⁾ Cetshwayo was captured in August, and the British, not really wanting to rule the Zulu territory directly, broke up his kingdom into thirteen weak ministates. In 1883 a civil war broke out between the Zulu chiefs; Cetshwayo was killed, and his son Dinuzulu only managed to win after the Boers gave him their support, in exchange for the northwestern third of Zululand (the Zulus living in this area immediately became tenant laborers on the new white-run farms). Then in 1887 the British annexed the rest of Zululand, but prohibited white settlement until 1897, when it became part of the Natal colony.

Though the British won the Zulu War, their initial defeat encouraged the Transvaal Boers to make a bid at regaining their independence. In December 1880 they ambushed and defeated the only British battalion in the Transvaal, and two months later, they beat a second British battalion at Majuba Hill, near the border of Natal. London was in a conciliatory mood, and it agreed to give the Boers autonomy; they could run internal affairs, but Britain retained the right to control their dealings with foreigners and African tribes.

The "Scramble for Africa," Part I

Active European involvement in the Congo was started not by a nation but by two individuals, Henry Morton Stanley and King Leopold II of Belgium. Since his journey down the Congo River, Stanley had been arguing that the region he had explored was rich in resources, and the country that exploited those resources would become very rich indeed. He tried to sell his scheme to the British government, but Britain paid little attention, because it had so many opportunities in other places already. Leopold, however, saw the proposal differently. He had never been satisfied to simply rule Belgium ("I am King of a small country, and a small-minded people."), and ever since he became king in 1865, he had been looking for a way to get a piece of the overseas pie. The Belgian government refused to back his ideas, so in 1876 Leopold hosted an international conference in Brussels (August 1876), which he used to form an organization to promote humanitarian activities and scientific research in Africa. As president of this foundation, he could start building an African empire with himself, and not any national government, in charge of it. In Stanley he saw the agent he was looking for, and his charm worked with British indifference to persuade Stanley to accept employment with the Belgian king.

Stanley returned to Africa in August 1879. This time his main objective was to tame the Congo River, which he said "is and will be the grand highway of commerce to west central Africa." He did it by setting up trading stations along the river, and by building a road around Livingstone Falls. Over the next four years, he also negotiated more than 450 treaties with local chiefs, to create a common market that only traded with King Leopold's organization. At first this was called the Confederation of Free Negro Republics, and after 1885 the Congo Free State, but the truth was that Stanley was building a private kingdom for Leopold, not a new independent African state.⁽²³⁾

Stanley's success prompted France's agent in the area, Count Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, an Italian-born French naval officer, to make a claim of his own. Since 1875 he had been exploring the lands of the Gaboon and Fang tribes, in modern-day Gabon. Then in 1879 he heard about Stanley, marched to the Congo, got Makoko, a chief on the north shore of Stanley Pool, to sign a treaty that put his land and people under French protection, and built a French base on the spot, which would eventually become the city of Brazzaville. He returned to France in 1882, and the French government was at first reluctant to officially claim the territory de Brazza had passed through--until news arrived of the British coup in Egypt. By the end of the year Paris had not only ratified de Brazza's treaty, but also sent him back to explore and claim more of the Congo basin for France.

With Leopold and the French dividing the middle of Africa between themselves, the Portuguese woke up from centuries of slumber, suddenly realizing that others were moving into lands they had claimed long ago, but never settled. Britain, getting jealous at French activity all over Africa's Atlantic coast, announced it would back Portugal's claim to the whole Congo basin in return for the right to trade freely there. And if those three nations and one king weren't enough, now Germany got involved in Africa. The Germans had stayed away in the 1870s because their chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, simply wasn't interested; he had everything he could want in Europe. However, once Britain and France started helping themselves to any piece of the non-Western world that caught their fancy, it became a matter of national honor for every first-rate nation to do the same. Bismarck couldn't ignore this, and he also realized that if he sent German soldiers overseas to blow off excess energy, he could keep them from trying to beat up European neighbors like the French. Thus, in the name of peace, from late 1883 to early 1885 he proclaimed protectorates over the four parts of Africa where German missionaries, scientists and merchants were most active: Togoland (modern Togo), Cameroon (Kamerun in German), Southwest Africa and the part of East Africa claimed by the Sultanate of Zanzibar. However, the boundaries of all four regions were ill-defined, especially East Africa, which included coastal Kenya (the British wanted Kenya because it was the closest maritime territory to the headwaters of the Nile). Because the British and Germans had stumbled into Africa without a clear strategy for conquest, and because spheres of influence were starting to overlap, there was now a real danger that two European armies clashing somewhere on the continent would start a war.

To keep this from happening, Bismarck invited everyone with an interest in Africa to attend a special conference in Berlin. Here in late 1884 and 1885, the nations of Europe reached agreements on who could have what in Africa. In most cases the decision was to give a piece of the hinterland to whoever controlled the nearest coast, since most of Africa's coastline had been claimed by now. However, an exception was made if occupying a territory would harm the interests of a neighboring colony (e.g., Kenya), and occupation of the coast was only recognized if the mother country had an administrative base there, thereby raising the cost to eliminate those who weren't serious about running a colony. The biggest winner was King Leopold; he only got a small bit of the Atlantic coast at the mouth of the Congo, sandwiched between two areas claimed by Portugal, but managed to keep the lion's share of the interior for his Congo Free State. If there was a loser, it was the British; France expressed so much outrage over the British occupation of Egypt that Britain had to let the French have their way almost everywhere else, in order to get other nations like Germany to approve a continuation of Britain's "veiled protectorate" in Egypt. Consequently France got a free hand in most of West Africa, keeping the British from uniting their colonies at Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, and Nigeria; the Congo was divided the way the French and Belgians liked it. Moreover, most of the continent, and not just the Congo basin, became a free trade zone.

Africa after the Berlin Congress. By now nearly all of the coast has been occupied by Europe.
Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2003. © 1993-2002 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

From the Cape to Cairo

Cecil Rhodes first came to South Africa in 1870, at the age of seventeen, after a doctor treated him for tuberculosis and recommended that he move from England to a warmer climate. Here he stayed with his brother, and because diamonds had just been discovered at Kimberley, he became a diamond prospector. But he didn't just dig for gems; he found other ways to make money. He formed a partnership with another Englishman, Charles Rudd, and they gained control of the market in steam pumps, which were needed to keep mines from flooding. Then he invested in an ice-making machine that allowed the Kimberley saloons to serve cold drinks. Finally, Rhodes and Rudd bought the claims of destitute prospectors who had failed to find their fortunes in the blue rocks of Kimberley. This allowed them to form the De Beers Mining Company in 1880, which eventually took over all its major rivals and gained control of 90 percent of the world's diamond production.⁽²⁴⁾

In 1881 Rhodes used his wealth to enter politics, winning a seat in the Cape Colony Parliament that he held for the rest of his life. From there he bought a controlling interest in several Cape newspapers and launched a scare campaign, warning that the Cape Colony would be in danger if the Germans or Boers occupied the lands immediately to the north. This prompted the British government to follow Livingstone's footsteps into Botswana and take the remaining unoccupied land south of the upper Zambezi River, forming the Bechuanaland protectorate in 1885.⁽²⁵⁾

Meanwhile, from the Transvaal came a discovery that would change the balance of power. This was the mother lode of South Africa's gold, in the Witwatersrand highlands south of Pretoria. The big find was made in 1886, when a wandering prospector named George Harrison happened to kick a pebble out of the ground and noticed that it glittered. He took it home, washed it in a pan, and sure enough, there was gold in the rock. The local authorities let Harrison stake a claim in what they declared a public goldfield, and a tremendous gold rush began. A year later Johannesburg was founded on the site, and it became home for 10,000 fortune seekers, half of them white immigrants from five continents; by 1889 Johannesburg was the largest city in southern Africa. The Transvaal would now go from being the poorest white-run community in Africa to become the richest, and that gold would be used to finance the white supremacist regime of twentieth-century South Africa. However, Harrison, like so many prospectors, only got lucky once, and did not profit from all the activities which sprang up around him; he sold his claim for £15, and was subsequently eaten by a lion, never realizing how much he had changed everything.

Rhodes didn't wait to see what Paul Kruger, the president of the Transvaal, would do with his newfound wealth. Like many people at that time, he thought that "a second Rand" (an abbreviation of Witwatersrand) would be found north of the Limpopo River. In 1888 he got Lobengula, the chief of the Ndebele, to sign a treaty granting exclusive mining rights to the De Beers company, in return for a small monthly pension, a thousand rifles, and ten thousand rounds of ammunition. A year later he set up the British South Africa Company, and got a royal charter to exploit the lands of the Ndebele and their northern neighbors, the Shona; this included the right to make laws and use a police force in the area. Too late, Lobengula realized he had been ripped off; in 1889 he told a missionary, "Did you ever see a chameleon catch a fly? England is the chameleon and I am the fly."

Rhodes went on to become prime minister of the Cape Colony in 1890, and he sent an armed force to take control of the Zambezi valley. In Shona country they built an outpost named Salisbury (modern Harare), that would someday become the capital of Zimbabwe; then they crossed the Zambezi to occupy everything between that river and Lake Nyasa (modern Zambia and Malawi), except for the territory of Katanga, which was claimed by Leopold's Congo. The Ndebele resisted, and resumed their traditional raids on the Shona; in response, the invaders crushed them in a full-scale war (the Anglo-Matabele War, 1893-94). This whole area, previously called "Zambezia," now became the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. "Rhodesia" was derived from Rhodes, of course; this may be the only case where a corporate CEO got to name a country after himself.

Once it looked like southern Africa was in the bag, Salisbury took the next step in creating a string of British colonies that ran from Cape Town to Cairo. Claims in East Africa were still dangerously vague (a German entrepreneur named Carl Peters was signing treaties with the African chiefs around Lake Victoria at this time), and back in England, Sir Samuel Baker was making a powerful case for British domination of the entire upper Nile valley. If another European country reached the White Nile, Baker argued, it could use modern engineering techniques to divert the course of the river and ruin the lives of everyone downstream, especially in Egypt, and that could threaten the whole British Empire.⁽²⁶⁾ Accordingly, Salisbury began negotiating with Bismarck in 1886 to draw a clear boundary between what the British and the Germans could have. The treaty they signed in 1890 let the Germans keep the land between Lake Tanganyika and the Indian Ocean, while Germany recognized British claims to Zanzibar, Kenya, Uganda, Rhodesia, Bechuanaland and eastern Nigeria. This agreement worked because Bismarck and his successor, Georg Leo Caprivi, weren't really interested in building an African empire for Germany; what Germany wanted--and got--for all its concessions was the Caprivi strip, a narrow corridor of land connecting Southwest Africa with the Zambezi River (this allowed Germans to travel between Southwest Africa and German East Africa without going around the British-ruled Cape of Good Hope), and Heligoland, a tiny island in the North Sea that the British had held since 1815. Then Salisbury negotiated treaties with the Portuguese that established the present-day borders of Angola and Mozambique. In 1894 the British government formally declared a protectorate over Uganda, and one year later it authorized construction of the Uganda Railway, to connect Mombasa with Lake Victoria (it was completed in 1901). There were some revolts, mostly by the Swahili against the British and German intruders, but each of these was put down within a year. The longest rebellion took place in Uganda, and pitted the largely Christian, pro-European kingdom of Buganda against the pro-Moslem kingdom of Bunyoro; that lasted from 1894 to 1899 before Buganda and the British prevailed.

Meanwhile on the east coast, the sultan of Zanzibar died, and his cousin, Khalid bin Barghash, immediately took charge. However, the British preferred another candidate, Hamud bin Muhammed, and an 1886 treaty required any candidate for sultan to get the permission of the British consul before taking the throne. Khalid hadn't done this, so the British ordered him to leave his palace; instead, Khalid barricaded himself inside with guards loyal to him. Two days later (August 27, 1896), the British showed up with five warships, 150 marines and sailors, and 900 African soldiers, and began to bombard the palace. A royal yacht and two other Zanzibari boats were sunk, and the bombardment quickly took out the palace's gun battery. Either 38 or 45 minutes later, the shelling stopped as the pro-British Africans approached the palace, and it was all over. It doesn't matter which clock was accurate; the Anglo-Zanzibar War was the shortest war in history. An estimated 500 Zanzibaris were killed or wounded; the only British casualty was one seriously injured petty officer, who later recovered. Khalid went into exile, and Hamud was installed as the next sultan; however, he needed to find a new headquarters, because the palace and harem were so badly damaged from the bombardment that they had to be torn down.

From 1890 onward, the British (and soon other Europeans) had a devastating weapon that gave them an overwhelming advantage against all African opponents--the first true machine gun. Invented in 1884 by an American named Hiram Maxim, it used the energy from each bullet's recoil to eject an old cartridge and load the next bullet. Previous automatic-fire weapons fired from more than one barrel at the same time, or required the turning of a crank, like the Gatling gun. Unlike them, the Maxim gun, as it was called for a while, could keep on shooting until it ran out of bullets or jammed.

We saw how in the past Africans eagerly bought European-made guns, but didn't feel too threatened by them. The replacement of the musket with the rifle gave Europeans more of an advantage, but not enough for them to count on defeating a larger force (remember Isandhlwana). With the Maxim gun, however, all that changed. Its firepower was so much greater than all other weapons, that even the stupidest European commander could blast away hordes of natives. The British first used it in the Anglo-Matabele War; in an 1899 battle, 320 French soldiers armed with Maxim guns shredded an army of 12,000 in Chad. Because Western armies were not yet using it against each other, it would take until World War I for everyone to realize how much the machine gun had changed warfare. Still, the Europeans knew that they wouldn't lose any more battles in Africa. In 1898, after Maxim guns won the battle of Omdurman (see below), Hillaire Belloc wrote a couplet to keep up the morale of British soldiers, possibly the most unheroic verse of all time:

"Whatever happens, we have got
the Maxim gun, and they have not."

"Heart of Darkness"

At the Berlin Congress, King Leopold II had talked about "civilizing" the Congo Free State, which listeners took to mean sending scientific expeditions, raising the standard of living among the natives, and fighting the Arab slavers that remained in the east. Instead Leopold did what he pleased, squeezing as much as he could from the Congo for his own personal gain. Instead of allowing free trade, he required that the natives trade only with his state agents or with his "concessions" (private companies that paid him 50 percent of their profits). Then he ordered the natives to hunt elephants for their ivory, mine copper or gather latex from rubber trees, hard work which paid a very minimal wage and forced men to be away from their families for up to twenty-five days out of every month. Failure to supply the quotas for rubber was punished with floggings, torture and death. A private army, called the Force Publique (public force), was established to combat slavery, but most of the time it was used as a goon squad, crushing any uprisings among the Congolese. When the level of unrest among natives who refused to work under these conditions got dangerously high, Leopold's regime started paying chiefs to supply "volunteer" workers, and either bought or took slaves from the slavers to use as workers or soldiers.

From 1892 to 1894, the Force Publique went on a campaign to drive all slavers out of the Congo. Tippu Tib, for example, had managed to get himself proclaimed Leopold's "governor" over Stanley Falls in 1887; now this improbable job was terminated, and Tippu Tib retired to Zanzibar. Of course Leopold described the campaign as a great humanitarian act, but his real purpose was to eliminate the competition and get more workers. At the same time, the invention of the inflatable tire caused world demand for rubber to skyrocket. This drove rubber prices upward, and the agents collecting rubber in the Congo reported returns as high as 700%, until the British starting planting rubber trees in Malaya after 1900. Leopold responded by increasing the rubber "tax" from his subjects, which sparked more revolts, and the Force Publique crushed these by burning villages, cutting off the heads of uncooperative chiefs, and slaughtering the families of men who refused to gather rubber. Sometimes the soldiers were ordered to prove they had killed rebels by cutting off and bringing back their right hands; when the rebels got away, the soldiers might cut off the hands of live civilians, even children, to make sure the number of hands captured matched the number of bullets spent.

Leopold never visited his African domain, and tried to keep away visitors who might give a negative report of his regime. Still, scattered reports of atrocities came from missionaries working in the Congo basin. Then in the late 1890s, Edmund Morel, a young British shipping clerk, was sent to Belgium to supervise the loading and unloading of ships, and he made a terrible discovery; the ships coming from the Congo Free State brought tons of rubber, but the cargoes they carried back were mostly guns and bullets. From this he guessed that the Congolese were being forced at gunpoint to collect the rubber. Morel quit his shipping job in 1901, and as a newspaper reporter, began a campaign of speeches, and pamphlets against the abuses in the Congo. This prompted the British government to send a diplomat, Roger Casement, to the Congo to investigate conditions there. Casement's 1904 report verified the terrible conditions, and he joined Morel in founding the Congo Reform Association, the first major human rights organization of the twentieth century. In the United States, Morel met with President Theodore Roosevelt and won the support of two celebrated writers, Booker T. Washington and Mark Twain. Washington wrote an article entitled Cruelty in Congo Country, which declared that "There was never anything in American slavery that could be compared to the barbarous conditions existing today in the Congo Free State." Mark Twain produced a grim satire, King Leopold's Soliloquy: A Defence of His Congo Rule, in which he imagined how the king would explain his actions:

"I have spent other millions on religion and art, and what do I get for it? Nothing. Not a compliment. These generosities are studiedly ignored, in print. In print I get nothing but slanders - and slanders again - and still slanders, and slanders on top of slanders! Grant them true, what of it? They are slanders all the same when uttered against a king."

Most incriminating of all was Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902), a novel he wrote after he traveled in the Congo, to describe the horrors that he saw (the "hearts of darkness" were in those who permitted the killings and mutilations to take place). Leopold responded with a massive propaganda effort of his own, but stories like Heart of Darkness were too much even for the other colonial powers of the day, and public opinion turned against the king. The Belgian government ordered its own investigation, which confirmed the accounts of Casement and the missionaries. In 1908 Leopold was ordered to hand over the Congo Free State to the Belgian government (which renamed it the Belgian Congo), and he received a huge cash payout for "his great sacrifices made for the Congo." When Leopold died in 1909, the American poet Vachel Lindsay wrote an epitaph which recalled the hand-cutting atrocity:

"Listen to the yell of Leopold's ghost
Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host,
Hear how the demons chuckle and yell
Cutting his hands off, down in Hell."

It is now estimated that between 5 and 15 million people perished while Leopold ran the Congo, making this the first genocide of the twentieth century. The worst abuses ended when the Belgian government took over, but life didn't get much better for the natives, because the land, along with its resources, remained in the hands of Europeans. In addition Leopold managed to cover up evidence of the genocide by burning the Congo Free State archives, in both Belgium and the Congo, before he gave up control. Consequently the world nearly forgot this dark episode in colonial history, until Adam Hochschild published the history book King Leopold's Ghost in 1998.

From Dakar to Djibouti

As for the British, they hadn't gone as far because they were in the jungles along the coast, rather than the semiarid plains of the Sahel, and they were facing the most advanced of the "forest kingdoms" we discussed in the last chapter. There had been another war with the Ashanti in 1874, which saw the British retaliate for a previous raid on Elmina by burning Kumasi, but they did not occupy the kingdom. After two more short wars in the early 1890s, they returned, deported the last Ashanti king, Prempeh, and made the kingdom a protectorate; in 1901 they finished the job by turning the protectorate into a colony.⁽²⁷⁾

The story of Nigeria's conquest is more complicated. Here, as in India and Rhodesia, merchants led the way. In 1879 a British merchant, George T. Goldie, organized the UAC (United Africa Company), which brought all British traders in Nigeria under one organization, and soon controlled the whole lower Niger River as well. The company was renamed the National African Company in 1882, and the Royal Niger Company in 1886; under the latter name it received a royal charter, meaning it would be defended by the British government and that it had the right to administer territories and make treaties with native chiefs. A matter of timing allowed these treaties to define Nigeria's borders; the Company signed a treaty with Sokoto just a few days before a German agent arrived (1884), and with Borgu, on the frontier of Dahomey, just a few days before a French officer got there (1894).

At the Congress of Berlin, Britain got Germany and France to recognize that the Niger delta was in Britain's sphere of influence; this was now called the Oil Rivers Protectorate (1885). From here and from Lagos, British forces went forth and conquered the native ministates one by one. In 1892 they marched on Ijebu, the only Yoruba state that would not allow missionaries to come in; with its fall, followed by the capture of Oyo in 1895, the Yoruba came under British rule.

The town of Brohimi, 150 miles from Lagos, provided two surprises when the British took it in 1894. Brohimi was surrounded by swamps and creeks, and had several strongpoints armed with well-placed cannon. Together these factors defeated the first force, requiring a second, larger force. When Brohimi was finally captured, the commanding admiral found at least 106 cannon, and reported that Nana, the local chief, had been preparing the defenses for months, maybe even years. In fact, he tried to learn as much as he could from the British before they became his enemies. The admiral also found a stockpile of 8,300 cases of imported European gin, for a total of 99,600 bottles. Chief Nana had not collected all this liquor to throw the world's biggest party--he did it because it was an outstanding growth investment. He had noticed that the price of gin went up every year, so by saving nearly a hundred thousand bottles of it, he showed he was a savvy investor!

Next on Britain's "to do" list was Benin. When he heard what happened to Brohimi, the oba of Benin, Ovonramwen, closed the markets under his control, thereby ending the shipments of palm oil and pepper from his neighborhood. Britain sent an embassy to negotiate a resumption of trade, and to persuade Benin to stop practicing slavery and human sacrifice. The leader of the embassy, a Captain Phillips, sent a letter ahead of him proposing a meeting, but the oba tried to postpone it, saying that he had just undergone the most important ritual of his people; it had left his body scarred, and for the well-being of himself and the kingdom, he must not come in contact with anything foreign for at least two months. But Phillips insisted that he could not wait for the king to heal up, because he had other duties in the Oil Rivers Protectorate, so he began his journey to Benin City anyway. On the way he met three representatives of the king, who requested that he at least wait two days so they could tell the oba to get ready for visitors. Again Phillips refused. When he arrived at the palace, the embassy was ambushed; seven of the nine Europeans, including Phillips, and most of their 200 African helpers were killed. Then the oba, afraid that the British would retaliate, did what kings of Benin had always done in tough times, sacrificing hundreds of human victims to persuade the gods to protect the city.

It didn't work. A British force of 1,500 men took only three weeks in February 1897 to fight their way to Benin City and sack the capital. When they arrived, they found the city a gory sepulcher, nearly deserted and littered with the bodies of sacrificial victims. The beautiful bronze plaques in the palace were covered with blood, but that didn't stop the soldiers from removing some 2,000 pieces of art, to take back to Britain as war trophies. The oba died in exile in 1914, but later on his son was allowed to return and become the new oba; he put on the coral beads that had been Benin's symbol of royalty, and commissioned new works in bronze and ivory, so that Benin could revive its rituals and not forget its heritage.

All the British had to do after that was take control of northern Nigeria. In 1898 London dissolved the Royal Niger Company, because the company would have been in too much danger if a war broke out with France. Then in 1900 British forces began to move toward Lake Chad. Finally Kano was occupied in 1902, and Sokoto in 1903.

In the Indian Ocean, the French no longer had the British standing in the way of them getting island colonies. We saw they had competed for influence on Madagascar in the early nineteenth century, but Britain had dropped her claim in 1890, in order to keep Zanzibar. France annexed the Comoros in 1886, and started making demands on Madagascar itself. In a situation similar to what Abyssinia faced, Rainilaiarivony, the Malagasy prime minister, insisted that the 1885 treaty did not make Madagascar a French protectorate, while the French insisted that it did. France sent a large military force, war broke out in 1895, and by the end of the year they had entered Antananarivo, removed the prime minister and imposed a new treaty that left the queen a French puppet. New revolts broke out in the countryside; the old Betsileo kingdom tried to regain its independence, now that the Merinas were no longer in charge, and there was a wave of anti-Christian persecutions, as pagans blamed Christianity for the problems they were going through. For a while Antananarivo was the only place under French control, but after a nine-year pacification campaign (1896-1904) the whole island was forced to accept the rule of France. As for the Merina monarchy, it was ended in 1897, as Queen Ranavalona III, along with her prime minister, was exiled first to Reunion, and later to Algeria.

Meanwhile on the mainland, Equatoria had fallen to the Mahdists after Emin Pasha's evacuation. The Belgians made a move against the Mahdists in 1897, invading from the northeast corner of the Congo and occupying the part of Equatoria west of the White Nile. The British wouldn't stand for this; though they currently didn't control any part of the White Nile, they didn't want any other Europeans there either (see footnote #26). They told King Leopold that he could hold onto the territory in question, the Lado enclave, for the time being, but upon his death it must be given back. Accordingly, Lado returned to Sudan--and British control--in 1909.

By this time the British had begun their campaign to avenge General Gordon. General Horatio Herbert Kitchener led 25,800 men, 8,600 of them British, out of Egypt in late 1895, accompanied by a flotilla of gunboats on the Nile. They moved very slowly, because they built a railway as they advanced to secure their supply line; it took them three years to reach Omdurman, near Khartoum. Here on September 2, 1898, Abdallahi attacked with an army of 52,000, and the Anglo-Egyptian force won a total victory: about 11,000 Mahdists were killed and 15,000 wounded, compared with 48 killed and 382 wounded in Kitchener's force. Then they entered Khartoum, where Kitchener destroyed the Mahdi's tomb, dug up his body, and sent the skull to the London College of Surgeons. The khalifa escaped to Kordofan and formed a new army, but was killed in another battle a year later.

After the annihilation of the Mahdists, eighty years would pass before Moslem fundamentalists gave the West any trouble again. However, the French added a new complication that required Kitchener's attention. Six weeks before the battle of Omdurman, Captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand, with six other French officers and 120 Senegalese soldiers, reached the White Nile at Fashoda, about 400 miles south of Khartoum. Marching from Brazzaville, and going through the heart of Africa on a path that paralleled the Congo and Ubanghi Rivers, it had taken them nearly two years to get there. Kitchener rushed to Fashoda to deal with this challenge. He and Marchand liked each other from the start, and they wined and dined while debating their positions, but both were firm. Kitchener argued that Egypt had ruled Sudan before the Madhist revolt, so now it was technically British. Marchand's response was that he was free to claim French possession of the upper Nile, because Britain had failed to effectively occupy this region since 1885 (a requirement of the Berlin Congress, remember), and although Kitchener's force was many times larger than his, he could not withdraw without orders from France to do so. The standoff lasted for two months, with both sides exchanging telegrams with their mother countries, and newspapers in both Britain and France fanned the flames of righteous fury. Finally the French backed down, because they faced tough domestic problems and a lack of international support for their claim; both sides signed a treaty in March 1899 that excluded France from the entire Nile valley. At no other time had two European countries come so close to starting a war over a piece of African land.

The French dream of having everything between Dakar and Djibouti would not come to pass, but the French weren't mad for long; they were having their way in the west, and there was still plenty to do. Much of this was accomplished by a really ambitious invasion of Chad, which involved three French forces, each marching about a thousand miles from a different direction. One force, led by a Major Lamy, left Algeria to cross the Sahara; the second, led by Captains Paul Voulet and Charles Chanoine (two veterans of the recently concluded brutal campaign against the Mandinka) advanced from French West Africa, taking care to go around the Hausa territory claimed by the British; the third, led by Émile Gentil, a naval officer, headed due north from Brazzaville through the Congo.

They all reached Lake Chad in 1900, where they met the local warlord, an Arab soldier named Rabih al-Zubayr. Rabih had served the Egyptian government in the neighborhood of the Sudd, until the Mahdist revolt broke out; instead of submitting to the Mahdi, he headed west with his armed followers. An attack on Wadai failed in 1887, but in 1893 he succeeded in finishing off the kingdom of Bornu in 1893, and conquered Bagirmi in 1894. In their place he set up a slave-raiding state, which terrorized its neighbors and, with the cooperation of the Sanussi Brotherhood, delivered its slaves to the caravans heading north to Benghazi and Tripoli. Rabih fiercely resisted the French columns coming at him from the north, west and south, only to be defeated and killed.

Rabih's son, Fadr Allah, moved to the British-claimed area southwest of Lake Chad, requested British protection, and staged raids on the French. This only lasted until a French column followed him back and killed him (1901). The newly conquered areas became the colony of French Equatorial Africa, formed by merging Chad with Ubanghi-Chari (today's Central African Republic), the French Congo, and Gabon in 1910. As for Wadai, it remained independent until 1909, and resisted French rule until 1913; the French also fought the Sanussi in northern Chad until 1919.

The Boer War

Because so many whites in the Johannesburg area were English-speaking immigrants, Rhodes thought he could use them to stage a coup against the Boer regime, and bring the Transvaal back into the British Empire. To do this he sent his chief agent from the Anglo-Matabele War, Leander Starr Jameson. They expected the uitlanders to launch an uprising on December 28, 1895; when it didn't happen, Jameson decided to start his own, leading 478 members of the British South Africa Company police in a raid on Johannesburg. Instead they were ambushed and captured, and the public outcry against "the Jameson Raid" forced Rhodes to resign from his post as prime minister.⁽³⁰⁾ Even worse, Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II, an addicted saber-rattler, sent Kruger a telegram congratulating him on his successful defense against the British; this poisoned Anglo-German relations and helped to make World War I inevitable.

Rhodes' successors did nothing to address Boer grievances against the British. In fact, they did everything they could to provoke a war, only this time the new high commissioner for South Africa, Sir Alfred Milner, and the colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, were careful to portray Kruger as an oppressive tyrant, something Rhodes had failed to do. Under pressure, Kruger made one concession after another, but they were never enough; exasperated, he cried out in June 1898, "It is our country you want." Finally, on October 9, 1899, Kruger demanded that the British remove all troops on the Transvaal's borders in forty-eight hours. Milner simply replied that this was "impossible to discuss," so three days later, the Boers attacked, beginning the most futile war in the period covered by this chapter.

The Boers, being familiar with the land and using guerrilla tactics, won the first battles. They besieged the British in Kimberley, Ladysmith and Mafeking; in one week in December 1899, they captured Kimberley and won battles at Magersfontein and Stormberg; Ladysmith was captured in February 1900.⁽³¹⁾ And since both sides were European in origin, casualties tended to be heavier than those from battles between Europeans and Africans.⁽³²⁾ However, this was "The Empire On Which the Sun Never Sets" that the Boers were fighting, so the war's outcome was never in doubt. British reinforcements began to arrive in early 1900, led by Field Marshal Lord Frederick Roberts and General Kitchener, the hero of Omdurman. In March they took Bloemfontein, the capital of the Orange Free State, and invaded the Transvaal to take Johannesburg in May and Pretoria in June. Kruger, being too old to fight, fled to the Netherlands when Pretoria fell, where he tried unsuccessfully to get other European powers to support his republic.

Now that the British held all the cities, Roberts thought the war was over and went home, leaving Kitchener to spend two more years fighting guerrilla forces led by Boer generals like Jan Christian Smuts, Christiaan De Wet, Louis Botha, and Jacobus De La Rey. Eventually the British resorted to extreme measures, burning crops, building blockhouses to divide the country, and putting more than 150,000 women, children, and black servants of the Boers in concentrations camps; one out of every six prisoners died from poor food and sanitation. Finally they wore down Boer morale, and the war ended with the Treaty of Vereeniging on May 31, 1902; on the battlefield Britain had lost some 28,000 men, and the Boers had lost 4,000. It had taken 450,000 British troops to defeat an army of 88,000, one that included teenagers and old men in its ranks.

Even then, it took several concessions from London to get the Boers to lay down their arms. For a start, the treaty promised to pay a £3 million indemnity, and granted amnesty and repatriation to Boer soldiers who pledged their loyalty to the king of England. The Transvaal and the Orange Free State were allowed to have their own constitutions as self-governing colonies, in 1906 and 1907 respectively. In 1910 London merged the Cape Colony, Natal, Orange Free State and Transvaal colonies together, and declared them an independent member of the British Commonwealth, the Union of South Africa. Though blacks had fought and died on both sides in the recent war, they were not allowed to take part in the all-white convention that created the new nation; one black council at the time "noted with regret that the contemplated Union is to be a Union of two races, namely the British and the Afrikaners--the African is to be excluded."

A former enemy of the British, Louis Botha, became South Africa's first prime minister, and while he tried to bridge the differences between Afrikaners and other whites, he also made sure that blacks, coloreds, and Indian immigrants⁽³³⁾ would never have any say in how the country was governed. In fact, only in the former Cape Colony were coloreds and blacks allowed to vote at all. All nonwhites had to carry passbooks, as if they were foreigners who needed to justify their presence; urban blacks had to live in segregated townships and were excluded from many white-collar jobs. One of the first laws passed by the South African parliament was the Natives Land Act of 1913, which prevented blacks, except those living in Cape Province, from buying land outside the so-called reserves. These reserves, which made up 7 percent of South Africa's territory, included the homes of tribes like the Zulus and Xhosa, but they contained no cities or industrial centers, and only poor quality farmland. As a result, the current economic system would continue, with cheap black labor available for the mines and industries. When Soloman Plaatje, a Tswana journalist who had founded the African National Congress in 1912, heard the news, he wrote: "Awakening on Friday morning, June 20th 1913, the South African Native found himself a pariah in the land of his birth." The longest-term result of the Boer War was that it created a colonial regime more aggressive than any of the ones based in Europe.

Libya and Morocco: The Last Unturned Stones

In 1911 the Italians launched an unprovoked attack to take the last Turkish province in Africa, Libya. They had little trouble grabbing Tripolitania (the Ottoman Empire was on its last legs, having only one more decade to live), and in the following year they grabbed Cyrenaica. The Fezzan was officially theirs as well, but for the time being it was the Sanussi, and not the Italians, who were supreme here.

Spain was motivated to join the "scramble" after she lost the last pieces of her American and Asian empire to the United States, in the Spanish-American War (1898). As was the case with Portugal and Italy, Spanish expansion didn't attract much attention; Germany, France and Britain certainly weren't worried about it. The Berlin Congress awarded to Spain the bit of coastline nearest to Fernando Póo, the Rio Muni enclave, and the borders of it were defined by a treaty with France in 1900. Together, the colonies of Fernando Póo and Rio Muni became Spanish Guinea in 1909. Near Morocco, Spain claimed a sparsely populated, phosphate-rich part of the coast between Cape Bojador and Cape Blanc, calling it Rio de Oro ("River of Gold," 1884). Its borders with French-ruled Mauritania were fixed by treaties in 1900 and 1904. Later, when the Spaniards got a piece of southern Morocco, they would name it Saguia el Hamra, and merge it with the Rio de Oro in 1924 to form the Spanish Sahara.

Speaking of Morocco, it lasted until the early twentieth century, largely because the Europeans couldn't agree on who could have it. When the French moved into Algeria, Sultan 'Abdul Rahman gave aid and refuge to Abd el-Kader. This caused the French to attack and badly defeat the Moroccans in a battle on the River Isly (1844), but Algeria kept them too busy to follow it up. In 1859 Spain declared war, claiming that the Spanish-held ports of Ceuta and Melilla were constantly being raided by Moroccans. Spain won some victories, but the Moroccans were tough opponents, and Spanish troops suffered from cholera, so when Britain put on pressure to make peace, Spain was glad to do so. The peace treaty included a huge indemnity to Spain, which forced the sultan to get a loan from London, thereby opening up Morocco to further European interference, in very much the same way debt had caused trouble for Egypt.

The last great sultan of Morocco before the French took over was Hasan I (1873-94). We noted in Chapter 6 that the sultan only had firm control over part of his country; the parts he didn't control could only be made to cooperate through threats and bribes. Hasan devoted his reign to decreasing the size of the unfriendly country, and was the first sultan in 250 years to have much authority on the desert side of the Atlas mts. By doing this, he prevented future incidents like the ones that caused the war with Spain, because he removed the ungovernable groups that had caused them. He also sent students abroad to get a modern education, but this didn't work as well as it had for Egypt; a fossilized society like Morocco's couldn't be brought up to date in a generation.

Unfortunately for Hasan, time was running out for Morocco, because it was the last African territory up for grabs. The two countries that wanted it the most were France and Spain, by virtue of its location. Others that were interested were Britain, which already had the Rock of Gibraltar, and Italy, which would take anything on the Mediterranean shore (Libya couldn't have looked very appealing, after all). Germany under Bismarck endorsed the French claim, but Kaiser Wilhelm II abruptly changed his mind when he realized that there wasn't much of Africa left for the Germans. In the end France and Spain became partners, agreeing to divide Morocco between them. When they were ready to make their move in 1905, the kaiser provoked a continent-wide crisis in Europe. It didn't work, because by this time Britain was more afraid of the kaiser than of the French. Wilhelm cried foul and threatened war again, when France and Spain made a second attempt to take Morocco in 1911, and was eventually bought off when France ceded a piece of the French Congo to German Cameroon. These crises are covered in more detail in Chapter 13 of this site's European history.

Now that the kaiser was out of the picture, Morocco's fate was sealed. The last independent sultan was forced to sign the treaty of Fez in 1912, which made his country a French protectorate. A second treaty signed with Spain in the same year put 10 percent of Morocco (the Mediterranean coast and the zone along the southern border) under Spanish rule. The sultan couldn't really refuse, not only because the Europeans were much more powerful, but also because eastern Morocco was in revolt, and the sultan needed French troops to regain control. However, Morocco fared far better under the French than neighboring Algeria did. Because Morocco had not been a part of any foreign empire, especially the Ottoman one, since the early days of Islam, it had a stronger culture than any other part of North Africa. In addition, the first French officer in charge of Morocco, Marshal Louis Lyautey, fell in love with the country, and while he remained an unquestioned French patriot, Lyautey also managed to keep French interference in Morocco's way of life to a minimum.

Africa after the "scramble." Only Abyssinia and Liberia remain independent.
Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2003. © 1993-2002 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

With the annexations of Libya and Morocco in 1912, the growth stage of the age of imperialism ended. ⁽³⁴⁾ Throughout the world, as in Africa, Europe was in command. The only places left that weren't under European control either had modern, Westernized societies of their own (e.g., the United States and Japan), weren't worth the trouble (Antarctica), or had their independence guaranteed by a Western power (e.g., Latin America and China). As a result, the armies and navies of the colonial overlords finally came to a halt.

There was simply no place left for them to go.

1. Before 1820, Cape Town tried to make a living by growing and exporting wines, but these vintages were scorned in Europe. Efforts to grow other crops, from indigo to rice to olives, all failed, so the wool trade made a big difference in the economy.

2. Both of the battles from Napoleon Bonaparte's Egyptian campaign are misnamed. The battle for Cairo is called the Battle of the Pyramids, though it really took place several miles north of those famous monuments, and the battle in Aboukir Bay is called the Battle of the Nile, though it has nothing to do with that river.

3. Bornu still had a king called a mai as the nineteenth century began, but after the reign of Idris Alooma, he lost all power, until he was nothing more than a figurehead. Hugh Clapperton, a Scottish explorer who visited Bornu in 1821, had this to say about the mai: "The Sultanship of Bornu is but a name; the court still keeps up considerable state, and adheres strictly to its ancient customs, and this is the only privilege left them. When the sultan gives audience to strangers, he sits in a kind of cage, made of bamboo, through the bars of which he looks on his visitors, who are not allowed to approach within seventy or eighty yards of his person."

4. France was in an expansive mood in the mid-nineteenth century; this was the age of Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III) and the Second French Empire. However, Umar started the fight by demanding tribute from the French before they could trade. Apparently he underestimated his opponents; in 1854 he wrote this to the French governor, Faidherbe's predecessor:

"The whites are only traders: let them bring merchandise in their ships, let them pay me a good tribute when I'm master of the Negroes, and I will live in peace with them. But I don't wish them to erect permanent establishments or send warships into the river."

5. Hamed made Eaton an honorary general, and between the two Barbary Wars Eaton called for teaching the pirates a lesson with these bellicose words: "Shall America, who, when in an infant state, destitute of all apparatus of war, without discipline and without funds, dared to resist the whole force of the lion's den of Great Britain to establish her freedom, now that she has acquired manhood, resources and experience, bring her humiliation to the basest dog kennel of Barbary?"

6. Because of all the changes he introduced to make the Zulus tougher, you could call Shaka "the African Lykurgos," comparing him with the founder of Sparta's militarist society.

7. Shaka seems to have planned it that way. A week before his death, he decreed that his friend Nathaniel Isaacs would become the "principal chief" of Natal. This means that technically, a British-born Jew was Shaka's rightful heir! However, Isaacs didn't have the resources or the armed forces needed to stake his claim, so in 1831, when Dingane was planning to kill all the whites he could get his hands on, Isaacs got out of South Africa, spending the rest of his life in Gambia and on an island in the Gulf of Guinea.

8. One Mameluke, Emin Bey, made a daring escape by jumping on his horse and making it leap off the wall of Mohammed Ali's citadel. They fell more than a hundred feet, and the fall killed the horse, but Emin Bey was unhurt; he got away to Tripoli, where he lived for forty more years. Another group of Mamelukes fled to Nubia, occupied the city of Dongola, and held it until 1820.

9. James Bruce, a Scottish explorer, visited Funj in 1770, while following the course of the Blue Nile. Funj had fallen into decline since its sixteenth-century heyday; Nubia and Kordofan had been lost, the trade of African ivory for Indian cotton had all but disappeared, and the nearby states of Darfur and Wadai were now richer. Bruce wrote: "War and treason appear to be the only occupations of this horrid people, whom Heaven has separated by almost impassable deserts from the rest of mankind."

10. "Instead of the introduction of more valuable and civilising merchandise, such as cutlery, or cloth for wearing apparel, as articles for barter--when the value of glass and copper ornaments began to decline and lose their charm--the traders disgraced themselves by descending to enrich themselves by the plunder and destruction of tribe after tribe."--John Petherick, a British consul in Khartoum, describing the results of a slave raid in 1863. The bad relations that exist today between the Arab and African elements of Sudan's population got their start here.

11. I already covered the Greek War of Independence elsewhere, so I won't retell that story here. For the details, read Chapter 14 of my Middle Eastern history and Chapter 13 of my European history.

12. British pressure persuaded the Turks to abolish slavery throughout the Ottoman Empire, except for western Arabia, in 1857. However, they couldn't enforce this in Libya because the Sanussi Brotherhood (see the next section) insisted on continuing the old trans-Saharan slave trade. It went on, in fact, until after 1900, when the French occupied one side of the central Sahara, and the Italians occupied the other side.

13. Abolitionists didn't get much cooperation from African heads of state, either. For example, when the British tried to enlist 'Abdul Rahman, the sultan of Morocco, in 1841, he declared that he would not even consider banning a practice that had been approved by the laws of every religion and nation "from the times of the sons of Adam up to this day."

14. France's famous elite military unit, the French Foreign Legion, was founded in 1831, to use in the Algerian campaign. Afterwards it continued to have its main headquarters in Algeria, until independence came in 1962.

15. In 1798, Sir J. Barrow, an English traveler, reported the flogging and imprisonment of a Boer farmer for mistreating a Hottentot servant: "For the whole of the first night his lamentations were incessant; with a loud voice he cried, 'Myn God! Is dat een maniere om Christian mensch te handelen?' (My God! Is this the way to treat a Christian man?) His, however, were not the agonies of bodily pain, but the burst of rage and resentment on being put on a level with one of the Zwarte Natie (Black Natives), between whom and themselves the Boers conceive the differences to be fully as great as between themselves and their cattle." (From An Account of Travels into the Interior of Southern Africa, Vol. I.)

16. "Travelers," from the Dutch word trek, meaning journey.

17. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a number of European misfits, mostly escaped convicts and deserters from the Portuguese army, traveled to southern Angola and joined the Ovimbundu. When they taught their skills to their hosts, they caused the Ovimbundu to advance more rapidly than their neighbors.

18. Actually, the Turkish government had leased Suakin and Massawa to Mohammed Ali in 1846; Ismail simply declared that he intended to keep those ports.

19. A week before Khartoum fell, the relief force suffered a defeat at Abu Klea. The attackers were not Arabs but the Beja (see Chapter 4), and the British called them "Fuzzy-Wuzzies" because they wore their hair in large afros. Rudyard Kipling, the bard of British imperialism, thought they were the toughest opponent the British army had faced, and paid tribute to them in his poem "Fuzzy-Wuzzy":

"So 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your 'ome in the Soudan;
You're a pore benighted 'eathen but a first-class fightin' man;
An' 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, with your 'ayrick 'ead of 'air -
You big black boundin' beggar - for you broke a British square!"

20. The presence of Somalis in the northeastern part of modern Kenya was the result of a nineteenth-century migration to put as much space as possible between them and Shoa.

21. "Thy words were found and I ate them, thy words became for me a joy."--Jeremiah 15:16.

22. The Zulus may not have been able to beat the British Empire, but they unintentionally prevented the birth of a third French Empire. Napoleon III went to exile in England after losing the Franco-Prussian War, so his only child, Napoleon Eugene Louis John Joseph, (better known as the Prince Imperial or simply Napoleon IV) received a British education and became an officer in the British army. Eager to prove himself, the twenty-three-year-old Prince Imperial volunteered to join the British expedition to Zululand, only to be killed in a Zulu ambush near Ulundi. Had he lived, he would have certainly gone back to France and tried to become president or emperor, by playing on the nostalgia the French felt for the other Napoleons.

23. Leopold made this clear when he said, "My rights over the Congo are to be shared with none."

24. The De Beers Mining Company got its name from the de Beer brothers, two Boer farmers who owned the land where the first diamond discovery was made.

25. The Tswana tribe's name was usually spelled Bechuana in the nineteenth century, so the country we now call Botswana was then known as Bechuanaland.

26. Remember, the British originally gained control over the Suez Canal to protect their shipping to India. Then they had to take over Egypt to protect the canal, and then they felt the need to rule Sudan and Uganda to protect the Nile before it got to Egypt, and finally it became necessary to take Kenya to protect Uganda. Is everyone writing this down?

27. The Ashanti let Prempeh be taken into exile because the alternative was war. They knew that they would probably lose any war with the British, and then the British would take away their most prized possession, the king's golden stool (see Chapter 6, footnote #29). Even so, in 1900 the governor of the Gold Coast, Sir Frederick Hodgson, came to Kumasi and demanded that the Ashanti fetch the golden stool, because (1) it now belonged to the queen of England, and (2) he had the right to sit on it, now that the Ashanti had no king. After the governor's speech, the Ashanti dispersed, but instead of getting the stool, they collected weapons, and the queen mother of the tribe, Yaa Asantewaa, organized an army to fight back (this, by the way, was the last war in African history in which a woman led one side). Hodgson and the soldiers he brought with him waited for a while, until they realized that they were going to have to get the stool themselves; when they went into the jungle to look for it, they were ambushed, and the survivors were driven back to Kumasi. There they were besieged by 12,000 Ashanti warriors for three months, until Britain could send reinforcements to rescue them and break the siege. In the end the Ashanti suffered 2,000 casualties, not counting civilians, and the British annexed their territory and exiled the queen mother as well. Still the Ashanti claimed victory in the War of the Golden Stool. Why? First, they killed 1,007 British; a ratio of one British casualty to every two Ashanti casualties is impressive, considering that the British had four Maxim guns. Second, and even more important, the British never got to sit on their stool. The Ashanti hid the stool so well that nobody saw it again for twenty years. As for King Prempeh, he was allowed to return in 1924.

28. We saw that the Boers spoke Dutch originally, but over the years their speech diverged from that used in Amsterdam, so that from 1875 onwards Afrikaans was classified as a separate language. Likewise, after the Boer War the Boers would be called Afrikaners.

29. The railroad forced Swaziland to submit to Boer protection in 1894. When the Boer War broke out, the Boers had to abandon the Swazis, and in 1902 the British arrived to declare Swaziland a British protectorate. The Swazi king Bhunu had died in December 1899, and his son Sobhuza II was only six months old, so Labotsibeni, his grandmother, ruled in his name until he was twenty-two. Sobhuza lived after that until 1982, so if you include Labotsibeni's regency, Sobhuza enjoyed the longest reign of any head of state in the twentieth century!

30. However, Rhodes did keep his parliamentary seat, and never gave up his imperialist ambitions. When he died in 1902, two months before the Boer War ended, his last words were reported as, "So little done, so much to do."

31. More than forty years before he became Britain's most admired statesman, Winston Churchill was an army officer and a war correspondent for a London newspaper. He led a cavalry charge at the battle of Omdurman, the last in British history, when he was only 23 years old, and after the Boer War broke out, he went to South Africa for more excitement. Though he was no longer in the army at this point, having resigned his commission between the two wars, he was still just as willing to shoot as to write, so the Boers captured him and locked him up at the State Model School in Pretoria. He managed to escape, and spent several days running and hiding in the countryside, until he caught a ride on the train to Mozambique. Once he was safely out of the war zone, he sailed from Lourenço Marques to Durban, and wrote about his adventures, which made him an instant hero. What he didn't mention was that the Boers were planning to release him the next day. If he had stayed, he wouldn't have earned the story which gave him enough fame to go into politics after the war.

32. Because the armies of Western culture are trained to put everything else aside in order to destroy the enemy, wars between two Westernized armies are the bloodiest kind of wars. See Chapter 2 of my European history for a more detailed explanation.

33. Mahatma Gandhi was among the Indians living in South Africa at this time, and being treated here as a second-class citizen, something which did not happen when he went to England to get a law degree, inspired him to develop his civil disobedience campaign.

34. It was also the end of the age of African exploration, now that Westerners had seen almost every part of the continent. The last of the old-style explorers was Theodore Roosevelt, who came to Africa after leaving the White House in 1909, and went on a hunting spree that bagged 296 wild animals, including 17 lions. He did it because he always enjoyed vigorous sports of any kind, and to give some breathing room to the next president, William Howard Taft. Even though he was no longer president, Roosevelt tended to steal the show wherever he went. Bully!

© Copyright 2005 Charles Kimball