Topic area: World history
Sub-topic area: European exploration and colonisation of Africa
Key unit competence
Discuss the role of agents of colonial conquest
Activity 4.1
In groups of five, discuss the roles played by missionaries, chartered companies and explorers during the process of colonisation of Africa.
Introduction
Who is an agent?
This is a person who acts on behalf of another. It can also mean a person who obtains and provides information for the government in a certain area in secret.Europeans who acted as agents to their respective governments came to Africa either individually or in groups such as: traders, hunters, explorers an missionaries among others.
Europeans annexed African states in the second half of the 19th Century and early part of the 20th Century. Groups of foreigners began arriving in earnest in the 15th Century, and the flow steadily continued thereafter. Some were explorers and adventurers, curious and eager to see new things and places, or to confirm certain geographical phenomena or scientific precepts. Many were looking for trading opportunities. Others sought an opportunity to spread the gospel and do philanthropic work among the long-suffering Africans; these were the missionaries. European intervention dramatically changed the history of Africa.
The socio-political set up of many states was significantly disrupted and changed. New forms of economic life were introduced. At first imperialism was gradual, sometimes imperceptible, and in the early days not even always in the conscious domain of the early arrivals. From the second half of the 19th Century, colonial intentions were much more clearly articulated and manifested. The roles of agents of colonial conquest can be illustrated through three main themes that link the activities of the earliest arrivals with the ultimate events of the colonial occupation.
Colonial agents in Africa
Explorers
Exploration is the act of searching for the purpose of obtaining information or resources. An explorer is a person who travels various in search of information various things and places. European explorers in Africa were seekers of information on geographical features, trade possibilities and agricultural potentials to mention but a few areas. However, whatever their immediate motivation, the result of their explorations led to European ultimate conquest of Africa.
Explorers in West Africa
Though by the beginning of the 19th Century the Europeans had a considerable amount of knowledge about the coastal states of West Africa, they were almost entirely ignorant about the interior of the continent. Men were sent off to explore the interior of Africa and bring back information about its peoples, its products and its geography. This was targeted at obtaining information about trading possibilities. This is why the early explorers of West Africa were so concerned with the River Niger, which they believed would be the highway to the riches of the interior.
The Europeans thought of themselves as explorers of unknown lands. From the point of view of the Africans these European explorers were tourists in lands which Africans had known for centuries. As a result of trade, particularly by the Dyula and Hausa, there were groups of Africans who knew a great deal about the geography of their neighbours. In 1826, the Caliph Mohammed Bello of Sokoto was able to tell his visitor, Commander Clapperton from England, much about the lands through which he would travel.
The European explorers were only making discoveries for other Europeans. They were not telling Africans in the lands they ‘discovered’ anything they did not already know. What is significant about the work of the explorers is that they gave their own governments information about the interior of West Africa, in particular about its trading possibilities. Immediately after Richard and John Lander ‘discovered’ that the Niger emptied into the sea at Brass, the British government backed an expedition up the river by MacGregor Laird, a Liverpool trader. At first the information the explorers brought back served peaceful ends; the promotion of trade and the opening up of the continental to Christian missionaries. But when the European powers undertook the Scramble for Africa, they had already obtained a considerable amount of the geographical information which they needed to conduct their invasion.
Mungo Park
In 1788, the African Association was formed by a group of leading British scientists, with the aim of finding out the course of the Niger River. Europeans knew very little about the river beyond its delta. The first three travellers failed. In 1799, a Scottish doctor, Mungo Park, set out from the Gambia. He travelled through Medina and Kaarta and eventually reached the Niger at Segu. His only success was to establish that the Niger flowed from the west to the east. No one knew, yet, where the Niger ended. Park was sent on a second trip in 1805, this time accompanied by 45 Europeans. Many of his companions died of sickness.
Clapperton and Richard Lander
In 1822, explorers Qudney, DenhamandClapperton travelled from Tripoli to Lake Chad. Qudney died but Denham travelled in the Bornu area and Clapperton travelled to Sokoto where he learnt that the Niger flowed south. Soon after returning home, Clapperton set out for the Niger again and travelled to Sokoto from Badagry, but he died there in 1827. His young servant, Richard Lander tried to follow the course of the Niger alone, but had to abandon the journey and return home to England. He then persuaded the British government to sponsor him and his brother on one more journey of the Niger exploration.
They travelled from Badagry to Bussa, where they used on canoes and floated down the river, eventually finding their way to the Niger Delta. There these two young men finally resolved the issue of the Niger and established that the so-called Oil Rivers were in fact the gateway to the Niger. Subsequent expedition in the 1830s which otherwise ended disastrously with even Richard Lander himself losing his life, established that the Niger was navigable by steamer.
The British Government in 1841 sponsored another ambitious expedition. It aimed to establish an agricultural colony of freed slaves at Lokoja. This, it was hoped, would become a centre old Christianity and legitimate trade comparable with Freetown.
In 1854 another Scottish doctor, William Balfour Baikie, led another expedition up the Niger. This expedition opened the door to an era of intensive trade and missionary work in the Niger. The British later conquered this place. As can be seen, these journeys were not motivated by imperialist ambitions. But one later important journey was between 1887 and 1889, where a French Officer, named Binger, travelled from Bamako to Kong Salaga and Mossi, ending his journey at Grand Bassam, in the Ivory Coast. This directly paved the way to French conquests in the Cote d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) hinterland.
Heinrich Barth
Heinrich Barth was a German traveller in the service of the British Government. Between 1849 and 1855, he journeyed from Tripoli across the Sahara to Western Sudan. His mission was to survey old trade routes and make treaties on behalf of the British government, with a view to exploring the possibility of developing the Sahara trade and to destroy the slave trade. Unfortunately the treaties he made were not followed up, and his mission proved worthless on threat score. But Barth also pursued other interests and copiously recorded in his Travels and Discoveries a great deal of the complicated history and analogy of these regions.
Travellers and explorers in East Africa
Early European explolers in east Africa came with the aim of establishing the source of River Nile. News that Krapf and Rebmann had seen the snow-capped mountains of mt. Kenya and Kilimanjaro and stories of great inland seas revived this quest.
Speke and Burton
In 1856 The Royal Geographical Society picked two army officers, Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke, to lead an expedition from Zanzibar to trace the source of the Nile. With the aid of two experienced Yao guides, Sidi Bombay and Mwinyi Mabruk they travelled inland along the trade route to Tabora. Early in 1858, they reached Lake Tanganyika but were unable to continue much further owing to illness. Returning to Tabora, Speke decided to go north to examine stories of a great lake in that direction. Speke alone found the lake and named it after his Queen, Victoria. He was convinced, though without sufficient proof, that it was the source of the Nile.
Speke and Grant
A second Royal Geographical Society expedition came out in 1860, with Speke in command accompanied by Grant. Travelling north – west round the shores of Lake Victoria they eventually reached Buganda and were welcomed by Kabaka Mutesa. Leaving Grant behind, Speke then travelled east and came across the place where the Nile leaves the Lake, the modern site of Jinja Town. Grant rejoined him and together they travelled north following the river to a place called Gondokoro. To Speke the matter was settled, and he sent a telegram to this effect to London from Khartoum
Henry Morton Stanley
Henry Morton Stanley made four expeditions to Africa:
First expedition, 1871-2
Stanley had his first taste of African travel while in the service of an American newspaper, the New York Herald. He was on a mission to find Dr. David Livingstone whose whereabouts for a long time were unknown. Stanley caught up with Livingstone in Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika in 1871.
Second expedition, 1874-7
In his second expedition, from 1874 to 1877, he moved across the continent from Zanzibar to the mouth of River Congo. He became the first traveller to use large, well-equipped, well-armed columns and ruthless military action against local populations who showed any hostility and lack of co-operation to his expedition. This made local people mistake Stanley and his party for slave traders. In his brief stay in Buganda in 1875, he impressed the Kabaka that he represented a people who would be useful to him because they possessed superior technological and military power. Stanley believed that the success of European Christian missionaries in Africa would be dependent on European commercial and military power.
After his expedition, European Christian missionaries visited Buganda, which in turn was one of the factors leading to British colonial occupation of Uganda and Kenya. It was also during this expedition between 1875 and 1877 that Stanley charted the main stream of the Congo River. He confirmed that the river was navigable. This opened up to Europe the general possibility of exploiting the economic potential of the Congo Basin. The journey further led directly to the actual beginning of Leopold’s imperial activities in the Congo. Stanley later became Leopold’s agents in the Congo between 1880 and 1885. He had made a thorough survey of Lake Victoria, Albert and Tanganyika, completing his journey by travelling down the River Congo to the Atlantic.
Third expedition, 1879-84
In 1879, Stanley made an agreement with Leopold II. In return for a large sum of money he would acquire the Congo for the Belgian monarch. Between 1879 and 1884, Stanley travelled up the Congo, establishing road and river communications from Kisangani to the coast, and building a solid base in the Congo Basin for Leopold’s future commercial enterprise. Another European by the name Savorgnan de Brazza was in 1882 busy obtaining a treaty from Chief Makoko of the Teke, whose lands were north of the river. In this treaty, Makoko apparently ceded his territory to France. Leopold suddenly became aware that all his efforts in the Congo might come to naught if he did not first assume political control of the area. Stanley was consequently instructed to make treaties with the Viri chiefs south of the river, and this he did.
Fourth expedition, 1885
Stanley’s last expedition, to rescue Emin Pasha, was an anti-climax after his second journey and imperialist work in the Congo. It was as futile and as unnecessary as his first expedition to find Livingstone. The Emin Pasha Relief Expedition was financed by a grant from the Egyptian government and the donations of English supporters.
Leopold II, with a great interest in the Upper Nile, got Stanley to lead the rescue expedition. The men of Stanley’s relief expedition arrived at Kavalli’s in such a state of poverty and sickness that Emin could be said to have rescued his rescuers. When Stanley and his men were fit again, Stanley insisted that Emin Pasha accompany him to Zanzibar.
Joseph Thomson
Joseph Thomson travelled between 1883-1884 through Maasailand, across the Rift Valley and into Western Kenya where he saw Mount Elgon. This was essentially a scientific expedition whose purpose was to gather geological and biological information about this part of Africa.
Explorers in Central and Southern Africa
From the close of the 18th Century, European countries began to take an increasing interest in Central Africa. The issue of the slave trade aroused interest in the continent which was the home of the black slaves. Furthermore, the Industrial Revolution led manufacturers and traders to turn their attention towards Africa as a source of raw materials and a market for the products of their factories. Thirdly, was curiosity and the quest for information on and confirmation of reported geographical and other scientific phenomena in the continent which might prove useful back home. And finally, there was the philanthropic interest, normally associated with Christian missionaries, who sought to put an end to the slave trade and convert Africans to Christianity.
Problems faced by explorers
• They lacked food & safe drinking water, whether they were explorers on land or sea.
• They were affected by disease mostly cholera and dysentery
• Lack of good maps to guide them in their exploration expeditions.
• Lack of effective medicine to cure snake bites bites, and other bites by poisonous animals. people had to be treated on the spot with experimental treatment: If it worked, well and good; if it didn't, they were buried where they lay.
Traders and hunters
During the latter part of the 19th Century, traders penetrated into Central Africa using two main approaches: from the east coast, either overland from the central settlements in Tanganyika and Mozambique; or up the Zambezi and the Shire and Luangwa rivers, to the land between the four great lakes of Mweru, Bangweulu, Tanganyika and Malawi.
Many Arab and Swahili traders used the overland routes while Portuguese traders generally used the Zambezi one. The other main approach was from South Africa to Barotseland and the area south of the Zambezi. European hunters and traders went into this area from the south. They went first to Matabeleland and then extended their interests to Mashonaland and Barotseland. Few penetrated further into Zambia which was very inaccessible before 1890.
Most of the visitors travelled along the so-called ‘Missionary Road’ to Matabeleland, which ran between the borders of the Transvaal and the Kalahari Desert. This area offered good facilities for hunting, as elephants and other game animals were plentiful in the savannah. Traders too were attracted as they were able to bring their goods into the area quite easily by wagon from the south.
George Cobb Westbeech
The Matabele were the dominant power in the region between the Limpopo and the Zambezi. Hunters and traders who wished to go anywhere north of the Limpopo needed first to gain permission from the Matabele ruler. In the early 1860s, two traders, George Philips and George Cobb Westbeech, reached Matabeleland. They were to have a long association in Matabeleland. In 1867 they formed a trading partnership: while Philips remained in Matabeleland, Westbeech pioneered trade in the Barotse Valley. As a businessman Westbeech was usually more trustworthy than many. This earned him permission to conduct business from a permanent camp at Pandamatenka, a little way south of the Victoria Falls. Between 1871 and 1876 he exported 30,000 lbs of ivory from Bulozi. Lewanika found Westbeech’s weapons superior to any he had handled before Abhorring slaves as a means of transporting his ivory, he used ox-wagons. The Lozi now more interested in contact with the south drafted him as an advisor to the Litunga. A seasoned white hunter and trader, perhaps no one played a greater role in paving the way for missionaries in Barotseland than George Westbeech; he introduced Lewanika to missionaries such as Coillard and Arnot.
Frederick Selous
He reached Matabeleland in 1872 and after his introduction to the Matabele ruler joined an existing hunting party for elephant hunting. In his first three seasons he killed 78 elephants – a relatively small quantity compared to his predecessors.At first, he hunted in Matabeleland and the region to the north, near the Zambezi and Chobe rivers.Then in 1877 he got permission to travel further east, exploring Mashonaland in the next few years.
He constructed a road from Bulawayo to Hartley Hills to facilitate transportation of ivory; it was named the Hunter’s Road. He visited and named many places including the Sinoia Caves, Mt Hampden and Mt Darwin. The increasing shortage of big game in Mashonaland and part of the Zambezi Valley made Selous eager to cross the Zambezi and explore the land to the north.
Eventually, he made a trip to the Barotse Valley where he met Lewanika and Coillard.In his wanderings, Selous acquired an unrivalled knowledge of Mashonaland which he bequeathed to others in numerous books. He mapped much of the area and described it in vivid detail. When quantities of ivory began to dwindle, Selous began his great collection of African mammals. Then he found himself collecting specimens for many of the museums of Europe.
For over twenty years he was hunting and collecting in what is today Rhodesia, and stirred much enthusiasm for the area among those who followed his career. He also made a contribution to the events that led to the region coming under British control. In 1889 he made a preparatory trip up the Zambezi and obtained for Cecil Rhodes a mineral concession from Mapondera, a chief who claimed independence from Lobengula. He next acted as a guide to the Pioneer Column and then laid out many roads under the new regime before he left for hunting fields outside Africa. He was foremost among the pre-Pioneers in opening up Mashonaland to the knowledge of Europeans.
Missionaries and Christianity in Africa
Missionaries or the ‘soldiers of Christ’, as they called themselves, provided the first concerted thrust at African institutions and way of life. Although they were preceded by the explorers, the the missionaries were men with a mission. They wanted to stay and win Africa into Christianity.
Their activities were to have a serious bearing on the direction of African history in the 19th and 20th Centuries. They usually invited their home countries to come and conquer Africa. In a sense therefore, the pattern of the partition was substantially affected by the earlier settlement of the missionaries.
Secondly, the missionaries purported to know the African better than other Europeans. Thus many of the policies pursued by the colonizing powers were inspired by the reports of the missionaries. It is important therefore to regard missionary activity in Africa in the 19th Century as the pioneering arm of imperialism.
Missionaries in West Africa
Christianity made practically no headway in West Africa between the 15th and 18th centuries. But in the 19th Century there was a great movement among English Protestants called the Evangelical revival. Evangelicals led the crusade against the slave trade.
They stressed that man is saved by faith that made the work of converting non-Christian seem extremely urgent, though it tended to produce low and condescending view of non-Christian cultures Two important missionary organizations in West Africa were the Church Missionary Society (founded and run by Evangelical Anglicans), which was established in 1799, and the Wesleyan Missionary Society.
Both of these were soon at work among the settlers and recaptives of Freetown, and the Creole Christians.Christianity spread more rapidly in West Africa than in any other region of the continent. By 1900 there were about quarter million Christians, nearly 2,000 churches, about 3,000 missionaries – 2,500 of them African and 29 missions. The bulk of Christian activity was concentrated in areas of British trading and political domination, namely along narrow strips of coast.
The Protestant Churches began the Christian missionary activity after 1800. They include Anglicans, Methodists, Baptists and various German and Swiss churches. They differ from the Roman Catholics in that they do not recognize the Pope as head of their Churches; their priests or ministers may marry; and their services are more varied. They received the name ‘Protestant’ because they protested against the Roman Catholic Church and therefore had to leave it.
The Church of England (Anglican Church)
The Church of England, also known as the Anglican Church, had two main missions in West Africa. One was the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), and the other the Church Missionary Society (CMS).
The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG)
This mission operated mainly in Ghana.
Ghana
The first chaplain of SPG, Rev Thomas Thompson, stayed for four years from 1752- 56, trying to learn the Fante language. He baptized eight peole some of whom disappointed him. He tried to start schools which were not successful at first. He therefore sent some boys to England for education. Rev Philip Quaque, a Fante educated under Mr Thompson’s scheme in England, was the chaplain from 1765 until 1816. He mixed trading with his job as chaplain. The only thing that he did actually to convert his fellow Africans was to run a school. In 1788 the school had 12 children. But he worked at his post for 41 years and left a small group of Christians on his death.
Church Missionary Society (CMS)
Men who had been active in the Sierra Leone Company founded the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in 1799. It was logical that Sierra Leone should be one of the first areas of interest.
Sierra Leone
Missionaries were dispatched in 1804. They were Melchior Renner and Peter Hertwig, both from Germany. Zachary Macaulay, the able ex-governor of Sierra Leone was on the Society’s committee. He had brought some Susu to England for education. Therefore, Renner, after a long delay in Freetown, went with some reinforcement from Germany to the Rio Pongas in 1808 to start the Susu Mission. The mission proved both a challenge and an opportunity for the CMS. The challenge lay in the climatic unsuitability of the coast for Europeans, and in the lack of precedent in missionary methods. The opportunity was the ability to reach a significant number of Africans who were uprooted from their tribal surroundings and who represented a variety of ethnic groups.
From 1808 to1812 setting up of the Susu mission remained the CMS’ only work. Even so, it was reported, there was no church, no proper public worship, and the school room was everything. By 1812 there were 120 pupils. In the same year three lay missionaries came out to teach working with the hands. One CMS missionary, Nylaender, worked north of Freetown on the Bulom shore and produced a grammar and translation of part of St Mathews Gospel in Bulom tongue.The colony was administered on parish basis, each parish was supervised by a clergyman, and the CMS provided not only churches but schools and education in each parish, culminating in training colleges for boys (Fourah Bay) and for girls (Annie Walsh Training Institution).
The Yoruba Mission
In 1942, the CMS in Sierra Leone sent the missionary Townsend to Shodeke, the chief of Abeokuta in the Egba part of Yorubaland. This was because several hundred Yoruba from Freetown had returned to their native land and sent urgent requests for missionaries to come after them. Shodeke undertook to suppress the slave trade and welcome white traders and missionaries to his land. Thus the Yoruba Mission was begun and in 1846, Townsend and Crowther reached Abeokuta to start work. This was the first effective mission from Sierra Leone. In 1948, five people, including Crowther’s mother, with whom he had been reunited after twenty-five years became Church members. By 1857, there were 827 communicants. Schools were founded and in 1949 a teachers’ training college at Abeokuta began.
However, the slave traders on the coast and in Abeokuta itself had no time for the mission and only wished to crush it. The priests of the Yoruba Supreme Being, Olorun, also opposed the Christians. The most serious threat was from Ghezo of Dahomey (the ‘Leopard’), who attacked Abeokuta in 1851, but Bit he was repelled, with heavy losses, and the Egba drew the useful conclusion that the presence of the Christians and their God had secured their victory. All persecution stopped and many more chiefs sent their children to school.
This interference in politics was seen even more clearly in 1851. In that year, missionaries asked the British government to take over Lagos to bring peace to the country. Accordingly, the British deposed the ruler, Kosoko and elevated Akitoye as a puppet, with conditions that: first he would outlaw slave trading; second that he would afford complete protection to missionaries; and third that he should engage only on lawful trade, especially with British merchants. This incident shows clearly the co-operation between missionaries and the British government in achieving their aims.The Yoruba mission also encouraged trade and agriculture. Once the slave trade was stopped in Lagos, the river Ogun was open to legitimate trade, which the missionaries encouraged. They encouraged the growing of cotton and taught Africans how to clean and pack it and to repair the machinery. They arranged for its export to England. Crowther introduced the plough round Badagry and gave prizes for the best farms.
In the 1860s, however, war broke out again in Yoruba. The British government intervened on the prompting of the missionaries. The events of that war can be summarized to demonstrate how often the missionaries proved to be one side of the coin of European colonial ambition.
Missionary influence in the colonial occupation of Lagos
Starting in 1839, large numbers of Anglican CMS missionaries, many of whom were former Yoruba slaves, started to arrive in Abeokuta. The CMS hoped to see the Egbas develop a christian state, which would grow through the palm oil trade, and which would turn away from slaving. Abeokuta was interested in this emerging trade and regarded the missionaries as worthwhile contact with the British traders at Lagos.
When the Egbas turned to a policy of military expansion at the expense of the Egbados, a Yoruba sub-tribe, the mission approved on the grounds that this would extend the influence of its Christian teaching. However, Ghezo of Dahomey was not so willing to see Egbadoland, which gave Dahomey access Porto Novo and Badagry, fall to the Shodeke of Abeokuta. Ghezo had already conquered Mahi to the north of Dahomey and was determined to destroy Abeokuta. Under these circumstances in 1851, the Egba-missionary friendship scaled new heights. The missionaries persuaded the British authorities at Lagos to help Abeokuta, and Ghezo was successfully driven back to Abomey. However, fear and suspicion of the missionaries began to set in, and they were expelled from Abeokuta in 1862.
To begin with, the Egbas were suspicious of British motives informally occupying Lagos in 1851. In return, the British did not like the fact that Abeokuta was intending to make Badagry into a more important export than Lagos. Then came the problem of Ibadan which caused the split between the Egbas and the missionaries.
The Niger Mission
In 1857, a further British government expedition in the ship Dayspring went up the Niger. The CMS sent Ajayi Crowther and JC Taylor, an Ibo, and decided to start a Niger Mission. The expedition left Taylor at Onitsha, then a town of 13,000 people, where he worked for nearly two years. Crowther obtained three sites for the mission. Crowther began to build a mission and read from the Hausa New Testament to passing caravans but soon after, the dayspring was sunk on the Juju rock at Jebba.Deaths still occurred among European missionaries sent to the Niger and Crowther was so active and effective that Venn decided that he should be made a Bishop to had an all-African mission. In 1864, he was consecrated at Canterbury Cathedral in England. His main stations were then Onitsha and Lokoja. He recruited his staff mainly from Sierra Leone and ordained a few of them who were worthy. He was invited by William Pepple into Bonny in 1864 and despite persecution and one martyrdom, the mission progressed.
The Methodists
The Methodists broke off from the Anglican Church in the 18th Century. Their leader, John Wesley, an Anglican minister, did not wish to do this but he was often not allowed to preach in the Church of England and so Methodism became separate. They worked more with the poorer and simpler English people than the Anglicans did.
Sierra Leone. Of the 1789 arrivals in Sierra Leone from Nova Scotia, 223 were Methodists and had their own black preacher, Moses Wilkinson. The work of the early Methodists did not pick until 1815 when Rev W Davis arrived. By 1821 there were 470 members of the church and by 1840 2,000. In 1841 they had 1,500 pupils in their schools. They were divided into two areas: the Creole Churches, mainly in the Colony around Freetown, and the white-run mission Churches, mainly in the bush.
The Gambia. After 1821, the Gambia came under governor Macarthy. He proposed that Wesleyan Methodists should work there. Morgan arrived in 1821 and began work among Muslims in the Kimbo chiefdom. This proved to be an uphill task and he soon returned to Bathurst where he opened a school for liberated Africans who lived there. By 1836 there were 535 Methodists in the Gambia and 230 in the schools. Little increase occurred after that, partly because European after European died.
Gold Coast. In the Gold Coast the mission work was begun by Africans. William de Graft, a pupil at the Cape Coast Castle School, on his own initiative began in 1831 a ‘Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge’ which studied the Bible in order to understand it. Between 1838 and 1857, TB Freeman, the son of Negro father and an English woman did much work in Kumasi. After the British attack on Kumasi in 1874, however, the mission had to leave the area. Not until 1896 did they return by 1913 2,600 baptised Asante and a new beginning had been made in the Northern territories. In all areas, there was a clamour for schools.
Catholic missionaries in West Africa
The Catholic revival began half a century later than the Protestant efforts. It led to the formation of fairly small missionary congregations, often with only several hundred members each. Whereas the Protestant societies included both clergy and laymen, and a large number of lay supporters at home, the Catholic congregations consisted only of priests, nuns, or brothers. Funds were collected by a number of separate organizations, which pooled small amounts from large numbers of humble contributors. The most important of these was the society called the Work of the Propagation of the Faith.
The Catholic congregations that had the greatest impact on West Africa were the Society of African Missions, and the Congregation of the Holy Spirit. The latter grew out of a congregation founded in France in 1844 by a converted Jew, Father Liberman. In 1848, it joined another body, taking the name of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit. Bishop Melchior de Marion Bresillac, a French aristocrat who had previously worked in India, founded the Society of African Missions in 1858.Sometimes the individual foreign missionary was unable to translate the high ideals, which brought him to Africa into day-to-day practice. Many were high-handed and authoritarian with their converts and exacted work from them, much in the fashion of forced labour for colonial governments.
Effects of missionary enterprise
In pursuing their main aim of conversion to Christianity the missions had several general effects:
(i) New religion. They introduced a new religion into West Africa. This broke down tribal, national and racial differences by preaching the brotherhood of man. This contributed towards African unity and world understanding of Africa It must also be said that after independence, the presence of Christian, educated elite led to divisions within states: an important example were the Ibo in a mainly Muslim Nigeria.
(ii) Education. Missionaries served the cause of imperialism further by providing a small circle of Africans with Christian Western education. They and their children were to prove invaluable to colonial rulers in establishing their administration: they provided government clerks junior officials in the commercial houses and interpreters in the early days of colonial rule.
(iii) Medicine. Hospitals helped to defeat diseases, do operations and fight malnutrition. Thus the missions helped Africans to live more healthily and happily and be more useful members of society.
(iv) Traditions challenged. The old way of life was undermined and old authorities challenged. Being independent observers, missionaries were often arbiters. Also, total conversion often, meant a rejection of chiefs and elders whose power came partly from ancestors. This effect uprooted Africans, sometimes violently, from their environment and was not always good.
(v) Abuses stopped. Specific abuses like slavery were denounced and combated by missions, sometimes again weakening traditional society but in the long term leading to improvements.
(vi) Europeanisation. There was the effect of an inculcation of the European, as well as Christian attitude to life. They did not live as simply as Jesus intended his disciples to do and they had, by African standards, enormous numbers of material possessions.
(vii) Independent churches. Missionary influence led to the foundation of the many independent African churches.
(viii) Source of information. Apart from venturing into hitherto unknown parts and supplying information to their home countries about the possibilities of trade, they also sent home reports of practices such as human sacrifice and domestic slavery or twin murder which the colonial powers used as justification for occupying Africa for its own good. Often these reports were exaggerated, and in fact the real motive of the colonial powers for occupation was economic, not moral.
(ix) Trade encouraged. Missionaries had an indirect effect in the early days of encouraging European traders, partly to supply their needs. Trade followed the mission. The flag followed trade. Missionaries asked for protection in some cases or demanded British or French interference. In the German Cameroon, missionaries were encouraged to go ahead into new areas to make first contacts peacefully. The occupation of Lagos in Nigeria was a case in point.
(x) European conquest and colonization. The flag of European conquest sometimes followed the mission. Missionaries asked for protection in some cases or demanded British or French assistance. In the German Cameroon, missionaries were encouraged to go ahead into new areas to make first contacts peaceful. Later, traders and the German government followed less peacefully.
Problems faced by Christian missions in West Africa
The Christian message received varied responses in West Africa. Some people accepted it, while others rejected it. There were rulers who were alarmed by the missionary presence and activities, for the missionaries demonstrated their capacity to disrupt the political and social life of the people early. Jaja of Opobo, for example, would on no account allow missionaries into his kingdom. His rejection of the missionaries was shaped by the events occurring in the neighbouring Bonny state.
In Bonny, present – day Niger, King George had warmly welcomed the missionaries. But he went even further in his pro-missionary zeal; he personally led the campaign to convert his subjects to Christianity. These attempts had destabilising consequences for the kingdom of Bonny. People became completely subservient to the white missionaries.
The missionaries gradually took over his powers, forcing him to increasingly depend on their prop to rule. Many rulers and people believed that the white men were spirits and therefore unnatural. They were treated as bringers of evil who would bring famine and destruction. Many Africans rejected the missionaries on these grounds. Furthermore, the egalitarian doctrine of Christianity made many converts, especially of slave or subject origin, insubordinate to their rulers.
The Christian doctrine which placed all men on the same level before God because they were all God’s creation seemed to undermine the authority of rulers. Some of questioning the rulers’ actions. This was particularly evident in Efik country. Many rulers sought to resist this harmful ideology.
Missionaries in East Africa
For East Africa, missionary activity can be divided into two phases. First the period from the early 1840s until about 1870. During this time the number of missionaries involved was small, their success limited and sphere of their operation confined largely to the coast. Then following the death of Livingstone in 1873 came a great wave of enthusiasm and support that led to the establishment of new mission stations in the interior, particularly in Buganda.
Missionary activities at the Coast
The earliest European missionary in East Africa was a German, Dr Johann Ludwig Krapf. He had been sent by the Church Missionary Society in England to work among the Galla of southern Ethiopia in 1837. It was hoped that through this strategy he might effectively spread the Gospel across much of north-eastern Africa, the area occupied by the Galla.
It failed, however, and in 1844 Krapf came south to Zanzibar, hoping to obtain permission to cross to the mainland and approach the Galla from the south. A few months later he crossed to Mombasa and established a mission station at Rabai. Here Johann Rebmann in 1846 and Jakob Erhardt in 1849 joined him. Krapf saw the Rabai station as the first of a series, ‘the first link of a mission-chain between East and Central Africa’, he wrote in 1848.
From the Rabai base, these missionaries travelled inland. Rebmann travelled to Taita in 1847 and Chagga the following year when he met Chief Makinga. It was during these visits that he saw Mt. Kilimanjaro. In July 1848 Krapf visited Usambara where he was welcomed by the Shambaa king Kimweri ye Nyumbae who asked for missionaries to come and teach his people. In 1848 Krapf travelled through Ukambani and met Chief Kivoi and saw Mt Kenya. He made a second visit there in 1851 hoping to set up a mission station. But while travelling with Kivoi towards the Tana River he was attacked and Kivoi was killed.
These pioneering days were difficult and the work of evangelism did not prove a success. When the British Consul, Colonel Playfair, visited Rabai in 1864, he found that only six people had been baptized and another six were being taught. But their work was not without some achievement. From the experience of their travels inland and from information they gathered from Arab and Swahili traders, Erhardt compiled a map of the interior, including what he called the Inland Sea, ‘Uniamuesi’. This, together with their reports of snow-capped mountains on the equator, was to arouse much geographical curiosity and controversy. Several expeditions were sent out to East Africa in search of the Nile’s source. On top of all of this, Krapf’s work on a Swahili grammar dictionary was to prove of great value to missionaries and travellers. Due to ill health he was forced to leave in 1853, but Rebmann remained for another twenty years.
During the 1860s and 1870s, one of the main concerns of mission societies in East Africa was the suppression of the slave trade and the subsequent problem of what to do with the freed slaves. In 1863 the Holy Ghost Fathers came from Reunion Island and started a mission in Zanzibar. In 1864, Bishop Tozer and the UMCA came to Zanzibar after an unsuccessful attempt to establish a station in the Shire area of Malawi. Much of their time and energy was taken up by the campaign for the abolition of the slave trade and plans for the resettlement of freed slaves. One such centre was set up by the Holy Ghost Fathers at Bagamoyo in 1868 at which former slaves were taught basic skills such as agriculture and carpentry as well as how to read and write.
In 1875, the CMS started a similar centre at Freretown on the outskirts of Mombasa.Livingstone’s death in 1873 made him a national hero in Britain. His reports on the slave trade and speech at Cambridge University in 1857 were received with enthusiastic response, and money and offers of assistance poured in. Livingstone’s emphasis on ‘Commerce and Christianity’ united both religious and business interests and gave a new impetus to missionary activity in Africa, widening its aims and objectives.
Typical of this new policy was the formation of the Livingstone Central African Trading Company by James Stevenson of Glasgow, with the dual object of supplying the missionaries in the area and exporting ivory at a price that would undercut the Arab slave traders.
Missionary activities in Buganda
Henry Morton Stanley led the exploration to the interior of east Africa and especially Uganda in 1876. He was an explorer who was looking for a missionary, David Livingstone. In the cause of his second great African journey, Stanley spent some time in 1875 at the court of Kabaka Mutesa I of Buganda. There, like Speke, he was impressed by the organisation of Buganda and, unlike Speke he found Mutesa no longer a foolish youth but a skilful diplomatist. In the course of his stay, Stanley broached the subject of Christianity with the Kabaka and found in him a ready listener. Stanley saw in Mutesa’s interest the possibility of establishing a sound missionary station in an organized and prosperous country.
Sir Henry Morton Stanley dispatched a message by Linant de Bellefonds, an agent of the Egyptian Government whom he found at Mutesa’s court, calling upon the missionary societies of England to answer Mutesa’s request for aid. Stanley’s appeal created a greater impression than had the earlier proposal by Speke, which the CMS had rejected. In view of the state of public interest aroused by Livingstone’s death it would indeed have been difficult for the missions to resist Stanley’s call. Nevertheless, the CMS would still have preferred to abide by their established policy of steady progress, step by step, from the coast.
Their position became untenable, however, when, a few days after Stanley’s letter had been published in the Daily Telegraph to startle its receptive readers, an anonymous offer of £5,000 was made to the CMS for the purpose of establishing a mission station on the shores of Lake Victoria. Other contributions were also received for the same purpose. The CMS selected a party of six to form the first expedition, and in spite of many difficulties Kabaka Mutesa received the first two members, who formed the advance guard, in July 1877. At the end of the following year three more missionaries entered Uganda from the north, following the Nile route.
Missionary activities and relation to the Kabaka
The first missionaries to arrive were from the Church Missionary Society (British Protestants) in 1877, led by Alexander Mackay. There was also the Catholic White Fathers Mission, founded in 1868 by Cardinal Lavigerie to work among the Muslims of Algeria and more particularly to provide homes for children orphaned by famine. The order had grown in strength and Lavigerie had begun to look for further fields of activity. The party of missionaries set out from Bagamoyo in June 1878, and on reaching Tabora divided into two parts, one going on to Ujiji and the other, under Father Simon Lourdel, turning northwards to cross the lake to Buganda. Both groups received a warm embrace from Mutesa and were accommodated at his court and confined in his capital to curb their freedom of movement and the possible influence they might have on his people.
Buganda offered an excellent starting point for missionary activity. The country was under a strong government. It had a ruler who was intelligent and interested in Christianity. The Protestants and Catholics lacked charity towards each other. Mutesa and his people regarded Protestantism and Catholicism as two different religions, one for the Ingleza (the English) and one for the Fransa (the French).
In 1879, Mutesa almost became a Christian and even sent Baganda ambassadors to Queen Victoria, on a trip organised by CMS missionaries. However, the Katikiro(prime minister) Mukasa pointed out that the Kabaka must remain independent of the three rival foreign religious groups: Muslims, Protestants and Catholics. The katikiro told the Kabaka, ‘If you join any of these foreign religions there will be no peace in this country’. Even if Mukasa’s advice had not given Mutesa sufficient reason to pause, the issue of polygamy – of what to do with about two hundred wives – would have done so. Moreover, the Kabaka found the disputes between Protestants and Catholics confusing.
The absence of White Fathers between 1882 and 1884 was a blessing in disguise to Christianity in Buganda. African converts, left under their own leadership, continued the work of evangelisation with not only fervour but a growing self-reliance and responsibility. Men like Joseph Mukasa Balikuddembe emerged as inspiring Catholic leaders during Father Lourdel’s absence. Lourdel’s temporary withdrawal also led to an abandonment of the narrow and rather futile policy of trying to Christianise Buganda by first converting the Kabaka. From 1882, a new policy of spreading the Gospel widely to all in the capital who would care to listen to it was adopted. By the end of Mutesa’s reign in 1884 there were several hundred Christian converts in Buganda.
Kabaka Mwanga’s reign and persecution of Christians
The worsening relations between the missionaries and the Buganda leadership were brought to a head by Mwanga’s accession to the throne. During his reign, Mutesa had been able to retain control over the new forces at work in his country. He had succeeded in preserving his independence by playing Anglicans against the Catholics, and both against the Muslims as the situation demanded. Arab traders had been admitted freely from as early as the 1840s, but their activities had been carried on under the strict supervision of the Kabaka himself. And if many of his subjects had become interested in Islam, Mutesa himself had paid it some attention, with the tolerant outlook of one who knew his own ability to check excess.
The Christian missionaries had been able to arouse deep concern for their teachings in the minds of some Baganda and had attracted a wider circle of those who hoped to benefit materially from the new religion. The arrival of the Christian missionaries had pushed the influence of the Muslims to a dangerous precipice, for the Christians combined their war against the slave trade with a powerful presence at the Kabaka’s court. But under the watchful eye of Mutesa, neither the Christians nor the Muslims could hope to be too successful, lest they should challenge his own pre-eminence.
Mwanga, who succeeded Mutesa on the latter’s death in October 1884, was of a different calibre. A young man of weak character, he was unable to dominate the situation in which he found himself, save for brief periods and by ill-considered acts of violence. At first it was hoped that the accession of Mwanga to the throne would strengthen the churche. Joseph Mukasa was promoted to the the position of majordomo (leading servant or butler in the palace), and Andrea Kagwa became the hunting and travelling companion of the young Kabaka. A bitter struggle for power, however, developed between these new young men and the older tribal chiefs headed by the Prime Minister.
Impact of European explorers and missionaries on Buganda Kingdom
European explorers and missionaries had a great impact on Buganda Kingdom in a number of ways:
(i) Growth of Christianity: By 1896 there were nearly 7,000 baptised Protestants and 57,000 readers. Further growth was aided, firstly, by the work of GL Pilkington who was the chief translator of the Bible into Luganda and began a system of ‘reading-houses’ where the scriptures were studied with enthusiasm under African teachers. Secondly, the strictly graded society of Buganda made the Baganda willing to accept the bishops, archdeacons, priests and other ranks of the Anglican Church. Thirdly, Bishop Tucker in 1909 was able to put into practice a church constitution which ensured an African majority in the House of Laity and also in the House of Clergy as soon as the African priests outnumbered the Europeans. He had left, he said, the Church of Uganda, ‘with power to make its own laws’.
(ii) Growth of the Church: The numbers in the Anglican Church rose as this activity continued. Missionaries from Buganda began in the nineties to work in Toro and by 1914 there were 9,000 Christians there. Bunyoro and Ankole also saw advances. Apolo Kivebulaya, a teacher on the edge on the then Congo Free State, translated St Mark’s gospel into the language of the pygmies for use in his evangelical work. From 1890 Bishop Tucker encouraged the Africanisation of the Church and by 1914 there were 33 African priests of several tribes who began as a group the breaking down of tribal barriers. By 1918 there were 110,000 baptised Anglicans in Buganda.
The coming of the railway from the coast gave rise to many social ills. In 1937 a Revival led to new evangelism, better living and as Muganda said, ‘heart-knowledge’ of Christianity instead of verbal acceptance. This has continued to the present and has affected Anglicans in Kenya as well as Uganda and other areas. Its theme song is the Luganda Tukutendereza, ‘We praise Thee’. The Revival works through meetings for confession, prayer and singing. By 1966 Uganda was the only African country where Christians (including Catholics) outnumbered non-Christians.
(iii) Growth of education: Mission education flourished and the government took no part until 1920. In 1900 there were seventy-two CMS schools with nearly 8,000 scholars and in 1913, 331 schools with 32,000 scholars. The schools were mainly primary up to World War II but they included the famous Kings College, Budo (founded in 1906 for sons of prominent Baganda Protestants), and agricultural, technical and industrial training institutions. The Catholics had Saint Mary’s College, Kisubi offering high school education to the sons of prominent Baganda Catholics. Since there were more Protestant boarding schools than Catholic in the early days, there were more Protestants among Uganda’s elite in the 20th Century.
(iv) Development of agriculture: In the agricultural field Borup, a lay missionary, imported the first cotton seed in 1903 and thus began the cultivation of this vital cash crop, on which the prosperity of Buganda depended.
(v) Developments in medicine: In the medical field the CMS was well-known. In 1897 a hospital was opened at Namirembe. Dr A Cook in 1900 was the first to diagnose sleeping sickness, to demonstrate how widespread syphilis was and to show that one form of anaemia was caused by the hook worm. He also warned that the population of Buganda and Bunyoro was decreasing largely through sexually-transmitted diseases. Not until 1922 did the population begins to increase in the Protectorate as a whole. In addition, three centres for lepers were founded by the CMS after 1920.
(vi) Forerunner of colonial rule: In Britain and Europe in general, the need to spread christianity justified imposition of colonial rule. However, it is the efforts of explorers over the source of the Nile, and the efforts of Protestant missionaries from Britain in Buganda, that led to the declaration of a protectorate over Uganda.
The rivalry and turbulent relations between the Protestants and Catholics in Buganda, ultimately resulted in a civil war (the Battle of Mengo) in 1892, which the protestantswon. But the situation was still dangerous for the Protestants. The Catholic got support from the Germans in Tanganyika. The Kabaka was certainly hostile. The Protestant appealed to their government, Britain, to declare this area a British protectorate and give them and their work security. Public opinion in Britain supported them. Buganda was declared a British protectorate in 1894.
Missionaries in Kenya and Tanzania
Kenya
After the efforts of the 1840s by Krapf and Rebmann, other missionaries followed much later. These included the Holy Ghost Fathers who arrived in Mombasa in 1890 and founded a mission in Bura in 1891. The Consolata Fathers came in 1902, founding the Mangu Mission in 1906. The Mill Hill Fathers from Uganda founded a mission near Kisumu in 1903, Mumias in 1904 and Kakamega in 1906. African Inland Mission (AIM) was founded in 1895 and began its work in Machakos. The Society of Friends (Quakers) founded a mission at Kaimosi in August 1902 and later among the Akamba. The CMS began their work in Western Kenya from Uganda with Bishop JJ Willis founding the Maseno Mission, while the Church of Scotland Mission worked in Central Kenya.
This Church later became known as the Presbyterian Church. It can be seen that most of these mission stations were established well after the British occupation in 1895, and perhaps as a direct consequence of the building of the Uganda Railway (1896 – 1901).
Tanzania
Missionaries moved in from Central Africa. They included the LMS near Lake Tanganyika. The Holy Ghost Fathers worked at the coast while the White Fathers worked in central and western Tanzania.Founding of mission stations in East Africa also meant establishing rehabilitation centres for freed slaves (Freretown in Kenya and Bagamoyo in Tanzania). It also meant establishing of schools to teach literacy skills and vocations such as agriculture, carpentry, and masonry. Examples of mission schools in Kenya included Maseno School, Alliance High School and Mangu High School. In Uganda, the Catholic and Anglican missionaries founded St. Mary’s College, Kisubi and Kings College, Buddo respectively. Mission stations were therefore centres of learning as well as medical centres as they offered medical services.
Missionaries in Central Africa
The story of missionary enterprise in Central Africa must start with David Livingstone. Livingstone was the pioneer of a widespread missionary movement in Central Africa. Several different mission groups took part in this, one of the first being the London Missionary Society. The LMS tried to work among the Matabele, but was as unsuccessful as the Jesuits who established missions at Bulawayo and Empandeni. The Paris Missionary Society’s Francois Coillard tried to establish a station at Mashiangobi’s in western Mashonaland but was taken away and warned not to try again by Lobengula’s indunas. Coillard did not give up, and moving northwards to Bulozi, he managed to get close to Lewanika and achieved much success with the king and his people.
Dr. David Livingstone
Activity 4.2
Look for a historical map in the library and trace the movement of David Livingstone in East and Central Africa. Act out how he dealt with various African kings that he came by during his journeys in Africa. What would have been the reaction in Rwanda during the reign of King Mutara III Rudahigwa?
Dr David Livingstone was both a traveller and a missionary. Livingstone was born at Blantyre near Glasgow in 1813. At the age of 10 he went to work in a cotton mill, but spent time improving his education through evening studies. He entered university in 1836 to study medicine, at the completion of which he volunteered to work with the London Missionary Society (LMS) and proceeded to South Africa to join Robert Moffat at Kuruman in December 1840, from where he rapidly moved to Central Africa.
Objectives of Livingstone’s missionary work
There is every reason to suppose that Livingstone’s ambitions, besides straightforward missionary work, had been formulated before he left for Africa, but they certainly concretised and took a more practical form during his first twelve odd years in Southern and Central Africa. The Following were the objectives of his missionary work:
(i) To spread Christianity: Although born of Christian parents and becoming a devout Christian early, Livingstone’s missionary zeal seem to have been catalyzed by a speech delivered by the veteran missionary practicing in South Africa, Robert Moffat. Moffat spoke of ‘Africa’s perishing millions’, to whom the word of God would be a great gift. Moffat continued, ‘I have sometimes seen, in the morning sun, the smoke of a thousand villages where no missionary has ever been.’ The picture embodied in these words captivated Livingstone’s entire being and fired his soul with great passion. He would go to Africa! He would be a forerunner for Christ ‘in the land of the miserables’.
(ii) To abolish slavery and promote legitimate trade: Livingstone detested slavery, which he saw firsthand in South Africa and later in its Arab form in East Africa. He was anxious that Christianity should break out of its narrow geographical confines and penetrate the interior. But such penetration required safe lines of communication, unsuited to the conditions of the slave trade and with endemic war. This could be secured only by regular trade of a kind welcome to interior peoples. Besides, the Zambezi valley would be a good source of raw materials for the British textile industry by producing enough cotton to make Lancashire independent of the slave-grown cotton of the American South. If articles of British manufacture were supplied to the interior by means of ‘legitimate’ commerce then the slave trade would find it difficult to survive. And if this could be accompanied by the spread of Christian influences, a new moral climate would exclude slavery and soften other features of African life.
(iii) To introduce western education: He also entertained the current popular belief in Europe, that white settlement in the vast, sparsely populated parts of the interior of Africa would greatly benefit the indigenous people in terms of western education and civilisation. Besides, the open space of Africa would provide a very healthy alternative to the slum dwellers of Britain’s cities.
Livingstone’s legacy
In reality, these expeditions constitute Livingstone’s major activities in Southern and Central Africa. Through them he had become an eyewitness to the most in human and repugnant trade in slaves, one whose eradication he felt must be the obligation of his countrymen. In his reports back to England as well as in lectures he gave between the expeditions, he singled out this as a reason why men of good will must come to Africa. The slave trade must be abolished. And here he achieved immensely. His writings and speeches on the horrors he witnessed at first hand in the central-southern African interior, stirred the humanitarian urging of the British Government to enforce abolition of the trade by the Sultan of Zanzibar in 1873, the year of his death.
He inspired the foundations of the Universities Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) and the United Free Church of Scotland, which established a mission at Blantyre. Men were inspired to volunteer for missionary work as a result of Livingstone’s example. The activities of these missionaries were later to lead to the British colonisation of parts of central-southern-eastern Africa.Another target audience was settlers and farmers. He summoned his countrymen to come and settle in the healthy and fertile Central Africa, like the Shire Highlands. The British industrialisation now seriously underway, created a situation of overcrowded slums, smog-filled environment, and deplorable living conditions of the lumpen proletariat who were ready to move to new sites any time. Many people in England followed Livingstone’s persuasions with a lot of interest. The settler situation in Central Africa subsequently became a prominent factor in the British colonisation of this area.
Livingstone also believed that commerce must be encouraged as this would undermine the slave trade and put Africa at par with the rest of the world. The Scottish doctor’s activities and attitude towards Africa, was itself the epitome of paternalism, that of a superior being sent as a gift to the ‘unfortunate’ lands. This attitude hopelessly betrayed the pioneer tourist’s motives. The white settlers, argued Livingstone, would tap the mineral and agricultural potential of Africa which the ‘natives had been too lazy to harness for the benefit of all mankind’.
Finally, there can be no debate that Livingstone hoped to prepare the way for imperialism. He did so in various ways. He spread his views by means of his books, such as Missionary Travels and Researchers in South Africa (1857). A voracious readership consumed his letters, reports and articles, many of which appeared in newspapers and magazines.
Thus he played no mean role in nurturing public opinion for effective British involvement in Central Africa. His death in 1873 activated Stanley’s great trans-continental journey from Zanzibar to the mouth of the Congo between 1874 and 1877 this led to the surveying of the River Congo, and active interest of King Leopold of Belgium and De Brazza of France in the region. Livingstone indirectly influenced these happenings, but they nonetheless conformed to his imperial motivations from the very beginning.
Missionaries in Zambia
Francois Coillard
Coillard belonged to Paris Missionary Society. Earlier missionaries had not been very successful. In 1858 the London Missionary Society missionaries Helmore and Price came to Bulozi but the Kololo chief Sekeletu gave them a cool reception on account that David Livingstone was not with them. Helmore died of malaria and Price went back to South Africa. In 1879, the Jesuits began work among the Ila. Lewanika, now restored as ruler of Bulozi, took this as an insult, as he regarded the Ila as his subjects. On this occasion the Jesuits left because of disease, but when they returned in 1881, Lewanika sent them away. It was the Methodists who finally established themselves among the Ila, and later extended their activities beyond the Kafue.
However, the advantages of having missionaries working in his area were not lost on Lewanika. For one thing, they would teach people to read and write, and so improve the administrative system; for another, they would bring legitimate forms of trade, and so discourage the slave raiding of the Mambari. To be resisted, however, was Christianity itself, as it threatened the king’s own religious authority. Thus, in this cautious mood, Lewanika gradually moved towards acceptance of missionary activity in Bulozi.
Meanwhile, Lewanika’s ally Khama had come under British protection. For Khama this meant security from the Boers of South Africa and from the Ndebele. Lewanika was well aware that the quickening of advance of Europeans from South Africa could not be ignored. An alliance with white men, either those in the south or those in the west, was essential for his survival. He decided to follow Khama’s example and in 1886 allowed Francois Coillard to found a mission station in Bulozi. Lewanika realized that this would mean valuable new kind of education for his people, or at least for his sons and those of other Lozi chiefs. If he could keep this education under his control, it could greatly strengthen his own position as a ruler, which was still by no means secure.
Coillard had worked in Lesotho and spoke the Sotho language which was similar to the Kololo spoken by Lewanika and his people. The Paris Missionary Society now became something of a state church in Bulozi. It was successful among members of the royal family, Lewanika’s son Letia being converted, and the Mokwani, or Queen-Sister, being persuaded to temper her punishments with mercy. But the PMS never became a popular church among the people of Bulozi as did the Watch Tower in the 20th Century. The Paris missionaries also suffered greatly from malaria. Coillard’s wife died in 1891, and Coillard himself died of blackwater fever in 1904.
Missionaries in Malawi
Missionary work preceded the effective establishment of government by European powers. Missionaries from a number of Christian churches were involved in this work. Christian churches in Malawi included the following:
(i) The Universities Mission in Central Africa (UMCA)
At a meeting at Cambridge on December 4, 1857, Livingstone had said, ‘I go back to Africa to try to make an open path for commerce and Christianity. Do you carry on the work which I have begun. I leave it with you’. These words inspired the formation of the Universities Mission to Central Africa, supported by largely Anglican well-wishers in Oxford, Cambridge and Durham universities. Soon afterwards Charles Mackenzie was chosen to lead the first expedition. Mackenzie, a brilliant mathematical scholar at Cambridge, had planned to become a lecturer there, but in 1854 he decided to devote his life to missionary work. He had been working for five years in Natal when he was appointed leader of the UMCA expedition.
Having been consecrated a Bishop, Mackenzie set out with five European and three African Christians from South Africa. The party met Livingstone early in 1861 at the mouth of the Zambezi. Livingstone had recently explored the Shire and Lake Malawi area, and it was agreed that he should accompany the mission party to search for a mission site.
The Magomero Mission
They sailed up the Zambezi into the Shire in Livingstone’s ship, the Pioneer. At Chibisa’s kraal, the party stopped while Livingstone and Mackenzie pushed on towards the Shire Highlands where they hoped to find a mission site. Two years earlier, Livingstone been impressed by the prosperity of Nyanja villages there. But the area had been depopulated by Yao slave raids. Within a couple of days of setting out, trouble with a raiding party led to a change of plans. The missionaries made a settlement in the low-lying land at Magomero, where Livingstone left them.The disasters which befell the mission can largely be traced to this ill-fated decision. The entire region was increasingly harried by the Yao who were pushing south-westwards from their home in the Rovuma Valley in their search for slaves. The whole area proved unhealthy too, and soon all the members were suffering from recurrent fevers.
The climax came in January 1862, when Mackenzie took a small party down the Shire to meet Livingstone who was bringing supplies. The canoe in which they were travelling struck a sand bank and the medicine chest which contained the all-important quinine was lost. Shortly afterwards Mackenzie and a colleague, Henry Burrup, fell ill with malaria and died in a few days. Illness struck the others, and within a year there were three more deaths.
The move to Zanzibar
In June 1863 Bishop Tozer took Mackenzie’s place as leader of this mission, and when he reached Magomero he reluctantly came to the conclusion that the mission had to be withdrawn to a less isolated and unhealthy centre. Tozer moved to Zanzibar, home of the Sultan, the recognised head of all the Arabs in East Africa, and the greatest centre for the trade in ivory and slaves.
In August 1864, work among the Arabs and freed slaves begun there. When the Sultan agreed to close the slave market in 1873, the missionaries hastened to buy this site, and soon a fine cathedral was built with the alter on the spot where formerly the slaves’ whipping post had stood.
The move to Likoma Island
Tozer was determined that the UMCA should return to the lake region as soon as possible. After 1875 the UMCA established a chain of mission stations leading to the lake. In1881, the missionary WP Johnson travelled around Lake Malawi. In 1885 a permanent settlement was established at Likoma Island, and this became the centre of missionary activity on both sides of the lake.
A map drawn in 1899 shows seventeen stations on the eastern side and five on the western. It was Chauncy Maples who built up Likoma, while WP Johnson carried out itinerant work from the steamship Charles Jansen. This steamship was important in two other respects: it enabled the missionaries to bring stores from Matope on the Shire River; and it put them in touch with the Scottish missionaries at Bandawe, where medical care was available. This meant that the UMCA missionaries no longer had to rely on the dangerous route to Zanzibar.
The Nyanja people, however, were now being raided by the Gwangwara Ngoni, so the UMCA mission at Likoma, like the one at Magomero, became a place of refuge rather than a centre of civilisation. There was also the recurring problem of malaria. In the first thirty years of the mission, fifty-seven missionaries died out of a total of two hundred, and the average tour of duty was only five years. Furthermore, Islam was well-established in the Likoma area, making it difficult for the missionaries to convert people to Christianity. Nonetheless, schools were opened; the gospels were translated by WP Johnson into the chi-Nyanja language; and medical work was carried out, especially after the arrival in 1889 of Dr Robert Howard.
Likoma Island became the centre of mission work in the area – indeed today the headquarters of the Anglican diocese of Malawi – and a fine cathedral was completed in 1905. From this centre missionaries eventually spread into Zambia. Meanwhile, the UMCA made their biggest impact in the rural areas. The main emphasis of UMCA education was still academic, and in reality the UMCA missionaries did little to prepare Africans for the Industrial Revolution when it came. They did, on the other hand, allow an African clergy to emerge: the first African priest was a Yao, Johanna Abdalla. Another African priest was Leonard Kamungu, who was ordained in 1901, and who later worked at Nkhotakhota and in Zambia.
(ii) Livingstonia Mission
The UMCA withdrew to Zanzibar in 1863. In 1874, the Free Church of Scotland formed a new mission in the area. It was called Livingstonia Mission of the Free Church of Scotland in memory of the great missionary-explorer.
Work in the south among the Amachinga Yao
It was first established in 1875 at Cape Maclear at the south end of Lake Malawi. It was not particularly successful in this area. The local people, the Amachinga Yao; saw little value in the missionaries for a number of reasons. First, they were sufficiently secure in their political position to need aid of external allies. Secondly, they also possessed in Islam an alternative historic religion and an alternative source of modernising skills to those offered by Livingstonia; and thirdly, and perhaps most important, their economic structure, and therefore their political power, depended on the continuance of the slave trade, while the missionaries demanded that they abandon slave trading and turn to ‘legitimate’ trade along the line of the Shire River.
This they could not accept, and the missionaries six years’ sojourn on the edge of Yaoland was characterized by tension between the mission settlement and the chieftains of surrounding villages, as the former sought for refugees from the latter’s villages to swell the ranks of its dependents. The Yao made little use of the missionaries.
Work in the north among the Tonga
In the north, even more momentous developments were taking place. In 1881 the Mission left Cape Maclear and moved north up the lakeshore at Bandawe in Tonga country. Here, under the energetic leadership of Dr. Robert Laws, the Mission was more successful. The Tonga were not involved in the slave trade and there was an absence of Islamic influence among them.
The Tonga, unlike the Amachinga Yao, welcomed the missionaries as they were looking for allies against Mbelwa’s Ngoni, from whose kingdom they had broken, and who continued to raid towards the lake in the 1880s. Also, being agriculturalists, the Tonga were less opposed to the missionaries than the Yao or the Ngoni, whose way of life depended on raiding.
Yet, perhaps more compelling in their need for missionaries was the internal competitiveness of the Tonga society in which a premium was placed upon individual achievement, in consequence of which education was sought with unequalled enthusiasm. The Tonga took quickly to education and by 1890, there were more than 2000 Tonga pupils in mission schools. They wanted this education not to strengthen their political position, as was the case among most of the other African societies who were quick to encourage education, but to give themselves the skills they needed to take part in a western-style economy.
From 1886 onwards, the Tonga were using their new skills to obtain jobs as clerks, foremen and interpreters in the young work markets of the Shire Highlands, where the African Lakes Company, an adjunct of the Livingstonia Mission, had established the first settler-type economy north of the Limpopo. The desire for educational skills generally preceded conversion to Christianity itself. Many Tonga took advantage of the missionaries’ teaching while remaining suspicious of their beliefs; not until 1895-1898 and after 1903 were there large-scale conversions of the Tonga.
(iii) The Blantyre Mission
The Blantyre Mission, a second Scottish mission in Malawi, was another branch of the Presbyterian church. It was founded in 1876 by Henry Henderson and established on land given by the Yao chief Kapeni in the Shire Highlands. It was more successful than the Livingstonia Mission had been at Cape Maclear because the Amangoche Yao, unlike the Amachinga, wanted an alliance with the missionaries. They had been driven south by their Amachinga compatriots and were now being attacked by the Maseko Ngoni of the Dedza highlands. They saw some value in an alliance with the Blantyre Mission of the Church of Scotland, established a year later than Livingstonia.
Success, however, did not come immediately to the Blantyre Mission. From 1879-1881 there were management scandals and in 1881 the Mission had to be re-founded by Reverend DC Scott. By 1885 the mission was carrying out successful missionary and educational work. But the mission’s residential role as a small colony was paramount, as it had also acquired certain political powers. The mission intervened repeatedly in the political and judicial process, judging a wide range of cases, not only at its stations, but among the surrounding Yao chiefdoms. Scott and his colleague Hetherwick, not only judged cases between chiefs, but also decided on punishments themselves.
iv) The London Missionary Society (LMS)
The London Missionary Society (LMS) had opened a station at Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika. In 1881, a Scottish businessman, Stevenson, gave some money for making a road between the lakes, so that the missionaries at Ujiji could get their supplies from the African Lakes Company. This route, named the Stevenson Road, served two other stations – the L.M.S. station at Fwambo and the Free Church mission at Mwanwanda. In order to supply these new missions, and to collect ivory from the northern end of the lake, the Company decided to establish a permanent trading station at Karonga.
This move invited trouble because the Arab and Swahili traders, attracted by the chance of selling ivory to the Company, decided to settle in the area. But the Arabs and Swahilis, viewing the lake-side missions as the chief critic of their own form of trade – the slave trade – now threatened the latter with violence and annihilation. Mlozi, the leading Arab tycoon, was not at all happy with the presence of the missionaries in Karonga, and the threat of Portuguese interference from the south-east. In the face of mounting opposition, British missionaries in the late 1880s began to campaign for some form of British protection.
John Moir, the founder of the Lakes Company, obtained the signatures of a number of chiefs to be sent to the Queen of England for her protection, or, if that was refused, the protection of a chartered company, in this case the African Lakes Company. Predictably, the request was refused, on account of the financial responsibilities it might involve the British Government in. At this stage, Cecil Rhodes offered to shoulder the administrative costs of the country under the British South African Company’s charter. But the ALC’s supporters and the Scottish missionaries were strongly opposed to the idea of South African involvement.
The British Government, however, did eventually reverse its earlier stand to accept administrative responsibility over Nyasaland. She could no longer take lightly the dangerously proximate Portuguese presence and the growing German interest in East Africa in the 1880s. Moreover, the victory of the Mahdi in Sudan in 1885 had created another fear. Salisbury thought that Sudan was urging the Arabs in the lake country to drive the missionaries and other white men into the sea, and conquer the whole region for Islam.
In May 1891, the British declared a Protectorate over Nyasaland. Johnston was appointed Her Majesty’s Commissioner and Consul-General to the territories under British influence north of the Zambezi. His expenses, and those of the other aspects of the administration of the new Protectorate, were to be borne by Cecil Rhodes’ Company.
v) The Dutch Reformed Church Mission
In the early 19th Century Afrikaners had little interest in missionary work. This attitude changed, however, after about 1885-6. The Dutch Reformed Church formed a missionary society, and in 1889 sent a missionary, AC Murray, to Malawi. Murray, having gained experience by working with Dr Elmslie, began work among Chiwere’s Ngoni. Murray’s presence helped Chiwere to keep his prestige among his own counselors, some of whom were plotting against him. Chiwere also expected Murray to have supernatural powers, especially in rain-making.
There seemed to be miraculous evidence of these powers when, as had been the case with Dr Elmslie, rain appeared in answer to Murray’s prayers, at just the right time.Murray was then joined by another missionary, Vlok, and in 1890 schools were opened at Mvera and Ndwide. In the 1890s more missionaries came, and more schools were opened. It was, however, an uphill task: the missionaries were often threatened by the Ngoni, and malaria took its usual toll. Murray himself was savaged by a leopard.
In 1894, 19 Africans were baptized. In 1896, the Mission began work among Mazengera’s Chewa. (Mazengera was anxious to protect himself against both the Ngoni and the Yao, and thought that he could do this by having missionaries at his village). By 1900 there were 18 missionaries working at Mvera, Kongwe and Nkhoma, and an African, Albert Namalamba, was looking after schools, 48 teachers and 1300 pupils. This educational work expanded still further after 1900.
Problems encountered by early missionaries
Activity 4.3
Work in groups of four.Using previous knowledge learnt, the Internet, textbooks and other historical materials;
(a) Find out the specific problems that were encountered by missionaries as colonial agents in Africa. Give examples where possible of the different areas where they encountered problems.
(b) Write down your findings in a notebook.
(c) Present your findings in a class discussion
Early missionaries encountered a number of problems:
i. Poor communication facilities. The Missionaries went into little-known areas with poor communication facilities, and for months, or even years at a time, they had to depend on the haphazard trips of traders and hunters for supplies and letters.
ii. Insecurity. They were faced with constant insecurity, for missions depended on the goodwill of some powerful chief, and at any time succession quarrels, tribal wars or raids could endanger their lives or force them to leave the district.
iii. Hostility of people. Frequently, missionary teachings provoked trouble, for they attacked many existing customs which appeared to them to conflict with the teaching of Christianity.
iv. Slave trade. Missionaries were often sickened by the heartlessness and cruelty they encountered, which included the agonies of victims of slave raids, speared to death if any rescue was attempted.
v. Medium of communication. Mission work in scattered populations, speaking a variety of languages increased the difficulty of putting new ideas across to the people. To secure understanding and acceptance of the Christian message was a long and arduous task.
vi. Unfavourable climate and disease. Most dangerous of all was the tropical climate, and the fevers that followed. Although quinine was known, the causes of malaria, blackwater fever, and many other diseases had not been discovered. Few of the missionaries were given any training in the use of such medicines as were available, and poor communications often caused a shortage of medical supplies. All suffered continually of illness and there were frequent deaths.
vii. Lack of central government. Lack of central government was an obstacle to missionary work; the spread of independent chiefdoms, often rivalling each other, resulted in missionaries getting into unnecessary antagonisms. This was not conducive to consistency and even success of missionary work.
The impact of missionary work in Malawi
Activity 4.4
Work in groups of three.Using previous knowledge learnt, the Internet, textbooks and other historical materials;
(a) Outline the positive and negative effects or consequences of missionary activities in Africa. Give examples where possible.
(b) Write down your findings in a notebook.
(c) Present your findings in a class discussion
Early missionary work had positive and negative impact on Malawi in a number of ways:
Positive impacts
(a) Introduction of Western education. Western education was introduced in institutions that were opened by missionaries. In their schools they established the beginnings of literacy among many African communities. A number of the early missionaries did an immense amount of work on the structure of African languages, reducing them to written form with the alphabet.
They produced grammar books, translated religious and educational books into the vernaculars, and published such work at the mission printing presses. In 1895, the Overtoun Institution was opened among the Ngoni at Kondowe in an area that came to be called Livingstonia. It trained Africans to become pastors, evangelists, schoolteachers, craftsmen and medical assistants. Livingstonia soon became famous for providing the most advanced education for Africans in Central Africa.
(b) Improvement of agriculture and food production. New crops and vegetables were introduced, new agricultural skills were practised, and people learnt how to use new implements such as ploughs.
(c) Spread of Christianity. The early missionaries built numerous churches where an ever-increasing number of converts were able to choose and accept certain Christian standards which they thought beneficial. Their work of evangelisation became even more effective by the translation of the Bible into various languages by those of them who learnt and mastered African languages, because literate Africans were trained and were able to supplement missionary efforts in spreading Christianity.
(d) Ending of the slave trade. The slave trade was brought to an end. Early missionaries such as Livingstone relentlessly campaigned against the slave trade. In his expeditions across Central Africa, Livingstone had become an eyewitness to the most inhuman and repugnant trade in slaves, one whose eradication he felt must be the obligation of his countrymen.
In his reports back to England as well as in the lectures he gave between the expeditions, he singled out this as a reason why men of good will must come to Africa. His writings and speeches on the horrors he witnessed first hand in the central-southern African interior, stirred humanitarian urging of the British Government to enforce abolition of the trade by the Sultan of Zanzibar in 1873, and the year of his death.
(e) Promotion of commerce. One of the reasons for Livingstone’s expeditions was to explore the Zambezi River in order to establish its navigability and use for commerce. In the early 1880s, the African Lakes Company – a concern financed by philanthropic Scottish businessmen to assist their missionary compatriots in the Malawi area – was established at the north end of Lake Malawi. This greatly promoted trade in the entire Lake Malawi region.
(f) Pacification of hostile people. The missionaries often met hostility among some communities and had to call in assistance from their government. For example, the majority of the Arab and Yao rulers bitterly resented the European incursion which threatened to destroy their trade in slaves and ivory, and their own power structure.
Mlozi, the leading Arab tycoon, was not at all happy with the presence of the missionaries in Karonga. When Nyasaland was declared a British protectorate, Harry Johnston immediately undertook the pacification of such hostile people, breaking in the process the power of the Yao and Arab slavers, and securing the position of the missionaries and the young British administration.
Negative impacts
(a) Destruction of indigenous culture. The missionaries despised and criticised many aspects of African beliefs, culture and traditions and worked hard to destroy them. African religious practices, marriage systems, ceremonies and festivals and so on were attacked as ‘backward’.
(b) Destruction of African industries. Missionaries destroyed local industries like craft industry, e.g. blacksmiths, pottery work were all destroyed and replaced with European. manufactured items like cups, saucepans, and so on.
(c) Harbingers of colonialism. Missionaries were harbingers of colonialism. An early missionary David Livingstone worked closely with the British government who saw the Shire Highlands as a suitable settlement for Britain’s surplus populations. Indeed, in his scouting activities, his second expedition was fully funded by the British government. However, the missionaries’ role as harbingers of colonialism in Malawi came more directly in the late 1880s when the slave-trading Arabs and Swahilis threatened two lakeside missions, the LMS at Fwamba and the Free Church mission at Mwanwanda, with violence and annihilation.
Karonga, which became both a strong mission and trading centre, was particularly vulnerable. In addition, the threat to the missionaries of Portuguese interference from the south-east was always real. In the face of mounting opposition, British missionaries in the late 1880s began to campaign for some form of British protection. John Moir, the founder of the African Lakes Company, obtained the signatures of a number of chiefs to be sent to the Queen for her protection. When the request was refused, Cecil Rhodes offered to shoulder the administrative costs of the country under the British South African Company’s (BSA) charter. The British government later took over when company rule came to an end – the invitation to do so having been spearheaded by the missionaries.
Missionaries in Zimbabwe
In other parts of Central Africa missionaries helped to prepare African societies for the impact of European rule in various ways. Sometimes they acted as advisers to chiefs. Sometimes they provided education and skills, which gave the people among whom they worked a favourable position in the early days of colonial rule. Sometimes they became so committed to ‘their’ people that they acted as effective spokesmen for them and defended their interests against the new colonial administrations. Very often they prepared African societies for the impact of other Europeans by beginning the process of introducing new ideas and new demands.
The missionaries in Barotseland, the missionaries among the Tonga and northern Ngoni in Malawi; the missionary advisers of Khama of Botswana; all these played an important part in lessening the shock of the confrontation of blacks and whites in Central Africa.
From 1859 missionaries of the London Missionary Society were permanently established in Matabeleland. The Ndebele made use of them in various ways such as to mend guns, inoculate cattle and give medical treatment to the sick. The Shona were Lobengula’s subjects. He refused permission for mission stations to be set up in Mashonaland. The Boer and Portuguese hostility blocked alternative approaches to Mashonaland.
In 1877, Coillard tried to set up a mission station in western Mashonaland; he was summoned before Lobengula and warned never to repeat the attempt. Eventually, missionaries lost interest in trying to get to Mashonaland. This position of missionaries in Matabeleland and Mashonaland had important results.
Traders as agents of colonisation
Activity 4.5
In groups of five each, visit the library and use the internet to carry out research on the role of traders in the colonisation of different parts of Africa. Prepare a group essay. Discuss the group essays in class.
In the second half of the 19th Century, a large part of Africa was divided among the European powers. This process has been called both the Scramble and the Partition of Africa. In reality, the Scramble took place in Africa itself, when representatives of the European powers took land in Africa, or made treaties with African chiefs.
The Partition took place in Europe, in agreements between the European powers, especially, at the Berlin Conference in 1884-5. One of the leading figures in both the ‘Scramble and Partition’ was Leopold II, king of the Belgians.
Leopold II and the Congo Free State
Leopold was an ambitious man. When he became king of the Belgians in 1865 he had already formulated ideas of taking over large parts of undeveloped world. He had travelled widely, and had studied African exploration. In 1876, he formed the African International Association. The aim of the Association was to establish commercial and scientific stations in Central Africa. They were to be attached to missionary stations, and protected by military garrisons. The first of them were set up in 1878 and 1879 at the White Fathers Missions at Tabora and Lake Tanganyika.
At this time, Leopold was mainly interested in developing Africa, and in abolishing the slave trade. From 1879 onwards, however, he became more interested in the wealth and power he could get from Africa.It was in 1879 that Leopold formed his association with Henry Morton Stanley. Stanley, the journalist who had met Livingstone at Ujiji in 1871, had tried to carry on Livingstone’s work by exploring the Lualaba area. He had travelled down to Congo, and he believed this area should be developed. He had taken these ideas to the British government. Britain, in the early 19th Century, had been interested in the Congo. Official expeditions had been sent up the river, and trade had been developed by merchants from Manchester and Liverpool.
This interest had now decreased, and the British government would not give Stanley the support he wanted. In 1897, therefore, Stanley made an agreement with Leopold. In return for a large sum of money, Stanley would take the Congo for Leopold. It took Stanley five years (1879-84) to travel up the Congo. He established road and river communications from Kisangani to the coast converting more than 1,000 miles. Leopold wanted the control of the area mainly for its trade. He wanted to control all the trade in the Congo Basin. He wanted goods to be exported on his own river steamers, and on the railway he would build from Kinshasa to the coast.
Leopold’s methods
Leopold now had to get the other great powers to agree to his taking over the Congo. In this, he showed himself a clever diplomat. He claimed that it was better to keep Congo as a free trade area under his ‘international’ control than to let any particular country have it. There were four main powers to convince - France, Germany, USA and Britain:
(i) France: With France, Leopold made a secret treaty. He promised France that she could have the Congo if he was unable to govern it. (He had already led France to believe he would be unable to govern it owing to shortage of money).
(ii) Germany. Turning his attention to Germany, he supported the German chancellor, Bismarck, in his claims to other parts of Africa. In return, Bismarck supported Leopold in the Congo.
(iii) America. American support was obtained when Leopold’s American secretary, Stanford, told the American government that Leopold’s main aim in the Congo was to abolish the slave trade.
(iv) Britain. The biggest obstacle, however, was Britain. Britain was worried about the position of her traders in the Congo and about the safety of Baptist missionaries. In February 1884, Britain signed a treaty with Portugal giving the Portuguese control of the Congo estuary; this cut Leopold off from the coast. Leopold countered by offering profitable contracts to British merchants, and by persuading the British government that he would be more ‘liberal’ in the Congo than either the French or the Portuguese. Britain abandoned her agreement with the Portuguese but would not actually agree to Leopold taking the Congo.
In November 1884, however, the Conference of Berlin opened. The Conference decided that there should be ‘freedom of navigation’ on the Congo River. Britain could no longer keep Leopold out, and therefore gave way. France kept her territory north of the river, but Leopold took the rest of the Congo basin down to the Congo-Zambezi watershed. His territory thus included the mineral-rich area of Katanga; it was to be known as the Congo Free State, and it was to be the property of Leopold himself – not the Belgian government.
Problems faced in the colonisation of the Congo
Leopold had left behind many problems. The concessionaire companies still owned large areas of land under contracts made with Leopold. They still controlled the trade of a still larger area. The Congo was heavily in debt: Leopold had borrowed money on Congo’s account, and spent it to build palaces in Belgium. Interest on this debt took as much as 20% of the government’s revenue. Congo was still a poor country; its people had no income that could be taxed to pay for more development.The Africans had been hostile to Leopold, and this hostility continued when the Belgian government took over.
The main opposition came from societies which were remote from the centre of Belgian power, and in which chiefs were mainly military leaders. These included the Azande of the Sudan frontier (whose main opposition was from 1892 to 1912), the Bashi in eastern Congo (1900 to 1916), the Luba of Kasongo Nyemba (1907 to 1917), and the Yaka on the Angola frontier (1895, 1902 and 1906).
Traders in West Africa
In many instances in Africa’s colonisation, ‘the flag followed trade; in other words, traders, in the fashion of explorers and missionaries, blazed the trail for European colonisation. Traders were important agents of the British, French and German colonisation of the African continent. Sometimes their activities were of individual traders; but they were more successful as agents of colonisation when they coalesced as chartered companies. In parts of West, East and South-Central Africa, traders played no mean role in the European acquisition of colonies.
Activities of traders in the colonisation of West Africa
Until the 19th Century relations between Europeans and West Africans were dominated by the slave trade, and it was not until the 1850s that the slave trade died out. The real period of European conquest began in the late 1880s. In the intervening years, Africans were required as objects to be bought. In the colonial period, they were subjects to be governed, if necessary by force of arms.
But in between the 1850s and 1870s when there was a black Anglican bishop on the Niger and a black commercial and professional class in Liberia and Sierra Leone, at least part of Europe’s interest in Africa was a measure of genuineness in European concern for Africans welfare and sympathy for African aspirations. This was partly the reflection of religious movements such as Evangelical revival, partly the result of a sense of guilt about the slave trade.
It fitted in well with the search for export commodities. The combination of different interests was reflected in the motto “Christianity, Commerce and Civilisation”. It was hoped that there would arise on the Niger ‘a kingdom, which shall render great benefit to Africa and hold a position among the states of Europe’.
However, there were limitations to the humanitarian phase. It had a tendency to identify civilisation with European culture. The implication was also evil. What the Europeans had done to Africa in the long centuries of the slave trade was conveniently forgotten. They now could see themselves as bringers of Christianity, crusaders against the slave trade, agents of ‘civilisation’. In a sense, it promoted a low view of Africans, who were seen mainly as the recipients of European good deeds. It directly paved the way for colonialism, which would be defended only in terms of the supposed benefits it would bring.
British encroachment
The Scramble for West Africa was to end with the British in control of the two small colonies, the Gambia and Sierra Leon and two large ones, the Gold coast and Nigerian.
(i) Role of traders in Gambia
The British presence on the Gambia dates from 1816. France and Britain had just fought a long war, in the course of which the British had taken Senegal from the French. At the end of the war, Senegal was restored to the French, so British merchants moved to Bathurst (now Banjul). Britain controlled a narrow strip of territory along both banks of part of the Gambia; French expansion soon cut it off entirely from its natural hinterland. On several occasions in the 19th Century, an exchange of Gambia for French territory elsewhere was suggested, but it never came to anything, mainly because of opposition of British merchants on the Gambia. In this instance, colonialism meant the creation of a small country, where economic development would be difficult, and which was cut off by political and linguistic factors from its neighbours.
(ii) Role of chartered companies in Sierra Leone
The colony of Sierra Leone began as a small area around Freetown. The colony was established in 1808, partly as a sequel to the various settlements made there, and partly because of the strategic value of Freetown harbour. During the 19th Century, the Creoles, who traded far and wide in the territory, repeatedly asked for an extension of British authority. But by the time the British authority was finally established in 1896, the French had already taken much territory which might well have formed part of Sierra Leone, and which instead became part of the Republic of Guinea.
(iii) Role of traders in the Gold Coast
For centuries, the Europeans competed for gold and slaves in the Gold Coast (Ghana). They had built a number of stone or brick forts but continued to pay rent to African owners of the land in acknowledgement of African sovereignty. By the beginning of the 19th Century, the European nations remained on the Gold Coast. All faced economic difficulties after the abolition of the slave trade. Palm oil and gold found their way to the coast, but in small quantities. The Dutch and the Danes finally withdraw from the area and the British came close to doing so on several occasions.
In the 19th Century the company of African Merchants administered the British forts. This company had been heavily involved in the slave trade, and in 1821 it was abolished. The British forts on the Gold Coast were then placed under the Governor of Sierra Leone, who happened to be Sir Charles MacCarthy, who had made tremendous contributions to the development of Sierra Leone. MacCarthy was killed in a battle with the Asante in 1824 and the British came close to withdrawing from the area entirely. The merchants trading in the area protested, and in 1828 the forts were handed over to a committee of merchants. The British presence in what is now southern Ghana was greatly strengthened during the tenure of the committee, especially its leader, Captain George Maclean, who developed very good relations with the African peoples with whom he had dealings. But jealousy led to criticism of him by his white colleagues and the crown resumed control in 1843, though Maclean remained in the area, in a judicial capacity, until his death in 1847. This direct control placed the territory under the Governor of Sierra Leone, Commander Hill who was appointed Lieutenant Governor.
Role of chartered companies in the colonisation of Nigeria
Activity 4.6
Work in pairs.Using the Internet, textbooks and other historical materials;
(a) Define a chartered company.
(b) Give examples of chartered companies that were involved in the colonisation of Africa.
(c) Find out the roles that these companies played especially in Nigeria.
(d) Write down your findings in a notebook.
(e) Present them in a class discussion.
For British activity, Nigeria was unique in two ways. It was the area where British traders had penetrated deeply into the African hinterland, and it was also the area where they became deeply involved in local politics. Besides, Nigeria eventually emerged as Britain’s largest colony in Africa in terms of size of territory as well as size of population.
The one British trader most remembered for a lasting interest in trade and politics in Nigeria was Sir George Goldie, who as the head of the Royal Niger Company acquired for Britain the bulk of its most important colony in West Africa.
Lagos
The British established their first bridgehead in Nigeria by the conquest of the small state of Lagos in 1851. Originally Britain became involved in this Yoruba Port by intervening in the rivalry for the kingship. In 1845 Kosoko drove out Akintoye and made himself king. Both Akintoye and Kosoko were slave traders, but Kosoko as ne in power was now doing most to keep the slave trade going in Lagos. Kososko became the target of British missionaries and palm oil traders who persuaded the British government to drive out Kosoko and make Akintoye King.
In 1851-1852, the British navy duly intervened and defected the king. Akintoye as king signed treaties with Britain in which he promised to expel slave traders, protect missions and trade freely with British merchants. British conquest of Lagos was an act of economic imperialism.
Lagos was now very much under the influence of Britain, and ten years later the island and a small area of coastline became a colony. A number of major problems still faced the British and each required determined attention. French interest in the port needed blunting. The British palm oil trade and missionary interests needed protection.
The semi-independent ruler of Lagos, Dosunmu, who had succeeded his father Akintoye in 1853, had not effectively suppressed slave trading by the people of Lagos. Now a British governor replaced Dosumnu. Although British annexation led to a quick end of the slave trade, the development of the Lagos palm oil trade that followed caused slavery to increase in the Yoruba interior, as the warrior merchants of Ibadan used slaves as labourers in palm oil plantations and as porters in trading.
The occupation of Lagos brought with it the obligation to pay the cost of administering it. The most satisfactory source of revenue would have to be customs duties, which in turn could only come in sufficient amounts if the colony was expanded along the coast and other ports annexed. Governor Glover during his tenure from 1866 to 1872 expanded the colony to the West to take in Badagry and to the east to absorb Palma and Lekki. But the Yoruba wars in the hinterland of the ports continued.
Trade was constantly interrupted and revenue remained poor. The logic of the British position in Lagos required expansion inland to impose a Pax Britannica on all Yoruba and end the war in the interior, thus ensuring free and regular trade. When the French occupied nearby Dahomey in 1892, the stimulus for Governor Carter to invade the interior was finally provided.
For a long time Yoruba communities had looked suspiciously at the island and British authority at Lagos, and feared that it would lead to a further encroachment. But its divisions and wars weakened Yoruba’s capacity and will to resist the invader. In 1886, despite this, two Christian Yoruba men went on a largely successful peace mission with the support of the Lagos governmen. They failed in one important respect, as Ilorin remained outside the agreement.
In 1888, a Frenchman obtained a treaty at Abeokuta, and the possibility of the French moving in on the area appeared. In 1982 the British invaded the southern Yoruba kingdom of Ijebu. They chose this particular area for a show of force, it would seem, because of Ijebu’s refusal to admit Christian missions and Western influence.
The overthrow of the warlike and well-armed Ijebu had a great psychological effect on the rest of Yorubaland, and treaties in the various Yoruba states, again with the exception of Ilorin.
In 1849 the British had appointed a Consul for a wide coastal area stretching from Dahomey to Cameroons. This consul’s successors came to concentrate on the Niger Delta. Of course they were not colonial rulers. They were diplomatic representatives to sovereign states. They did not even live there, but, until 1882, on the distant island of Fernando Po. But supported by the ‘moral authority of a “man-of-war”’ they often intervened in Delta affairs, with decisive effect.The nature of the British presence in Southern Nigeria changed dramatically in the middle of the 1880s.
In 1884-1885, an international conference was held at Berlin, where it was decided that ‘effect occupation’ was recognised. Before the delegates had left Berlin, German representatives arrived in Togo and Cameroons, and obtained treaties, which established their claims to these areas.
The British presence in the Cameroons had been much like the British presence in the Delta. There had been many British traders there, but nothing like colonial government. Hurriedly, to avoid being forestalled by another European nation the British established a protectorate in the Delta.
George Goldie and the Royal Niger Company
George Goldie Taubman, better known as Sir George Goldie, was the founder of the Royal Niger Company. The Holland Jacques and Company of London was one of the several companies operating in West Africa. In 1875, this Company was nearly collapsed due to financial difficulties, its Secretary, Captain Joseph GroveRoss turned for help to the wealthy Maux family of Taubman. The response was positively enthusiastic, and Goldie took the affairs of the problem-ridden Company.
A year later in 1876 he reconstituted Holland Jacques as the Central African Trading Company, and his brother left for the Niger. Goldie arrived in Nigeria in 1877, and found three other British companies operating in that area; James Pinnock and Company, of Liverpool; the West African Company, of Manchester; and Alexander Miller Brothers and Company, of Glasgow. He quickly studied their problem.
The four British and a few French firms were engaged in a fierce competition and could not realise much profit. Consul Hopkins visited the interior in 1878 and confirmed that the coastal type of cutthroat competition was now rampant there. Goldie decided that this state of affairs had only one solution: the amalgamation of all these companies, elimination of competition, and the institution of a trade monopoly. One problem, however, would still remain unsolved.
While amalgamation might take care of the European firms, it would not reduce competition from African merchants. The solution to this was to secure political control over the Oil Rivers.The question of competition was to be tackled swiftly. Goldie now took firm control of the Company, which had invited him first, and by 1879 had managed to persuade the four British companies to come together and form the United African Company, with a nominal capital of £250,000. Their assets - ships, stores and staff – would be pooled together for a more economical and profitable operation.
The bargaining power of the British traders would be strengthened, enabling them to reduce the prices paid to Africans for their palm oil and other products. Thus the new Company hoped to raise the capital needed to open regular trading relations with Hausaland.
Eventually, Goldie hoped, he would be able to add the region of the Niger to the British Empire.But the success of this monopolistic policy was itself a new incentive to renewed competition, for if prices fell on the Niger, trade in that region would begin to attract merchants buying produce in other areas and paying more. The French did not delay in making this possibility a reality.
Chartered companies in East Africa
Missionaries and travellers had shown what the prospects were for trade. At first, this was limited to Zanzibar and the traditional exports such as ivory, gum copal, cloves, copra and skins.
In 1833, the Sultan had signed a commercial agreement with the United States, to be followed by one with Britain in 1839. French and German traders also became increasingly interested in trade in East Africa.
The French had a particular concern in the export of slaves from the coast to their islands in the Indian Ocean. This was to bring them into conflict with both the sultan, for encouraging the smuggling of slaves without paying the duties required, and the British because they were attempting to abolish the trade.Following the establishment of a British Consulate in 1840, British influence increased steadily in Zanzibar.
In the 1822 Moresby Treaty and the 1845 Hamerton Treaty, Seyyid Said had reluctantly agreed to severe restriction on the extent of the slave trade, in return for Britain’s recognition of his position in East Africa and encouragement of what they referred to as ‘legitimate trade’. Missionaries and travellers were at the same time trying to interest British merchants and shippers in the commercial prospects of East Africa.
Though prospects for trade were in fact poor, there was some response, especially from Scotsmen influenced by the appeal of Livingstone and the activity of the Scottish missions that followed him. In 1872, William Mackinnon, a self-made Glasgow ship owner and a member of Free Church of Scotland, began running the ships of his British India Steam Navigation Company to Zanzibar.
Thus there was tremendous expansion of European missionary and commercial activity in East Africa. But it would be a great mistake to imagine that this expansion was to lead inevitably to the establishment of colonial rule. Although the British, with their Indian and South African territories, and their powerful navy controlling the Indian Ocean, were in a very strong position to do so, they had no desire at all to found new colonies in East Africa. Prevailing economic theories insisted that colonies were a bad investment, yielding less in trade returns than they cost in administrative expenditure.
The British Government’s task was to create the conditions necessary for legitimate trade and Christianity to expand and drive out the slave trade.This meant that the British Foreign Office, acting through its consular officials, sought to strengthen local states, which seemed likely to maintain the peace and order necessary for commercial expansion. In East Africa, the Sultanate of Zanzibar was an obvious vehicle for such a policy, the only difficulty was that it was a slave trading state.
In 1841, Britain appointed a consul in Zanzibar and began the long process of forcing the Sultan to cut down the extent of the slave trade and to seek compensation in expanding his ‘legitimate’ trade and his political control over the mainland.After the appointment of John Kirk, who had been with Livingstone on the Zambezi, British pressure on Zanzibar increased to such a pitch that in 1873, under threat of force, Sultan Bargash had to prohibit the sea-borne slave trade completely.
Zanzibar was now ready as the British saw it, to go forward as a respectable, enlightened state, maintaining law and order in favour of British travellers, missionaries and traders.In the light of later events such a policy was naïve, informed less by tough analysis of world politics than by hopeful dreams of an ideal world. It was soon challenged. The first challenge to the idea of using Zanzibar to control East Africa came, not from Europe but from Egypt.
Role of Imperial British East Africa (IBEA) Company
The British company was at first more successful than its rival. It possessed a rather more capital, which it kept more or less intact so long as its activities were confined to the coast. But for some years after the Anglo-German partition, British interest in East Africa was focused upon the Kingdom of Buganda.
The great object of the East African Company was how to reach the lakes and its populous surroundings.
By 1890 the establishment of an administration in Buganda had become not only the chief goal of the Company, but also the chief justification for its stations at the coast and along the route into the interior. The Company’s overriding emphasis upon Buganda determined the way money was spent in Mombasa and the way economies were made in Kikuyu.
At the coast the company stationed agents at Kismayu, Lamu, Witu, Malindi, Takaungu, and Vanga. Not much happened here save for the collection of customs. The central administration at Mombasa was larger, employing as many as 20 Europeans, and more active, but again, most of its work was connected either with customs or preparing caravans for the interior. Otherwise poor management was responsible for a great deal of inefficiency and sheer waste. Every traveller who visited the town commented upon the disorganization of the Mombasa administration.
A great deal of disorganization was attributed to Mackinnon. Since Salisbury had never had much confidence in him; Kitchener’s advice in 1888 was to ‘get rid of him’. By 1890 even his fellow directors were angered with his impractical ideas and his poor tactical sense.
An assessment of Mackinnon’s IBEA Company
The Company had gone into Buganda, and indeed East Africa, to further and defend British imperial interests, while the government whose claims it was upholding had steadfastly withheld its own assistance even during compensation. The biggest share of the burden was to be shouldered by the Sultan. So the administration of the I.B.E.A. Company was taken over by the Foreign Office, and what is now Kenya became the British East Africa Protectorate in 1895.
The reasons for the Company’s financial embarrassment, which led to its inability to continue operating in East Africa, were manifold. The early preoccupations with Anglo-German rivalry accounted for a great deal of lost time and spent resources. By 1890, however, the German problem had been resolved.
Challenges facing the IBEA Company
Activity 4.7
Work in groups of three.Using the Internet, textbooks and other available historical documents;
1. Outline the problems faced by traders and chartered companies in Africa.
2. Write down your findings in a notebook.
3. Discuss them in a class presentation.
The East Africa seemed to have more challenges than opportunities for the Company in a number of ways:
• Lack of exportable produce. It had a limited range of exportable produce, and the Company did not have an established commodity trade, like the palm oil trade of West Africa.
• Means of transport. The greatest challenge for any European enterprise in East Africa, whether a chartered company or colonial government, was the lack of an economical means of transport. It took about six weeks for a caravan to march from Mombasa to Kikuyu, and three months for the journey from the coast to Buganda. Human porterage cost in the region of £ 250 a ton; at this figure only ivory could be a comfortable source of commerce from the interior. The Company made several unsuccessful attempts to improve its method of transportation and to find a substitute for its Zanzibar porters. Pack animals – donkeys and camels – and carts pulled by Cape oxen were imported and tried out along the Mombasa route. A steamer was chartered for use up the River Tana and Juba. Roads were levelled off inland from Malindi and from Kibwezi towards Tsavo. Finally, a few kilometres of a 0.61 metre (24 in) tramway were shipped out to Mombasa in 1890, and the first rails of the so-called Central African Railway were laid. Like the park animals, which died, and the roads, which washed away with the seasonal rains, the railway was a ‘sorry fiasco’, never used except for what one witness called ‘occasional picnic parties’ from Mombasa. The company needed only two years experience of East Africa before its directors began, with increasing desperation, to press the government for a railway subsidy.
• Internal challenges. There were problems within the Company also. Among them was the crippling combination of lack of qualified staff, disorganization and undercapitalisation. At the London headquarters the directors lacked coordination. Plans were often capricious, erratic and confused. Some thought Mackinnon himself was at the root of the obviously mediocre administration of the Company.
• Salisbury commented that Mackinnon ‘had no quality for pushing an enterprise which depends on decision and smartness’. Most of the Company’s staff was recruited outside East Africa without much regard for their experience or qualifications. The Niger Company in West Africa had done well right from the start because of the use the Company made of established trading agents with knowledge and experience of local conditions. For East Africa, there was no comparable group of traders.
But the Company did not fail in its principal aim, which was to acquire the area for Britain. It left a mixed legacy to the government of the British protectorate. It secured for the Imperial Government Uganda and the route from the Coast to that area at a cheaper cost. This route paved the way for colonisation of the territory it passed through.
The treaties of April 1892 gave future administrations both the authority and juridical basis upon which to negotiate new treaties and new land settlements. The protectorate government inherited even the Company’s armed forces. It had been a definite asset to Britain in providing continuity from missionary influence, especially in Buganda, to the institution of her administration. So the Imperial Government, which at first would rather work through a chartered company, finally and energetically embarked on the task of establishing a ‘white man’s country’ in today’s Kenya, and a powerful presence in Uganda. However, Lugard and Williams left their successors with three major problems; the revision of the inequitable land settlement within Buganda, the pacification of the Baganda Muslims, and most difficult, the decision upon the question of Britain’s future relationship to Toro and Bunyoro.
Role of chartered companies in Central Africa
In the 16th Century, the Portuguese were the first Europeans to attempt colonizing south-central Africa, but the hinterland lay virtually untouched by Europeans until the arrival of explorers, missionaries, ivory hunters, and traders in the early 1800s. These were the pioneers exploring unknown territory with their own agendas. The occupation and administration of firstly, Southern Rhodesia, followed by Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland started, and during the years 1885 to 1895 most of Central Africa was brought under British control.
Traders in Southern Rhodesia
The name “Rhodesia” was derived from Cecil John Rhodes, the British capitalist and empire-builder who was a guiding figure in British expansion north of the Limpopo River into south-central Africa. This was part of the scramble for Africa when almost the whole continent was parcelled out and apportioned among European countries. The British South African Company (BSA Company) under Cecil Rhodes was the enduring agent of the British colonisation of Southern Rhodesia.
The factors that led to growth of British interest in Southern Rhodesia
Spearheading British interest in Southern Rhodesia were English-speaking South Africans led by the empire builder Cecil Rhodes. The following factors led to this interest:
• Belief in the existence of minerals in the interior. In the late 1860s travellers brought reports that gold was to be found in Matabeleland, and though the earliest prospecting companies, set up in the 1870s, failed to make any really spectacular strikes, influential South Africans were still prepared to believe in the 1880s that Mashonaland held some of the richest deposits of alluvial gold in the world.
• At the same time, the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in the Transvaal in 1886, led to the belief that gold existed further in the interior. It had been known that Africans had access to gold of their own in trading with Arab traders on the East African Coast.
• Besides, stories of ‘King Solomon’s Mines’ mixed with the theory of the Witwatersrand gold seam running further north attracted speculators and adventurers from around the world. Cecil Rhodes was determined to acquire this area for Britain in the belief that it contained endless supplies of minerals.
• Settlement. The country between the Limpopo and the Zambezi was regarded as enormously fertile. The climate and soils were also suitable for agriculture. The British saw Rhodesia as an area with promising potential for settlement.
• Cecil Rhodes was a declared imperialist. His overriding ambition was the expansion of the British Empire. ‘If there is a God’, Rhodes once remarked, ‘I think that what he would like me to do is to paint as much of Africa British-red as possible’. In his vision, this meant the extension of the British Empire from Cape to Cairo for Britain. He believed the British culture to be superior to all others, and had to be planted in Africa. He formed De Beers Company, which controlled South Africa’s diamond trade. Money provided Rhodes with freedom and power. Power he used to translate his political vision of extending the British empire into reality. Between 1888 and 1893, Rhodes’ men, by a mixture of war and diplomacy, occupied Mashonaland and Matabeleland in Southern Rhodesia.
• Trade. The Portuguese were known to have conducted lucrative trade in gold with this part of Central Africa dating back to the days of Mwenemutapa through the Indian Ocean. The British sought to occupy Southern Rhodesia for the purpose of trade.
The role of BSA Company in the British occupation up to 1923
The British, Portuguese and Boers from the Transvaal desired to push into Central Africa but, as agreed at the Berlin Conference, a country’s claim to a region would only be recognised if it could show ‘effective occupation’. Whoever would be first to try in 1885, Lobengula, king of the Matabele, would be the greatest obstacle in the area south of the Zambezi, as the rivalry between Britain and the Transvaal centred upon him.
The British-Boer rivalry
The increasing number of concession seekers worried Lobengula and perplexed him about the best course to follow, as he found it difficult to resist the pressures upon him first by one group, then by another. In 1885, an envoy of British soldiers arrived from Bechuanaland to inform him that the country on his southern borders had become a British Protectorate and that the chiefs, notably Khama (with whom Lobengula had a border dispute) had accepted this. The envoy returned, believing that Lobengula’s body language indicated he too favoured British protection.However, by 1887, the Transvaal, a potentially wealthy state since the discovery of gold on the Rand, was subjecting Lobengula to a lot of pressure.
The Transvaal government wished to expand northwards, especially as Mashonaland was known to have gold deposits which might yet prove as rich as those of the Rand. Accordingly, two government representatives sent over by President Paul Kruger, Pieter and Frederick Grobler, visited Lobengula and persuaded the king to agree to a treaty in July 1887. The treaty was a far-reaching non-aggression pact (treaty of friendship) between the Matabele and the Transvaal (the South African Republic). But the difference between what was said and what was subsequently written looked disturbingly big. This became especially evident when early in 1888 the Transvaal government appointed Pieter Grobler as ‘Consul of the Republic in Matabeleland, who, after a short visit there, left for the Transvaal to fetch his family. Thus Lobengula later insisted that this was merely a revival of an old, non-committal treaty of friendship signed in 1852 between his father and predecessor, Mzilikazi, and the Boers, and no more.
The BSA Company’s Charter and administration of the colony
In granting the BSA Company a Charter, Cecil Rhodes was given a number of mandates and the conditions to be met by the Company in carrying out the function of its powers.Mandates
(i) Its object was to acquire and exercise commercial and administrative rights in a large area extending from the Transvaal to the Congo and from Angola to Portuguese East Africa.
(ii) To extend the infrastructure of modern capitalism (including railways) into south-central Africa for the benefit of the British but without the cost’s falling on the British taxpayer.
(iii) Unlike normal companies, the BSA Company was permitted to establish political administration with a paramilitary police force in areas where it might be granted rights by local rulers.
(iv) It was also allowed to profit commercially through its own operations or by renting out land, receiving royalties on the mining of minerals according to the Rudd Concession, levying customs duties, and collecting other fees.
(v) The British government guaranteed the BSA Company a monopoly where it operated and, as a last resort, was prepared to support it militarily against rival European powers or local rebellions.
Conditions
The following conditions applied:
(i) The company was to be directly responsible to the Colonial Office for the handling of native affairs.
(ii) Though a private concern, it had to accept some government-appointed directors.
(iii) It was obliged to pay off all previous concessionaires.
(iv) It was to exercise governmental powers only with the consent of the native ruler.
(v) It could have its charter revoked at any time.
These stiff conditions were meant to try and diminish the exploitation of Africans along the lines of what had happened to Africans in the Transvaal Republic.
The BSA Company was now poised to occupy at least part of Lobengula’s dominions. A secret agreement was reached between Rhodes and two soldiers of fortune, Frank Johnson and Maurice Heany, that if Lobengula proved difficult, they would enter Bulawayo with a force of 500 whites, attack Matabeleland and completely break up the king’s power, to pave the way for the Company’s personnel and mining operations. Lobengula learnt of the pending confrontation and gave way just enough to avoid it. He gave Jameson, Rhodes’ emissary, permission to prospect in the southern part of the kingdom. He gave them an alternative permission to prospect in Mashonaland in the event of gold not being found in the south.
The ‘Pioneer Column’ and the occupation of Mashonaland
Lobengula’s permission to the Company to prospect in Mashonaland, together with worries over Portuguese activities in these areas, propelled Rhodes to act. Armed with the BSA Company’s Charter, Rhodes was fast in organising and dispatching the Pioneer Column to Mashonaland to carry out its provisions. The expedition was divided into two main groups: prospective settlers and police. The first was called the Pioneer Corps and consisted of some 200 young men. On arrival in Mashonaland each was promised fifteen gold claims and 3,000 acres of land. The second group consisted of another 200 young men to help protect the expedition on its way to Mashonaland and to maintain order on its arrival. These were the BSC Company police. The officer in charge of the police, Lt-Col Pennefather, was also to be in charge of the whole expedition. In addition, 200 Ngwato, led by Khama’s brother, accompanied the Pioneer Column to help in making the road and to look after the cattle, wagons and horses. Dr Leander Starr Jameson accompanied the Pioneer Column as Rhodes’ personal representative. Sir Archibald Colquhoun, who had gained administrative experience in the Indian Civil Service, was to act as the Company’s administrator when the Column reached its destination.
In order to avoid a clash with the Matabele, it was decided to abandon the route through Bulawayo for the moment and to occupy Mashonaland by taking a column along the eastern border of the Matabele area. Thus, an armed ‘road-making party’ was dispatched to make a wagon road to Mt. Hampden near present Harare. Thus, the ‘Pioneer Column’ entered Mashonaland in July 1890. On September 13 a flag pole was erected and the Union Jack hoisted in what became Cecil Square, Salisbury (present-day Harare), and the occupation of Mashonaland was proclaimed. In 1891 Mashonaland was declared a British Protectorate by an Order in Council.
BSA Company administration
In the early years of occupation of Mashonaland a simple administrative system was organised by Colquhoun and then by Jameson who took over from him as administrator in August 1891. The laws of Cape Colony were adopted. Mashonaland was divided into districts, each under a magistrate. In 1891 the BSA Company took over the ownership of the land. It had from the beginning granted settlers farms of 3,000 acres in anticipation of some agreement being made, as the Rudd Concession had given no rights over the land, and no land settlement had been made in the BSA Company’s Charter.
Constitutional and administrative development of (Southern) Rhodesia followed a unique path. From the conquest of the country in the 1890’s until 1923, the territory was administered by a commercial company, the BSA Company. The Company developed an administrative cadre whose members were drawn mainly from the Cape, headed by an officer bearing the title of ‘administrator’. The Company’s control of affairs was restricted in 1898 and a Resident Commissioner was appointed to Southern Rhodesia to act as a ‘watchdog’ of the British government. WH Milton, Administrator from 1898 to 1914, set up administrative machinery by reorganising the civil service, modelling it on that of Cape Colony. He set up a number of government departments and recruited capable and experienced staff. Europeans were employed in many subordinate posts which elsewhere in British Africa would have been filled by Africans. At the same time, most recruits to the service came to be local Europeans, not expatriates. In the administration of Africans, the BSA Company followed the direct method developed earlier in South Africa with chiefs deprived of most of their judicial powers and regarded as nothing more than government agents.
Southern Rhodesia was given a new constitution by the Orders-in-Council of 1898 to ensure a sound basis for its administration. The constitution provided for an Executive Council consisting of a British government-appointed Resident Commissioner - an ex officio member without voting rights - and four Company nominees as members, and a Legislative Council which would have four elected members in addition to five nominated ones. The Company Administrator presided over both councils. The Legislative Council could make laws subject to the approval of the South African High Commissioner, who might also legislate by proclamation. This constitution was largely the work of Lord Alfred Milner, the South African High Commissioner. He hoped, as did Rhodes, that Southern Rhodesia would one day join with the four self-governing South African states in some form of union or federation, in which Southern Rhodesia would act as a counter-weight in favour of British interests over Afrikaner nationalist ones. For this reason he set Southern Rhodesia on the road to white self-government by providing for the settlers to elect some of the members of the Legislative Council. Cecil Rhodes saw the new constitution as ‘the first step in the direction of self-government’ for Rhodesian white settlers.
Elections were held every three years. The effect of these qualifications was to exclude Africans from registering as voters. In 1903, the composition was altered to provide for seven BSA Company officials and seven elected members. In 1912 the franchise qualifications were raised to prevent sizable numbers of Africans from qualifying to vote: Voters had to be able to complete the registration form and write a fifty word dictated passage in English while the property qualifications were doubled. In 1919 women were granted the franchise, which roughly doubled the numbers on the voters’ roll.
Role of traders in Northern Rhodesia
Imperialism in Northern Rhodesia (today’s Zambia) was preceded and prompted by the outcome of the deliberations at the Berlin Conference of 1884 - 1885. The Berlin Conference stipulated that once a European power had established an effective occupation of an area, it could assert its claim upon the territory, and her supremacy in the region would be recognized by other powers.
For a variety of reasons, Britain was interested in retaining an influence in these areas. As was the case elsewhere in Africa, it was reluctant to face the pains of colonisation. In Central Africa, she was lucky in having Cecil Rhodes who was ready and willing to undertake the task of imperial expansion on her behalf. A supposed minerally-rich area, the BSA Company had made Northern Rhodesia an early target.
Factors that led to growth of British interest in Northern Rhodesia
Northern Rhodesia was created as an extension of British power in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia, and its main contacts were always with southern Africa. As was the case with the occupation of Southern Rhodesia, Cecil Rhodes’ British South Africa Company spearheaded British interest in this area. A number of factors led to the growth of British interest in this region:
i. Copper mining. The Copperbelt attracted white settlers from Europe and South Africa. Rhodes considered Barotseland as a suitable area for British South Africa Company operations and as a gateway to the copper deposits of Katanga.
ii. Agriculture.Europeans were discouraged from settling in Northern Rhodesia by the prevalence of tsetse fly and malaria. But in the more healthy areas, the Company appropriated blocks of land and made allocations from these to Europeans. Thus a few settlers took up land in Tonga country along the railway, which happened to run through a tsetse-free belt. There they raised maize and beef for sale in Katanga. Other European farmers settled in the far north, at the south end of Lake Tanganyika, and near Fort Jameson in the east, where from 1914 tobacco was grown successfully.
iii. Suppression of slave trade. In his travels across Central Africa, David Livingstone had highlighted the dominance of the slave trade, calling upon men of goodwill to work for its suppression. The first batch of missionaries, traders and other humanitarians settled in these areas to see what they could do to suppress the slave trade and replace it with legitimate trade.
Role of the BSA Company in North-western Rhodesia
Cecil Rhodes used the chartered British South Africa company to make treaties with African chiefs on behalf of the British government in Central Africa. The company made many stakes of claim to African territory at the expense of other European powers. These treaties gave the company powers of administration in the areas, and thus helped in extending the British empire. With the charter, Rhodes managed to secure for the British the Central Plateau north of Limpopo, at no cost to the British tax payer. His company shouldered the costs.
Most Europeans who crossed the Zambezi from Matabeleland or Bechuanaland in the 1870s went to the Lozi kingdom. Some ten years later Europeans began to reach the north-eastern part of Zambia, entering from Tanzania and Malawi. In this dual approach, Zambia was brought under British control as two separate areas, North-western Rhodesia and North-eastern Rhodesia.
The ‘conqueror’ with the praise name Liwani Ka la, more commonly Lewanika (whose real name was Lubosi) was king of the Lozi people of Barotseland in north-western Rhodesia. This made him a leading figure in the events by which the area was brought under the BSA Company rule. He was aware of rival European ambitions, for by 1885 a German protectorate had been established in South-West Africa and a British one in Bechuanaland (Botswana).
The BSA Company’s activities in Barotseland
Having made a treaty with the Ndebele in 1886, the BSA Company’s first goal north of the Zambezi was Bulldoze (Barotseland). Rhodes’ desire to establish his Company north of the Zambezi coincided with two factors, both advantageous to him. The first was Lewanika’s eagerness to seek British protection against Ndebele and Boer attacks. Having heard of the benefits of cooperating with the British from his friend Khama of the Bamangwato, Lewanika was eager to welcome the British.
He invited a French Missionary Francois Coillard of the Paris Evangelical Mission to act as an intermediary with the white man and his technology. Lewanika reasoned that western education – especially reading, writing and even learning the English language – would be an asset to himself and his people. He also thought the British would create law, order and stability in his kingdom, and above all give him protection against his rivals and unfriendly neighbours.
The Lozi king had several times suffered from Ndebele raids, and had observed that the Bamangwato, his neighbours, had secured considerable immunity to such attacks by placing themselves under British protection. Lewanika made a formal application through the French missionary Francois Coillard, who wrote to Sheppard, the British administrator in Bechuanaland, requesting for protection.
The second coincidence advantageous to the Company was the presence in Bulozi of the pro- British Coillard. Coillard was the only foreigner in whom Lewanika had confidence. Coillard himself feared Portuguese or German interference from the west and desired British protection in order to further his missionary efforts. In January 1889, therefore, Lewanika sent a request for protection to the British government. The reply was slow in coming and somewhat indefinite as Britain did not see much wisdom at that stage in establishing a protectorate so far in the interior.Meanwhile, concession-seekers mounted much pressure on Lewanika, who for some time was unyielding as he awaited a reply from Britain.
Finally in June 1889, he granted a limited concession outside the Lozi kingdom itself to Harry Ware, a Kimberley businessman who hoped that there might be gold north of the Zambezi. It was with this background that the north-western Zambia found itself entering into treaties with the British representatives, which would later lead to the occupation of their lands by the British. The British company upon entering the area, signed treaties with the chiefs in total disregard to those earlier made by the Portuguese. The key African personality to deal with the British and other European agents was King Lewanika of the Lozi.
Assessment of BSA Company’s activities
Right from the start the Company was faced with the problem of fighting the institution of slavery, and in this Lewanika’s cooperation was steady. By 1906 the practice of slavery had been significantly reduced, and about 30,000 slaves liberated in the region. It also achieved the following.
• The Company also succeeded in solving the boundary problem. The true extent of Lewanika’s sovereignty had not been agreed upon by all the powers neighbouring the Kingdom: Britain, Germany, Portugal and Belgium. Rhodes had some interest in the north and would do anything to prevent Katanga’s copper from falling into the hands of Leopold II of the Congo Free State. Accordingly, in 1890, Alfred Sharp was sent to Katanga to negotiate treaties, but had no success at Msiri’s. Rhodes later dispatched Joseph Thomson of East African fame to reach Msiri, but Thomson only got as far as the Lamba country. Rhodes’ luck in this area failed him completely, for in 1891 two expeditions working for Leopold II penetrated the so-called ‘Katanga Pedicle’ and asserted Leopold’s claims. These were upheld by a treaty between Britain and Portugal in 1894.
• There was a problem also over the RhodesianAngolan boundary. The Portuguese had established a post across the Zambezi from Katanga and were clearly trying to press their claim. The British claimed that the area lay within Lewanika’s kingdom. Both parties agreed in 1903 that an arbitrator be appointed to define the boundaries of the Bulozi kingdom. The Arbitrator Commission, under the chairmanship of ltaly, established the frontier along the conventional geographical lines which form a prominent feature of the map of northwestern Zambia today. To the east, the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty of 1891 had established the boundary line.
The Company now faced local hostilities from the Bemba and Lunda. The Bemba had not abandoned the export of slaves and therefore resented the Company’s influence. They tried to resist company rule but were finally defeated in 1898 by Company forces led by Robert Young. The Lunda under Kazembe also put up some resistance, but were silenced by the Company’s machine guns, which hastened Kineme’s flight into the Congo Free State. The defeat of the Bemba and Lunda made it possible for the Company to execute a more effective control in Bulozi.
The Mpezeni Ngoni of eastern Zambia who had settled among the Cewa in 1870 united together to resist invasion by Company Europeans. With their warrior tradition, which distinguished them from Bemba, the Lunda and the Lozi immediate military action against the invaders who believed Ngoniland to be rich in gold, came naturally. The Europeans also attempted recruiting the Ngoni as labourers in their plantations in Malawi. Thus the Ngoni were determined to resist. A major confrontation occurred, resulting in the defeat of the Ngoni in 1891. This the completed the of subduing all the parts of Zambia. The territory was then referred to as Northern Rhodesia.
Role of colonial agents in Nyasaland
At the beginning of foreign interest in these areas, Britain, Portugal and Germany were the main actors in the Nyasaland region of Central Africa. But factors that led to the growth of their interests were not always the same.
1. British interest
The factors that led to the growth of British interest in Nyasaland included the following:
(i) Fight against the slave trade. The activities and explorations of David Livingstone in the 1850s first ignited British interest in Nyasaland. Livingstone became witness to the horrors of the slave trade around Lake Nyasa and was highly opposed to it. His pioneering efforts would prove a magnet for British missionaries keen to follow in his footsteps.
(ii) Missionary influence. The early interest of British missionaries in Nyasaland regions was aroused because of the promising and facilitating line of communications into the interior offered by the Zambezi-Shire water route. As a direct influence of Livingstone’s work, Nyasaland became an area of great missionary enterprise. By 1890, missionary centres and schools were established all over Nyasaland, and the missionaries began to press for their home government to assume imperial control over these areas. There were four main reasons for their doing so:
• Their campaign against the slave trade required mechanism of enforcement – a stronger, administrative force.
• Connected with the first point, the missionaries wanted to have a power that would be judicial in civil activities and free them to concentrate on teaching and preaching.
• The missionaries felt threatened by the Mahdist revolution in the Sudan and the subsequent Arab advance from the north. If these Arabs teamed up with the Yao Muslims, the fanaticism of the Mahdists would make the position of the missionaries in Nyasaland very difficult.
• The Catholic Portuguese were laying claims to parts of Nyasaland. If they succeeded, this might see a link up of the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique, and the British Protestants’ work in Nyasaland would be in jeopardy, as news from Uganda was amply demonstrating.
(iii) Expansion of territory. The British also wished to extend their influence and control of their southern African territories. In this imperial ambition, the plans of the British government and of a certain Cecil Rhodes coincided. The Portuguese had claimed that their lands in Mozambique ran across the continent to their lands in Angola. If this had been the case, then British plans for uniting their southern colonies with their eastern colonies would have been stillborn. Instead, the existence of British missionary activity and the absence of any Portuguese settlements of any kind was a convenient diplomatic excuse for the British to lay claim to the intervening land.
(iv) Economic interest. The growth of British interest was also fired by economic factors. An early explorer and missionary, David Livingstones, believed in the area’s potentiality for agricultural development on cash crop lines; his reports led to the encouragement of white settlement, especially of Shire highlands. The settlers found that the area was suitable for growing the valuable coffee cash crop.
(v) Labour. Availability of cheap African labour led to the growth of British interest in Nyasaland. The BSA Company hoped to exploit presumed mineral resources using African labour. When the settlers found the area agriculturally suitable, they began to establish coffee plantations with extensive use of cheap or sometimes forced and free African labour.
2. Portuguese interest
The Portuguese had been in these parts from the 16th Century. In both west coast and east coast, their main pre-occupation had been the slave trade. The Portuguese interest lay in the fact that control over Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia would give them an unbroken control from the Atlantic coast of Angola to the Indian Ocean coast of Mozambique.
It also lay in the fact that from Mozambique, they had operated in the region of Nyasaland for a long time – to such an extent that in 1882, the Governor of Quelimane in Mozambique took an armed force along the Lower Shire and invited the chiefs to hand over to his government ‘the lands now in their possession which by right belonged to the Crown (of Portugal). Indeed, two years later a large force under Lt. Auguste Cardoza travelled up the Rovuma valley from the coast to Lake Nyasa and persuaded a number of chiefs, including the Yao slave trader, Mponda, to make treaties of loyalty to Portugal. This would give the Portuguese a bigger geographical area in which to operate.
Effects of BSA Company’s policies in Central Africa
Activity 4.8
1. In groups of five, discuss the consequences of each of the following agents in Africa.
(a) Explorers
(b) Missionaries
(c) Traders
2. Find out at least three colonial agents who came to Rwanda and discuss their effects.
The BSA Company was the most important agent of the colonization of central Africa. In the execution of its control, solidly based on its South African experience, the impact of its administrative policies on the Africans was not always positive. The subsequent British colonial system was not to see a significant departure from what its agent had established. The BSA Company needed revenue. This could be obtained from mining royalties, sale of land, customs duties, postal charges and other sources. These sources, however, did not bring in enough money: in 1911 for instance, the Company collected £95,000 but spent £149,000. The deficit was particularly great in Northern Rhodesia. Taxation was the obvious answer. The whites themselves were not taxed until after 1918, but the Company taxed Africans. Hut-tax, already in operation in Nyasaland, was introduced in Southern Rhodesia in 1898, North-East Zambia in 1900, and North-West Zambia in 1904. Hut-tax was double-edged: to raise revenue, and to get Africans to work.
• In the early days the tax could be paid in kind – in gold, copper, ivory, livestock, cotton, coffee and salt. These goods were each given a value. Later, however, the tax could only be paid in cash. The hope was to draw Africans into a cash economy.
• The problem of taxation was intertwined with that of labour. Because they had to pay tax, Africans had to go search for work in mines and on farms. The whites knew this: when the tax collector went to a village he was often accompanied by the recruiter of labour. The whites wanted cheap labour, and this often meant forced labour. This was normally the responsibility of District Commissioners.• In the mining settlements discipline was strict. Corporal punishment was often used. The whites had no concern for the well-being of the Africans. They used ‘boss boys’ noted for their brutality. They sat on the Africans’ wages until they had worked long periods. They knew that if the African wanted money he would have to work at a mine; there was no other work. The government did nothing to help. The Masters and Servants legislation of 1908 made desertion a crime.
• Migrant labour took away rural workers and broke up the pattern of rural life. It led to the weakening of traditional structures of government and to great suffering in the villages. The effects of migrant labour in Malawi were perhaps more acute than anywhere else in the BSA Company-controlled Central Africa.
• In the Northern Province 328,314 Africans were expected to pay £18,379 in tax, but only 2,800 could work locally at wages between 4/= and 20/= a month, and since they were subsistence farmers they could make little money from selling surplus food. They had to go south to raise enough money for tax.
• The expansion of the South African mining industry after the Anglo-Boer War of 1902 gave an impetus to the demand for labour. The Witwatersrand Native Labour Association was given permission to recruit in Malawi. In 1906 the Rhodesian Native Labour Bureau set up an agency at Chipata and recruited Malawi labour from there. pass system came into operation in 1909, but it was not successful. Conditions for obtaining it were too stiff, and many Africans went south without obtaining it. Commissioner Manning tried to stop the flow, but it continued unabated.
• Migrant labour caused a labour shortage in the Shire Highlands. The settlers and builders of the Chiromo-Blantyre railway needed labour. Going south was not the only reason for non-availability of African labour; the Africans, especially those educated at mission schools, were perfectly willing to work in order to buy calico and other goods, but the problem was that the settlers paid poorly and wanted labour in the rainy season when the Africans were planting their own crops.
• Various methods were used to get Africans to work. Some settlers bribed the chiefs. Others used agents whose methods included intimidation. Some brought labour from the Northern Province and from Mozambique.Many settlers still took labour from their own estates to work as ‘squatters’ – to pay their tax and to pay rent.
• In 1904, Commissioner Sharpe laid down rules that only approved recruiters could carry out recruitment in the Lake province. Employers would have to provide transport, food and housing. The settlers complained that this raised the cost of labour, but Sharpe rejected their demand to what amounted to forced labour, and from 1903-10 the relations between the settlers and the Government were hostile.
Unit summary
This unit deals with the different agents of colonisation. Most of these agents were Europeans who acted as agents of their respective governments. They came to Africa as; traders, hunters, explorers and missionaries.
The Royal Geographical Society picked two army officers, Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke in 1856, to lead an expedition from Zanzibar to trace the source of the Nile. The two set out as explorers.They faced the challenges of tropical diseases such as malaria and dysentery in the interior of Africa. Unfortunately these diseases had no cure at the time. Missionaries were also sent out to different parts of Africa. For example, the two important missionary organisations in West Africa were the Church Missionary Society and the Wesleyan Missionary Society.African rulers and their subjects believed that the white men were spirits and therefore, unnatural.
They treated the whites as bringers of evil who would bring famine and destruction. The earliest European missionary in East Africa was Dr Johann LudwigKrapf, a German who had been sent by the Church Missionary Society in England.Kabaka Mwanga II supported missionary activities in the Buganda Kingdom leading to the strong establishment and growth of Christianity.
The problems experienced by early missionaries included: insecurity, poor communication facilities, unfavourable climate, diseases and slave trade.The Europeans also established chartered companies that operated in Africa to enable them to exploit the resources of their colonies in Africa.There were also traders who were sent to trade in Africa even though the trade balance was unfair as Africans benefitted less than the Europeans.
Unit assessment
At the end of this unit, the learner is able to discuss and analyse the activities of colonial agents, their roles, the problems they faced and the consequences of their presence in Africa by identifying different colonial agents such as missionaries, chartered companies and explorers.
Revision questions
1. (a) What were the problems faced in the colonisation of Congo by the Belgians under the leadership of King Leopold II?
(b) Explain why the Congo was named ‘the Congo free state’ at the time of its colonisation.
2. (a) Name two European traders who were found in West Africa and explain the activities in which they were involved.
(b) What were the roles of European traders in the colonisation of Nigeria?
3. (a) Who is Seyyid Said?
(b) Describe how Carl Peters led the Germans to the encroachment of East Africa.
(c) What are the terms of the Heligoland Treaty of 1890, signed between the British and the Germans?
4. Why did European traders find it difficult to establish themselves in Africa’s interior before they established their governments there?
5. (a) Discuss the roles of the Imperial British East African Company (IBEACo).
(b) What problems did the Imperial British East African Company face in the region during the period of its operation?
6. (a) What role did Cecil Rhodes play in the colonisation of central and southern Africa?
(b) What does BSA stand for?
7. (a) What role did Harry Johnston play in the British occupation of Nyasaland?
(b) What were the causes of the struggle between the British and the Portuguese in Central Africa and especially in Nyasaland?
8. Analyse the use of chartered European companies in the colonisation of Afric
Clapperton and Richard LanderIn 1822, explorers Qudney, DenhamandClapperton travelled from Tripoli to Lake Chad. Qudney died but Denham travelled in the Bornu area and Clapperton travelled to Sokoto where he learnt that the Niger flowed south. Soon after returning home, Clapperton set out for the Niger again and travelled to Sokoto from Badagry, but he died there in 1827. His young servant, Richard Lander tried to follow the course of the Niger alone, but had to abandon the journey and return home to England. He then persuaded the British government to sponsor him and his brother on one more journey of the Niger exploration.
Speke and BurtonIn 1856 The Royal Geographical Society picked two army officers, Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke, to lead an expedition from Zanzibar to trace the source of the Nile. With the aid of two experienced Yao guides, Sidi Bombay and Mwinyi Mabruk they travelled inland along the trade route to Tabora. Early in 1858, they reached Lake Tanganyika but were unable to continue much further owing to illness. Returning to Tabora, Speke decided to go north to examine stories of a great lake in that direction. Speke alone found the lake and named it after his Queen, Victoria. He was convinced, though without sufficient proof, that it was the source of the Nile.Speke and GrantA second Royal Geographical Society expedition came out in 1860, with Speke in command accompanied by Grant. Travelling north – west round the shores of Lake Victoria they eventually reached Buganda and were welcomed by Kabaka Mutesa. Leaving Grant behind, Speke then travelled east and came across the place where the Nile leaves the Lake, the modern site of Jinja Town. Grant rejoined him and together they travelled north following the river to a place called Gondokoro. To Speke the matter was settled, and he sent a telegram to this effect to London from KhartoumHenry Morton StanleyHenry Morton Stanley made four expeditions to Africa:
First expedition, 1871-2Stanley had his first taste of African travel while in the service of an American newspaper, the New York Herald. He was on a mission to find Dr. David Livingstone whose whereabouts for a long time were unknown. Stanley caught up with Livingstone in Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika in 1871.Second expedition, 1874-7In his second expedition, from 1874 to 1877, he moved across the continent from Zanzibar to the mouth of River Congo. He became the first traveller to use large, well-equipped, well-armed columns and ruthless military action against local populations who showed any hostility and lack of co-operation to his expedition. This made local people mistake Stanley and his party for slave traders. In his brief stay in Buganda in 1875, he impressed the Kabaka that he represented a people who would be useful to him because they possessed superior technological and military power. Stanley believed that the success of European Christian missionaries in Africa would be dependent on European commercial and military power.After his expedition, European Christian missionaries visited Buganda, which in turn was one of the factors leading to British colonial occupation of Uganda and Kenya. It was also during this expedition between 1875 and 1877 that Stanley charted the main stream of the Congo River. He confirmed that the river was navigable. This opened up to Europe the general possibility of exploiting the economic potential of the Congo Basin. The journey further led directly to the actual beginning of Leopold’s imperial activities in the Congo. Stanley later became Leopold’s agents in the Congo between 1880 and 1885. He had made a thorough survey of Lake Victoria, Albert and Tanganyika, completing his journey by travelling down the River Congo to the Atlantic.Third expedition, 1879-84In 1879, Stanley made an agreement with Leopold II. In return for a large sum of money he would acquire the Congo for the Belgian monarch. Between 1879 and 1884, Stanley travelled up the Congo, establishing road and river communications from Kisangani to the coast, and building a solid base in the Congo Basin for Leopold’s future commercial enterprise. Another European by the name Savorgnan de Brazza was in 1882 busy obtaining a treaty from Chief Makoko of the Teke, whose lands were north of the river. In this treaty, Makoko apparently ceded his territory to France. Leopold suddenly became aware that all his efforts in the Congo might come to naught if he did not first assume political control of the area. Stanley was consequently instructed to make treaties with the Viri chiefs south of the river, and this he did.Fourth expedition, 1885Stanley’s last expedition, to rescue Emin Pasha, was an anti-climax after his second journey and imperialist work in the Congo. It was as futile and as unnecessary as his first expedition to find Livingstone. The Emin Pasha Relief Expedition was financed by a grant from the Egyptian government and the donations of English supporters.
Leopold II, with a great interest in the Upper Nile, got Stanley to lead the rescue expedition. The men of Stanley’s relief expedition arrived at Kavalli’s in such a state of poverty and sickness that Emin could be said to have rescued his rescuers. When Stanley and his men were fit again, Stanley insisted that Emin Pasha accompany him to Zanzibar.Joseph ThomsonJoseph Thomson travelled between 1883-1884 through Maasailand, across the Rift Valley and into Western Kenya where he saw Mount Elgon. This was essentially a scientific expedition whose purpose was to gather geological and biological information about this part of Africa.
He constructed a road from Bulawayo to Hartley Hills to facilitate transportation of ivory; it was named the Hunter’s Road. He visited and named many places including the Sinoia Caves, Mt Hampden and Mt Darwin. The increasing shortage of big game in Mashonaland and part of the Zambezi Valley made Selous eager to cross the Zambezi and explore the land to the north.Eventually, he made a trip to the Barotse Valley where he met Lewanika and Coillard.In his wanderings, Selous acquired an unrivalled knowledge of Mashonaland which he bequeathed to others in numerous books. He mapped much of the area and described it in vivid detail. When quantities of ivory began to dwindle, Selous began his great collection of African mammals. Then he found himself collecting specimens for many of the museums of Europe.For over twenty years he was hunting and collecting in what is today Rhodesia, and stirred much enthusiasm for the area among those who followed his career. He also made a contribution to the events that led to the region coming under British control. In 1889 he made a preparatory trip up the Zambezi and obtained for Cecil Rhodes a mineral concession from Mapondera, a chief who claimed independence from Lobengula. He next acted as a guide to the Pioneer Column and then laid out many roads under the new regime before he left for hunting fields outside Africa. He was foremost among the pre-Pioneers in opening up Mashonaland to the knowledge of Europeans.
In May 1891, the British declared a Protectorate over Nyasaland. Johnston was appointed Her Majesty’s Commissioner and Consul-General to the territories under British influence north of the Zambezi. His expenses, and those of the other aspects of the administration of the new Protectorate, were to be borne by Cecil Rhodes’ Company.v) The Dutch Reformed Church MissionIn the early 19th Century Afrikaners had little interest in missionary work. This attitude changed, however, after about 1885-6. The Dutch Reformed Church formed a missionary society, and in 1889 sent a missionary, AC Murray, to Malawi. Murray, having gained experience by working with Dr Elmslie, began work among Chiwere’s Ngoni. Murray’s presence helped Chiwere to keep his prestige among his own counselors, some of whom were plotting against him. Chiwere also expected Murray to have supernatural powers, especially in rain-making.There seemed to be miraculous evidence of these powers when, as had been the case with Dr Elmslie, rain appeared in answer to Murray’s prayers, at just the right time.Murray was then joined by another missionary, Vlok, and in 1890 schools were opened at Mvera and Ndwide. In the 1890s more missionaries came, and more schools were opened. It was, however, an uphill task: the missionaries were often threatened by the Ngoni, and malaria took its usual toll. Murray himself was savaged by a leopard.In 1894, 19 Africans were baptized. In 1896, the Mission began work among Mazengera’s Chewa. (Mazengera was anxious to protect himself against both the Ngoni and the Yao, and thought that he could do this by having missionaries at his village). By 1900 there were 18 missionaries working at Mvera, Kongwe and Nkhoma, and an African, Albert Namalamba, was looking after schools, 48 teachers and 1300 pupils. This educational work expanded still further after 1900.
Leopold’s methodsLeopold now had to get the other great powers to agree to his taking over the Congo. In this, he showed himself a clever diplomat. He claimed that it was better to keep Congo as a free trade area under his ‘international’ control than to let any particular country have it. There were four main powers to convince - France, Germany, USA and Britain:(i) France: With France, Leopold made a secret treaty. He promised France that she could have the Congo if he was unable to govern it. (He had already led France to believe he would be unable to govern it owing to shortage of money).(ii) Germany. Turning his attention to Germany, he supported the German chancellor, Bismarck, in his claims to other parts of Africa. In return, Bismarck supported Leopold in the Congo.(iii) America. American support was obtained when Leopold’s American secretary, Stanford, told the American government that Leopold’s main aim in the Congo was to abolish the slave trade.(iv) Britain. The biggest obstacle, however, was Britain. Britain was worried about the position of her traders in the Congo and about the safety of Baptist missionaries. In February 1884, Britain signed a treaty with Portugal giving the Portuguese control of the Congo estuary; this cut Leopold off from the coast. Leopold countered by offering profitable contracts to British merchants, and by persuading the British government that he would be more ‘liberal’ in the Congo than either the French or the Portuguese. Britain abandoned her agreement with the Portuguese but would not actually agree to Leopold taking the Congo.In November 1884, however, the Conference of Berlin opened. The Conference decided that there should be ‘freedom of navigation’ on the Congo River. Britain could no longer keep Leopold out, and therefore gave way. France kept her territory north of the river, but Leopold took the rest of the Congo basin down to the Congo-Zambezi watershed. His territory thus included the mineral-rich area of Katanga; it was to be known as the Congo Free State, and it was to be the property of Leopold himself – not the Belgian government.
In the 1822 Moresby Treaty and the 1845 Hamerton Treaty, Seyyid Said had reluctantly agreed to severe restriction on the extent of the slave trade, in return for Britain’s recognition of his position in East Africa and encouragement of what they referred to as ‘legitimate trade’. Missionaries and travellers were at the same time trying to interest British merchants and shippers in the commercial prospects of East Africa.Though prospects for trade were in fact poor, there was some response, especially from Scotsmen influenced by the appeal of Livingstone and the activity of the Scottish missions that followed him. In 1872, William Mackinnon, a self-made Glasgow ship owner and a member of Free Church of Scotland, began running the ships of his British India Steam Navigation Company to Zanzibar.Thus there was tremendous expansion of European missionary and commercial activity in East Africa. But it would be a great mistake to imagine that this expansion was to lead inevitably to the establishment of colonial rule. Although the British, with their Indian and South African territories, and their powerful navy controlling the Indian Ocean, were in a very strong position to do so, they had no desire at all to found new colonies in East Africa. Prevailing economic theories insisted that colonies were a bad investment, yielding less in trade returns than they cost in administrative expenditure.The British Government’s task was to create the conditions necessary for legitimate trade and Christianity to expand and drive out the slave trade.This meant that the British Foreign Office, acting through its consular officials, sought to strengthen local states, which seemed likely to maintain the peace and order necessary for commercial expansion. In East Africa, the Sultanate of Zanzibar was an obvious vehicle for such a policy, the only difficulty was that it was a slave trading state.In 1841, Britain appointed a consul in Zanzibar and began the long process of forcing the Sultan to cut down the extent of the slave trade and to seek compensation in expanding his ‘legitimate’ trade and his political control over the mainland.After the appointment of John Kirk, who had been with Livingstone on the Zambezi, British pressure on Zanzibar increased to such a pitch that in 1873, under threat of force, Sultan Bargash had to prohibit the sea-borne slave trade completely.Zanzibar was now ready as the British saw it, to go forward as a respectable, enlightened state, maintaining law and order in favour of British travellers, missionaries and traders.In the light of later events such a policy was naïve, informed less by tough analysis of world politics than by hopeful dreams of an ideal world. It was soon challenged. The first challenge to the idea of using Zanzibar to control East Africa came, not from Europe but from Egypt.Role of Imperial British East Africa (IBEA) CompanyThe British company was at first more successful than its rival. It possessed a rather more capital, which it kept more or less intact so long as its activities were confined to the coast. But for some years after the Anglo-German partition, British interest in East Africa was focused upon the Kingdom of Buganda.The great object of the East African Company was how to reach the lakes and its populous surroundings.By 1890 the establishment of an administration in Buganda had become not only the chief goal of the Company, but also the chief justification for its stations at the coast and along the route into the interior. The Company’s overriding emphasis upon Buganda determined the way money was spent in Mombasa and the way economies were made in Kikuyu.At the coast the company stationed agents at Kismayu, Lamu, Witu, Malindi, Takaungu, and Vanga. Not much happened here save for the collection of customs. The central administration at Mombasa was larger, employing as many as 20 Europeans, and more active, but again, most of its work was connected either with customs or preparing caravans for the interior. Otherwise poor management was responsible for a great deal of inefficiency and sheer waste. Every traveller who visited the town commented upon the disorganization of the Mombasa administration.A great deal of disorganization was attributed to Mackinnon. Since Salisbury had never had much confidence in him; Kitchener’s advice in 1888 was to ‘get rid of him’. By 1890 even his fellow directors were angered with his impractical ideas and his poor tactical sense.