After Tamerlane (47 page)

London and Paris, not to mention the khedive, were now in a quandary. The khedive was forced to appoint Arabi to his government. But it was obvious that Arabi could keep his support only if he confronted the ruler and broke the Dual Control. British and French ministers came under pressure from their men-on the-spot and the lurid warnings of European journalists:
The Times
alone ran nearly 700 articles on the ‘crisis' in Egypt in 1881–2. Arabi would lead a fanatical regime. Foreign property would be lost; loans never recovered. The Christian minority would be persecuted (or worse) by the Muslim mob. In London there were two other aspects that affected ministerial thinking. Though there was little evidence that the Suez Canal was directly at risk, its strategic value was already immeasurable as the vital route through which British troops could be sent to India if a second Mutiny broke out (and the memory of the first was still very fresh). Secondly, for the British officials who ran the government of India, and who regarded Islamic fanaticism as the most dangerous threat to their Anglo-Indian Raj, a successful revolt against European
influence on the high road to India was an unacceptable challenge to their all-important prestige. It might light the fuse to a much larger conflagration.
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A cocktail of political, financial and strategic arguments pushed Gladstone's Liberal government first into the clumsy bombardment of Alexandria (to intimidate Arabi) and then into an outright invasion of Egypt in September 1882 (the French decided not to take part). Arabi was defeated and forced into exile. The khedive's authority was vindicated, although his wings were clipped. British advisers were installed, and a newconstitution was drafted at British suggestion. In 1883 Evelyn Baring (of the banking family) arrived to oversee a British withdrawal as soon as conditions were stable. But by the end of the decade the British had made up their minds to stay on indefinitely, and Baring himself stayed for twenty-four years. Egypt had become a ‘veiled protectorate', in which the British pretended that their occupation was temporary and that they were merely advising the Egyptian government. In fact their control was guaranteed by a garrison in Cairo and by their naval power in the eastern Mediterranean.

For the British government, being stuck in Egypt was a dangerous hostage to fortune – the main reason why the decision to stay was put off for so long. The other great powers fiercely resented the way that Britain had seized one of the largest provinces of the Ottoman Empire (Egypt's technical status). Isolation over Egypt risked major collateral damage to other British interests elsewhere. Nor was early withdrawal an easy solution. The British would need the active agreement of those European powers who had seats on the board that administered Egypt's debts. Without swift financial reform, Egypt's crisis would worsen. London would face an unpleasant dilemma: whether to abandon Egypt (and British interests there) or dig in regardless of the great powers' displeasure. To escape from their impending ‘bondage in Egypt' (contemporaries revelled in the biblical references), the British adopted the path of appeasement. They offered concessions where it mattered least (to them). In parts of West, East and Southern Africa, where they had assumed by default an informal predominance, they accepted the claims of French and (especially) German interests. They also agreed to a newset of rules to decide the share-out of claims where they were in dispute. At the Berlin West Africa Conference in
1885 (the location is significant), provision was made for ‘effective occupation' as the key criterion in the adjudication of rights. To reduce the risk of commercial conflict, a free-trade zone was declared in the Niger and Congo basins.
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The African ‘deal' was enough to scale down the diplomatic row over Egypt and divide Britain's critics – though the occupation remained a source of British embarrassment until the French were bought off in 1904 when the British recognized their claim to predominance in Morocco. It seems very unlikely that its makers expected any drastic consequences, least of all in Africa. They may well have thought that by requiring ‘effective occupation' they would delay indefinitely the formal extension of European rule in the African interior. In fact their formula became the starting gun to divide the continent. The reasons had little to do with any deliberate policy among the governments of Europe. Nothing much would have happened had there not already been would-be empire-builders on the spot, determined to find wealth, promotion or fame, regardless of the views of faraway officialdom. The one great exception to this was the king of the Belgians, Leopold II. But even his ‘Congo Free State', whose claim to the Congo basin he had persuaded the powers to accept in 1884–5 (perhaps because it solved the problem of who else should have it), was a private empire that belonged to him, not the Belgian state. Elsewhere in Africa, the ‘Berlin rules' became an open inducement to European adventurers to win their governments' backing for their territorial ambitions. Their logic was simple. Once other Europeans were excluded, it would be very much easier to enforce their will over the African communities whose lands, labour and trade they coveted. The real surprise was that it proved so easy to lobby governments at home to endorse their claims.

From the mid- 1880s to around 1900, the ‘scramble' – the term seems to have been coined by
The Times
in September 1884 – proceeded at breakneck speed. Across a huge swathe of West Africa between the desert and the forest, a group of French marine officers under Commandant Louis Archinard, and their black rank and file, created a military fiefdom that defeated or absorbed all the African states that stood in its path.
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Ignoring the angry complaints from Paris, this military clique, the
officiers soudanais
, conquered first and
sought permission later.
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They challenged the politicians to disavow their gains. Reports of their heroism in the popular press and ministerial weakness in a fragmented National Assembly were enough to save them from recall and disgrace. Meanwhile, in the lower Niger valley, a tough British soldier-turned-businessman called George Goldie had changed a failing family firm into a newkind of enterprise. Intense competition (with the arrival of steamships) and a sharp fall in the price of the main West African export, palm oil (down by a third in the later 1880s), had made control over supply the key to survival.
¹⁶
In 1886, after ruthless lobbying, Goldie won a royal charter from the London government – in effect a licence to exercise a minimal form of administrative control in parts of southern Nigeria (as it later became) where his firm was trading. But Goldie turned his ‘Royal Niger Company' into a regional power, with a private army, and light artillery brought over from England.
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He could nowimpose taxes on rival African traders, and enforce a virtual monopoly in the palm-oil trade that was the regional staple. Before long the Company's army, under another ex-officer of wide African experience, Frederick Lugard, was beginning to spar with the
officiers soudanais
in the north-western districts of modern Nigeria.

In West Africa, the European intruders were able to muster just enough firepower to move in from the coast and defeat their local opponents, sometimes by only the narrowest margin. Their African foes were very adept in the use of fire in battle, Goldie warned his officers, and would burn them out if they had a chance.
¹⁸
Facing an African army of
30,000
men, ‘the 12-pounder and 9-pounder [guns] alone saved us from annihilation,' he reported to London a fewweeks later.
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In East Africa (a much more isolated region before 1870), Europeans could exploit the fact that the Zanzibar sultanate (an Arab dynasty from the Gulf) was in the throes of political crisis just as the region itself became easier and cheaper to reach because of the new Suez route. The much publicized travels, and even more publicized death, of David Livingstone (the missionary saint of Victorian Britain) turned the humanitarian spotlight on the East African slave trade and its Arab practitioners. The Zanzibar sultan had been forced to outlaw it. In Scotland especially there was an ardent desire to honour Livingstone's memory by bringing ‘Christianity, commerce and civilization'
(his famous formula) to the scene of his last great journeys in modern Uganda and Malawi. A company was formed under a Bombay-based businessman called William Mackinnon, and lobbied successfully for a charter in 1888. Already, however, the dwindling power of the Zanzibar sultan had encouraged German traders, like Carl Peters, to get Bismarck's support for a ‘zone of protection' – to which the British had agreed in 1884–5. Mackinnon's company tried and failed to make a profit in Uganda, where a civil war raged between Muslim converts and Christians. After more furious lobbying, helped in part by the British government's fear that the whole of Zanzibar's ‘empire' would be lost to the Germans and French, two vast new protectorates, covering modern Uganda and Kenya, were declared British territory in 1895. East Africa was partitioned.

In South and Central Africa, the scramble was largely the work of two restless tycoons. In Leopold's Congo Free State a polyglot band of half-pay officers (mostly Belgian) and drifters set out to impose his rule across a colossal tract as large as Western Europe. To give his regime a respectable veneer, Leopold tried to hire as governor another Victorian celebrity, the evangelical soldier Charles ‘Chinese' Gordon (who chose instead to go to Khartoum). But the real object of Leopold's shambolic ‘government' was to coerce the population into collecting ivory and rubber (both highly profitable crops). It took over twenty years before the terrifying brutality that this regime unleashed with genocidal results (perhaps 10 million Congolese died from its direct and indirect effects)
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forced the winding up of Leopold's private state and its reorganization as a colony under the Belgian government.
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Cecil Rhodes's aims were much more ambitious, and his methods less crude. Rhodes was more than willing to buy the influence he needed (the boards of his companies were crammed with cash-strapped peers), to dupe the investor, and to use brute force against any African community that resisted his power. His company fought wars against both Ndebele and Shona in what is now Zimbabwe, and seized African land for him and his followers (much of modern Zimbabwe was first shared out in this way).
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But Rhodes's objective was not just a land-grab or his own enrichment. He was determined to unite almost the whole of Southern Africa in a single great state as ‘British South Africa'. This was not simply for the sake of imposing
London's authority. For what Rhodes intended was that local white settlers of British origins and outlook should be in control, making the whole vast subcontinent into a ‘white man's country' like Canada or (the grandest example, to which Rhodes was much attracted) the United States. But without London's help Rhodes ultimately lacked the strength to impose this plan on his local opponents: two Boer republics with the will and the means to make a fight for their freedom.

The extraordinary course of the African scramble raises a whole series of questions. Why in the first place did the European governments believe that they had the right to propose rules for the grand larceny of Africa? After all, they devised no similar programme for the Middle East, China or Latin America. Much of the answer must lie in their hostile viewof African states and cultures. Little was known about the African interior, and most of what was reflected the self-serving bias of the missionaries, explorers and dubious businessmen who had made a career there. A good case can be made that much of what was reported by travellers as fact about the ‘dark continent' was the imaginary product of minds fuddled by drink, fuelled by drugs (the cocktail of medications to ward off disease) and filled with dreams of glory and gold.
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No African ruler (with the possible exception of the Christian emperor of Ethiopia) was considered capable of exercising all the functions of sovereignty. Instead, it was widely assumed that the interior states were a chaos of barbarism, where slavery thrived and civilization had stalled. Under the ‘Berlin rules', the European powers that asserted a claim were expected to suppress the one and promote the other. But this does not explain why the European governments were willing to allow frontier merchants and soldiers to suck them into commitments that they usually disliked on grounds of (some) risk or expense.

Here the answer is threefold. Firstly, the frontier interests were extremely adept at the art of lobbying through their backers at home. They played upon religious and humanitarian feeling, as well as patriotic emotion, and commercial greed. They touched a rawnerve of economic anxiety in an era of falling prices that lasted into the mid 1890s. They exploited to the full the newmeans of publicity in the popular press (like
Le Petit Journal
, with its 1 million readers).
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Since they usually controlled what information there was, their version of
events was often hard to challenge. In the hands of a master like Rhodes, all this was combined with a remarkable talent for co-opting support among the good and the great, often by a generous distribution of shares in his companies. The second factor is financial. It is doubtful whether even skilful lobbying would have loosened the purse strings of the governments at home. Had frontier expansion meant large sums of money at the taxpayers' expense, its benefits would have been questioned, the politicians would have been warier, and the controversy much greater. As it was, however, the occupation of Africa proved astonishingly cheap – one of the reasons why public enthusiasm waxed rather than waned in the 1890s. The private empires of Leopold and Rhodes cost the taxpayer nothing. The West African conquests of the
officiers soudanais
brought nearly 2 million square miles into France's empire for the sterling equivalent of £ 5 million.
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Thirdly, much the same applies to the prospect of war. Despite the verbal aggression with which colonial claims were often publicly debated, it was well understood that they could never be pressed so far as to risk a European conflict. Even France's long struggle to oust the British from Egypt assumed a diplomatic solution: German support at an international conference to ‘settle' the Egyptian question.
²⁶
When this failed to happen, and a French expedition to the upper Nile met Kitchener's army at Fashoda in late 1898, the whiff of war was enough to bring a humiliating French climbdown.
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