Ghosts of Empire (44 page)

Yet, whatever the material benefits of British rule, the most enduring imperial legacy in Sudan was the policy incoherence. The British adopted
a ‘Southern Policy' only to reverse it after sixteen years. The Sudan is an outstanding example of how the enormous degree of individualism which imperial government fostered often led to policy inconsistency and tragedy. That theme is a central argument of this book: individualism, the reliance on individual administrators to conceive and execute policy, with very little strategic direction from London, often led to contradictory and self-defeating policies, which in turn brought disaster to millions. As one historian observed, ‘the British administration had certainly vacillated between uniting the south with the north and making the south a black Christian buffer region against the spread of Islam in the north'.
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Another observed, at the end of the first Sudanese civil war in 1972, that ‘even pro-British historians admit that British policy at the time was not consistent or far-sighted' with regard to the Sudan.
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Back in the 1890s, Lord Cromer identified lack of policy coherence as a prominent trait in British administration: ‘The absence of consistency which is so frequently noticeable in the aims of British policy is indeed a never-ending source of embarrassment to those on whom devolves the duty of carrying that policy into execution.'
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Cromer saw democracy as the principal cause of this inconsistency. Like so many of his contemporaries, he believed in personal rule and influence. He was an individualist, who fundamentally distrusted democracy, and yet the subsequent history of the empire he spent his life serving shows that it was the very individualism he praised that created instability, as it provided no over-arching framework under which consistent policies could be conceived and executed. The adoption and rejection of MacMichael's ‘Southern Policy' was a tragic example of the shortcomings of individualism, devoid of any strategic aim.

Perhaps no other country in the modern world is more a creature of empire than Nigeria. Even the name ‘Nigeria' was a consciously invented one, first appearing in an article of the London
Times
on 8 January 1897, at the beginning of the year in which Queen Victoria celebrated her Diamond Jubilee. Flora Shaw, a journalist and commentator on colonial affairs, suggested the name, which she thought would be a good title for the ‘agglomeration of pagan and Mohammedan states which have been brought . . . within the confines of a British protectorate'. For the ‘first time in their history', these states needed to ‘be described as an entity by some general name'.
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Flora Shaw was the very model of Victorian womanhood. Her friend and younger contemporary Mary Kingsley described her as a ‘fine, upstanding young woman, as clever as they make them, capable of any immense amount of work'. She was also, according to Kingsley, ‘as hard as nails', and she talked ‘like a
Times
leader all the time'. She was a committed patriot and was ‘imbued with the modern form of public imperialism' which was ‘her religion'. Unusually for her time, Flora Shaw was a professional woman. She had been born into a middle-class family in Ireland in 1852 and, in 1897, looked a good deal younger than she actually was. She had written a popular novel based on her Irish childhood,
Castle Blair
, which had been published as long ago as 1878. As yet unmarried, she had turned herself into a crusading journalist, after giving up writing novels in her thirties. Early in 1892 she had gone to South Africa, where she went down both diamond and gold mines. Nothing, it seemed, could stop her; she asked questions, investigated and then wrote hundreds of letters about labour conditions, agriculture and other aspects of colonial development.
Her letters so impressed the management of
The Times
that she was sent to Australia and New Zealand. On her return from the round-the-world trip in 1893, she settled in London to take up a permanent position on the newspaper as colonial editor. She was given an annual salary of £800 a year, much higher than other women journalists of the time.
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She had become one of the best-travelled women of her day.

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

The other woman strongly associated with the beginning of British colonial rule in Nigeria was Mary Kingsley. She would have recognized and applauded the description of the ‘superman'. She was another strong female who had been born into the middle class–into a family of academics and clergymen–in 1862. Her uncle was the famous novelist Charles Kingsley, author of the children's classic
The Water Babies
, who died in his fifties in 1875. Mary's parents had neglected her education, so she had been compelled to absorb scraps of information from her father's library. Both her parents died in 1892, when she was thirty, and, with the small inheritance she had been bequeathed, she reinvented herself by packing her bags and setting off for West Africa. There she considered herself an explorer and anthropologist but paid her way by trading, obtaining food by selling fish-hooks and matches, and even engaging in the rubber trade.
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Mary Kingsley was striking, if not conventionally beautiful. Tall, slim and blonde, she had big blue eyes, a large mouth and weak chin. Her smile was described as ‘crooked'. It was when she opened her mouth, however,
that the full power of her extraordinary personality revealed itself. With her deep voice and cultivated speech, she made a strong first impression. Her interlocutors would then be rather surprised, even charmed, by her dropped aitches and her very individual way of expressing herself, as she frequently used slang and other seemingly uncouth terms she had picked up from sailors and West African traders. As a child she had, like many toddlers before and since, shocked her father by picking up and repeating his large stock of swear-words. Rudyard Kipling met her at a tea party in South Kensington in the 1890s. Afterwards they left the house together and were clearly fascinated with each other, talking for hours. She spoke of witch doctors, of rubber and oil trading, of cannibal preferences in ‘joints of human flesh'. Any further association, however, was strictly curtailed by the social constraints of the time. Kipling said to her, ‘Come to my rooms and we'll talk it out there.' She agreed, then suddenly said, ‘Oh I forgot I was a woman. 'Fraid I mustn't.'
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Both Mary Kingsley and Flora Shaw were committed imperialists. Kingsley died tragically young, succumbing to typhoid at the age of thirty-eight, while working as a nurse in a prisoner-of-war camp in South Africa in 1900. Yet in her short life she articulated as well as Kipling himself the unapologetic imperialism of the 1890s, the decade of her brief career and fame. For Kingsley, imperialism was a ‘good and honest thing', which sought a world ‘wherein just, honourable, respectable men of all races, all colours, all religions, can live, worship, trade, labour, or live quietly, unhampered by a lot of pettifogging arbitrary rules and regulations and persecutions'.

For imperialists like Kingsley, the British Empire was an ideal; it was not primarily about glory or money. England had seen ‘Venice rolling in riches' and then ‘Spain magnificent', but had also witnessed the decay of both those once mighty empires. The English ‘must have the world, a free and open world'. Having welcomed the prospect of a world where all colours and races could live freely, Kingsley acknowledged that only the Northern European could make the world free. ‘We know from centuries of experience that the ideal of making freedom for the world is not to be expected from any race save the Teuton.' According to Kingsley, there was nothing wrong with this kind of imperialism, which would free Africans
and Asians from their superstitions and despotic rulers. In the same address, Kingsley asserted that this ‘Imperialism, our Imperialism, is the thing that is not ashamed of wanting all the world to rule over'.
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This aggressive imperialism was what brought Nigeria into the colonial fold in the first place, and it is no surprise that the single individual who did more than anyone else to bring this about was a hero to both Mary Kingsley and Flora Shaw. George Goldie was a volatile, tempestuous man, who had been a soldier before becoming a trader. To Mary Kingsley, Goldie was ‘one of that make of men who gave Britain India–namely a soldier-statesman'. It was unfortunate that in Africa those men had not been so attracted to founding empires. Goldie was the exception. In Kingsley's opinion, the empire needed more people like him. ‘Had we but had a line of these men in Africa acting in conjunction with our great solid under-staff–the Merchant Adventurers–our African record would be both cleaner and more glorious than it is.'
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For Flora Shaw, who had hoped to marry Goldie after his first wife had died in 1898, his exertions alone had prevented a territory passing ‘into the possession of France and Germany' which was ‘no less than half the size of British India'.
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George Goldie, or George Taubman-Goldie, had been born on the Isle of Man in 1846 and had been spared the usual treadmill of public school. This contributed perhaps to his eccentric, aloof and highly private manner. He was arrogant, but his arrogance was not of the sort that wanted monuments to be erected in his honour, or long biographies to be written about him. Indeed his ‘wish to remain unrecognised amounted almost to a mania'. He had, in addition to this wariness of publicity, no ‘literary ambition, no desire for popularity, no desire whatever to make money'.
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In this he stood in stark contrast to Cecil Rhodes, who desired, and achieved, fame, immortality and a colossal fortune. The suggestion that Nigeria be called ‘Goldesia', in recognition of George Goldie's achievements, and along the same lines as Rhodesia's celebration of Cecil Rhodes's achievements, met with a flat refusal from Goldie himself.

Yet, despite his seeming self-denial, Goldie's ambition was as intense as that of Rhodes. Dorothy Wellesley, who later wrote a book about Goldie, remembered her childhood friend fondly, particularly as Goldie himself was well into his seventies when she met him. As a small girl, she had
called him ‘Rameses' because his old, wizened face reminded her of the mummies in the British Museum. ‘Rameses, will you tell me the story of your life?' asked the little girl. Goldie stared into the fire and laughed. After a couple of minutes, he replied, ‘All achievement begins with a dream. My dream, as a child, was to colour the map red.'
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He had taken a rather bizarre route to fulfil his boyhood dream. Starting out in a way typical of the late Victorian empire-builder, he had attended Woolwich, from which in 1865 he passed into the Royal Engineers. He was a wild man, claiming to be blind drunk when he passed his final examination. Two years later, as he himself recounted, a rich relation died, leaving him a fortune. Excited by his new freedom, he left the Engineers and all his belongings, heading straight for Egypt, where he fell in love with an Arab girl who taught him ‘fluent colloquial Arabic'.
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He lived in the desert for three years, but he ordered books from England, which he picked up in the local town, Suakin. It was while spending time with his Arab girlfriend, in what he termed the ‘Garden of Allah', that he obtained and digested Barth's
Travels
, five hefty volumes packed with historical and geographical information on the western Sudan.
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Still only in his early twenties, Goldie returned to England, after setting up a trust fund based in Cairo to provide for his Arab companion. He was restless and turbulent, and plunged into another passionate affair, this time with his family governess, Mathilda Catherine Elliott. The couple ran away to Paris in 1870, where they were caught up in the Franco-Prussian War and had to live in very straitened circumstances, as the city was besieged for four months. In February 1871, Goldie returned with his new mistress to London, where they were married in July of that year.
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From the adventures he had enjoyed when only in his teens and early twenties, it was clear that Goldie was going to lead an eventful life. In the early 1870s, however, it was still uncertain how he would make his mark in the empire. His opportunity came when Holland Jaques, a small trading company that operated around the River Niger, ran into trouble in the 1870s. The company was run by the father-in-law of one of Goldie's brothers, and it was agreed to send George Goldie himself to West Africa, where his formidable energy would be employed. After taking over the
company, the then thirty-three-year-old Goldie re-formed it as the United Africa Trading Company on 20 November 1879 and, from the beginning, set his heart on obtaining a Royal Charter for it. This would allow the company a monopoly of trade in the region of the Niger delta and further up-river.
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