The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (49 page)

For most of the nineteenth century, Britain’s West African colonies were derelict outposts. The Gambia and Gold Coast settlements were relics of the slave-trading era, no longer of economic value. Sierra Leone served as a glowing example of what could be achieved by black men and women with a Christian education, and was also a major coaling station for the Royal Navy. A visitor in 1898 found it a ‘most terrifically civilised place’, even though the sight of black people going to church in European clothes, which would have so pleased an earlier generation of philanthropists, struck him as ‘grotesque’.
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Lagos, acquired in 1861 as a base for anti-slaving operations, was a toehold in Nigeria, the only part of this region which attracted British commerce.

The magnet here was palm oil, a vital commodity for British industry which used it as a lubricant and the basis for making soap and candles. The profitable trade in palm oil was dominated by Liverpool entrepreneurs whose interests were guarded by a network of consuls, backed by intermittent naval patrols, some of which penetrated the Niger and Benue rivers. The natives here and elsewhere in West Africa were enthusiastic consumers of ‘trader gin’, a noxious but potent narcotic; in 1889 1.35 million gallons were imported into Nigeria and, despite protests from temperance and missionary groups in Britain, the flow steadily increased. In 1908 the total West African gin trade was worth £1.2 million, with nearly 90 per cent going to Nigeria.

So long as palm oil poured out of Nigeria and gin poured in, Britain had no interest whatsoever in acquiring additional territory there or elsewhere in West Africa. Until the early 1880s, it was a region where the machinery of informal empire functioned more or less effectively. If a local ruler proved obstructive, as did Kofi, Asantehene of the Asante (‘King Coffee’), in 1873, a small but well-armed military force delivered a rap over the knuckles.

This local equilibrium was upset by France. From the mid-1870s a small, highly motivated clique of French soldiers and politicians became entranced by the idea of creating a sprawling empire, which would stretch from West Africa across the western Sahara. This province might prove another India, enriching France and enhancing its status in the world, which had been diminished by the humiliations of the Franco-Prussian War. The key to the region’s economic exploitation was thought to be a railway that would cross from West Africa to the Red Sea, never leaving French soil, and which would serve as a conduit for the entire trade of Africa north of the Sahara. The inspiration for this trans-continental railway was the American Union Pacific Railroad, which had been completed in 1869 and was currently opening up the West. Rhodes had also recognised the potential of a railway bisecting Africa and, from the 1890s, planned a Cape to Cairo line which would, needless to say, run across British territory.

The French took their first steps towards a West African empire in the late 1870s. The impetus came from two highly-placed imperialists, Admiral Jean de Jauréguiberry, the Minister for Marine, and Charles de Freycinet, a railway enthusiast, who was Minister for Public Works. They approved probes inland from Senegal, while the gunboat
Voltigeur
was ordered into Nigerian waters to make contact with and extract treaties from local chiefs. Simultaneously the explorer, Savorgnan de Brazza, was making agreements with rulers in the Congo basin. Confronted with trespassers in regions hitherto under the loose control of Britain, British consuls started to collect treaties.

These pledges were ammunition for British and French statesmen and diplomats to whom fell the task of haggling over who had what. Britain’s main fear was that the protectionist French would obtain swathes of the West African hinterland, which would leave the Gambia, Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast as stranded coastal colonies without any inland trade. Furthermore, France might secure the Upper Niger and so strangle the trade that passed down the river from northern Nigeria and the western Sudan. British commercial interests got some safeguards from the settlement made at Berlin during 1885: Britain was allowed a sphere of influence which stretched up the Niger and inland from the Gold Coast.

As elsewhere in Africa, the British government now faced the problem of giving substance to its authority over paper protectorates. It was, as in southern and eastern Africa, lucky to find a private corporation that was willing to undertake what otherwise was a tiresome and costly business. The Royal Niger Company was chartered in 1886 to trade and govern along the lower and mid-Niger. The company was the creation of George Taubman Goldie, a Manxman who had, until 1877, led a directionless life as an extremely diffident professional soldier and wanderer. In that year he visited the Niger coast and saw the chance to make his mark on the world. A childhood worshipper of Rajah Brooke, Goldie later claimed that, ‘My dream as a child was to colour the map red,’ and there is no reason to disbelieve him. In Nigeria he found a convenient blank, and like Brooke, he had the cash to fulfil his ambitions. Within a few years he had organised the local merchants and laid the foundations for his own company.

During the late 1880s and early 1890s, there were plenty of Goldies, and for that matter Lugards among the young French officers who were pursuing promotion and medals in West Africa. Their collective motto was
‘Prenez l’initiative’,
even if that meant, and it often did, ignoring orders from hesitant bureaucrats in Paris. By the early 1890s, the French conquest of West Africa and the western Sahara had entered a decisive phase, with the momentum sustained by soldiers convinced that they knew better than their masters, one of whom once remarked that colonial commanders constituted what was in effect an independent state, answerable to no one. Perhaps so, but politicians were wary of asserting authority over the French army which, in right-wing, ultra-nationalist circles was seen as the embodiment of the country’s honour.

French aggression in West Africa had never unduly troubled Salisbury, who once sardonically questioned the ultimate value of vast areas of ‘light soil’, his euphemism for sand. This view was quietly held by many in France, and was reflected in the failure of the projected trans-Saharan railway to attract any investment. It was less easy, however, for British ministers to dismiss out of hand France’s West African adventures after 1894, when it had become plain that they might end with the seizure of the Upper Niger. Goldie had been among the first to sense the danger, and in July 1894 he hired Lugard to lead a small expedition deep into northern Nigeria and negotiate treaties which would bring its rulers into Britain’s orbit. Almost simultaneously, Captain Decouer had been commissioned to proceed from Dahomey into the same area and for the same purpose. There was also a rumour that the Germans were preparing an expedition for this end.
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Lugard’s treaty-gathering trek through Borgu during the autumn and early winter of 1894 was a superhuman feat of perseverance. He and his party endured extremes of temperature (his dog died of heat exhaustion), torrential rain, an ambush and bouts of fever. Lugard overcame the latter by self-medication in the form of a course of antipyrin and a thirteen-mile march in the blazing sun, which produced a curative sweat. Native medicines, whose ingredients he did not investigate too closely, provided an apparent antidote to poison from an arrowhead which had pierced his skull. Lugard deserved and got what he wanted, an agreement in which the aged and decrepit King of Nikki accepted the protection and friendship of Britain and its agent, the Royal Niger Company. The trouble was that just over a fortnight later Decoeur arrived at Nikki and went away, like Lugard, with a treaty.

The Upper Niger now became a focus for Anglo-French rivalry. The chief protagonists were Chamberlain, who became Colonial Secretary in June 1895, and Gabriel Hanotaux, who took over France’s Foreign Ministry in April 1896. Chamberlain refused on principle to relinquish an inch of African territory to which Britain had a legal claim, while Hanotaux sought to prevent Africa from becoming another India in which French ambitions were checked by a combination of British guile and bullying. The British, he believed, used their language as a cover for deception (
‘elle affirme, elle n’explique pas’
) and therefore France would have to resort to action to get her way rather than waste time on otiose negotiations over the validity of treaties. Only Marchand on the banks of the Nile and Senegalese
tirailleurs
on the banks of the Niger would stop Britain in her tracks.

It was Britain which was first off the mark in the confrontation on the Niger. With Chamberlain’s blessing, Goldie launched a war against Bida and Ilorin, whose rulers had refused to fulfil their promises to abandon slave-raiding. The campaign of January 1897 was not just a humanitarian crusade, it was a fearsome demonstration of the military power of the company and, by association, Britain. A twelve-pounder gun was manhandled, with considerable difficulty, through the bush to hurl shells against the walls of Bida at a range of two miles. But what really struck terror into the spearmen and mailed cavalry of the two states were the company’s six Maxim guns, the ‘bindigat ruiva’ (water guns) or ‘piss guns’. They enabled an army of 500 men, mostly Hausa constabulary, to beat a mediaeval horde, believed to outnumber them by thirty to one.

Goldie’s little war alerted the French to British intentions, and during 1896–7 advance parties of their colonial forces filtered into Borgu, where
tricolores
were hoisted over native villages and old treaties waved about as proof that they were now French property. Chamberlain foresaw a collision, and began taking precautions. In June 1897 he proposed the immediate formation of a 2,000-strong black army, the West Africa Frontier Force, and appointed Lugard its commander and Britain’s special commissioner for northern Nigeria. Obviously Lugard’s experience counted, but Chamberlain was also making a gesture designed to show the French that Britain was going to take a tough line. In France, Lugard was detested on account of his alleged massacre of Catholic converts in Uganda and, more recently, his coup at Nikki. When Lugard arrived in Nigeria in the spring of 1898,
The Times
reported that for Frenchmen he ‘symbolised … the fierce and grasping spirit of perfidious Albion. He is for them the stuff of which legends are made.’
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A comedy of manners rather than a legend emerged from the Anglo-French stand-off in Borgu during the summer of 1898. Lugard had officered the West Africa Frontier Force with men of his own kidney, all of whom could have stepped from the pages of a G.A. Henty yarn. They were young, ex-public-school boys with a love of sport and taste for adventure. Field command was in the hands of Colonel James Willcocks, another sportsman and veteran of several Indian campaigns. It was he who set out from Jebba into Borgu where, at Lugard’s instructions, he was to hoist the Union Jack wherever he thought fit, taking care to avoid villages over which the
tricolore
was already flying. There followed a bizarre charade in which British units sidestepped French villages and occasionally collided with French detachments. There were some wrangles, usually about such niceties of protocol as saluting flags, but the prevailing mood on both sides was one of nervous good humour. International rivalries were forgotten as professional empire-builders discovered, over drinks and cigarettes by a campfire, that they had much in common as soldiers and gentlemen.
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As Captain George Abadie observed of one French officer he encountered, he was ‘a gentleman … and one knows how to deal with him.’
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There were a few fire-eaters on both sides, including some of the native troops, who yearned for a fight. The French position was, in fact, precarious, since their rule was still being resisted in other parts of West Africa. During the confrontation on the Niger, troops had had to be hurried to the Ivory Coast to deal with Samory Touré, France’s most tenacious adversary in West Africa, and to suppress an uprising in Soudan (Mali). Furthermore, as Lugard appreciated, a shooting war on the Niger would leave the French isolated throughout the region since the navy would blockade their West African ports.

Throughout the crisis, Chamberlain remained in full control as the telegraph line had been extended from Lagos to Jebba so that the men-on-the-spot could not take matters into their own hands. It was diplomatic camel-trading that finally ended the confrontation and Britain, who got the best of the deal, secured Borgu and with it all the territory which now lies within the boundaries of modern Nigeria. All that remained was for Chamberlain to tie up the administrative loose ends. Lagos and the coastal Oil Rivers Protectorate were amalgamated in 1900 as Southern Nigeria, the company was abolished, and its territories passed into the government of the new colony of Northern Nigeria, whose first governor was Lugard.

Similar consolidation occurred in Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast where, boundaries having been fixed with the French, pacification followed. Regions where British control had hitherto been fitful or non-existent were brought to heel. In 1887, at the conclusion of a campaign against the Yonni of Sierra Leone, the British commander told their chiefs, ‘The Queen has shown you her power by sending her force and taking the country, which now belongs to me and the governor.’ The message was punched home with a demonstration of Maxim-gun fire which ‘much surprised’ them.
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It took two expeditions, in 1895 and 1900, to convince the Asante of the strength and permanence of the new order in the Gold Coast. The last was a particularly brutal affair in which British officers had the utmost difficulty in restraining their native troops who seemed to have regarded the campaign as a licence to plunder and rape.
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