Colonial invasion

Widespread possession of arms, codes of military hon-our, and long hostility to governmental control made popular resistance toconquest more formidable in Africa than, for example, in In

Colonial invasion

during the last twenty years of the nineteenth century,European Powers swiftly and painlessly partitioned the map of Africa amongthemselves To implement the partition on the ground, however, was anythingbut swift or painless Widespread possession of arms, codes of military hon-our, and long hostility to governmental control made popular resistance toconquest more formidable in Africa than, for example, in India In creatingstates in a turbulent and underpopulated continent, colonial administratorsfaced the same problems as their African predecessors and often met them

in the same ways, but they had technological advantages: firepower, ical transport, medical skills, literacy The states they created before the FirstWorld War were generally mere skeletons fleshed out and vitalised by Africanpolitical forces But European conquest had two crucial effects As each colonybecame a specialised producer for the world market, it acquired an economicstructure that often survived throughout the twentieth century, with a broaddistinction between African peasant production in western Africa and Euro-pean capitalist production in eastern Africa perpetuating the ancient contrastbetween the two regions And the European intrusion had profound effects onAfrica’s demography

mechan-partitionThe slow European penetration of Africa during the nineteenth century began

to escalate into a scramble for territory during the late 1870s, for a complex

of reasons One was a French initiative in Senegal launched in 1876 by a newgovernor, Bri`ere de l’Isle Faidherbe had pursued an expansionist policy theretwenty years earlier, but his departure in 1865 and France’s defeat by Prussia in

1871 had aborted it Bri`ere de l’Isle, however, belonged to a faction determined

to revitalise France with colonial wealth, especially that of the West Africansavanna The faction included many colonial soldiers, eager for distinctionand accustomed in Algeria to extreme independence of action, and certainpoliticians who secured funds in 1879 to survey a railway from Senegal to theNiger The military used the money to finance military advance to the river

at Bamako in 1883 This forward policy extended to two other West African

193

10 Colonial invasion.

regions First, French agents sought treaties with local notables on the lowerNiger that threatened long-established British trading interests Second, in 1882the French Assembly ratified a treaty in which the Tio ruler at Lake Malebo

on the River Congo professed to cede his hereditary rights to the travellerSavorgnan de Brazza This treaty, the basis of French empire in equatorialAfrica, threatened the plans of King Leopold II of Belgium, who, since 1876,had used his private wealth to establish commercial stations on the lower Congobut now felt obliged to advance territorial claims Fearing a French protectionistregime on the lower Congo, but not desiring responsibility there themselves,the British recognised Portugal’s ancient claims in the region in return forfreedom to trade there This angered other European statesmen, especially theGerman chancellor

Bismarck had no wish for German colonies, but to protect German mercial interests in Africa was a responsibility that might also earn him somepolitical support He therefore authorised German protectorates in SouthwestAfrica, Cameroun, and Togo during 1884, taking advantage of a dispute betweenhis main European rivals, France and Britain The dispute arose from events

com-in North Africa In 1881 France declared a protectorate over deeply com-indebtedTunisia, chiefly to prevent Italian predominance there Egypt too was indebtedand was under joint Anglo-French financial control When the Europeanssecured the Khedive Ismail’s deposition in 1879, Egypt’s political vacuum wasfilled by Arabic-speaking landowners and army officers, led by Colonel Arabi,hostile to foreign control France and Britain drew up plans to invade, but anew French government abandoned them British officials in Cairo told theirgovernment that order in Egypt was collapsing, enabling an imperialist factionwithin the British Cabinet to insist on invasion of Egypt in August 1882 Theyintended to entrench an amenable Egyptian regime, stabilise the finances, andwithdraw, but found this impossible The resulting Anglo-French antagonismleft Bismarck great authority

He used it to convene the Berlin Conference of 1884–5 This recognisedLeopold’s claims to the Congo Independent State (subsequently BelgianCongo), acknowledged French rights in equatorial Africa, and insisted on free-dom of trade throughout the region The delegates accepted the British position

on the lower Niger and French primacy on its upper reaches Most important,the conference laid down that future European claims to African territory must

be more substantial than the informal predominance that Britain had hithertoenjoyed through her naval and commercial power The subsequent partitionwas shaped by Britain’s attempts to defend her most valuable claims, eitherstrategic positions guarding sea routes to India or areas of especially extensivetrade, such as Nigeria

The first step took place one day after the Berlin Conference ended, whenBismarck declared a protectorate over mainland territory opposite Zanzibar

where German adventurers had obtained treaties Hitherto content to exerciseindirect influence here through the ruler of Zanzibar, Britain now partitionedthe region in a treaty of 1886 which gave modern Kenya to Britain and mainlandTanzania to Germany A further treaty in 1890 gave Britain a free hand inUganda, where the headwaters of the Nile were thought vital to Egypt’s security.The Berlin Conference also precipitated rapid European expansion in WestAfrica The British declared a protectorate over the Niger Delta, whence theylater expanded into Igboland and Benin They also asserted predominance

in Yorubaland in 1886 by brokering a peace treaty ending nearly a century

of warfare, subsequently persuading war-weary Yoruba states to accept Britishresidents Britain thereby gained control of southern Nigeria, the richest part ofthe West African forest The main French conquests in this area were Dahomey,taken after fierce resistance in 1892, and C ˆote d’Ivoire, initially seen as a routefrom the coast to French positions on the Niger

The upper Niger was France’s chief interest in West Africa In 1888 her armyresumed its advance inland from Bamako, capturing the Tukulor capital atNioro in 1891, taking Jenne and Timbuktu in 1893–4, and expanding southwards

to conquer Futa Jalon and the Mossi capital in 1896 The chief adversary herewas Samori Ture, who during the 1870s had created a Mande-speaking statebetween the upper Niger and the forest edge, dominating it through bands

of young professional gunmen financed by massive slave-raiding His longresistance ended with his capture in 1898 The French could now advance toLake Chad, where columns from the Niger, the Congo, and Algeria met in

1900 This advance eastwards had led coastal colonies to expand northwards tosecure their commercial hinterlands Sierra Leone and Liberia were confinedquite closely to the coast, but the British had time to occupy Asante in 1896,without resistance, and to declare a protectorate over the Sokoto Caliphate in1900

In West Africa the British were content that France should occupy huge areas

of ‘light soil’, as Britain’s prime minister described it In northeastern Africa,concern for Egypt’s security made the British more sensitive, but they had noneed to act until 1896 because the middle Nile Valley was controlled not by a rivalEuropean power but by the Mahdist state The Sudanese Mahdi, Muhammadibn Abdallah, had revealed himself in 1881 as leader of Sudan’s stateless peoplesagainst Egyptian rule, then weakened by political turmoil in Cairo Three yearslater his forces took Khartoum and established a theocratic regime, whichthe British were content to contain More alarmed by French ambitions inEthiopia, Britain encouraged Italian interests there, leading to the occupation

of Eritrea in 1889 and the advance southwards into the Christian kingdom thatEmperor Menelik repelled at the Battle of Adwa in 1896, the greatest Africanvictory against foreign invaders This undermined British policy, as did Frenchschemes to approach the Nile from equatorial Africa In 1898 Britain destroyed

Mahdist forces at Omdurman and took control of the Sudan Six years laterFrance abandoned her opposition to British policy in Egypt in return for a freehand in Morocco, which she invaded in 1911 The Italians were compensated bysimilar freedom to invade the Ottoman province of Tripoli (modern Libya).The interconnections between events in different regions that convertedgradual expansion into a scramble also embraced southern Africa Here themain initiative was Britain’s unsuccessful annexation of the South AfricanRepublic (Transvaal) in 1877 in an attempt to create a South AfricanConfederation under Cape leadership that would secure Britain’s imperialcommunications Seven years later Bismarck challenged Britain’s regional hege-mony by creating German Southwest Africa (Namibia) To prevent a junc-tion between this and the hostile South African Republic that would blockexpansion northwards, Britain declared her own protectorate over interven-ing Bechuanaland (Botswana) in 1885 A year later, the discovery of gold inthe South African Republic transformed the situation, for with gold, and per-haps European allies, the Republic might dominate southern Africa Britain’sfirst response was to encourage the diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes to launch

a pioneer column northwards into Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) in 1890,hoping that gold discoveries there might offset the South African Republic.Britain also occupied Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and Nyasaland (Malawi),defying Portugal’s claims there but giving recognised borders to Mozambiqueand Angola Yet Southern Rhodesia’s gold proved disappointing Instead, withcovert British acquiescence, Rhodes organised in 1895 an abortive invasion ofthe South African Republic to provoke insurrection by British immigrants Itsfailure left no means of domination except the threat of war In 1899 Britain’sHigh Commissioner at the Cape, Sir Alfred Milner, manoeuvred PresidentKruger of the South African Republic into issuing an ultimatum that drewthe reluctant British Cabinet into the Anglo-Boer War, not to control the goldmines but to protect Britain’s position in South Africa against the threat aris-ing from the gold mines Victory cost Britain three years of war, nearly 500,000troops engaged, 22,000 dead, and£222 million

By the First World War, the European Powers had, on paper, partitionedthe entire African continent except Liberia and Ethiopia, both of which hadused firearms to extend their territories On the ground, however, many largeand remote areas remained outside European control Darfur in the Sudanand Ovamboland in northern Namibia were conquered during the First WorldWar, the interior of British Somaliland in 1920 Berber followers of Abd el-Krim in the Rif Mountains of northern Morocco resisted 250,000 Spanish andFrench troops until 1926, while the High Atlas escaped colonial administrationuntil 1933 The Beduin of Libya had submitted two years earlier Even in 1940 theinterior of the Western Sahara was outside European control Yet these were onlymajor instances Throughout the continent smaller groups, usually stateless,

defied European overlords as they had defied all previous government ‘I shall ofcourse go on walloping them until they surrender’, a 27-year-old district officerwrote from central Nigeria in 1925 ‘It’s rather a piteous sight watching a villagebeing knocked to pieces and I wish there was some other way but unfortunatelythere isn’t.’1 Only thirty-two years later he became the first governor-general

of independent Ghana In Africa the experience of colonial rule was often verybrief indeed

There had been no single European motive for the partition Africa was notcentral to European economies: during the 1870s it accounted for little morethan 5 percent of Britain’s trade, most of it with Egypt and South Africa Com-mercial interests in tropical Africa were vital to annexations on the west coast,but elsewhere merchants such as the Germans in Zanzibar often opposed colo-nial conquest lest it disrupt existing trade Successful businessmen left riskycolonial investments to less prosperous competitors or to enthusiasts withnoncommercial motives Rhodes’s British South Africa Company never paid

a dividend during the thirty-three years it administered Rhodesia Only afterothers had borne the costs of pioneering did the great German investmentbanks or Belgium’s dominant trust, Soci´et´e G´en´erale, put money into Africa.The important economic motives in the partition were Britain’s wider imperialinterests and such long-term hopes and fears as Leopold’s vision of Congolesewealth, French dreams of Eldorado in Timbuktu, or British fears of exclu-sion from protected French colonies These motives might move statesmen,although less than their strategic concerns to control the southern shores ofthe Mediterranean or the routes to India

Yet European statesmen did not always control imperial expansion marck certainly controlled his country’s, and so generally did British cabinets,although their agents on the spot took the lead in Egypt in 1882 and to somedegree in South Africa, while missionary agitation outweighed other considera-tions in Nyasaland Such sectional interests were especially powerful in France’smultiparty political system, where imperial expansion was driven forward by

Bis-ambitious colonels on the frontiers and the parti colonial in Paris, a pressure

group of colonial deputies, geographical and commercial interests, civil vants, retired officers, publicists, and professional patriots They framed thepolicies that took French troops to Lake Chad, threatened Britain on the Nile,and acquired Morocco

ser-Moreover, Africa was partitioned not only because European statesmen orsoldiers willed it but because they for the first time possessed the technologicalcapacity to do it Two obstacles had hitherto confined European power to theAfrican coastline, except in the north and south One was disease, especiallymalaria, which in the early nineteenth century killed within a year roughlyhalf of all Europeans reaching West Africa The introduction of quinine pro-phylaxis during the 1850s reduced the deathrate by about four-fifths and made

European military operations possible The other obstacle had been the absence

of overwhelming military superiority so long as early nineteenth-century kets took at least a minute to load, had an effective range of only eightymetres, and misfired three times in ten Breech-loading rifles were first usedextensively in 1866 Two decades later, they gave way to repeating rifles, whichFrench forces in West Africa began to adopt in 1885, one year after the patenting

mus-of the Maxim machine-gun, firing eleven bullets a second Field artillery astated the palisaded strongholds of East Africa and the baked-mud defences

dev-of the savanna, sparing the French a single casualty when driving the lor from Segu Whereas Abd al-Qadir’s followers had fought the French inthe 1830s with a near-equality of weapons, the British at Omdurman in 1898killed at least 10,800 Sudanese for the loss of only 49 dead on their ownside

Tuku-Both those campaigns were exceptional in employing large white forces Mostcolonial armies were warbands of African mercenaries barely distinguishablefrom Mirambo’s or Samori’s The Tirailleurs S´en´egalais who conquered theWest African savanna for France were mostly slaves, while many African troopswere deliberately recruited from ‘martial tribes’ in remote regions Yet eventhese forces had weapons vastly superior to the muzzle-loaders that Buganda’swarriors fired from the hip or at arm’s length from a range of about ten metres,wearing their whitest cloth to display their courage Several African leadersacquired breech-loaders; Samori, for example, had perhaps six thousand athis peak But in tropical Africa only Ethiopia, Dahomey, the Tukulor, and theMahdists possessed a few artillery pieces, while Menelik and the Mahdists aloneused machine-guns Abd el-Krim, however, employed over two hundred cap-tured machine-guns and bought (but never used) three aeroplanes during the1920s By then Europeans were losing the near-monopoly of modern weaponsthat had briefly made their conquest cheap enough in men and money to bepossible

resistance and negotiationConstrained by technological inferiority, Africans had to decide whether tofight or negotiate with invaders seeking to convert their paper-partition intopower on the ground This was a question of tactics, for the African objectivewas the same in both cases: to preserve as much independence and power aswas possible in the circumstances In choosing their tactics, Africans had toconsider their total situation Those with previous experience of European fire-power might think resistance futile, as did Asante in 1896 after experiencing in

1874 ‘guns which hit five Ashantees at once’ Others might be given no choicebut to fight Ambitious French commanders, schooled in the Algerian tradi-tion that Islam was irreconcilable, brushed aside attempts by Tukulor leaders

to find a modus vivendi, just as British officers in Uganda treated Bunyoro as

an inevitable enemy because it had previously conflicted with visiting peans and with the Buganda kingdom where the British made their base Even

Euro-if negotiation were possible, some peoples could not hope to preserve theirway of life under European control, notably the slave-trading Yao chiefdoms

of Nyasaland, which resisted stockade by stockade For others, by contrast, theadvantages of accepting an initially remote European paramountcy might seem

to outweigh its costs, as for most of the war-weary Yoruba kingdoms that signedtreaties with the British after one kingdom, Ijebu, had resisted and been heav-ily defeated Africans learned quickly from their neighbours King Lewanika ofBulozi asked his ally Khama in Bechuanaland whether, given his experience ofBritish ‘protection’, he recommended it, and accepted his assurance that he did –advice coinciding with that given to Lewanika by a resident missionary, anotherelement in the situation This Central African region illustrated the full com-plexity of the historical circumstances within which Africans had to make theirchoices It was still dominated by the consequences of its invasion by Ndebele,Kololo, and other South African groups during the first half of the nineteenthcentury The Ndebele military kingdom tried to coexist with Rhodes’s PioneerColumn but was forced into war in 1893 by white aggression and the militancy

of its own young warriors The whites found allies among some Shona peopleswho saw them as potential protectors against Ndebele aggression Lewanikaalso feared the Ndebele, which was one reason for negotiating with the British,but more important was the instability of his Lozi throne, recaptured fromKololo invaders only in 1864 and threatened by royal rivals, dissident subjects,and numerous slaves He wanted a British protectorate, he declared in 1888, ‘toprotect myself against those [Lozi] You do not know them; they are plottingagainst my life.’2

Amidst these complex calculations, the one common feature was that Africanpolities were divided Like the European Powers, each had its war and peaceparties, its hawks and doves Sometimes, as in Asante and Dahomey, advocates

of the two policies had long contested power Sometimes they were virtually

at war, as in Buganda, where the weaker Protestant party used the Britishforces that arrived in 1890 as allies to secure its own predominance over RomanCatholic, Muslim, and traditionalist parties More commonly, the Europeanadvance itself polarised opinion In 1879, following the British victory overthe Zulu, the Pedi ruler, Sekhukhuni, proposed at a public meeting to acceptEuropean rule, only to be denounced as a coward and compelled to resist.Twelve years later, the Mpondo people on the northeastern border of the CapeColony fought a civil war over whether to fight the British Such anguisheddispute divided the Sokoto Caliphate when British forces invaded in 1900 Eachemir made his own decision for war or submission Kontagora, a militarisedfrontier chiefdom deeply engaged in slaving, resisted in arms Zaria, on poor

terms with Sokoto, opened its gates Kano strengthened and manned its wallsbut made little resistance once the field guns breached them Opinion in Sokotoitself was divided between resistance, negotiation, and withdrawal A minorityfought to the death outside the city, but others departed eastwards towardsMecca, found their way blocked, had no chance to surrender, and died on 27July 1903 with their Caliph Attahiru at the Battle of Burmi, some roped together

so that they could not retreat

Where aims were so similar and decisions so complex, it would be idle tothink that ‘warrior societies’ inevitably fought or more pacific peoples invari-ably negotiated Sotho fought the Orange Free State in the 1850s and 1860s,negotiated a British protectorate in 1868, fought in 1880 to prevent the Capegovernment from disarming them, and in 1884 negotiated the restoration ofBritish protection What mattered at any moment was whether the circum-stances gave predominance to hawks or doves, on both African and Europeansides Yet hawks were especially numerous in two kinds of societies Locallydominant, militarised polities formed one category They did not always fight –Ibadan, the dominant Yoruba state, chose to negotiate – but the reasons againstresistance had to be compelling Neither Sekhukhuni of the Pedi nor Lobengula

of the Ndebele could convince his young men to negotiate Military honourwas vital here, as it was also for those like the Mahdists for whom resistancewas holy The other societies with especially strong war parties were state-less peoples who lived amidst continuous intervillage feuding, cherished theirown notions of honour, and had no experience of external rule Often remoteand amorphous, they were exceptionally difficult to conquer The Baoul´e of

C ˆote d’Ivoire, for example, fought the French village by village until 1911 TheIgbo of Nigeria were not fully defeated until 1919, the Jola of Senegal not untilthe 1920s, and the Dinka of southern Sudan not until 1927 Pastoralists like theSomali or the Beduin of Libya were even more intractable, for their statelessnessand fierce independence were compounded by mobility and Islamic fervour.Such societies – the militarily dominant and the stateless – not only resistedmost stubbornly but also launched the major rebellions against early colonialrule

To rebel against a colonial government was more difficult than to resist initialconquest, for rebellion had to be organised both secretly and on a large scale

if it were to have hope of success Most leaders of large armed rebellions weretherefore established political and military authorities in major states, espe-cially where initial resistance to conquest had been muted, colonial demandsfor tax and land and labour were heavy, and a favourable opportunity presenteditself The Ndebele of Southern Rhodesia launched such a revolt in 1896, threeyears after their defeat by Rhodes’s white pioneers in a war that had engagedonly part of the Ndebele forces Embittered by seizure of land and cattle andemboldened by the absence of many white policemen on the Jameson Raid,

the Ndebele rose under their leading military commanders, mobilised subjectpeoples and surrounding Shona clients who had not participated in the earlierresistance, and spread the revolt to hitherto hostile Shona chiefdoms, whichnow had their own reasons for insurrection After besieging Bulawayo, Ndebeleleaders won important concessions before accepting peace In Buganda, KabakaMwanga launched a rebellion in 1897 mobilising many of those excluded fromthe colonial and Christian order, but it was defeated by the British and thedominant Christian chiefs Three years later Asante sought to remedy by rebel-lion its failure to resist British occupation in 1896, rising under the leadership

of a queen mother and military chiefs during the king’s exile and besieging theBritish in Kumasi for four months until reinforcements suppressed the revolt.The last great rebellion drawing chiefly on established political and militaryinstitutions took place in Mozambique in 1917, when the Barwe people (a Shonagroup) restored an ancient kingship and won widespread support at a time ofwartime grievances and Portuguese weakness

Because grievances against early colonial rule were widespread, stateless ples and small chiefdoms launched many local revolts, but they generally lackedthe organisation to threaten European control on the scale achieved by Nde-bele or Asante, even when they utilised institutions stretching across politi-cal divisions such as the Nyabingi cult, which led opposition to German andBritish control on the border between Rwanda and Uganda until 1928, or thesecret society that organised the Ekumeku resistance to British rule in westernIgboland between 1898 and 1910 One exception to this narrowness of scalewas the Maji Maji rebellion of 1905–7 in German East Africa (modern Tan-zania), which spread widely among stateless peoples through the leadership

peo-of a prophet, Kinjikitile, who operated within the framework peo-of a territorialreligious cult, spoke with the authority of divine possession, and distributed

water-medicine (maji) alleged to give invulnerability to bullets Similar revolts

with religious inspiration took place in Upper Volta (Burkina Faso) in 1915–17and in French Equatorial Africa in 1928–32 Elsewhere, however, large-scalerebellion by stateless peoples took place only under Islamic inspiration TheSudanese Mahdi’s revolt against Egyptian rule had employed the same com-bination of divine authority and multiethnic appeal as Kinjikitile’s The chiefIslamic revolt against early European control took place in Niger in 1916–17,when Tuareg tribes besieged Agades at a time of French weakness and decline

in the desert economy Christianity inspired only one significant rebellion, in

1915, by plantation labourers in southern Nyasaland led by John Chilembwe,

an African clergyman with American training His followers harboured lennial expectations and launched a brief and bloody attack on their employersbut gained no widespread support, for Christians were still few and engaged

mil-in buildmil-ing up their strength withmil-in the colonial order, a task to which mostAfricans turned once armed revolt was defeated

colonial ruleBecause most African colonies were acquired in hope of long-term advan-tage, their early governments were only holding operations Their subjectswere impressed by their strength, as the memoirs of literate Ganda show, butEuropeans ruling Buganda were more conscious of their weakness in the face of

‘something like a million fairly intelligent, slightly civilized negroes of warliketendencies, and possessing about 10,000 to 12,000 guns’.3To maintain a precari-ous order, if necessary by swift use of violence, was therefore the administrator’sfirst priority The second was to do it cheaply ‘Get to know your district, andyour people Keep an eye on them, collect tax if possible, but for God’s sake don’tworry headquarters’, as a veteran native commissioner in Southern Rhode-sia remembered his duties.4 To collect tax for his impecunious governmentwas the purpose for which his office had been created ‘In assessing you,’ thegovernor-general of French Equatorial Africa warned his officials in 1903, ‘I shallbase myself above all on the results which you will have obtained with regard

to the native tax.’5 A poor colony like Nyasaland introduced direct taxationfrom the moment it was created in 1891, generally requiring each adult male topay the equivalent of one or two months’ wages – a common pattern in easternAfrica, where tax was seen not only as a source of revenue and a ‘sacrament ofsubmission’ but also as an ‘educational’ measure compelling Africans to supplyproduce or labour to the colonial economy Early tax collection involved muchbrutality and provoked much resistance, notably the Sierra Leone Hut Tax War

of 1898 and the Bambatha Rebellion of 1906 in Zululand There are accounts

of men in Uganda killing themselves when unable to find the cash to pay tax.For most individuals, however, tax was probably less burdensome than earlycolonial demands for labour Long Africa’s scarcest commodity, labour wasdoubly so when European rulers added new demands for porters and con-struction workers before they introduced mechanical transport This was whyforced labour was the most widespread abuse of the early colonial period TheFrench required each man to work unpaid for up to twelve days a year They alsoconscripted Africans for longer periods of paid labour and for military service,taking about half a million men from the continent during the First World Waralone, despite widespread evasion and armed resistance The Congo Free State’slabour tax, as codified in 1903, was forty hours a month, although the reality wasarbitrary impressment Forced labour remained common there until at leastthe Second World War, as also in Liberia and in Portuguese colonies, where itwas not abolished even formally until 1961 –2 In British colonies it generallyended during the early 1920s Until then a Ganda peasant might theoreticallyowe five months’ labour a year: one month (in lieu of rent) to his Africanlandlord, one month of local community labour, two months (in lieu of tax)

to the state, and one month of compulsory paid (kasanvu) labour for the state

11 Colonial boundaries Source: Adapted from Roland Oliver, The African experience

(London, 1991), p 215.

or (rarely) a private employer Recruiting for private employers was often anearly colonial official’s most distasteful duty.

Administrators took more pride in their fourth basic task: to judge casesand administer law Early district officers were as eager as Ethiopian emperorsand Asantehenes to attract cases into their courts, and for the same reasons: itaugmented their political power, implied confidence in their rule, and enabledthem to impose their notions of justice Historians have neglected the process

by which colonial governments destroyed rival African jurisdictions, repressedblood feuds, and asserted a sole prerogative to take life, but Africans remem-bered it vividly and officials thought it a crucial achievement, for many Africansocieties had been violent and cruel Yet early colonial justice was itself oftenoppressive Many early officials were brutal men, recruited only because theywere available They were entrusted with overwhelming firepower and wereremote from control by superiors or public opinion Their quality improvedenormously after the First World War, but even the most just among them rep-resented alien and impersonal regimes: an Igbo masquerade caricatured ‘Gov-ernment’ as a faceless figure clutching a sheet of paper Their courts mainlyenforced their own orders and prohibitions And when these ‘student mag-istrates’, as an African described them, tried to enforce indigenous law, itsunwritten character left them in the hands of the elderly men they consulted,who often reshaped custom to their own advantage, chiefly at the expense ofwomen and the young ‘The white men brought peace between Igbo com-munities,’ an Igbo later recalled, ‘but they have not brought peace within thecommunities.’6

Officials could not avoid reliance on African agents At headquarters theydepended on clerks and interpreters, one of whom was accused in Dahomey

in 1909 of having ‘established a court in which he regulates all matters beforesubmitting them to the administrator; this is not done for nothing, chicken,sheep, money have to be paid [He] has said that the white man willbelieve anything he says.’7For communication with the countryside, officialsrelied on messengers – the key figures in Northern Rhodesia’s rural adminis-tration – or soldiers, ‘pure barbarians [whose] brutality on the villagers’8was one grievance underlying John Chilembwe’s rebellion Their rural agentsmight have indigenous authority, but they might be merely appointed ‘taxchiefs’, as they were known in C ˆote d’Ivoire, or ‘government dogs’, as the Nuba

of Sudan described them Many early colonial agents had no better claim thaneager collaboration Some were aliens, such as the Swahili-speaking coast-men whom the Germans used in East Africa or the Fulbe whom they andthe British imposed on stateless highlanders in Cameroun and Nigeria Butthe most powerful Africans within the colonial situation were the farseeingmodernisers who quickly recognised that armed resistance was doomed andthat wisdom dictated the manipulation of the colonial order to their own