The Scramble for Africa

 In any search for significant British manufacturing places, the continent of Africa figures for good or mainly evil. It had the resource that the Industrial Revolution needed but also that for which the developed world hungered. Thus any account of British manufacturing cannot ignore what was long known as the dark continent, not least since that is where our ancestors came from.

I have long had a book on my shelves titled The Scramble for Africa. In it Thomas Pakenham takes his reader through a dreadful story on so many levels. Yet, Europe's relationship with the continent does go back much further than his essentially nineteenth century account.

With the Ottoman empire controlling the Mediterranean, Spain (Christopher Columbus 1492) went west, but Portugal (Vasco da Gama 1498) headed east following the coast of Africa and round the cape up to Madagascar and across the Indian ocean. The Portuguese claimed possession of Angola on the west coast and Mozambique in the East. (I write of my father's experience of trading in Mozambique in the early twentieth century in my book Dunkirk to D Day. He bartered 'Manchester goods' for ground nuts and mealies.)

Soon after da Gama, the Portuguese were trading brass for ivory in vast quantities; the country known as the Cote d'Ivoire was so named with good reason. The Nigerians were taking a little of the brass and rolling it flat to take finely drawn images - one such is one of the one hundred objects Neil MacGregor chose for his History of the World. The evidence is of mutual respect with no hint of racism which would come later with the slave trade.

The first slaves were taken to America in 1619 – there followed a trade in human beings who would be rounded up by African chiefs and sold to European traders to transport to the sugar and cotton plantations of the New World. Some twelve million people were traded in this way in unbelievable horror. In the context of British manufacturing we have to accept that the labour which slavery provided was fundamental to the supply of cotton which was a key raw material of the industrial revolution. I should note in passing that each of Spain, Portugal, the Dutch, the Ottomans and indeed Africans traded slaves alongside the British.

Pakenham starts his story in 1876 with Queen Victoria's nephew, Leopold II of Belgium, who believed that the Belgians would benefit from an empire; after all it was not only the Portuguese: the Spanish had South America, the British had India and America, the Dutch has the East Indies and the French not only America but interests in Indo-China. Leopold had been inspired by the stories of exploration of Livingstone and Stanley. He cast his initiative as philanthropic with Stanley as his explorer.

Pakenham's account is long and detailed, but I think there are threads which can be drawn. Exploration of the dark continent was not to be undertaken lightly; it was dangerous and demanding. The account written by Stanley of the hardships of exploration one might have thought would be enough to discourage all but the brave; yet there were brave men.

Britain, France and Germany were jostling for position in Europe and their ambitions spread to the dark continent. Germany had not been interested in imperial expansion until Bismark had a change of heart, but after that they were well into the scramble. The Dutch in the shape of the Boers were already in the south.

The role of the Ottomans is significant since they gained control of a good portion of north east Africa. Sudan was under the rule of a Muslim emperor.

The other role sometimes forgotten was that of the Africans themselves. Pakenham paints a picture of great diversity of both groups and their leaders - some three thousand tribes. Some lived in temperate and beautiful places enjoying a peaceful existence. There were some large towns with the ruling class living in some luxury. There was art as evidenced by the Nigerian brass plate with finely drawn images. For others it was dessert, swamp or rain forrest. Many were involved in trading ivory, but also slaves. Some, like the Zulus, made disciplined soldiers, others were cannibals. Of these some were obscenely cruel whilst others ate their dead for essential food. Cruelty abounded. Time and again men, women and children would run in terror from fellow African slave traders. Pakenham notes in particular Uganda where the same trait of cruelty was evident well into the twentieth century.

Cruelty was not the sole preserve of the Africans. The actions of members of the European nations were carefully covered up, but, when exposed, rank in evil alongside those of the dominant African tribes but on an even larger scale.

There is a philanthropic strand with missionary activity at its heart. Many in Europe had been sickened by the slave trade and saw it their duty to civilise the 'pagan' Africans. This they did with the spirit of the Reformation: Protestant and Catholic in sometimes violent opposition.

The British succeeded in passing legislation abolishing the slave trade in their territories in the early nineteenth century. The focus of the trade moved east to Sudan which was split between Ottoman and native Africa; the Ottomans had murdered General Gordon in the siege of Khartoum and the Mahadists controlled Sudan. Thirteen years later, of which I write much more below, Egypt under British advisory rule invaded under General Kitchener and slaughtered 12,000 Mahadists at Omdurman. These were but two of many bloody battles.

What I find particularly interesting is the key role taken by British commerce. I wrote in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World how trade had driven exploration. The idea was that a charter company along the lines of the East India Company could gain trade for Britain without cost to the exchequer. Initially it worked to a degree, but, as the competing governments gained more and more imperialist ambitions, there was more at stake and the governments took over. In Britain this coincided with the arrival of Joseph Chamberlain at the Colonial Office.

So we have The Imperial British African Company (previously the British East Africa Company) in East Africa set up by Sir William Mackinnon. Mackinnon was a man inspired by Livingstone and who shared his belief that the task of developing Africa had the three strands of Christianity, Commerce and Civilisation. For Mackinnon, Christianity came first and he wrestled with the discordance of this with the growing capitalism. Commerce mattered too, for Mackinnon also ran one of the largest shipping lines, later to become Inchcape, amongst many commercial enterprises. His company was to develop trade in East Africa. It had an ambition to build a railway from Mombasa to Lake Victoria. The Duke of Sutherland was among the directors and I have photograph of my father on Mombasa railway station in 1908 with the Duke's son the Marquis of Stafford whom my father had met by chance on the ship out from England.

The collapse of Barings bank made financing the railway increasingly difficult so much so that the company ran out of money and, after much blood was shed, the territory fell to the protection of the British government. British East Africa comprised Uganda and what would become Kenya.

In the south, there was gold and diamonds for explorers. Companies to emerge which are still in evidence today included De Beers and Consolidated Goldfields, in both of which Cecil Rhodes had a significant interest. His Charter Company (British South African Company) led the push north into what became Rhodesia and then further into copper rich Northern Rhodesia which became Zambia.

In the west, Sir George Goldie's National African Company (later known as the Royal Niger Company and United Africa Company) led expansion. Goldie was the youngest son of an old Isle of Man family and very much a free spirit. The battle was for the palm oil and ivory trade on the Niger and the French under Pierre Brazza proved stiff competition. The conflict linked to the control of the upper Nile and the influence it could have on Egypt where the British and French uncomfortably shared control.

In a sense King Leopold was another commercial participant even though he avowed philanthropic principles. The Congo was rich in wild rubber and as road transport took off so too did the demand for rubber from the likes of Dunlop. The Congo had become profitable.

Overriding all of this were competing ambitions. The British, led really by Rhodes, imagined an Africa which could be crossed from north to south without leaving territory coloured pink on the map. Then the French looked to do the same, but from East to West. Italians wanted influence in Ethiopia and the Germans in South West and East Africa. The Portuguese were already there in Mozambique and Angola.

The flea in the ointment were the Sudanese Mahdists with their Dervish warriors and here we come to Kitchener, Obduman and revenge for the murder of Gordon. The script remains the same, the French and British advancing to the upper Nile, the French from their lands in the west, the British and Egyptians from the north ; their mutual enemy the Mahadists.

For the British it was technology that triumphed: the Sudan military railway built by Percy Girouard who would be Director General of Munitions Supply in the First World War. The building of the railway as the army advanced was a triumph; workshops were set up at Wadi Halfa on the Nile in Sudan. Less so the locomotives, so Rhodes sent heavy engines from the south and others were imported from America. Then the weapons: the newly invented Maxim machine gun (1884) made in London. In 1888, the Lee-Metford Rifle was developed, combining the rifled-bore developed by William Ellis Metford with the bolt action and detachable magazine of James Paris Lee. This rifle succeeded the Martini Henry all made by the Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield. The Lee-Medford was in turn superseded by the Lee-Enfield, designed in 1895. Rifles were also provided by the Birmingham Small Arms Factory. Howitzers made in Woolwich and gun boats steaming up the Nile added to the extraordinary arsenal. The Dervishes had spears and obsolete slow firing Remingtons.

The result was victory for Kitchener who then put his large force face to face with the very small French force also competing for control of the Upper Nile. Eventually the French politicians relented leaving the British in control of the vast expanse between Lake Victoria and the Mediterranean.

A small statistic intrigued me. Kitchener’s steam ships could make the journey back to Britain in sixteen days; it had taken Kitchener two and a half years to get from Cairo, albeit that he was building a railway as he went!

Now it was the turn of the British to suffer from inefficient lines of supply. The Boers in the Transvaal had Mauser rifles from Germany and French De Bange artillery, but were thought to be no match for the British. How wrong! This was war as it would haunt the twentieth century. Kitchener joined the British, but even he made no quick difference.

Pakenham observes that twenty years of struggle until then had cost comparatively few British lives (but many African), but in South Africa angry Boer farmers armed with the latest German rifles gave the British army a taste of the emerging world. As witness, a young Winston Churchill reported on the war.

The formal war, strongly supported by the British gold mining interests in Johannesburg, ended with the British as victors, but the Boers would not give in. There followed a commando war with attacks on British supply columns and retaliatory raids on Boer farmers. Kitchener saw that the raids weren’t working and began a process of enclosing groups of Boers behind barbed wire fences policed by armed Africans who had no love for their Boer masters. This process developed into camps where mainly women and children were crowded together with restricted rations; disease became rife. The British press reported to an horrified public on these ‘concentration’ camps. It was horrific, but a fraction of whites died compared to many thousands of Africans during the Struggle. Eventually the Boers relented, but victory had a sour taste. Countless Africans continued to suffer. It was not only Africans, the gold mines recruited Chinese coolies who lived and worked as slaves, for Africans now rejected mining because of its low wages. The Chinese problem occupied the British press and the Under Colonial Secretary, Winston Churchill.

The Congo remained in Leopold’s hands and paid for grand projects in Belgium. It soon became apparent that rubber was being collected by slave labour. But worse was the treatment of the slaves and the canabalism of many of the indigenous masters. Disease spread and the population shrank. The French, in their part of the Congo, piggybacked on the abuse and eventually saw a monetary return for years of effort. A report of the situation by Roger Casement sent shockwaves through Britain. Yet, neither France nor Germany wished to rock the boat. The Germans had more pressing issues.

German West Africa witnessed rebellion against the white occupiers. The solution was cruel oppression; if the rebels couldn’t be beaten on the battlefield they would be driven into the Kalahari desert to die from thirst, disease and starvation. Similarly in East Africa, the local tribes rebelled believing they were protected by 'medicine'. They pulled up the cotton crop, which they were being force to grow, and at first succeeded. Reinforcements arrived and the rebels discovered that their medicine was ineffective. Starvation by the destruction of crops proved a better and crueller weapon than the Mausers. Such was the destruction that inhabited and farmed areas reverted to being the home of wild animals.

Rebellion now spread to the French Congo and Pierre Brazza was sent back to report. He died whilst on his mission, but evidence of cruelty hit the Paris newspapers. The British now faced challenges in Nigeria, the government having bought out Goldie. More atrocities were reported.

Churchill visited East Africa in 1907 and wrote columns for the Strand Magazine, boyish articles of adventure. These, I suspect caught my father’s imagination. Churchill found in Kenya white settlers determined to dominate the Africans; yet, in Uganda a Black Country was developing into Livingstone’s vision.

Leopold eventually sold the Congo to the Belgian government, but left the country largely ungoverned. It was rich not only in rubber, but also copper and rare metals. South Africa gained independence but shocked the British by electing a Boer to lead the Transvaal allowing a colour bar throughout the new country.

The Second World War took the former German colonies and portioned them out. After the war the Gold Coast discovered new riches as the world developed an appetite for cocoa. This was the first country to gain independence, as Ghana. There followed the ‘wind of change’ as former colonies gained independence from their former masters. British influence was kept alive by radio. There is an anecdote of a Deltic engine being used in Somalia to power BBC World Service radio transmissions into the African continent. Such was the size of the radio valves used that, when the ‘pips’ were broadcast, the roar of the engine could be heard for miles across the desert.

The powers may have gone, but commercial enterprises remained. In the south De Beers Diamonds and Consolidated Goldfields continue to meet the world’s demands. In sub saharan Africa it was Tiny Rowlands' Lonrho (London and Rhodesian Mining and Land Company Limited). Zambia and Zaire (the former Congo) have rich reserves of copper and rare metals which were exploited by RTZ which had been mining there since 1929, and many others including Konkola Copper Mines.

In my research for both How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines, many British companies had significant operations in Africa.

In the mid 1930s, investigations had been made to assess the possibility of setting up industrial production in Kenya to remove the necessity of importing so many manufactured goods. The place chosen, Nakuru, was conveniently located on the Kenyan communication system both for the collection of raw materials and distribution of finished goods. With the coming of the Second World War and the entry of the Italians in 1940, Nakuru was mobilised to produce what was needed to defend the northern frontier. There was a tannery capable of producing five tons of leather a month, a whole plant for the manufacture of blankets, shoe machinery and a soap plant.

I write in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World how Lever Brothers had acquired the Niger Company in 1920 to secure supplies of palm oil and how in 1929 the Niger company merged with the African and Eastern Trade Corporation Ltd, to form The United Africa Company Ltd. Perhaps in parallel with the initiative in East Africa, from the late thirties through the war and into the late forties, the UAC shifted its focus from providing African countries with what they needed to setting up local manufacturing

These examples barely scratch the surface. Now much of Africa has now fallen to the commercial influence of the Chinese.

Further reading

Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991)