African History Lecture Notes – 11th March 2004

[Get introduction off mike]

there was little conflict between France and Britain in West Africa; around 1870 they tried to define spheres of influence to avoid conflict; the main ambitions were commercial rather than political or territorial

Bismark, the leader of the newly unified Germany wanted to his nation to become a major European power; but it lacked any particular idea of how to do it, and so they simply arrived at various place that were unoccupied (by Europeans powers) and signed a few treaties and declared them protectorates, namely Togo  and Cameroon

This triggered the established powers to claim more territory – the scramble for Africa:
- the main powers (UK, France, Germany) recognised that is this went unchecked, it could lead to military conflict, which had potential to spill-over back to Europe, which was in no one’s interests

Bismark argued successfully that the issue should be sorted out rationally, and thus organised the Berlin Conference of 1884, attended by Foreign Ministers from the involved nations
- this was the initial sanctioning/licence for territorial empire

Salisbury, as British Foreign Minister, and later as Prime Minister was content to maintain, and slightly expand, Britain’s existing West African settlements
- much of the interior of West Africa was abandoned to France, but this huge swathe of territory was much less important militarily

somewhat arrogantly, the European powers acquired the states often lacking any real knowledge of what was there; for example, the French encountered Islamic states as they travelled inland along the Niger river, particularly a state led by Samori Touray, an Islamic state that was mobile, lacked specific territory

The British expanded in a less aggressive way; for example, the Gold Coast state expanded from the Coast in the South in states, first the Asante, who were first occupied in 1896 and eventually suppressed in 1901, and then later the savannah further North

In Nigeria, the British were established as traders in the South West of the country, and slowly subjugated the rest of Nigeria, overthrowing Sokoto in the North in 1903

Overall, the scramble for Africa was a rapid process, essentially complete by 1905, a mere 20 years after it began. This was largely attributable to the huge technology gap, perhaps as large as it has ever been, especially the machine gun.

No European colony had any real idea of how to govern their colonies, how to administrate and extract money

- The British administration was often desscribed as ad-hoc, but in reality even this was overstating it. In an effort to make the colonies self-financing, a political imperative, there were attempts to create mono-crop economies, which is the origin of cocoa domination in the Gold Coast, for example. Cotton and groundnuts were also introduced in Western Nigeria. The idea was that it would be easy to set a single price for these crops.

Both military dominance and mono-crop economies depended on transport networks, especially railways. In Ghana, the railway reached Kumasi in 1903, with no need to expand into the economically less significant North.

A macro-consequence of World War I was that the Germans were thrown out of West Africa – Cameroon was partitioned between the French and the British

Sir Frederick Lugard is regarded almost as the single author of British imperial theory. He was first stationed in East Africa, and later became the 1st Governor of Nigeria. He was well aware of British pre-war priorities and came up with the theory of ‘indirect rule’

British colonial government would be more effective, inexpensive and efficient if it could create a collaborative class, a (racist) assumption that the natives would be happier if they were ruled by other natives

This theory was tested in Sokoto, an area with a particularly hierarchical set of chiefdoms and so on, however this was not universal in Africa.
- in areas without which lacked leaders, the British would simply create them, as was the case among the Ibo in South East Nigeria. Here Lugard and his successors create warrant chiefs in the 1920s. These became petty tyrants and the Ibo resented, and successfully rebelled against them.

This ended indirect rule as a pure theory, but it continued (in part due to lack of alternatives) to be use in various adapted forms.

Lugard, less famously, also discussed the moral compass of Africans, and wrote ‘The Dual Mandate’, which expressed Britian’s role/responsibilities to Africans, albeit in patronising, racist terms. It discussed the material and moral advancement that Africans needed for Self-government (in the very distant future)

This theory was perhaps most forcibly expressed in the smaller colonies like Sierra Leone. Structural developments like deep-water harbours and roads, but the most significant component was Education

In 1925, the education secretary Ormsby-Gore visited West Africa and argued for a radical increase in Education, partly for dual-mandate, but also to create a collaborative elite which would allow the extension of indirect rule. In addition to the intended result, it also created a new generation of educated nationalists, who were eventually to overthrow the colonial rulers.