Roberts A.D. The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 7: from 1905 to 1940
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CLASS, RACE AND POLITICS
monopolising companies. Several farmers went to gaol before the
government abandoned the measure. Settlers frequently criticised
the policy of the British South Africa Company concerning
railway rates and mining royalties, and the Company's claims to
the ownership of unalienated land. Several sectional interest
groups were formed to press the claims of farmers, mine-owners
and businessmen. As the economic strength of Southern
Rhodesia's national bourgeoisie grew, so their political influence
widened. Elected representatives in the legislative council were
conceded a de facto majority by the Company in 1907. The next
year, with the election to the council of Charles Coghlan, a
Bulawayo lawyer, they obtained a leader of stature who was to
guide them to self-government; their majority was further
increased in 1914.
While settlers sought to extend their influence over the central
government, African wage-earners in Southern Rhodesia were
involved in a desperate struggle for survival. Most were migrant
workers, employed as miners or on European farms and paid as
single men on the comfortable assumption that their families
could sustain themselves through subsistence cultivation near
their villages. Wages tended to fall during the period of recon-
struction in the mining industry from 1903 to 1912 and living
conditions also deteriorated as the number of miners increased.
Overcrowding became a basic feature of compound life; hospital
provision was virtually non-existent on the smaller mines and
even on the larger mines was frequently confined to a hut staffed
by an unqualified orderly; food supplies were so inadequate that
scurvy became common; pneumonia and dysentery also spread
through the squalid, draughty compounds. In 1906 the death-rate
among African miners averaged 76 per 1,000 and in the next year
153 black miners out of every 1,000 in the Gwanda district died,
scurvy being the greatest killer. With mortality rates so high,
criticisms from settlers and missionaries in Nyasaland and North-
ern Rhodesia could not be entirely ignored, and from 1908
government labour legislation began to be enforced with the aim
of reducing the death-rate in the compounds, and thus protecting
Southern Rhodesia's labour supply. By 1912 the death-rate had
fallen to
3 5
per
1,000;
ten years later it was down to
21.
But while
genuine improvements in food supplies and medical treatment
took place the results should not be overemphasised. Only 16 of
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BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA
the
488
mines
in
Southern Rhodesia
in
1913 were said
to
have
'good, properly equipped hospitals'; hundreds of cases of scurvy
continued
to
occur.
6
Wherever African wage-earners were employed
in
large numb-
ers
— on the
railways
or in the
public works department as well
as
on
the
mines
—
compounds were created
to
facilitate labour
control. The central problem facing employers was how to coerce
the first generation
of
workers into meeting industrial demands,
while at the same time preventing them from using their collective
muscle
to
press
for
improvements
in
living standards.
The
solution arrived
at
— the
compound system
—
derived from
innovations
at the
Kimberley diamond-mines
in the
1880s,
but it
developed some distinctive Rhodesian features. While most
compounds offered open access
to
traders and local farmers, some
compounds
in the
larger mines
had
a
closed inner core
in
which
were housed
the
workers most likely
to
desert. These were
the
men
who
had
been bound
by
labour recruiters
to
long-term
contracts
(a
system known locally as
cbibaro,
slavery), as opposed
to
the
monthly contracts offered
to the
'voluntary' workers who
were engaged
at
the
mine
itself.
Within
the
compound area
the
manager, supported
by
the
compound police, exerted
a
quasi-
military form
of
control, fining, gaoling
and
whipping workers
in the drive to increase production and eliminate inefficiency. This
system was sustained by the use
of
the Masters and Servants Act
which made
it a
criminal offence
to
break
a
labour contract,
by
pass-laws which hindered the free movement of labour and by the
widespread readiness of government officials to disregard assaults
made
by
Europeans
on
Africans
in
the
normal course
of
work.
Where prosecutions could
not be
avoided, settler juries demons-
trated
a
reluctance
to
convict. Time
and
again, white miners
charged with culpable homicide were found
not
guilty
on the
grounds that their African victims suffered from 'enlarged
spleens',
a
common consequence
of
malaria.
Yet
if
the
path
to
effective organisation
was
scattered with
daunting obstacles, labour migrants were
by
no
means passive
victims
of
the new
industrial economy. Independent workers
exchanged news
of
wages
and
working conditions
in
different
parts of the labour market, and used this information to determine
6
Quoted
by
Charles
van
Onselen, Cbibaro. African mine labour
in
Southern Rhodesia,
1900-19))
(London, 1976),
39.
614
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CLASS, RACE AND POLITICS
where they should work and with whom. Despite the constraints
of the pass system, desertion from unpopular employers frequently
took place, the general tendency being for workers to percolate
southwards to the higher wage economy of the Rand. Though
formal combination was largely lacking among miners prior to
the
1920s,
discontent
was
expressed through' loafing', slowdowns
and acts of minor sabotage, and several strikes took place — for
example at the Ayrshire mine in August 1908, as a protest against
wage reductions, and again at Wankie colliery in
1912,
when about
a hundred men were involved. Worker consciousness at an
embryonic level was thus clearly revealed, though it manifested
itself more effectively in the informal acts of individual workers
than it did in strikes and other larger-scale protests which
employers, supported by the state, were able to suppress.
It has often been asserted that military considerations were of
little importance in explaining the maintenance of European rule
in Central Africa.
7
The comment is valid in the sense that few
policemen and administrators were employed and that outlying
regions were only lightly patrolled, but in other respects it is
highly misleading. Most officials shared with Sir Ian Hamilton,
the inspector-general of the British Overseas Forces, the
belief,
expressed in 1911, that 'for years to come it is by the sword and
rifle alone that the white man must retain his hold on the
country'.
8
Control over the balance of power was jealously
preserved through rigorous restrictions on African ownership of
firearms and through the establishment of colonial armies. The
British South Africa Police in Southern Rhodesia was an elite
para-military force consisting in 1913 of
5
50
whites (an exception-
ally large figure by colonial standards),
9
plus 600 black const-
ables armed not with rifles but with knobkerries. They could rely
on the support of virtually all European males, some of them
active in the Volunteers or in rifle clubs, as well as of the
semi-official compound police, strategically placed in the mines
and townships. One of the two Nyasaland battalions of the King's
7
See, for
example, Lewis
H.
Gann,
Central
Africa: the former
British
states (Englewood
Cliffs,
NJ,
1971), 102-3.
8
Quoted
in
Martin
Chanock,
Unconsummated
union:
Britain,
Rhodesia
and
South Africa
1900-4} (Manchester, 1977),
21.
* In
contrast, there were only
332
European policemen
and
soldiers employed
in the
four British West African colonies
in 1939. A. H. M.
Kirk-Greene,
'The
thin white
line:
the
size
of the
British colonial service
in
Africa', African Affairs,
1980, 79, no.
3'4.
J9-
615
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BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA
African Rifles (KAR) was permanently stationed
at
Zomba
whence
it
made periodic sweeps through the country. Some 750
Africans armed with rifles served in the Northern Rhodesia Police
in 1912 and took part in various shows of strength and punitive
expeditions.
Military superiority provided the basis of colonial rule; informal
collaboration ensured
its
continued success. Even
in
Southern
Rhodesia where white settlers,
'the
ideal prefabricated
collaborators',
10
acted informally as agents of the ruling power,
the effective functioning of the labour system was dependent on
African intermediaries —' boss-boys', messengers and policemen
— and further north the influence
of
such men was still more
deeply felt. Office messengers played
a
large part in the day-to-
day running of administrative districts, and in return they were
rewarded with favours: wages that were higher than average, and
exemption from manual work. Chiefs in theory were little more
than underpaid policemen before the 1930s, but in practice they
relieved the colonial authorities of responsibility for hearing civil
disputes among Africans, and also assisted
in
the collection
of
taxes and in the recruiting of labour for the government. Mpezeni
II was so anxious to bolster Ngoni authority against the counter-
claims of his Chewa subjects that he actively assisted in recruiting
carriers during the First World War. Though the powers of the
Lozi monarchy were drastically reduced between 1898 and 1911,
Lewanika continued to ally himself to the Company and in 1916
raised 2,000 men to act as military porters.
African responses
to
colonial rule were conditioned
by
the
growing differentiation taking place within and between societies
from the early years of the century. Colonial capitalism developed
unevenly, so that Africans were drawn in different ways and with
different skills into the new economy. Even among underground
miners, distinctions existed between the despised
chibaro
workers,
usually drawn from peripheral areas uninvolved
in
cash-crop
farming, and ' voluntary' workers whose knowledge
of
market
conditions equipped them
to
reject the advances
of
the labour
recruiter. Where different levels
of
skills were required,
the
distinction became much clearer. Production processes
in the
10
A
phrase coined by Ronald Robinson, 'Non-European foundations of European
imperialism', in Roger Owen and Bob Sutcliffe (eds.),
Studies in the theory
of imperialism
(London, 1972), 124.
616
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CLASS, RACE AND POLITICS
mines and railways, together with the bureaucratic needs of the
government, ensured that some Africans were employed as clerks
and hospital assistants
and
others
in
skilled
or
supervisory
positions as foremen, machinists and the like. Western education,
the virtual monopoly of Christian missions up to the 1930s, was
thus
an
important differentiating factor;
it was
particularly
accessible
to
'Nyasas' from
the
sphere
of
influence
of the
Livingstonia Mission in the Northern Province — comprising 60
per cent of all schools in the protectorate in 1906. By 1915, more
than 800 students had passed through the Overtoun Institution,
most of whom followed a spell as teachers in mission employment
with work
as
clerks
and
interpreters
for the
governments
of
Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland or for the mining companies
of the south. Other centres of educational influence were estab-
lished in the Shire highlands, by the Blantyre Mission, and in the
Lozi heartland, where
the
foundation
of the
government-
sponsored Barotse National School
in
1906 provided
a
valuable
stimulus
to
the work
of
the Paris Missionary Society. Training
institutions were also founded south of the Zambezi, for example
at Mount Silinda and Nenguwo (renamed in 1915 the Waddilove
Institution) and
at
Epworth close
to
Salisbury. But
in
general
Christian education was slow
in
getting under way
in
Central
Africa,
for
while missions spread widely
in the
aftermath
of
colonial occupation, many were newcomers weakly rooted in the
local environment and active
in
the provision only
of
the most
elementary training.
For many villagers in those marginal areas regarded as labour
reserves by the colonial authorities, small-scale protests against
labour recruitment and tax-collection constituted the main polit-
ical response to colonial rule.
In
North-Eastern Rhodesia, 'mal-
contents' attempted
to
escape the authority
of
headmen, chiefs
and white officials by settling next to gardens deep in the wood-
land. Labour recruiters were sometimes attacked. Armed resist-
ance,
provoked by the imposition of tax, took place among the
Bisa in 1903, the Gwembe Tonga in 1909 and the southern Lunda
in 1912. As chiefs were drawn into the colonial administrative
structure, rural discontent was most frequently articulated
by
religious leaders. Prophets
in
southern Nyasaland
in
1907, and
again among the Gwembe Tonga in
1909,
denounced the payment
of taxes and called
for
the removal
of
Europeans.
In
Southern
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BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA
Rhodesia, African collaborators were also sometimes attacked.
In
1904
the
rainmaker Manyanga
was
quoted
as
stating that
'the
Native Messengers [policemen] would
no
longer trouble
the
natives... That
if the
whites were driven from
the
country
the
messengers would disappear with them
and
that those
who did
not side with
him
would also disappear with
the
whites.'
11
In those few districts where Christian elites were strong African
resistance took
a
different form.
The
growth
of
literate groups
provoked tensions between them
and
those who were unable
to
gain admission
to
school
or
church,
but
were likewise enmeshed
in
a
settler labour economy. Among the Tonga
and
Tumbuka
of
northern Nyasaland, from the early years
of
the
century, Christian
sectarianism provided
the
outlet through which
the
resentment
of the unprivileged
was
expressed.
In
1908 the return of the Tonga
migrant, Elliott Kamwana, from South Africa
to his
homeland
precipitated
an
outburst
of
Christian millenarianism.
12
Drawing
on the Watch Tower teachings of Charles Taze Russell, Kamwana
denounced established authorities, clerical and secular, and prom-
ised salvation
at the
approaching millennium
in
October
1914,
when
all
those who accepted
his
message would come into their
own. Within
a few
months more than 9,000 converts
had
been
made, most
of
them people
who
were frustrated
by
their failure
to get into the church and resented Livingstonia's monopoly over
western education. Though Watch Tower suffered with
the
deportation
of
Kamwana
in
1909, the needs
of
the disadvantaged
continued
to be
proclaimed
in
northern Nyasaland
by
Seventh
Day Baptist pastors,
in
particular Charles Domingo. Domingo,
a prize product
of
Livingstonia's educational system, looked
beyond the creation of Christian communities to the establishment
of
a
rival network of schools offering to the poor and isolated what
the mission
had
been unable
to
provide.
The
experiences
of
his
poverty-stricken parishioners informed
his
critique
of
colonial
society. ' Nyasaland Europeans
are as
cruel as
anything,'
he
wrote
in
an
angry indictment
of
conditions
on
settler estates.
For if
labourers refused
to
work
on the
Sabbath (Saturday), 'they will
be dismissed (torn the employment, and will/a// to get some money
to pay
for
their hut
tax.
The native
police
will
come,
and arrest them;
1
' Quoted in Charles van Onselen,' The role of collaborators in the Rhodesian mining
industry, 1900-1935',
African
Affairs, 1973, 72, no. 289, 414.
" See pp. 151-2.
618
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
CLASS, RACE AND POLITICS
they will be severely punished for their
disobedience
and Christianity
will not sweeten them.'
13
While the disadvantaged sought
to
reunite societies divided
against themselves by western influence, clerks, teachers and other
members of the educated elite more frequently tried to maintain
and extend privileges gained during the early years of the century.
In centralised kingdoms, where vestiges
of
political authority
survived, educated Christians combined with sections
of the
aristocracy
in
pressing
on the
government plans
for
'tribal'
improvement. Though Lewanika's plans for making his kingdom
strong and economically efficient were largely frustrated by the
British South Africa Company, he continued right up to his death
in 1916
to
associate himself with those modernising influences
which he believed would strengthen the monarchy.
In
1904
he
invited black South African missionaries of the African Methodist
Episcopal Church
to
Barotseland
in an
unsuccessful attempt
to
establish better schools than those provided by the Paris Mission.
When the scheme collapsed, he changed his tactics and from 1906
joined with mission-educated Lozi,
in
particular
the
chief
councillor Mokamba,
in
sending petitions
to the
British high
commissioner complaining about the Company's encroachments
on Lozi sovereignty and the small percentage of hut-tax that went
to the royal exchequer. In Matabeleland too, the idea of monarchy
became
a
focus
for
political activity. Two sons
of
Lobengula,
educated in South Africa, became for a short time up to 1910 the
centre of
a
campaign for the restoration of the Ndebele kingship.
Educated Christians in Bulawayo argued for the strengthening of
the Ndebele state.
Black settlers from South Africa were
the
most experienced
exponents
of
the politics
of
privilege,
but
they too sometimes
gravitated into schemes for'tribal' improvement. From the 1890s
a stream of South African drivers, store assistants and interpreters
had moved into Southern Rhodesia. Anxious to escape from the
disabilities imposed
on
the indigenous population, they formed
a number of associations to press their claims on the government.
Loyalty
to
Britain
was
loudly proclaimed along with such
moderate requests as that they should receive exemption from the
pass-laws and be allowed
to
walk on the pavements of towns
(a
11
Quoted in John McCracken, Politics
and
Christianity
in
Malawi, ig^f-1940 (Cambridge,
1977), 216-17.
619
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BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA
privilege reserved
for
whites).
The
Company's contemptuous
rejection
of
these petitions bred
a
sense
of
disillusionment,
and
by
the
First World War individual black settlers were rejecting
their alliance with the whites
in
favour
of
African contacts. John
Hlazo, the leader of
a
group
of'
colonial boys' settled by Rhodes
at Bembesi
as a
buffer against the Ndebele,
is a
typical example.
When the Company attempted to evict him and his followers from
their land
in
1916, Hlazo reacted
by
turning
to
more radical
tactics. He hired a South African lawyer, Alfred Mangena, to fight
his case and then joined Mangena
in
the Matabele Native Home
Movement
of the
early 1920s,
led by
Nyamanda,
the son of
Lobengula. New kinds
of
expertise from the south thus entered
into Ndebele politics and influenced their subsequent direction.
THE
PRESSURES
OF WAR
The outbreak
of
hostilities between Britain
and
Germany
in
August
1914 had
important repercussions
for
many
of the
inhabitants
of
British Central Africa. Skirmishing began almost
at once
on the
long border separating Northern Rhodesia
and
Nyasaland from German East Africa, but the scale
of
operations
remained small until
the
start
of the
British invasion
of the
southern highlands of Tanganyika in May 1916.
14
As the invasion
proceeded,
the
overall commander, General Smuts, came
to
recognise that the white troops upon whom he had mainly relied
were unable
to
cope with
the
demanding climatic
and
physical
conditions. In consequence African troops, mostly from the KAR,
were largely employed
in the
final, most arduous stage
of the
campaign, the pursuit of Lettow-Vorbeck's army through Portu-
guese East Africa and back
to
Northern Rhodesia. When the war
ended
on 18
November 1918,
a
week after
the
signing
of the
armistice
in
Europe,
von
Lettow's troops were still
in the
field
and heading south from Kasama.
The
war had an
uneven impact
on the
region.
In
Southern
Rhodesia
the
effect
was
comparatively slight.
Out of a
white
population
of
27,000,
5,000
white men volunteered
for
service
in
Europe
or
East Africa but only two battalions
of
African troops
were recruited along with
a
handful
of
porters.
At no
time
did
the
war
spill onto Southern Rhodesian soil.
The
northern
14
See chapter 15,
p.
666.
620
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THE
PRESSURES
OF WAR
colonies, however, were deeply and destructively involved. Some
15,000 soldiers, about half the total strength of the KAR, were
recruited in Nyasaland; 1,741 died on active service. Nyasaland
also supplied 197,000 military porters, most of whom served for
only limited periods. In Northern Rhodesia, 3,500 troops and
between 50,000 and 100,000 porters were recruited, the great bulk
from the north-east of the country. With the intensification of the
war from 1916, districts which had previously avoided all but
minimal contacts with the colonial state were fully exposed to its
brusque demands. Villages in Northern Rhodesia within forty
miles of the border were arbitrarily uprooted. Policemen press-
ganged reluctant recruits in nocturnal raids. Large quantities of
cattle and grain were impounded for military use. Chiefs and
headmen called upon to recruit were confronted with an agonising
dilemma. Those, like Mpezeni II of the Fort Jameson Ngoni, who
complied with government demands reaped the hatred of their
subjects, but those who refused to provide porters risked being
deposed. Once the invasion of Tanganyika began, conditions for
carriers deteriorated. Supplies had to
be
carried over vast distances,
medical attention was virtually non-existent, food was in short
supply. According to official figures, deaths among carriers from
Nyasaland on active service amounted to less than 5 per cent,
15
but many of the survivors returned home starving, disease-ridden
and exhausted, to succumb during the famines of 1917 and 1918
which were caused largely by the requisitioning of food supplies.
The intensity and persistence of the war affected families far
from the battle-front. As the price of imported goods became
prohibitive, bark cloth replaced mass-produced textiles in many
homes and locally smelted hoes reappeared. In Southern Rhodesia,
the war increased demand for maize and cattle, thus buoying up
African farmers in spite of white competition; it was the post-war
slump in 1921 which tipped the scales against them. In the Shire
valley, in Nyasaland, African cotton output increased up to 1916,
only to fall away with the drain of manpower to war service.
Mining flourished in the Rhodesias. In the south, gold output
reached its all-time peak in 1914-17. War needs stimulated the
production of base metals; by 1916 chrome contributed
8
per cent
of Southern Rhodesia's exports, while in Northern Rhodesia
ls
G. W. T. Hodges, 'African manpower statistics for the British forces in East Africa,
1914-1918',
Journalof African
History,
1978, 19, 1, 109.
621
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BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA
copper was exported from Bwana Mkubwa
in
1916-18
and
lead
from Broken Hill
was the
territory's chief export from 1917
to
1925.
This activity,
and the
rapid growth
of
copper output
in
Katanga, was fuelled by increased coal-production at Wankie.
But
as import prices rose, such efforts were only made possible
by
tightening still further
the
screws
on
African workers.
In
village
and mine alike, war-work critically lowered resistance
to
disease.
In September 1918 the influenza pandemic swept through South-
ern Rhodesia, killing
7 per
cent
of
black mineworkers.
In
November
it
reached Blantyre; some 17,000 deaths were reported
in
or
near
the
principal European stations
of
Nyasaland,
and
thousands more died
in
villages where doctors could
not
reach
them.
It is difficult to generalise about the effects of the war on African
attitudes. Some soldiers, attracted
to the
army
in the
early years
by skilful propaganda
and the
offer
of
above-average wages,
developed
a
lasting sense
of
regimental loyalty.
It was
through
the efforts
of
such men, returning from Tanganyika, that the new,
military-style
bent
dance societies were spread throughout Central
Africa
in the
1920s.
For
many others, however, wartime service
was
an
embittering experience. John Chilembwe,
the
American-
trained pastor
of
the Providence Industrial Mission
in the
Shire
highlands, expressed
a
widely held view when
he
complained
in
November 1914 that 'the poor Africans who have nothing to own
in this present world,
who in
death, leave only
a
long line
of
widows
and
orphans
in
utter want
and
dire distress,
are
invited
to
die for a
cause which
is not
theirs'.'
6
Though
the
fundamental
explanation
for the
short-lived rising
led by
Chilembwe
in
January 1915 must be sought in the grievances
of
landless Lomwe
labour-tenants
on
European estates,
who
were driven
to
revolt
by
the
hopelessness
of
their economic predicament, there
is
little
doubt that resentment against forced African participation
in the
war
was an
important subsidiary factor.
Other manifestations
of
anti-war feeling took
a
wide variety
of
forms.
The
millennial doctrine
of
Watch Tower
had
been
introduced
by
Nyasa migrants
to the
Southern Rhodesian mines
about 1910. Seven years later
it
was carried into the
far
north-east
of Northern Rhodesia which
had
been particularly disrupted
by
16
Quoted
in
George Shepperson
and
Thomas Price,
Independent
African (Edinburgh,
1958),
255.
622
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