Roberts A.D. The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 7: from 1905 to 1940
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THE GROWTH OF MODERN POLITICS
On one major issue the northern associations could claim to
have scored a distinct success. This was the question of 'closer
union'. In 1928 the Hilton Young Commission explored the
prospects for closer union in East Africa, Northern Rhodesia and
Nyasaland. This prompted the Southern Rhodesian prime
minister, Moffat, and several settlers in Northern Rhodesia to
express their preference for an amalgamated Rhodesia. The
commission, however, concluded that such union would not be
in the interests of Africans and in 1930 the Labour colonial
secretary, Lord Passfield, reaffirmed the principle that African
interests should prevail in any conflict with those of immigrant
races.
27
This had little effect on colonial governments, but it
reinforced the belief of settlers in Northern Rhodesia that their
salvation must lie in union with the south, as did the shock of
the African strikes on the Copperbelt in 1935. Many whites in the
south also supported amalgamation, which now offered hopes of
a share in the new-found wealth of the Copperbelt. In January
1936 a conference at Victoria Falls of settler representatives from
both north and south called for early amalgamation of the
Rhodesias and 'complete self-government', i.e., the removal of
Britain's reserve powers in the south. Meanwhile, in April 1935,
all three governors in Central Africa had agreed with Huggins,
the Southern Rhodesian prime minister, on the need for closer
inter-territorial co-operation in several fields. These converging
pressures induced Britain, in
1937,
to appoint
a
Royal Commission
to consider closer co-operation or association between the Rhod-
esias and also Nyasaland, whose labour was crucial to the whole
region.
The commission was chaired by Lord Bledisloe, a former
governor-general of New Zealand, and included MPs from the
three main British political parties, a businessman, and the former
director of East Africa's unified postal system. In 1938 the
commission took evidence from whites in all three territories, and
also from African groups north of the Zambezi, though not in
Southern Rhodesia. The African evidence came from native
authorities, welfare associations, teachers, civil servants and
mineworkers. All voiced emphatic and often well-argued opposi-
tion to amalgamation. Most had seen the south for themselves and
knew that even if some Africans there were materially better off
" See above, p. 64, and below, p. 687.
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BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA
than those in the north, they were consistently denied opportun-
ities to make the most of their abilities; besides, they had lost most
of their land and were harassed by pass-laws. The commission was
impressed
by its
African witnesses and duly reported that 'the
striking unanimity,
in the
northern territories,
of the
native
opposition
to
amalgamation...[is
a
factor] which cannot
in
our
judgment be ignored'. The commissioners were divided as to the
inherent desirability of amalgamation but agreed that it should be
postponed
for
the time being, since the subjection
of
so many
people to a unified government against their will' would prejudice
the prospect
of
co-operation in ordered development'.
28
Within
a year, the Second World War cut short further discussion of the
question. The commission's equivocal and irresolute report did
not by any means
close
the door en white hopes of amalgamation,
29
but
it
did give Africans
in
the north some reassurance that their
opinions mattered, and
in
Nyasaland,
at
least,
its
enquiries had
served
to
strengthen among African leaders
a
growing sense of
territorial,
if
not yet national, identity.
Faced from the late
1920s
with increasing economic deprivation,
few
of
Central Africa's rural inhabitants found much assistance
in the new associations. Instead, they took refuge in
a
variety of
religious movements which appeared
to
offer more convincing
answers
to
the problems that now confronted them. Misfortune
was still commonly believed to derive principally from the action
of witches. But whereas
in
the nineteenth century the welfare of
the land was a primary religious concern, by the 1920s the welfare
of individuals appears
to
have grown more important,
a
development associated with the enhanced importance bestowed
on an active, interventionist High God in most people's systems
of
belief.
Millennialist ideas took root, and though some
of
the
prophetic movements that resulted were
of a
localised nature,
others spread over
the
greater part
of the
region. Specially
important were the ideas
of
the New York-based Watch Tower
Bible and Tract Society (Jehovah's Witnesses), whose literature
foretold
the
imminent
end of
the world
in its
existing form.
Outside the mines of Katanga and Southern Rhodesia where they
28
Quoted
in
Richard Gray,
Tie
two nations. Aspects
of
race
relations
in the
Khodesias and
Njasaland (London, i960), 177, 193.
29
W. K.
Hancock, Survey
of
British Commonwealth affairs, 11. Problems
of
economic
policy
8—19)9,
part
2
(London, 1942), 124—7.
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THE GROWTH OF MODERN POLITICS
appealed mainly to a literate minority, African Watch Tower
preachers were influential up to 1920 only in scattered districts
of Nyasaland and in the north-east of Northern Rhodesia. But in
1924 returning migrants from the Wankie colliery evoked a
massive if transitory response in the Luapula valley. This was
followed over the next few years by a succession of waves of
popular enthusiasm in northern Mashonaland, between 1925 and
1929,
and among the Lala of Northern Rhodesia where Tomo
Nyirenda's witch-killing exploits in 1925-6 gained the movement
unwelcome publicity. Watch Tower doctrines appealed in the
early 1930s to the exploited Wiko people of Barotseland, resentful
of Lozi domination. Elsewhere, the supervisors appointed in the
mid-1930s to Zomba and Lusaka from white South African Watch
Tower congregations probably weakened the movement through
their repudiation of the practices of many rural congregations
which had taken on a character of their own.
While Watch Tower preachers prepared for the Second Coming
by seeking in a number of different ways to restructure rural
societies, movements of witchcraft eradication concentrated
instead on cleansing those societies once and for all of
evil.
Long
before the twentieth century, generalised attempts to eradicate
witchcraft appear to have occurred occasionally in a number of
societies as alternatives to more conventional procedures of
detecting individual witches. But with the establishment of
colonial rule, confidence in these conventional procedures was
weakened by the outlawing of the poison ordeal which chiefs had
previously used to test individual cases. And further tension was
created during the depression with the return home of thousands
of unemployed migrants, many of whom found difficulty in
reconciling the achievement-orientated assumptions of the new
economic order with the community-orientated morality of the
village. The result was the emergence of a number of witchcraft
eradication movements, directed, so it has been suggested 'not
so much against individual sorcerers...but against sorcery as a
frame of reference and an institution'.
30
By far the most popular
and the most far-flung was the
mchape
movement of
1933—4.
The
movement originated in the Mlanje district of Nyasaland, whence
it
was
carried by vendors selling medicine into Northern Rhodesia,
30
W. M. J. van Binsbergen, 'The dynamics of religious change in western Zambia',
Ufabamu, 1976, 6, 5, 81-2.
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BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA
Tanganyika, Mozambique and Southern Rhodesia. Those who
gave
up all
charms and drank
the
medicine were promised
freedom from
all
witchcraft, with the threat that those who
attempted witchcraft thereafter would suffer instant death.
In
village after village
a
sense of communal purification was achieved,
though inevitably
it
failed to last for long.
The desire for healing that existed within the
mchape
movement
was even more prominent in the Spirit-type churches of Southern
Rhodesia, the area of Central Africa least affected by
mchape.
Spirit
healing can be traced
in
southern Africa from its roots
in
the
evangelical tradition
of
the Dutch Reformed Church, through
contacts with American evangelists,
to
the creation
in
South
Africa
of a
large number
of
Zionist churches.
In
Southern
Rhodesia the key agents were workers returning from the south
where they had been attracted to the Zionist message. In the 1920s
they introduced Zionism into western Mashonaland and by the
1950s were attracting
a
substantial following, predominantly
among Shona cultivators previously uninvolved
in
mission
Christianity. The Vapostori movement of Johanne Maranke
in
eastern Mashonaland obtained particularly widespread support.
Led by
a
charismatic prophet famed for his healing powers, the
Vapostori combined
a
radical assault
on
many traditional
approaches
to
misfortune with
an
appeal
'to
the fundamental
notions of healing, prophecy and exorcism which had formed the
basis
of
Shona traditional religion'.
31
By 1940
adherents
received communion from the founder at over
a
hundred sites.
It
is
an indication of the substantial inroads that Christianity
had made
in
Central Africa by the 1930s that, though disillus-
ionment concerning the transforming power of the Gospel was
at its height during this period, many Africans followed orthodox
paths
in
their search for religious initiative. The leaders
of
the
independent churches founded
in
northern Nyasaland between
1928 and 1934 possessed theological views not dissimilar from
those held
in the
Presbyterian church from which they
had
broken, along with
a
passionate belief in the virtues of modern
economic and educational training. Their answer to the collapse
of the migrant labour economy was thus not
a
withdrawal into
passive millennialism but rather a desperate if unavailing struggle
to create independent schools and colleges of a quality sufficient
31
T. O.
Ranger, The African
voice
in
Southern
Rhodesia ifyf-ipjo (London, 1970), 221.
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THE GROWTH OF MODERN POLITICS
to supply Africans with the techniques that mission education was
not providing. In 1934 the independent church leader Y. Z.
Mwase founded the Nyasaland Black Man's Educational Society,
' to improve and develop the impoverished condition of the black
man...by starting a Purely Native Controlled high school or
college'. Such organisations met with little practical success, but
they were significant as attempts by Africans to take the process
of improvement into their own hands.
32
Under such ministers as
Hanoc Phiri in Nyasaland and John Membe in Northern Rhodesia,
networks of schools were established under the control of the
African Methodist Episcopal Church and rivalled those of the
older missions. Even where Christians did not leave the mission
churches, they were often active in such urban centres as the
Copperbelt and the Harare township of Salisbury in creating
interdenominational churches virtually independent of missionary
control.
For all the variety of African initiatives in the inter-war years,
colonial authority remained secure in 1940. Bodies such as the
Bantu Congress of Southern Rhodesia or the grandly-named
Northern Rhodesia African National Congress, founded among
the Plateau Tonga in 1937, were still primarily elite accommoda-
tionist bodies incapable of exerting effective pressure on the
government. Urban unrest was still too disorganised, small-scale
and sporadic to cause more than occasional inconvenience. The
answers sought in rural areas tended to draw people away from
confrontations with the authorities, though the colourful imagery
of independent Watch Tower preaching, with its emphasis on the
arrival of black Americans in aeroplanes and the consequent
removal of the
whites,
struck discordant notes that the government
would have preferred not to hear.
At a deeper level, however, there are indications to suggest that
the network of local alliances so carefully woven in the earlier
years of the century was becoming badly frayed in the 1930s. For
reasons that have still not been adequately explored, African
policemen and soldiers appear to have been largely untouched by
the widespread crisis of confidence in the colonial order that
spread through the ranks of African intermediaries. But many
chiefs, upon whose shoulders responsibility in the local areas had
been placed, were not immune to the infection. The success of
32
For further details, see McCracken, Politics and Christianity, 28J.
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BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA
Watch Tower, 'first of the twentieth-century mass movements to
demonstrate the collapse of chiefly power',
33
gave warning of the
paradox that the more authority colonial officials transferred
to
chiefs,
the
less respect they could expect from their African
subjects.
Ila
chiefs opposed
to
the activities
of
Watch Tower
prophets
in
1934 were either compelled
to
accede
to
public
demand or else were forced from office.
Mchape
vendors organised
village ceremonies whether chiefs co-operated or not. As govern-
ment intervention became more active
in
the aftermath
of
the
depression, so the weakness of their agents was exposed. Several
Plateau Tonga farmers responded positively from 1936
to
the
introduction of the so-called Kanchomba system, which employed
farmers to demonstrate improved agricultural techniques to their
neighbours. But by introducing a measure of compulsion into its
proposals for stemming soil erosion, the agricultural department
placed
a
burden on
its
African intermediaries that would eventually
provoke
resistance.
So
resentful were growers
in
central Nyasaland
at the low prices paid
for
their tobacco
by
the government-
controlled marketing board that
in
1937 they burnt their crops
and upset their baskets on the roads.
33
Ranger, African
voice,
Z12.
648
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CHAPTER
13
EAST AFRICA
By 1905, the British and the Germans had occupied several
strategic points in East Africa. They were the latest of many
intruders from overseas. The coast and the offshore islands had
long shared in the commerce of
the
Indian Ocean. The expansion
of trade in the nineteenth century quickened the flow of Arab
immigrants and also prompted Indian traders to settle among the
black, and mostly Muslim, Swahili-speakers of the East African
littoral. The British government intervened in Zanzibar and
up-country mainly to secure the western flank of its Indian
empire: well into the twentieth century it continued to regard East
Africa as an appendage to India. But both British and Germans
also came to colonise the hinterland. The British had recently
completed the Uganda Railway, which ran from Mombasa
through scrub and desert to the temperate uplands south of Mount
Kenya, across the great Rift Valley and down to the shores of Lake
Victoria. The western part of this line skirted the populous
countries of the Kikuyu and Luo, and lake steamers completed
the link between the coast and the kingdom of Buganda. Here
the scope of British initiative was constrained by an agreement
reached in 1900 with a ruling elite already converted and educated
by Christian missionaries. But either side of the Rift there were
fertile and lightly occupied highlands which attracted white
farmers, especially from South Africa, while British planters
moved into western Uganda (the name used by the British for both
Buganda and much of the surrounding territory). Meanwhile,
German planters and farmers clustered round the hills of Uluguru
and Usambara, and the lower slopes of Kilimanjaro. As yet, there
were few white immigrants, but their governments assumed that
they had a crucial role to play in promoting economic and cultural
change, while the settlers themselves expected a share in
government. At the same time, colonial rule in East Africa
attracted a new wave of Indian traders, and also Indian clerks and
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EAST AFRICA
K
E N Y A
Land over
1500
metres
0 300 km
200miles
23 East Africa,
1935
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COLONIAL CONSTRUCTION
artisans. At home, of course, Indians were a 'subject race', and
Europeans tended to treat them as such in East Africa. But they
were also feared as possible rivals: Indians too contributed
modern skills, and many identified themselves with European
efforts to 'civilise' Africa. In 1905 it remained to be seen whether
immigrants would be given effective political roles in East Africa:
if they were, the question of racial balance would clearly be hotly
debated. Beyond this, however, white settlement raised a still
more fundamental issue: the balance to be struck in assigning
land, labour and capital as between Europeans and the indigenous
African population. How this should be resolved was still very
much an open question.
COLONIAL CONSTRUCTION, I905-I914
The consolidation of colonial rule
Between 1905 and the outbreak of the First World War, the
colonial governments in East Africa extended their grasp over
most of the region. At the same time they were placed on a more
regular footing than hitherto. In the heat of the Scramble, Britain
and Germany had had to run up their respective flags hundreds
of miles from the coast, and each Foreign Office had hastily
improvised local administrations from whatever personnel lay to
hand: mainly army officers, civil servants borrowed from the
metropolis and adventurers rescued from ruined chartered com-
panies. It took several years to establish routines of command and
recruitment.
The British ruled three territories: the protectorates of Zanzibar
and Uganda, and the East Africa Protectorate (the future Kenya).
All three were subject to legal codes compiled for India by British
reformers in the nineteenth century. Such law controlled those
spheres of greatest interest to immigrants: taxation, communica-
tions,
property, criminal law and procedure.
1
In 1905 Uganda
and the East Africa Protectorate were transferred from the care
of the Foreign Office to that of the Colonial Office. In 1907 the
northern frontier of the East Africa Protectorate was defined by
agreement with Ethiopia; the capital was moved from Mombasa
to Nairobi, near the 'white highlands', and the legal status of
1
The substance of these Indian codes was retained until after 1930, when Britain began
to replace them.
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EAST AFRICA
slavery was abolished. By 1908, the government had largely
completed its conquest of
the
most densely populated parts of the
territory: Kenya Province, around Mt Kenya, and Nyanza
Province, bordering Lake Victoria. British control in Nyanza had
for years been disputed by the Nandi people, athwart the railway
line,
but they were subdued in 1905, after losing 600 warriors and
their chief ritual leader. In 1905 and again in 1908 the British
invaded the country of the Gusii and killed over 400 men. But
it was many years before the British were able to administer the
nomadic herdsmen who roamed the vast arid countries to the
north and east. By 1914, attempts to tax the southern Turkana
had ended in failure. East of Lake Rudolf (Turkana), a Northern
Frontier District was formed in 1910, while a post was set up on
the borders of Italian Somaliland; but the purpose of such efforts
was chiefly to fly the British flag in the face of rival European
powers.
Administrative expansion in Uganda followed a somewhat
similar pattern. In 1905, British authority was still almost entirely
confined to the lake kingdoms, and even there it was patchy. The
alliance with the Christian oligarchy in Buganda was firm enough,
but in 1905 a senior official was assassinated in Ankole and its
agreement (modelled on that with Buganda) was suspended for
seven years. In Bunyoro, resentment against intruding Ganda
chiefs provoked the despatch of British troops in 1907, though
this crisis was resolved by negotiation. Further east, Ganda
'sub-imperialism' loomed still larger: by 1905, Semei Kakungulu
had carved out a kingdom of his own between Lake Kyoga and
the populous slopes of Mt Elgon (Masaba). Over the next two
years,
the British took over the existing Ganda structure of
administration, though Ganda chiefs were redesignated ' agents'
and Kakungulu himself was transferred to Busoga, where he
helped to introduce a unified administration among its numerous
small chiefdoms. Between 1909 and 1912, British officials were
posted throughout most of northern Uganda, among the Iteso,
Langi and Acholi; in
1911,
a military post was set up in Karamoja
to suppress the gun traffic across the Ethiopian border. Through-
out these districts, and indeed on Mt Elgon, British rule was
mainly imposed by force: there were no large-scale actions as in
the East Africa Protectorate, but frequent' punitive' expeditions
were despatched to subdue the numerous small-scale polities.
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