Roberts A.D. The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 7: from 1905 to 1940
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COLONIAL CONSTRUCTION
Meanwhile, the Scramble had left some unfinished business.
In
the north, the Sudan border was precisely defined for the first time
in 1914: it lay well to the south of the line sketched by Johnston
in 1900, since there was no longer any hope that the Nile might
serve as a trade route for Uganda. On the other hand, the Sudan
transferred
to
Uganda the West Nile district, where
a
British
official was posted to Arua in 1914. In the far south-west,
it
was
a sudden need
to
forestall possible Belgian claims which
in
1909-10 prompted the assertion of British authority among the
hills of Kigezi. For a decade this was resisted by the followers of
Muhumusa, the female leader
of
the Nyabingi spirit-possession
cult.
In theory, Zanzibar (together with the nearby island of Pemba)
was
a
protected 'native state';
in
practice, British officials had
made major inroads upon the power of the ruling Arab minority.
The sultan himself
was
only 17 at his accession in 1902;
a
British
regent was appointed; and the administration
of
the sultan's
household was firmly separated from that of the islands. Between
1904
and
1907
the consular jurisdictions exercised by the USA and
various European states were brought to an end.
In
1905-6 the
British consul-general was given powers of local administration
comparable to those of
a
colonial governor; in 1908 British judges
were given control over the sultan's courts; and many new posts
were created
for
British civil servants.
In
1913 Zanzibar was
transferred from the Foreign Office
to
the Colonial Office, and
its chief administrator, now termed a Resident, was placed under
the general supervision
of
the governor
of
the East Africa
Protectorate. A year later,
a
relic of Indian judicial imperialism
was removed when appeals from Zanzibar courts were transferred
from Bombay to the East African Court of Appeal, set up in 1902.
By 1905 the Germans had established some sort of presence in
most parts of their vast East African colony, but their control was
very uneven. They had just completed one short railway, from
Tanga to the plantations of Usambara, and were building another,
from the capital, Dar es Salaam, to Morogoro. Elsewhere, their
transport depended on head-porterage. The coast and its immed-
iate hinterland were under civilian rule. Further inland,
the
Germans confronted huge areas of sparsely-populated light wood-
land. There were a few pockets of dense African settlement, but
in contrast to the British territories these were situated along the
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fringes of the colony and far apart from each other. Thus German
rule expanded in the form of isolated defensive outposts rather
than as a continuous web. Many inland districts were run by army
officers from massive forts. They ruled by force and were greatly
feared, but over much of the country their authority was far from
being accepted.
This was generally true in the south-east, where the Maji Maji
rising began in July 1905. It was triggered off by the resistance
of Matumbi villagers near the coast to a scheme for compulsory
cotton-growing; it spread rapidly inland, among the Ngindo,
Mbunga, Bena and Ngoni. By March 1906 the rising had been
largely suppressed, though some rebels held out until August
1907.
On the German side, some 400 were killed, including 15
whites; in retaliation the Germans laid waste large areas and
starved whole peoples into submission. Over 200,000 people may
have died as a result of the rising, and much of the south-east was
permanently depopulated. This catastrophe hastened a review of
German administration. In 1906 the colony received its second
civilian governor, Freiherr von Rechenberg, a Prussian diplomat.
He at once embarked on a policy of reconstruction specifically
intended to preclude the possibility of another rebellion. He
sought to secure African obedience through economic incentives
rather than violence, and expanded the scope of civilian adminis-
tration. Meanwhile, relations with the home government were
reorganised: in 1907, colonial affairs were transferred from the
German Foreign Office to a new and independent Colonial Office,
and in 1911 a separate colonial service was set up. Even so, the
growth of more centralised colonial government was a slow
process. In 1914, soldiers still ruled two districts (Iringa and
Mahenge) and even civilian district officers were no mere tools
of the governor's will. The telegraph was gradually extended
inland, but in practice most district officers enjoyed a great deal
of autonomy and many also acquired great local prestige: by 1914
seven had ruled the same post for seven years or more. And the
Germans never subdued the densely populated mountain country
in the far north-west. In 1911 they killed 548 Ha but then decided
that the rest were not worth taxing. From 1907-8, Residents at
the Tutsi courts of Rwanda and Burundi tried to extend their
control over surrounding chiefdoms. In 1912 resistance to Tutsi
rule north of Rwanda was brutally suppressed, but taxes were first
collected only in 1914.
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The
growth
of
an
export
economy
For colonial governments, the taxation
of
Africans was both
a
direct and indirect means of increasing revenue. Their expenses
were rising all the time, yet they were expected in Europe to pay
their own way as soon as possible.
In
the long term, the surest
way
of
increasing revenue was
to
tax imports, but this meant
expanding exports which in turn meant inducing people to earn
cash incomes through production for export. Hence the payment
of taxes in cash was gradually made compulsory; throughout the
region the unit of currency was the Indian rupee. But in 1905 the
export trade of East Africa was very limited and in urgent need
of new initiatives. As yet, European enterprise was thin on the
ground. The great bulk of the region's exports were produced by
Africans, and
it
was the fruit of hunting and gathering as much
as husbandry. In Uganda and the East Africa Protectorate, ivory,
hides and skins loomed largest;
in
German East Africa, wild
rubber, followed by hides and skins. Grain, copra and coconuts
were exported from Malindi and Mombasa on the northern coast,
but Zanzibar was the only territory whose main export was
a
cultivated crop — cloves; and these were already widely grown
there and on Pemba island. There was clearly little prospect of
expanding production in this range of commodities: indeed, ivory
and wild rubber were rapidly wasting assets.
If
exports were
to
increase significantly, other lines
had to be
found. Various
experiments were made, but most attention was given to cotton,
simsim (sesame), coffee, sisal and plantation rubber; the last two
called for skills and capital confined as yet to Europeans.
Up
to
1914,
the
exports
of
Uganda
and the
East Africa
Protectorate came almost entirely from African producers.
In
Uganda, large-scale white settlement was never likely: the climate
was unsuitable, and in Buganda, the heart of the territory, African
land rights were firmly entrenched by the 1900 agreement. For
Sir Hesketh Bell, governor from 1905
to
1910, the best hope of
raising revenues
lay in
persuading Africans
to
grow cotton.
Between 1908 and 1914, cotton exports increased nearly sevenfold
in value, to £331,000, rising from one-third to two-thirds of total
exports, even though the population had recently been gravely
reduced by sleeping-sickness. This cotton was mostly grown by
a mass of small producers who still grew their own food: those
in Buganda and Busoga led the way, but by 1914 much cotton
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was coming from Teso. There were
a
few European planters,
mostly in Buganda: by 1914 these produced
arabica
coffee worth
5 per cent
of
total exports, but as yet little
of
their rubber was
ready for tapping.
In the East Africa Protectorate, African cultivation was also
assisted, though here its main function, in the eyes of most senior
officials, was
to
tide the colony over while infant European
enterprises gathered strength. Attempts
to
promote cotton
in
Nyanza province failed, partly because the local people found
it
easier, and more immediately profitable, to grow simsim. By 1913,
this was the territory's second export, following hides and skins.
The value of simsim exports was only
a
quarter of Uganda's cotton
exports, but much was also sold at home and in any case Nyanza
also exported maize. In 1913
it
was reckoned that 70 per cent of
agricultural exports were produced by Africans. Europeans had
indeed begun
to
grow coffee
in
the highlands, but
in
1914 this
accounted
for
only
4 per
cent
of
total exports, now worth
£444,000 (three-quarters of Zanzibar's). Sisal and rubber planta-
tions near the coast had scarcely come into production. Revenue
in 1914 was £985,000, more than three times that of Uganda.
In German East Africa the export of cultivated crops was much
further advanced by 1905 than in the British territories. This was
due mainly
to
the efforts
of
Europeans. Since 1892, they had
planted sisal between Tanga and the foot of the Usambara hills;
by 1905 it had also been planted in the far south, near Lindi. Sisal
became the territory's chief export in 1907-8 and again in 1913,
after
an
upswing
in
world prices. Between 1909
and
1912
a
temporary boom enabled
ceara
rubber to take the lead: since 1900
it had been planted by many settlers near Morogoro and
in
the
Tanga-Usambara region (where British companies now bought
out several German owners). Europeans also predominated in the
production
of
coffee:
at
first this came from plantations
in
Usambara but by 1911 far more was being grown on Kilimanjaro.
Meanwhile, African farmers, mostly in Buhaya in the north-west,
were producing one-third of coffee exports. European enterprise
was less important in cotton-growing: grandiose schemes failed
in Sadani and Kilosa, whereas the price rise of 1905-7 encouraged
the Sukuma
to
take up cotton, and Africans around the lower
Rufiji to persist with it despite the experience which had sparked
off the Maji Maji rising. Nonetheless, by 1913 European enterprise
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contributed over half the colony's total exports (now worth nearly
The growth
of an
export trade
in
cultivated crops duly
increased the revenues of East African governments, and dimin-
ished their dependence on tax-payers in Europe. The East Africa
Protectorate ended this
in
1912, and Uganda followed
in
1914:
they had received respectively £1.8m and
£2.5
m
as grants-in-aid.
In German East Africa the imperial subsidy was confined from
1907 to military
expenses:
from 1904 to
1914
grants-in-aid totalled
£z.
5
m.
Meanwhile, governments increased their capacity to create
infrastructures for further economic expansion: administration,
technical services, communications. Such investment was most
conspicuous
in
German East Africa, where
in
1905 the railway
system was
far
less developed than
in
British territory.
The
Uganda Railway (financed by an interest-free loan from Britain
which was never repaid) not only carried African export crops
from
the
British territories;
it
provided
the
cheapest route
between the coast and the populous German districts to the south
and west of Lake Victoria. This challenge was soon taken up.
In
1907-8,
to improve military mobility and also further his policy
of boosting African export production, Governor Rechenberg
obtained
a
loan to extend the Dar es Salaam-Morogoro line
to
Tabora and on to Lake Tanganyika. This 'central railway' was
intended to carry produce from the Nyamwezi peoples, and from
Rwanda and Burundi;
it
was completed in 1914 and
a
branch
to
Lake Victoria was begun. Meanwhile, in
1910—11,
pressure from
German settlers provoked the extension of the Tanga—Usambara
line up to Moshi, near Kilimanjaro. By 1914, out of
a
total revenue
of £823,000, 32 per cent was spent on servicing railway loans.
This investment killed
off
the old caravan traffic and diverted
the territory's external trade from Bagamoyo and Zanzibar to the
deep-water ports
of
Tanga and Dar
es
Salaam, which could
harbour ships from Europe. This helped
to
boost Germany's
share of its colony's trade from around one-quarter in 1902 to over
a half in 1912.
By providing railways,
the
imperial governments took
a
leading part in placing the resources of East Africa on the world
market. But private enterprise was also crucial. In German East
Africa, white smallholders rapidly increased
in
the years
of
the
rubber boom: by 1912 the colony's white population numbered
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almost
5,000
(compared with just over 3,000 whites
in
the East
Africa Protectorate). The upswing
in
sisal favoured the larger
plantations
and
helped
to
confirm
the
predominance
of the
German East Africa Company, which attracted investment from
German financiers and had interests in banks and railways as well
as mines, plantations and the import-export trade. In the British
sphere, import-export was dominated by the Uganda Company
and Smith, Mackenzie. But the most important entrepreneur was
the Indian middleman. Immigrants from the Punjab, Gujerat,
Kathiawar and Cutch spread out from the towns
of
East Africa
and
far
up-country, sometimes ahead
of
the colonial administ-
rators.
Their commercial skills, possessed as yet by few Africans,
and their readiness to live more simply than most Europeans,
enabled them to play a vital part in the region's external trade:
they bought African crops for resale to European firms and sold
tools,
bicycles, textiles and other consumer goods imported from
abroad. Outstanding among Indian traders was Allidina Visram,
an Ismaili whose business, based on Mombasa, included branches
in German as well as British territory. Indians also played key roles
in service trades, as artisans, clerks, and also as lawyers. By 1911
there were nearly 12,000 Indians in the East Africa Protectorate,
about 7,500 in German East Africa, 2,200 in Uganda and nearly
9,000 in Zanzibar.
Politics and social change
During the decade preceding 1914, both European and Indian
immigrants came to occupy an increasingly important place in the
economies of East Africa. But if they were to retain and improve
on their positions, they needed
to
take
a
share
in
government.
European settlers were especially anxious: if they were to survive,
let alone prevail over, African competition, they needed privileged
access
to
land
and
labour.
The
former presented
no
great
difficulty: in both the East Africa Protectorate and German East
Africa much land had been alienated to whites by the end of 1905
(when the Nandi gave up a large area), though the British did not
succeed in confining the northern Masai south of the railway until
1913.
In the East Africa Protectorate, areas of African occupation
adjoining white property were defined
as
'reserves' and these
were supposed to meet both present and future African needs. The
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most pressing problem
was
labour. European farms
and
plantations, many quite new, needed
a
great deal
of
unskilled
labour, but few employers were willing
or
indeed able
to
pay
wages sufficient to bring labour forward without some form of
compulsion. Many of the 11,000 Kikuyu who lost land in Kiambu,
near Nairobi, stayed on as 'squatters', whose rights to graze or
cultivate now depended on working for the new white owners.
But Africans who could grow crops for cash were often lost
to
the labour market,
and
even those who lacked this option
preferred to work for employers other than farmers or planters,
whose peak demands tended to coincide with the busiest months
in the African farmer's year.
Various means were found
to
bring labour forward.
All
governments made use of compulsory labour for public works:
in German East Africa since the 1890s, in Uganda from 1908 and
in the East Africa Protectorate from 1910. The scale and terms
of such employment varied, but it benefited private employers as
well by depressing the market price of labour. Over much of the
region, as in southern Africa, labour recruiters roamed, seeking
to bind Africans to the work they least wanted. In the East Africa
Protectorate, labour-hungry settlers demanded that Africans
be
deprived of their land, taxed more heavily, or simply compelled
to work by
law..
By and large, neither the colonial nor the British
government offered much resistance
to
such pressure. Many
officials set more store by settler hopes than African achievement
and they failed in practice to protect Africans against the violence
of white employers. Meanwhile, in 1907, two non-official Europ-
eans were nominated to the new legislative council. One was Lord
Delamere, the chief settler spokesman, who saw this as only the
first step towards eventual European self-government.
And
Delamere, like other settlers, felt that European prosperity was
threatened not only by the scarcity of African labour but by the
ambitions of Indian immigrants. The latter far outnumbered the
Europeans; some of them also sought to buy land; and an Indian
businessman, A. M. Jeevanjee, was nominated to the legislative
council
for
1909-11:
in
1910
he
urged that
the
territory
be
annexed
to
the Indian Empire. Since
it
was British policy
to
broaden unofficial representation, political controversy in the East
Africa Protectorate focused
for
many years
on a
struggle
for
power through the council between Europeans and Indians.
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In German East Africa, European settlers were nominated to
a Governor's Council from 1904, but this meant little since full
control of the budget was vested in the Reichstag (the German
parliament). So while German settlers formed local associations
and pressure groups, they pursued their ambitions most effectively
through allies in Germany. There they were confronted, from
1906 to 1910, by an unsympathetic colonial secretary, Bernhard
Dernburg who, like Governor Rechenberg, looked to African
production as the best hope for East Africa. Yet from 1908
Dernburg began to yield to the settlers' friends in the Reichstag.
The whip continued to be used freely against African workers:
it has been calculated that in 1911-12 there were, on average, five
floggings a week at every district office in German East Africa.
2
This was scarcely the free market in labour which Rechenberg had
hoped to create. Besides, when Rechenberg left East Africa in
1911 prices for exports strongly favoured European producers.
Their commanding role in the economy — far more impressive
than that of their counterparts further north —
was
acknowledged
by the new governor, Schnee: in 1912 he allotted to settlers 12
out of 16 seats in his advisory council. In the same year, Schnee
restricted Indian immigration, and in 1914 Indians were denied
the vote in elections to the new town councils of Dar es Salaam
and Tanga. Nowhere in East Africa had either imperial govern-
ment taken a firm decision for or against further white settlement,
but Germany's colony was well on the way to becoming a 'white
man's country'.
In areas of European enterprise, relations between black and
white mainly rested on the use or threat of violence. But these
were mere enclaves, mostly clustered near the major centres of
government or railway lines. To hold down the huge expanses
of East Africa with the limited forces available, more subtle forms
of control were needed. Colonial rule was consolidated with the
aid of African allies, to whom the necessary powers of coercion
were delegated. In Uganda, the expansion of the Ganda was
curbed and harnessed to the purposes of British officials, but they
introduced a supposedly Ganda model of hierarchical administ-
ration and found local leaders to staff it as territorial chiefs and
headmen, even where such roles were quite new, as in the
north-east and south-west. The judicial and fiscal roles of chiefs
2
John Iliffe, Tanganyika
under
German rule, ifoj-1912 (Cambridge, 1969), 106.
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were defined by ordinances in 1909, and they also became pillars
of the export economy; in the early years, Uganda's cotton was
mainly grown
by
collective effort under
the
chiefs' personal
direction, and chiefs exacted a share of the proceeds as a new form
of tribute payment.
In
the East Africa Protectorate there were
virtually no territorial chiefs, and
at
first the British delegated
low-level justice and taxation
to
'headmen' who were either
prominent local men, such as priests
or
'rain-makers',
or
else
former caravan leaders, traders and mercenary
soldiers.
Since such
new-found political authority was often disputed,
the
minor
judicial powers of headmen were transferred in 1911 to councils
of elders. But as junior administrators, headmen steadily enlarged
their powers: from 1912,
for
example, they were able
to
levy
unpaid labour for public works, while informally many served as
labour recruiters for private employers.
The Germans also relied heavily on African assistants. Along
the coast they had inherited the literate administrative staff of the
Zanzibar sultanate: town governors or
liwalis,
and their subord-
inate akidas. Under German rule (as on the British coast), the
liwalis
retained authority over Africans in towns, while
akidas
were
appointed in some rural districts, mostly along the coast, where
they collected tax and settled minor
disputes.
By
1913,
many
akidas
had been educated
at
post-primary government schools
for
Africans
in
Tanga, Bagamoyo and Dar
es
Salaam; these also
produced clerks for government service all over the country. The
Germans,
in
short, tightened their grip
on the
country
by
fostering the growth of a Swahili bureaucracy, much
as
the British
in Uganda relied primarily on Ganda men and methods. However,
the closest parallel to Buganda itself in German East Africa was
to be found in other lake kingdoms, those of the Haya. Here the
emergence
of
chiefs
as
tax-collectors and promoters
of
coffee-
growing owed much
to
their long association with one district
officer, Stuemer, who ruled at Bukoba from 1904 to 1916. There
was
a
similar
entente
between Gunzert,
at
Mwanza from 1906
to
1916,
and
chiefs
of
the Sukuma, who disseminated cotton-
cultivation, though Gunzert used his own staff to collect tax.
Elsewhere,
a
varying balance was struck
in
the delegation
of
power as between chiefs and government
staff.
When choosing
chiefly allies the Germans tended, after the Maji Maji rising,
to
favour those who had remained 'loyal' then, such as the Hehe
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chiefs,
at the
expense
of
those who had assisted their initial
conquest.
By 1914, alien rule
had
caused profound changes
in the
economic life
of
most East Africans. Little trace now remained
of the trade patterns characteristic of the later nineteenth century.
Not only was the caravan trade dead; railways, and Indian traders,
enabled imports from Europe to undercut the products of African
industry; no less important, European manufacturers were learn-
ing how to meet African requirements. In 1907, Nyoro hoes were
still being sold over much
of
Uganda and even
in
the eastern
Congo; within
a
few years they were replaced
by
hoes from
Germany or Britain. Apart from some outlying pastoralists, nearly
all African production was now devoted to food-crops or to the
new range
of
exports fostered
by
the colonial powers. Some
people grew export crops on their own land; this could notably
enrich chiefs who already controlled the use of land, as in Buganda
and Buhaya. Other people, less fortunate, exhausted former
exports, such as ivory or wild rubber; for them, as for people quite
new to the export economy, the best hope of cash usually lay in
wage-employment. Some might be able to do seasonal labour, as
porters
or
construction workers,
but
many Nyamwezi,
for
example, were conscripted to work for months at a time on distant
sisal plantations. Many Kikuyu left their own homes to colonise,
as squatters, empty land which Europeans had lately taken from
the Masai. Some wage-earners managed to save enough to invest
in African production: thus Luo began
to
buy ploughs
and
Kikuyu bought livestock. Cash could also be obtained by growing
surplus food
to
meet the needs
of
wage-earners,
or to
stock
government famine reserves: rice-growing replaced rubber-
collection in Ulanga; simsim was grown by the Langi, and maize
in Nyanza (as also in the ' white highlands'). The domestic market
for food was rapidly expanding: by
191 z
there were over 85,000
wage-earners,
at
any one time,
in
the East Africa Protectorate;
in 1913, there were 192,000 wage-earners in German East Africa,
and almost half of them were on plantations. In some areas their
absence from home was beginning
to
leave
its
mark.
In the
woodlands south of Lake Victoria, human and cattle diseases in
the 1890s had caused much land to be abandoned; tsetse
fly
moved
in and spread sleeping-sickness among people and cattle. This
process was aggravated by large-scale labour migration: plantation
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