The British Empire: Africa
How Great Britain colonized the Dark Continent.
The year was 1885. Sudan’s capital of Khartum had fallen. Over the waning years of the 19th century, the European powers competed in a colonial Scramble for Africa. Each empire tried to carve up as much of the Dark Continent as it could. Atop these efforts was the mighty British Empire. Here is the riveting story behind Great Britain’s colonialism in the African continent.
British Africa
British colonialism in Africa already had a long history before the 19th century. It began in 1618, when English King James I granted a royal charter to the London-based Guinea Company in West Africa. For the rest of the 17th century, this colonist company trafficked timber and slaves. But this alone was the extent of British influence in Africa. This would change after the American Revolutionary War. Having lost the Thirteen Colonies in North America, the wounded British Empire turned its attention to Africa.
Going into the 19th century, the Europeans were not very fond of going near Africa at all. Disease was rampant. It was a death sentence just arriving at the continent. Sierra Leone was populated by a sparse population of only 1,000 former slaves. Although disease deterred immigration, the British still recognized the massive money-making potential of colonizing Africa.
The Dutch
The Dutch had already established their own colonial presence at the southernmost tip of Africa in 1652. Cape Town allowed the Dutch to monopolize the lucrative spice trade in India and Asia.
When Revolutionary France seized the Dutch colony in 1795, the British Crown was alarmed. They responded by annexing the Dutch territory as a way of blocking the French from accessing trade with India. Two squadrons of warships were dispatched to secure the colony. Cape Town was formally annexed by the British Empire in 1814.
The British promised not to interfere with Dutch affairs in Africa, but they wrote the laws in English. The Dutch were enraged. Many Dutch farmers, called Boers, had fled religious persecution in Holland to start a new life in Africa. The Dutch permitted slavery, but the British Empire was growing more vocally opposed to the vile institution. Slavery was abolished in 1833, causing many Dutch settlers to leave South Africa and found their own independent republics. But over the next decades, the British would move further inlaid.
Ashanti Empire
In the meantime, the British held on to their colonial holdings in West Africa. As they expanded, the British came into conflict with local African powers, such as the Ashanti Empire of modern-day Ghana. After years of silent hatred, the Ashanti provoked the British into an open conflict in 1824 when they killed an African officer serving in a British army.
Led by Sir Charles McCarthy, governor of Sierra Leone, a British force of 3,000 led a punitive expedition. He and his men were slaughtered by 10,000 Ashanti as they tried to cross over the Prok River. McCarthy’s skull was furnished as a golden drinking cup by the African savages.
But the British wrecked their revenge. After winning the Second Battle of Accra, the British acquired a peace treaty from the Ashanti. A border was established. Peace lasted for 30 years, until the British resumed their expansionism. This time, the Brits annexed the Dutch Gold Coast, causing the Ashanti to intervene. After defeating the African warriors in two decisive battles, the British worked their way northward toward the capital at Kumasi. The Brits rummaged through the African palace, which they demolished using explosives.
Zulu War
Having subdued the Ashanti, the British expanded southward at the expense of the Dutch and Africans. In 1874, the British demanded that the Boers be organized into a confederation. They wanted this, because it would give Great Britain a de facto monopoly over the diamond mines of South Africa. The Dutch were furious.
The British then turned their attention toward the Zulus. The Zulu people first rose to prominent in the early 19th century under King Shaka. Later in the century, the Africans came into conflict with the Dutch settlers. Although not as familiar with firearms as the Ashanti, the Zulus possessed a highly disciplined army with tens of thousands of troops.
Colonial British authorities orchestrated a conflict with the Zulus as a pretext for annexation. This happened when, in 1877, the British seized the Dutch Republic of Transvaal. They demanded that the Zulus disband their army and accepted British authority. The Africans refused. Two years later, in 1879, the Redcoats marched into Zululand to assert their rule by force.
Imperial Britain suffered their worst-ever loss at the Battle of Isandlwana. The colonizers were too hubristic, and they lacked familiarity with the local terrain. This enabled the Zulus to engage in effective guerrilla warfare. Ultimately, the African warriors were still no match for the modern professional army of Great Britain.
Ottoman Egypt
The British then turned their attention toward the Mediterranean coast, alarming the Ottoman Empire.
The Europeans had their sights on this region since the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869. This piece of infrastructure had finally justified its enormous production costs by providing a quick trade route to Asia.
After decades of wasteful spending by local Egyptian leaders, coupled with a clumsy invasion of Ethiopia, Egypt was effectively left in the hands of European creditors. The Egyptians were mad, and a nationalist coup was led by former military officer Ahmed Urabe in 1879. Exploiting the situation, Great Britain declared its support for the deposed leader Mohammad Pasha. The English sent a large expedition to crush the revolt.
What followed was the Anglo-Egyptian War. British warships were sent full of troops to restore order. When the Brits landed, they inflicted a decisive defeat against the Egyptian nationalists at the Battle of Tel El Kebir.
With the old regime was restored, Egypt had become an informal vassal of the British Empire. Notably, the Suez fell into British hands. The Brits maintained unofficial control over Egypt until 1922.
Scramble for Africa
Despite these minor territorial gains, the British were still largely uninterested in Africa. This was especially true after the abolition of slavery.
But after a second wave of industrialization, the European powers felt a renewed interest in Africa by the 1880s. They desired the Dark Continent’s natural resources. Meanwhile, within the nations of Europe, there was a underclass of dissatisfied people in search of a better life abroad.
Politics also played a role in this surge of African colonialism. With Europe and the Americas largely settled, the colonial powers turned their attention toward expanding into Africa. As tensions grew between the European powers, Germany’s Chancellor Otto von Bismarck sought to ensure peace. He organized the Berlin Conference in 1884. Representatives of 13 European nations, as well as the United States, were in attendance. None of the African people were represented.
In just a few years, the African interior went from “the White Man’s Grave” into the “White Man’s Burden.” Steamships made traveling much easier. The first train tracks were laid. Tropical diseases, such as malaria and yellow fever, were becoming less lethal thanks to improvements in medicine. The invention of machine guns gave the Europeans an invincibility against their African enemies. They could now pacify indigenous people with almost total impunity.
Despite their superior technology, the British underestimated the resilience of the Africans. This time, they came into conflict with the Kingdom of Benin, located in modern-day Nigeria. The kingdom was a major exporter of palm oil and rubber. But the Africans grew skeptical of British intentions, and refused to trade with them. James Robert Phillips attempted to smuggle an invading force of 250 troops into the capital of Benin. But the plot was uncovered, and the Africans slaughtered their would-be European colonizers.
After this embarrassing spectacle, the British launched a second invasion, this time openly. They used 1,200 men, and involved the earlier massacre as a casus belli. One by one, the British dismantled every settlement. The resistance was fierce. After a ten-day siege, the capital finally succumbed to Great Britain. They burned the city to the ground.
Cecil Rhodes
The Dutch Republic of Transvaal discovered gold deposits. This fascinated Cecil Rhodes, an ambitious British businessman who was obsessed with gaining control of these natural resources. But the British Crown feared another open conflict with the Dutch. So Rhodes went ahead and founded the British South Africa Company to goad the Dutch into another war. This became the Second Boer War of 1899. Rhodes’ company was utterly ruthless, waging genocidal campaigns against the Dutch. Entire communities were crushed. Thousands were herded into the world’s first-ever concentration camps. At least 46,000 people died from starvation and disease. About 20,000 of the victims were indigenous Africans who got caught up in the conflict. The other 26,000 were Boer women and children. After nearly three years of fighting, the Dutch finally caved in. The disparate Dutch republics were consolidated into a single state, known as the Union of South Africa.
Rhodes orchestrated another campaign of Imperial Britain, pushing southward from Egypt into Sudan. The British rapaciously conquered nearby territories in an effort to outcompete French and German colonial interests. Britain’s southward expansion brought them into conflict with the Sudanese, who were united in a jihad against foreign interference. They were led by a Muslim cleric named Muhammad Ahmad bin Abdullah, who proclaimed himself the Mahdi of Islam. Hence, the conflict is known as the Mahdist War. Ahmad expanded his jihad to include the other European powers as well. It ended after nine years of brutal desert warfare. It saw the death of Governor-General Charles Gordon, one of the seniormost British officials to be killed in Africa.
Clash of empires
Having pacified much of Africa, Great Britain turned its attention toward consolidating its gains. On foreign policy, they pursued a rapprochement with the French Empire in 1904. Together, Britain and France would focus their animosity toward Imperial Germany. As war loomed between the European empires, South Africa held a strategic position as a major route to the Indian Ocean. Fearing an African revolt, Imperial Britain granted additional privileges to the Dutch colonial authorities. Racism became encoded in law. This directly led to the creation of apartheid in the 1940s. Over the following decades, South Africa would move away from the British sphere of influence, before finally cutting all ties in 1961.
The Age of Colonialism led to a cataclysmic clash of the European empires, in what became World War One. This was followed by the Second World War only 20 years later. Together, the two World Wars saw the collapse of multiple global empires: the Ottomans, Austria-Hungary, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. Following WWII, the British Empire gradually lost its preeminence in the face of decolonization efforts in the Third World. The Soviet Union, which suffered tens of millions of casualties in the war against Hitler, finally broke up in the 1990s.
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