alternatehistory.com
Western Africa 1936-1939
Britannian West AfricaBritannian West Africa— a vast region that was termed “Sudan” [1] increasingly often in the late 19th century— came to be divided into three zones.
Inner Zone: New Kent
The Colony of New Kent, with capital at Henriston [2], was the epicenter of Britannian power in the Sudan. This zone of least autonomy, in which the absolutism of London echoed most profoundly, was the primary destination for European migrants to Africa— and there were many, drawn by promises of land and gold. Henriston, in many ways, was intended from the start to be an ideal Puritan society, a “city upon a hill” that could be a model even for European cities, especially unruly cities like Birmingham. Africans had a part to play in all this.
Though servitude was sanctioned (“It’s just the natural order of things”) Britannia never permitted chattel slavery. Earthly shackles were just as bad as spiritual shackles, and seeking to place either upon a subject of the King made one an enemy of the King and of God. The Africans native to the territory of New Kent, usually people of Akan extraction, were allowed to stay and keep their property of the most part. Missionaries were urged to preach to the Akan. Converted Akan were urged to move to Henriston. Most interestingly, the English and the Akan were allowed to become friends, to marry, to have children. The monarchy grew to believe that a mestizo population, of the type that existed in Spanish Vespucia, was not such a bad thing. Did not the ability of Puritan Catholicism to transcend boundaries of race demonstrate the strength and vigor of the Faith? And, if it could bring two races together into one, was it not even more suited to unite the whole world in due time?
Middle Zone: The Princely States
In 1860, things had never looked better for the Kingdom of Dahomey. After freeing itself from Oyo domination earlier in the century, the kingdom launched several aggressive wars against the Yoruba, hastening Benin’s eventual conquest of Oyo. Though the abolition of the European slave trade hurt the states’ finances, a successful transition to selling agricultural products like palm oil pulled the kingdom out of economic free-fall. Through the middle of the 1800s, Dahomey grew wealthy from the sale of palm oil, pigs, livestock, maize, beans, cassava, and groundnuts.
Then the hammer of Britannian anger came crashing down.
The stated reason for Britannian intervention was that Dahomey had, despite appearances, continued to supplement its income through slave-trading. “We will not suffer the existence of this kingdom of lies on the doorstep of Henriston,” the Britannian Viceroy reportedly quipped when asked why Dahomey had been conquered. After capturing Abomey, the Britannians placed the child prince of Dahomey on the throne, and assigned the boy an English tutor.
By 1890, the prince— by now known as James I, first Christian King of Dahomey— announced that his Kingdom’s period of repentance for the perfidious lies of the old pagan king had ended. Personally visiting London aboard a ship of the Imperial Navy, James I met his Britannian counterpart. As a result of their deliberations, Dahomey became the first Princely State.
The Africa Company’s office in Henriston defined the Princely States as “those realms which, having converted over 40 of every 100 men among them to the True Faith, have become worthy of Britannia’s friendship and beneficence.” “Beneficence” meant privileged access to Britannian markets for traders, rights of migration for (converted) commoners, and unconditional protection without extortion fees or tribute payments.
The Asante Empire watched the situation in Dahomey with alarm. The same could thing happen here, the Asantehene wondered, as his eyes flicked nervously to his Golden Stool. The Golden Stool was more than just the ancient symbol of Asante rulership, bestowed by the divine— it was the soul of the Asante nation itself. Reasoning that the Britannians were ferocious savages who would easily and gladly melt the Stool down if they ever won against Asante, the monarch decided that conflict with Britannia would be too costly to win and too disastrous to lose. With this in mind, he made a difficult decision. Converting to Christianity, Asantehene Henry I set about remaking the Empire with the help of Britannian missionaries invited to his court at Kumasi. The Golden Stool became a Christian relic, supposedly containing metal from the nails that pierced Christ. A rebellion of traditionalist nobility and commoners was put down with Britannian auxiliaries. Destroying his own people affected Henry I greatly, and probably contributed to his early death in 1910. Nevertheless, when he died, Asante had become a Princely State and the Golden Stool— the soul of Asante— was safe from harm. In the next few decades, Asante Puritanism became a strange beast. Combining traditional Akan beliefs with the Puritanism doled out in newly-established seminaries, radical preachers like Kwame Johnson began to insist that the Asante, not the English, were God’s favored nation. England had been founded by some bastard named William, a foreigner from a country that the English tried but ultimately failed to hold on to. Only the Asante had been presented with such visible proofs of God’s favor as a stool descending from the sky, and interminable victory in war since the time of Osei Tutu. Kwame Johnson stood out for his particular willingness to extend this line of thought to its natural conclusion— if the Asante could guide the world to a true understanding of God, then the Britannian interlopers needed to be pushed out of the way sooner or later.
The Mande and Senufo peoples, to the west of Asante, grew interested in the idea of Princely States in the 1910s. On the eve of the War of the Danube, Henriston’s authorities considered the establishment of a Duchy of Kong— a Catholic successor to the Kong Empire that had ruled over the Mande and Senufo prior to its destruction by West African jihadists.
Outer Zone: The Halfway Domains
At the dawn of the 1800s, a teacher of Islamic law named Usman dan Fodio complained about conditions in the kingdoms of the Hausa, a people of the Northern Sudan. Eventually, he decided to fix them himself by gathering an army of his people, the Fulani, and inspiring them to a grand struggle— a jihad. His army swept across the lands of the Hausa, uniting all of their warring kingdoms into a single state. He turned his army’s camp at Sokoto into a proper city, and was declared the Caliph of his new domain. In time, the success of the Sokoto Caliphate inspired two more great Fulani jihads. The preacher Seku Amadu led a revolution against Segu, the empire of the Bambara, and became the founder of the Massina Empire. Massina would, in turn, be conquered in the 1860s by Umar Tall, founder of the Toucouleur Empire.
By the 1900s, it was clear that the two great Fulani states of the Sudan had seen better days. The Toucouleur Empire was a legal fiction— since the Great European War, it had been divided into western and eastern zones of influence controlled by the French and the Britannians, respectively. This division mirrored the division within the erstwhile Empire itself— the western portion, which encompassed the traditional Toucouleur homeland at Futa Toro, was functionally independent from the “official” rulers in the east who ruled the Bambara-populated territories of Segu and Massina. The Sokoto Caliphate’s political authority was diminished as it lost control over its constituent emirates, but the real blow to it and the eastern Toucouleur was spiritual. In 1877, Britannia sacked Sokoto’s southernmost city of Ilorin as a show of force, destroying over half the city and looting it thoroughly. They then promised to return and destroy another city unless the Caliph of Sokoto signed a "treaty of friendship". After the eastern Toucouleur signed a similar treaty in the 1920s, they and Sokoto became the two most prominent “Halfway Domains.”
The Africa Company’s office in Henriston defined the Halfway Domains as “those realms which, having not yet beheld the Light of our Lord, must be met with mercy and brought civilly, as adopted brothers, into the embrace of the Faith.” In other words, these states were allowed to exist on the sole condition that they convert to Christianity eventually and refrain from non-brotherly aggression against each other. To ensure that conversion happened, the governments of Halfway Domains would allow Britannian missionaries to enter, and bestow extraterritorial privileges to them. A Britannian criminal on Halfway Domain soil would be carted back to Henriston to be tried before a jury of fellow Britannians. Britannian merchants would also be allowed to enter freely, and would be entitled to protection from the rulers of the Halfway domains. With this arrangement, Britannia retained the capability to project power and subjugate the natives but still had the option to sit back, exact tribute, spy on the native populace and government, and steadily build up a loyal phalanx of the King’s own Christians in the darkest of the world's continents. Since Britannia was itself quite poor and agrarian, such features of the Halfway Domain system were not just benefits but necessary prerequisites for fast, easy, and profitable colonization. The Halfway Domain system, built on the early establishment of African fear of an exaggerated image of Britannian ferocity, gradually expanded to cover all the non-Christian states of the Northern Sudan.
The establishment of a third Fulani state, the Adamawa Emirate, was a bit of an accident. The groundwork for the state was laid by Modibo Adama, who conquered the land and governed it on behalf of his Caliph, Usman dan Fodio. Though it was originally governed as a part of the greater Fulani realm, its Emirs steadily grew autonomous. The Britannians, however, made Adamawa sovereign— upon arriving in the Emir’s court at Yola, they assumed that they were meeting a sovereign chief of the Africans and asked him to sign a “treaty of friendship” as if he were one. The Emir of Adamawa signed the treaty and, in return for numerous concessions, could expect Britannian protection from any future Sokoto army looking to reclaim their lost lands. Adamawa was, like a prisoner in his cell, absolutely secure from its fellow inmates.
The Fulani did not bear the Britannian yoke alone— two successor states of the old Hausa kingdoms (which the Fulani had swept aside in the jihads of the early 1800s) survived the arrival of the Britannians. The Abuja Emirate, centered on the city of the same name, was a continuation of the old Emirate of Zazzau. Zaria, the capital of Zazzau, had become a southern outpost of Sokoto in 1808— but its rulers fled southward, founded Abuja as a Hausa refuge in the late 1820s, and continued to claim the increasingly hollow title of Sarkin Zazzau (king/chief of Zazzau) well into the 20th century. Meanwhile, the Brotherly Emirates of Gobir and Katsina eked out a precarious existence in the far north of Britannian Sudan. The Hausa kingdom of Gobir and its last sarki, Yunfa, had once been Usman dan Fodio’s patrons— but upon realizing dan Fodio’s ambitions of jihad, they became his bitterest rivals. The Fulani seized Gobir and Katsina in 1808, killing Yunfa in the process. The Hausa loyalists, however, simply trekked northward, escaping the then-new Sokoto Caliphate’s reach. The Katsinawa founded the new settlement of Maradi, and then, putting aside their former differences with Gobir, helped the Gobirawa found a new capital-in-exile at Tibiri 5 kilometers away. Both of the new exile states derived their sustenance from the Gulbin Maradi (Maradi River) which supported a population of Hausa settlers that steadily grew after the 1830s. By the time the Britannians arrived, the area around the two cities had become a majority-Hausa zone of mixed ancestry. The two emirs at Tibiri and Maradi recognized this state of affairs, and signed the Britannian treaty to become a single, jointly-ruled Halfway Domain.
The last and largest of the Halfway Domains was the Bornu Empire. Suffering aggression from west, east, and center, this beleaguered state barely survived the 1800s. A violent dynastic transition in the early 1800s unseated the ancient Sayfawa dynasty, replacing them with the family of Muhammad al-Kanemi, a Muslim scholar interested in religious and political reform. The Kanemi dynasty, however, proved more than capable of venality, and signed up as a Halfway Domain more to stave off conquest by the more vigorous Wadai Empire to their east than any other factor.
***
The only thing the people of Bilad as-Sudan have in common, Selim decided, was their color.
In the four months he’d spent in the land, almost every notion of Africa that he’d developed in his sheltered years in Kostantiniyye had shattered. He’d learned so much, he felt that his head would burst. Though his Arabic proved sufficient to communicate with the men of letters— the modibo, the Sudanese called them— Selim was also trying, with some success to pick up Hausa. Only by communicating with the common man could the cause be furthered. Only speaking to the Sudanese in his own tongue could convince him to recognize the errors of sectarian chauvinism, which still held sway in these parts.
Sipping from a canteen of the ginger drink the locals were so fond of, Selim hastened his pace through the streets of Kano. What a city! The Berbers of the desert came in and left like sands in the wind, keeping alive the same trade routes their ancestors trod into the dirt centuries ago. Men traveled to and from all directions, in fact— and those who stayed in the city day after day were no less remarkable. Selim has heard stories of the jihad that once tore through this city, of the supposedly misguided Hausa farmers and town-dwellers set straight by the noble herdsmen of the Fula. And yet, looking around, who would tell the difference between one and the other? Subject and ruler had intermarried, blended, adopted each other’s culture until the lines between them disappeared. They were as one under the beneficence of their Caliph in Sokoto. There was unity in this land, to be sure. But it was, all the same, a rich mosaic of overlapping traditions and sources of authority.
Setting up a government in Tripolitania was difficult, but only with a state may we direct our own course through this violent world. Perhaps this land, this vast belt of hidden civilization, can be united in revolt. But what force could govern its people after that?
Selim found his way to the caravanserai, a room of which had been sub-let to him. He found his desk and papers. There was much that the Muslims of the world needed to know about the Sudan, and much that the Sudan needed to know about the world.
[1] From the Arabic Bilad as-Sudan, meaning “Land of the Blacks.”
[2] In OTL, this would be the Gold Coast Colony. Henriston (a corruption of “Henry’s Town”, named for the great line of Plantagenet Henries who conquered France. The cult of France-conquering kings is strong in Britannia) is at the site of OTL Accra.
The flag of Argelia, the newest constituent nation of the Federal Republic. In another world, this flag was the Spanish merchant flag until 1927.
The Federal Republic of Spaniards, Basques, and Catalans faced a slight problem, and that problem’s name was Argelia.
The revolution that overthrew the old military government of Spain was met with hope and joy in Madrid, Barcelona, and Seville, but reactions were more tepid in Argel [1] and Orán. The Muslim population of the colony did not expect to be enfranchised or integrated to any significant degree. Surprisingly, they were both right and wrong.
After a series of contentious debates, the Cortes Federal, the representative body of Spain, issued the Basic Law of Argelia in 1925. In the spirit of Federalism, the Law proclaimed that Argelia was a constituent nation of Spain in the same manner as the Basque Country or Catalonia, and would have some of the trappings of local democracy and participation on the federal level— but only some. Spanish society still had room for Protectionism, and nowhere was this Protectionism more apparent then during the Argelian Question. Inspired by the Charter of Dakar which the French had issued four years earlier, the Basic Law proclaimed that Argelia would also have a limited electorate— but membership in this electorate would require attending government-run schools for the entirety of one’s primary and secondary education, completing of at least two years of higher education, and working for up to three years of productive employment in a Spanish firm or nonprofit. The aim was ostensibly to ensure that the best of the Argelians could get a chance to prove themselves, and guide their brothers toward full political development. However, the Basic Law also had a cultural element. Its goal was assimilation— the transformation of the Argelians into a people that might pray in mosques once in a while, but that in all other important respects would think and act like Europeans.
The cultural transformation of Argelia was not exclusively top-down. Some of it was more horizontal in nature.
In 1910, the population of the Spanish Caribbean stood at 4.5 million. That’s a lot of people to fit on some tiny islands, and overpopulation made itself felt even in Cuba, the largest of the Antilles. Among the Afro-Caribbean population, especially the educated portions, a sudden urge to move manifested. The latent racism of Caribbean society made the past unsavory, and population pressure made a future in the New World seem untenable. The “Returno al África” movement was a noticeable force by the late 1920s, and Afro-Caribbean writers like Luis Torres wrote extensively about the need of Africans to pull themselves away from the closed door to opportunity in the New World.
Migration to Spanish Central Africa, while possible, was not as common as migration to Argelia, which stood out among the Spanish possessions in Africa for its economic and political opportunities. In Argelia, an African might be able to vote and run for office if he worked hard enough. Migrants boarded boats in Santo Domingo and San Juan, ready to leave centuries of disappointment behind. Santeria, Roman Catholicism, and everything in between made its way to the fertile plains of the Mitidja and the tall buildings of Argel el Blanco, pearl of the western Maghreb.
Nothing was simply black and white in Argelia. Spaniards, Berbers, Arabs, and Afro-Caribbeans struggled with and against each other, creating a society of almost unbelievable diversity and adversity. The repercussions of all this demographic tomfoolery would soon be felt in Spain itself.
[1] OTL: Algiers.
The Europeans never penetrated very far into the African interior. Part of the reason was disease, a problem for which a cure— quinine— had only been invented at the turn of the 20th century. Part of the reason was the inhospitable climates. Part of the reason was simple inertia, or genuine ignorance of the economic opportunities that might lie deeper in the African continent. Whatever the case, two vast zones of land, centered around the Sahara and Kalahari, were completely unclaimed by any European power as late as 1939. In both zones, old ways of life retained their roots even as they morphed into something new.
The oases were God’s gift to the Sahara. Oases, and the settlements that sprung up between them, made trans-Saharan trade possible. One trade route extended south from eastern Tripolitania to the oasis of Kufra, before proceeding onward to Abeche and then to Lake Chad. Another extended north from Kano in the north of the Sudan, to Agadez, to Tamanrasset, and then to Ghadames, just south of Tripoli.
The Kufra-Lake Chad route would become famous as “Selim’s Road”, the path that brought the young revolutionary to the great proving ground of the Sudan. The Ghadames-Kano route, meanwhile, was always famous. This was the Berber route. Though there were never more than a hundred Ghadamsi merchants in any given city, their keen knowledge of economic situations in the Mediterranean coast and the African interior let them serve as organizers and financial backers of trade. Tamanrasset was the center of the Kel Ahaggar Tuareg confederation. These men of the Ahaggar mountains recognized the prosperity trade could bring, and generally allowed men of wealth to proceed unmolested to Agadez, the home city of the Air Tuaregs. At every major step and plenty of minor ones, the Imazigh and their brethren dominated.
Through this trade, which proceeded apace through the 20th century with increasing amounts of trinkets made in faraway places like Budapest and Krakow and brought to the merchants in Ghadames, the Sahara kept tabs on the world beyond. In the 1930s, strange travelers with fire in their eyes came from places like Persia and Egypt, calling upon the Berbers and Tuaregs to join them. And, surprisingly, some did.
The ancient tribal confederations of the desert had not yet seen any compelling reasons to build centralized governments. But who knew what the future had in store?
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This post's gotten long, so I'll save Portuguese Morocco and French West Africa for another day-- the day when I finally get around to drawing up a picture of the Congo and Southern Africa.
Western Africa (1939)
Britannian West Africa
Inner Zone: New Kent
The Basilica of Our Lady of Peace. A monument to Puritan pride, it was the largest cathedral in all of Africa at the time of its construction.
The Colony of New Kent, with capital at Henriston [2], was the epicenter of Britannian power in the Sudan. This zone of least autonomy, in which the absolutism of London echoed most profoundly, was the primary destination for European migrants to Africa— and there were many, drawn by promises of land and gold. Henriston, in many ways, was intended from the start to be an ideal Puritan society, a “city upon a hill” that could be a model even for European cities, especially unruly cities like Birmingham. Africans had a part to play in all this.
Though servitude was sanctioned (“It’s just the natural order of things”) Britannia never permitted chattel slavery. Earthly shackles were just as bad as spiritual shackles, and seeking to place either upon a subject of the King made one an enemy of the King and of God. The Africans native to the territory of New Kent, usually people of Akan extraction, were allowed to stay and keep their property of the most part. Missionaries were urged to preach to the Akan. Converted Akan were urged to move to Henriston. Most interestingly, the English and the Akan were allowed to become friends, to marry, to have children. The monarchy grew to believe that a mestizo population, of the type that existed in Spanish Vespucia, was not such a bad thing. Did not the ability of Puritan Catholicism to transcend boundaries of race demonstrate the strength and vigor of the Faith? And, if it could bring two races together into one, was it not even more suited to unite the whole world in due time?
Middle Zone: The Princely States
In 1860, things had never looked better for the Kingdom of Dahomey. After freeing itself from Oyo domination earlier in the century, the kingdom launched several aggressive wars against the Yoruba, hastening Benin’s eventual conquest of Oyo. Though the abolition of the European slave trade hurt the states’ finances, a successful transition to selling agricultural products like palm oil pulled the kingdom out of economic free-fall. Through the middle of the 1800s, Dahomey grew wealthy from the sale of palm oil, pigs, livestock, maize, beans, cassava, and groundnuts.
Then the hammer of Britannian anger came crashing down.
The stated reason for Britannian intervention was that Dahomey had, despite appearances, continued to supplement its income through slave-trading. “We will not suffer the existence of this kingdom of lies on the doorstep of Henriston,” the Britannian Viceroy reportedly quipped when asked why Dahomey had been conquered. After capturing Abomey, the Britannians placed the child prince of Dahomey on the throne, and assigned the boy an English tutor.
By 1890, the prince— by now known as James I, first Christian King of Dahomey— announced that his Kingdom’s period of repentance for the perfidious lies of the old pagan king had ended. Personally visiting London aboard a ship of the Imperial Navy, James I met his Britannian counterpart. As a result of their deliberations, Dahomey became the first Princely State.
The Africa Company’s office in Henriston defined the Princely States as “those realms which, having converted over 40 of every 100 men among them to the True Faith, have become worthy of Britannia’s friendship and beneficence.” “Beneficence” meant privileged access to Britannian markets for traders, rights of migration for (converted) commoners, and unconditional protection without extortion fees or tribute payments.
The Asante Empire watched the situation in Dahomey with alarm. The same could thing happen here, the Asantehene wondered, as his eyes flicked nervously to his Golden Stool. The Golden Stool was more than just the ancient symbol of Asante rulership, bestowed by the divine— it was the soul of the Asante nation itself. Reasoning that the Britannians were ferocious savages who would easily and gladly melt the Stool down if they ever won against Asante, the monarch decided that conflict with Britannia would be too costly to win and too disastrous to lose. With this in mind, he made a difficult decision. Converting to Christianity, Asantehene Henry I set about remaking the Empire with the help of Britannian missionaries invited to his court at Kumasi. The Golden Stool became a Christian relic, supposedly containing metal from the nails that pierced Christ. A rebellion of traditionalist nobility and commoners was put down with Britannian auxiliaries. Destroying his own people affected Henry I greatly, and probably contributed to his early death in 1910. Nevertheless, when he died, Asante had become a Princely State and the Golden Stool— the soul of Asante— was safe from harm. In the next few decades, Asante Puritanism became a strange beast. Combining traditional Akan beliefs with the Puritanism doled out in newly-established seminaries, radical preachers like Kwame Johnson began to insist that the Asante, not the English, were God’s favored nation. England had been founded by some bastard named William, a foreigner from a country that the English tried but ultimately failed to hold on to. Only the Asante had been presented with such visible proofs of God’s favor as a stool descending from the sky, and interminable victory in war since the time of Osei Tutu. Kwame Johnson stood out for his particular willingness to extend this line of thought to its natural conclusion— if the Asante could guide the world to a true understanding of God, then the Britannian interlopers needed to be pushed out of the way sooner or later.
Kwame Johnson, radical preacher who helped define Asante Puritanism.
The Mande and Senufo peoples, to the west of Asante, grew interested in the idea of Princely States in the 1910s. On the eve of the War of the Danube, Henriston’s authorities considered the establishment of a Duchy of Kong— a Catholic successor to the Kong Empire that had ruled over the Mande and Senufo prior to its destruction by West African jihadists.
Outer Zone: The Halfway Domains
At the dawn of the 1800s, a teacher of Islamic law named Usman dan Fodio complained about conditions in the kingdoms of the Hausa, a people of the Northern Sudan. Eventually, he decided to fix them himself by gathering an army of his people, the Fulani, and inspiring them to a grand struggle— a jihad. His army swept across the lands of the Hausa, uniting all of their warring kingdoms into a single state. He turned his army’s camp at Sokoto into a proper city, and was declared the Caliph of his new domain. In time, the success of the Sokoto Caliphate inspired two more great Fulani jihads. The preacher Seku Amadu led a revolution against Segu, the empire of the Bambara, and became the founder of the Massina Empire. Massina would, in turn, be conquered in the 1860s by Umar Tall, founder of the Toucouleur Empire.
By the 1900s, it was clear that the two great Fulani states of the Sudan had seen better days. The Toucouleur Empire was a legal fiction— since the Great European War, it had been divided into western and eastern zones of influence controlled by the French and the Britannians, respectively. This division mirrored the division within the erstwhile Empire itself— the western portion, which encompassed the traditional Toucouleur homeland at Futa Toro, was functionally independent from the “official” rulers in the east who ruled the Bambara-populated territories of Segu and Massina. The Sokoto Caliphate’s political authority was diminished as it lost control over its constituent emirates, but the real blow to it and the eastern Toucouleur was spiritual. In 1877, Britannia sacked Sokoto’s southernmost city of Ilorin as a show of force, destroying over half the city and looting it thoroughly. They then promised to return and destroy another city unless the Caliph of Sokoto signed a "treaty of friendship". After the eastern Toucouleur signed a similar treaty in the 1920s, they and Sokoto became the two most prominent “Halfway Domains.”
The Africa Company’s office in Henriston defined the Halfway Domains as “those realms which, having not yet beheld the Light of our Lord, must be met with mercy and brought civilly, as adopted brothers, into the embrace of the Faith.” In other words, these states were allowed to exist on the sole condition that they convert to Christianity eventually and refrain from non-brotherly aggression against each other. To ensure that conversion happened, the governments of Halfway Domains would allow Britannian missionaries to enter, and bestow extraterritorial privileges to them. A Britannian criminal on Halfway Domain soil would be carted back to Henriston to be tried before a jury of fellow Britannians. Britannian merchants would also be allowed to enter freely, and would be entitled to protection from the rulers of the Halfway domains. With this arrangement, Britannia retained the capability to project power and subjugate the natives but still had the option to sit back, exact tribute, spy on the native populace and government, and steadily build up a loyal phalanx of the King’s own Christians in the darkest of the world's continents. Since Britannia was itself quite poor and agrarian, such features of the Halfway Domain system were not just benefits but necessary prerequisites for fast, easy, and profitable colonization. The Halfway Domain system, built on the early establishment of African fear of an exaggerated image of Britannian ferocity, gradually expanded to cover all the non-Christian states of the Northern Sudan.
The establishment of a third Fulani state, the Adamawa Emirate, was a bit of an accident. The groundwork for the state was laid by Modibo Adama, who conquered the land and governed it on behalf of his Caliph, Usman dan Fodio. Though it was originally governed as a part of the greater Fulani realm, its Emirs steadily grew autonomous. The Britannians, however, made Adamawa sovereign— upon arriving in the Emir’s court at Yola, they assumed that they were meeting a sovereign chief of the Africans and asked him to sign a “treaty of friendship” as if he were one. The Emir of Adamawa signed the treaty and, in return for numerous concessions, could expect Britannian protection from any future Sokoto army looking to reclaim their lost lands. Adamawa was, like a prisoner in his cell, absolutely secure from its fellow inmates.
The Fulani did not bear the Britannian yoke alone— two successor states of the old Hausa kingdoms (which the Fulani had swept aside in the jihads of the early 1800s) survived the arrival of the Britannians. The Abuja Emirate, centered on the city of the same name, was a continuation of the old Emirate of Zazzau. Zaria, the capital of Zazzau, had become a southern outpost of Sokoto in 1808— but its rulers fled southward, founded Abuja as a Hausa refuge in the late 1820s, and continued to claim the increasingly hollow title of Sarkin Zazzau (king/chief of Zazzau) well into the 20th century. Meanwhile, the Brotherly Emirates of Gobir and Katsina eked out a precarious existence in the far north of Britannian Sudan. The Hausa kingdom of Gobir and its last sarki, Yunfa, had once been Usman dan Fodio’s patrons— but upon realizing dan Fodio’s ambitions of jihad, they became his bitterest rivals. The Fulani seized Gobir and Katsina in 1808, killing Yunfa in the process. The Hausa loyalists, however, simply trekked northward, escaping the then-new Sokoto Caliphate’s reach. The Katsinawa founded the new settlement of Maradi, and then, putting aside their former differences with Gobir, helped the Gobirawa found a new capital-in-exile at Tibiri 5 kilometers away. Both of the new exile states derived their sustenance from the Gulbin Maradi (Maradi River) which supported a population of Hausa settlers that steadily grew after the 1830s. By the time the Britannians arrived, the area around the two cities had become a majority-Hausa zone of mixed ancestry. The two emirs at Tibiri and Maradi recognized this state of affairs, and signed the Britannian treaty to become a single, jointly-ruled Halfway Domain.
The last and largest of the Halfway Domains was the Bornu Empire. Suffering aggression from west, east, and center, this beleaguered state barely survived the 1800s. A violent dynastic transition in the early 1800s unseated the ancient Sayfawa dynasty, replacing them with the family of Muhammad al-Kanemi, a Muslim scholar interested in religious and political reform. The Kanemi dynasty, however, proved more than capable of venality, and signed up as a Halfway Domain more to stave off conquest by the more vigorous Wadai Empire to their east than any other factor.
***
The Gidan Rumfa, gate to the palace of the Emir of Kano.
The only thing the people of Bilad as-Sudan have in common, Selim decided, was their color.
In the four months he’d spent in the land, almost every notion of Africa that he’d developed in his sheltered years in Kostantiniyye had shattered. He’d learned so much, he felt that his head would burst. Though his Arabic proved sufficient to communicate with the men of letters— the modibo, the Sudanese called them— Selim was also trying, with some success to pick up Hausa. Only by communicating with the common man could the cause be furthered. Only speaking to the Sudanese in his own tongue could convince him to recognize the errors of sectarian chauvinism, which still held sway in these parts.
Sipping from a canteen of the ginger drink the locals were so fond of, Selim hastened his pace through the streets of Kano. What a city! The Berbers of the desert came in and left like sands in the wind, keeping alive the same trade routes their ancestors trod into the dirt centuries ago. Men traveled to and from all directions, in fact— and those who stayed in the city day after day were no less remarkable. Selim has heard stories of the jihad that once tore through this city, of the supposedly misguided Hausa farmers and town-dwellers set straight by the noble herdsmen of the Fula. And yet, looking around, who would tell the difference between one and the other? Subject and ruler had intermarried, blended, adopted each other’s culture until the lines between them disappeared. They were as one under the beneficence of their Caliph in Sokoto. There was unity in this land, to be sure. But it was, all the same, a rich mosaic of overlapping traditions and sources of authority.
Setting up a government in Tripolitania was difficult, but only with a state may we direct our own course through this violent world. Perhaps this land, this vast belt of hidden civilization, can be united in revolt. But what force could govern its people after that?
Selim found his way to the caravanserai, a room of which had been sub-let to him. He found his desk and papers. There was much that the Muslims of the world needed to know about the Sudan, and much that the Sudan needed to know about the world.
[1] From the Arabic Bilad as-Sudan, meaning “Land of the Blacks.”
[2] In OTL, this would be the Gold Coast Colony. Henriston (a corruption of “Henry’s Town”, named for the great line of Plantagenet Henries who conquered France. The cult of France-conquering kings is strong in Britannia) is at the site of OTL Accra.
Spanish Argelia
The flag of Argelia, the newest constituent nation of the Federal Republic. In another world, this flag was the Spanish merchant flag until 1927.
The Federal Republic of Spaniards, Basques, and Catalans faced a slight problem, and that problem’s name was Argelia.
The revolution that overthrew the old military government of Spain was met with hope and joy in Madrid, Barcelona, and Seville, but reactions were more tepid in Argel [1] and Orán. The Muslim population of the colony did not expect to be enfranchised or integrated to any significant degree. Surprisingly, they were both right and wrong.
After a series of contentious debates, the Cortes Federal, the representative body of Spain, issued the Basic Law of Argelia in 1925. In the spirit of Federalism, the Law proclaimed that Argelia was a constituent nation of Spain in the same manner as the Basque Country or Catalonia, and would have some of the trappings of local democracy and participation on the federal level— but only some. Spanish society still had room for Protectionism, and nowhere was this Protectionism more apparent then during the Argelian Question. Inspired by the Charter of Dakar which the French had issued four years earlier, the Basic Law proclaimed that Argelia would also have a limited electorate— but membership in this electorate would require attending government-run schools for the entirety of one’s primary and secondary education, completing of at least two years of higher education, and working for up to three years of productive employment in a Spanish firm or nonprofit. The aim was ostensibly to ensure that the best of the Argelians could get a chance to prove themselves, and guide their brothers toward full political development. However, the Basic Law also had a cultural element. Its goal was assimilation— the transformation of the Argelians into a people that might pray in mosques once in a while, but that in all other important respects would think and act like Europeans.
The cultural transformation of Argelia was not exclusively top-down. Some of it was more horizontal in nature.
In 1910, the population of the Spanish Caribbean stood at 4.5 million. That’s a lot of people to fit on some tiny islands, and overpopulation made itself felt even in Cuba, the largest of the Antilles. Among the Afro-Caribbean population, especially the educated portions, a sudden urge to move manifested. The latent racism of Caribbean society made the past unsavory, and population pressure made a future in the New World seem untenable. The “Returno al África” movement was a noticeable force by the late 1920s, and Afro-Caribbean writers like Luis Torres wrote extensively about the need of Africans to pull themselves away from the closed door to opportunity in the New World.
“Why do you bang your fists against a closed door?” Luis Torres wrote in a letter to a friend seeking to buy land for a farm near Havana. “You will walk away with bloody hands and a hungry stomach.”
Migration to Spanish Central Africa, while possible, was not as common as migration to Argelia, which stood out among the Spanish possessions in Africa for its economic and political opportunities. In Argelia, an African might be able to vote and run for office if he worked hard enough. Migrants boarded boats in Santo Domingo and San Juan, ready to leave centuries of disappointment behind. Santeria, Roman Catholicism, and everything in between made its way to the fertile plains of the Mitidja and the tall buildings of Argel el Blanco, pearl of the western Maghreb.
The Plaza Republicana, in central Argel. Here, the increasingly numerous residents of the city bumped into each other on their way to work or stopped for a chat. Spanish, or some form of it, was the lingua franca here.
Nothing was simply black and white in Argelia. Spaniards, Berbers, Arabs, and Afro-Caribbeans struggled with and against each other, creating a society of almost unbelievable diversity and adversity. The repercussions of all this demographic tomfoolery would soon be felt in Spain itself.
[1] OTL: Algiers.
The Unclaimed Interior, Part I: The Sahara
The Europeans never penetrated very far into the African interior. Part of the reason was disease, a problem for which a cure— quinine— had only been invented at the turn of the 20th century. Part of the reason was the inhospitable climates. Part of the reason was simple inertia, or genuine ignorance of the economic opportunities that might lie deeper in the African continent. Whatever the case, two vast zones of land, centered around the Sahara and Kalahari, were completely unclaimed by any European power as late as 1939. In both zones, old ways of life retained their roots even as they morphed into something new.
A panoramic view of the Old City of Ghadames.
The oases were God’s gift to the Sahara. Oases, and the settlements that sprung up between them, made trans-Saharan trade possible. One trade route extended south from eastern Tripolitania to the oasis of Kufra, before proceeding onward to Abeche and then to Lake Chad. Another extended north from Kano in the north of the Sudan, to Agadez, to Tamanrasset, and then to Ghadames, just south of Tripoli.
The Kufra-Lake Chad route would become famous as “Selim’s Road”, the path that brought the young revolutionary to the great proving ground of the Sudan. The Ghadames-Kano route, meanwhile, was always famous. This was the Berber route. Though there were never more than a hundred Ghadamsi merchants in any given city, their keen knowledge of economic situations in the Mediterranean coast and the African interior let them serve as organizers and financial backers of trade. Tamanrasset was the center of the Kel Ahaggar Tuareg confederation. These men of the Ahaggar mountains recognized the prosperity trade could bring, and generally allowed men of wealth to proceed unmolested to Agadez, the home city of the Air Tuaregs. At every major step and plenty of minor ones, the Imazigh and their brethren dominated.
Through this trade, which proceeded apace through the 20th century with increasing amounts of trinkets made in faraway places like Budapest and Krakow and brought to the merchants in Ghadames, the Sahara kept tabs on the world beyond. In the 1930s, strange travelers with fire in their eyes came from places like Persia and Egypt, calling upon the Berbers and Tuaregs to join them. And, surprisingly, some did.
The ancient tribal confederations of the desert had not yet seen any compelling reasons to build centralized governments. But who knew what the future had in store?
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This post's gotten long, so I'll save Portuguese Morocco and French West Africa for another day-- the day when I finally get around to drawing up a picture of the Congo and Southern Africa.
- LostInNewDelhi
- Word Count: 3.7k