alternatehistory.com

The massive Spanish dominions in Central Africa were referred to by commentators in interwar Europe as “Africa’s Youngest Colonies”, since some parts of the colony had not seen Spanish rule until the 1910s, and other parts had seen almost no European infiltration until the 1920s. Nevertheless, the colony and its peoples could lay solid claim to a long and storied history. The earliest Spanish expeditions to the region were undertaken in the 1860s, under the directives of Spain’s military government. The nation was still reeling from its expulsion from Vespucia and the emergence of military rule in 1809, and the disappointments of that period birthed a powerful appetite for a “Second Empire” in the nearest colonizable continent. Nueva Cadiz, the future capital of Spanish Guinea, was founded in 1865. Three years later, the explorer Eduardo Pondal navigated up the Congo River and signed a treaty with the king of the Bateke, who was eager to secure the benefits of Spanish trade and believed that it could help him gain an edge over his rivals. He agreed to make his state a Spanish protectorate and grant the Spaniards rights to settle near the now-famous Pondal Pool [1] on the Congo River. The explorer, remembering the command of Spanish dictator to “strike a blow for our way of life, with the speed and splendour of a lightning bolt,” named his new settlement Relampago [2]. This quick expansion guaranteed Spain a seat at the 1871 Conference of Rome, and they were accordingly granted a large sphere of influence in the western Congo Basin.

The Dutch, meanwhile, barreled inward from the eastern coast. Puffed up with pride in their beschavingmissie, or civilizing mission, the Dutch took it upon themselves to eliminate the twin problems of African slavery and African independence. In 1869, the successful conclusion of the Dutch-Zanzibari War resulted in all of Zanzibar’s mainland African holdings being transferred to direct Dutch control, while the islands of Zanzibar stayed as an internally autonomous protectorate. With the international legitimacy that Rome provided, the Dutch could launch expeditions into the interior to eliminate the warlords who supplied the Zanzibari coast with slaves. The strongest opponent of the Dutch was Mirambo, warlord of the Nyamwezi.


Translating his economic power as a trader and owner of caravans into political clout by hiring large armies of orphaned teenagers and other rootless outcasts, Mirambo ran a profitable enterprise by selling ivory, copper, and slaves in exchange for cloth and guns. The Dutch war against Mirambo ran into the 1880s, but ended with the complete subjugation of the Nyamwezi domain. The war’s costs proved prohibitive, however, and the Dutch would not penetrate any deeper into the African interior, leaving the middle part of modern-day Central Africa unclaimed until the start of the Great European War.

The Great European War decided the fate of Central Africa. Although French colonial troops made gains against Spain and almost completely expelled the Spanish from Africa, the Spanish and their Baltic-Adriatic allies won the larger war by 1916. Spain’s control of its old colonies was restored, and it was assigned rulership of Dutch Madagascar and the northern parts of Dutch East Africa. The map of Spanish Central Africa is a reflection of the subsequent mad dash for control.

While a Visegradian fleet departed for Madagascar and accepted the surrender of the Dutch governor on behalf of the Spanish, the Spanish army landed in Kilwa and headed inland. In taking control of the formerly Dutch territories, the Spanish kept the old administrative boundaries. Zanzibar and its former mainland territories came under direct Spanish rule, while the military districts of Azania (encompassing the territories north of the Rufiji and Ugalla rivers once ruled by Mirambo) and Rhapta (a neo-classically named zone separating the busier colonies of Zanzibar and Zambezia) underwent only small changes like the replacement of governors, renegotiation of treaties with native chiefs, and the renaming of capitals. Dutch and Swahili, the languages of the civil service and police forces, were retained, but long-term plans were made to keep Swahili and drop Dutch for Spanish. Under the directive of Manuel Garcia Terrero, the dictator of Spain, contact was made with Buganda and other kingdoms of the Great Lakes, leading to the creation of the Nyanza [3] Protectorate and the Ruanda-Urundi Protectorate, each governed by a Spanish governor-general who used military force to control the economic and foreign affairs of the petty kingdoms under their charge. This was as far as Spain got before the 1919 Revolution.

The founders of the Federal Republic, to their credit, tried to have a serious dialogue about the benefits and drawbacks of colonialism. Opponents of colonialism argued that, despite the brutality and forced labour employed by the concession companies— violence that the old government had never prohibited— the Congo River colonies were not even that profitable. In other words, Spain was dehumanizing the native people of Africa for no reason, and stood ready to expand its useless and harmful colonies even more. The proponents of colonialism successfully responded that Spain had the dynamism necessary to reform the old policies of the dictators, and would be a better overlord than the French who would almost certainly move in in the event of a Spanish withdrawal from the continent. The tiebreaker ended up being the copper trade, which— if the Spaniards stayed— promised profits beyond that which rubber could provide. Though no plans were made to integrate Central Africa as constituent nations like Argelia, the set of policies devised over the 1920s, collectively termed “Fraternal Integration,” would impact the course of Central African development thereafter.


The unclaimed areas in the very center of the continent were integrated by the 1920s. While exploring the areas near the French border, Colonel Angel Castro found that his Luo interpreters, hired in northwestern Azania, could, after a fashion, understand the speech of the Lango people Castro encountered north of Nyanza. He wrote to the Spanish colonial office in Kilwa, arguing that the northeastern fringes of the Spanish empire should be governed as a single unit so that the government would not have to hire as many interpreters or train them in languages overly foreign from theirs. The officials in Kilwa, with Madrid’s backing, made Castro the first Governor-General of the Upper Nile Protectorate, and he governed it from his residence at Kisumu, a traditional place of barter trade. Later anthropological studies would determine that most of the region’s population spoke languages belonging to the Nilotic group. Meanwhile, Swahili-speaking soldiers from the east were employed by Colonel Ricardo Baroja in the areas west of the Great Lakes for their ability to ability to understand the local dialects of Swahili, which were used as the linguae francae ever since the first trade caravans arrived from the coast. Baroja’s opponents were the last of the slave-raiders, who had been driven inland by the Dutch and no longer sold slaves but still kept them as workers in households and mines. Rooting out these men completely would take too much time, and so Baroja skillfully employed a strategy of “sanitary cordons.” Each warlord, upon being defeated, was not deposed but simply had his domains reduced to a circle of 20 kilometers around his main center of power [4]. A network of Spanish-led and Swahili-manned waystations held down the territory newly liberated from warlords and traditional rulers alike, and by 1922 Baroja founded the settlement of Ciudad Carranzo [5] as the capital of the Protectorate of the Lakes.


The west and east were brought into the Spanish fold through force, but the center would be integrated through diplomacy. The Luba empire retained its independence in the center of the continent despite the depredations of the slavers that once roamed the lands of the Lakes Protectorate. The Spanish dictatorship, however, mostly ignored the Luba, and the Spanish republic had been so gracious as to eliminate the main enemy of the Luba even if they were doing it for their own ends. All this was fertile ground for an alliance. The Mulopwe— monarch of the Luba— accepted the presence of a Spanish resident in his court, and some effort was made to negotiate ivory and copper trade conditions that were fair to the Luba and the Spanish concessionary companies. Making nice with the Luba was essential to quickly bring them into the Spanish sphere and solidify the southern border of the colonies against Dutch or Portuguese incursions. Similar terms were negotiated with the Kuba kingdom, a smaller state that was heavily influenced by Luba culture. The Lunda states along the border with Portugal had no common authority— Lunda unity had been destroyed by the Chokwe invasions of the previous century— and so an army was sent in from the Congo to impose a Protectorate on the local population and beat back any Portuguese soldiers who wandered in.


While the Spanish imposed their will on the east and center, the older colonies of the west prospered. The old colonies of Guinea and Congo, separated by the Ogooue River, gained the most from Fraternal Integralism. In these colonies, the Spanish had reigned for decades and felt fairly sure of their control, and bold reforms and new policies could be attempted. Recognizing that the army had become overstretched over the course of the 1920s’ expansions, the Spanish government took steps to create a civilian-staffed civil service to take over the administrative functions which the military had retained for itself. Because not too many whites were willing to settle outside Relampago and Nueva Cadiz, the civil servants who came to administer large areas of Guinea and Congo were drawn from the small but growing population of educated Africans produced by the string of public and Catholic schools established by the old dictatorship. Graduates of these public schools could acquire a working knowledge of Spanish and either Kikongo, Lingala, or Teke (depending on where they lived) and a few Africans used these skills to fight their way into the white-dominated universities that the dictatorship originally established for the benefit of the colonists. The concessionary companies were reined in— the creation of the Federal Republic had involved the nationalization of companies that were perceived as too close to the dictatorship, and the Republic gently reminded the concessionary companies that it still had the capacity to impose federal control. Though a minimum wage and holiday break were not in the cards, the Congolese could at least look forward to a stringent ban on forced labor and a limit on how many hours in a day the employers could demand from their workers. The rubber plantations incurred more expenses, but stayed solvent. Secondary industries— coffee, copper, and lumber among them— formed as well, and Spanish companies prospected for oil along the coast of the Congo colony. Expeditions in the east of the Congo colony drew the border with the Lakes protectorate at the approximate points at which Lingala-speaking civil servants stopped being useful and Swahili-speaking civil servants could get the job done. Of course, Lingala and Swahili were languages of trade and there was no perfectly solid line as which one language stopped being spoken and the other started. Nevertheless, the Spanish successfully drew a colonial line through the blurry polyglot borderland that made at least a little bit of sense, an act which would have implications in the future.


In the 1930s, the music of Afro-Caribbean bands started to be broadcast over the Sengupta. The sound took the Congo by storm. The youth of Relampago tried to imitate the sound on their Spanish-made guitars, creating a new genre of music that came to be called Agitado [6]. Meanwhile, the Spanish designers of the Congolese education policy looked on. If the Congolese of Relampago knew how to sing in Spanish, and the Congolese of the river’s upper reaches knew how to craft poetic lyrics in the Lingala dialects spoken downstream, the Spanish education system deserved at least some credit. Of course, this willingness to engage with the outside world in a relatively united matter might prove dangerous. But for now, the Spanish decided, why not enjoy the music? In the same way that the knowledge of the Moors filtered into Europe through al-Andalus, the Spanish Republic would become a conduit for the spread of African influence in modern art and music.


The 1930s also saw the growth of the Matamban diamond trade. The Kingdom of Matamba, long a resident of the Portuguese sphere, had discovered diamonds within its territory in the 1920s and soon started expanding into the disunited territory of the Lunda and Chokwe to its east in the hope of finding more diamonds. Francisco III, the Ngola (king) of Matamba, granted a concession to the Portuguese Companhia dos Diamantes Africanos, or Comdia. Workers hired by Comdia and guarded by the soldiers of the Ngola began large-scale diamond mining in the hinterlands of Matamba, and the diamonds were sometimes imported into Spain and then sold to Europe in order to avoid the high taxes of the absolutist Portuguese monarchy. The diamond trade gave Francisco a reliable and immense source of income, and he put it to work. While Francisco was careful to set aside money for economic modernization and social improvements, he also hired foreign military experts as officers for his soldiers, under the pretext of needing to “better protect the diamond mines.” Comdia and its friends in the Portuguese government were, interestingly enough, supportive [7]. Some of the executives of Comdia feared that the stagnating Portuguese monarchy might someday be too weak to hold the Africans down, and figured that cultivating strong native allies who would preserve Portuguese economic influence would be a worthwhile exercise. As it slowly dawned on the Visegradian exiles that their multinational kingdom was gone forever, Comdia operatives in Europe contacted them and asked if they were willing to hawk their military and espionage skills in a new continent and for a negotiable price. A great number were willing to do exactly that, and they were joined by Italian soldiers, who found that their country’s neutrality policy offered few opportunities for excitement. All these new arrivals wanted Portuguese-style houses in which to live, and the resulting diamond-funded construction boom in the Matamban capital of Malanje (once the headquarters of a concessinonary company that unsuccessfully sought to encourage Portuguese emigration to the interior kingdom, the settlement had been reintegrated by the Matambans with few complaints from the Portuguese government) did much to diversify the local economy, bring in migrants from other parts of the kingdom, and lay the foundation for future modernization of Matamban society. This interested Francisco, but did not captivate him as did the memory of Ndongo, land of his ancestors. Though he was a wise steward of his realm who was very interested in the prosperity, education, and advancement of its people, Francisco felt that he and his ancestors would never know peaceful rest until the Mbundu came to know unity under a flag of their own.

Violence. Clemency. The sinister glitter of diamonds, and the dull gleam of copper. The sharp scent of coffee, and the spice of peanut sauce. Advancement. Deprivation.

All these and more would define the dominions of Central Africa for years to come.

[1] OTL: Malebo Pool.

[2] OTL: Brazzaville and Kinshasa. The cities developed in parallel historically— when the Belgians founded Leopoldville on the south bank of the Congo, the French refurbished their older northern settlement at Brazzaville in order to catch up. Since both banks of the Congo now share a common political authority, there’s no real reason to administratively separate north and south. The core of Relampago may reside in the north, but the suburban districts that will someday develop along the south bank will be regarded as an integral part of the city as well. Lastly, relampago means “lightning” in Spanish.

[3] Means “large mass of water” in many Bantu languages. The term is used in reference to Lake Victoria, which is Lake Nyanza TTL.

[4] This was the strategy used to prevent the successors of Msiri, once the ruler of a strong and wealthy kingdom in Katanga, from presenting a challenge to the Belgian rulers of the Congo.

[5] OTL: Kisangani.

[6] Spanish for "shaken."

[7] The Arab Gulf state approach to building a modern military— find resource X, find a patron who’s willing to help you exploit it, and then use your newly-gained money to buy new toys and people that know how to play with them. Matamba has big goals for its role in the region, and is working toward them. Comdia, on the other hand, probably sees Matamba as the kind of "independent ally" that OTL's Belgian copper companies saw in Katanga :^)

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Generally, the TTL Spanish are a different kind of colonizer from OTL Belgium, and the structure they are building in Congo-- a government with a European head and native limbs-- wouldn't look out of place in OTL British Nigeria or India. Congo also looks different from OTL. Instead of being attached to the fractious eastern and central lands that have given it so much trouble in OTL (Katanga Crisis, South Kasai secession, Simba Rebellion, the contemporary Kivu conflict) it's attached to western lands that, lingustically, aren't too dissimilar. It's not a perfect society, but it hasn't been brutalized as heavily as OTL and a tradition of responsible government has been maintained for a few decades now. However, that tradition isn't as strong in the newer colonies, which are still mostly governed from the barracks. I wonder how they'll turn out. And the native monarchies offer intriguing possibilities of their own-- they're set up for both success and failure in the modern world...