Alex Richards
Donor
Ah. Considering the absence of French and Italian areas and a more centralist model it's really very far from Switzerland then.
Look to the West: Thread III, Volume IV (Tottenham Nil)!
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
- Status
Ah. Considering the absence of French and Italian areas and a more centralist model it's really very far from Switzerland then.
The only thing where we use latin is the official name (Confoederatio Helvetica). The reason why the official name is an exception is because a country can have only one official name so one of the four official languages (German, French, Italian and Romansh) would wouldn't do.
In other application using latin would be useless, as almost no one understands it anyway. Instead everything is translated into all four languages.
Since English has become ever more important and most of the younger people speak it, it has become the default language for communication between different groups. The major advantage is that because it is no ones native language any misspelling, mispronounciation, misconjugation or wrong word order go on unnoticed and don't disrupt the discussion.
I've just been reading about a group called the cagots in France and Spain. Apparently the main steps towards their integration into mainstream society came during the French Revolution, when records of who were cagots were torn up and official efforts were made to integrate them. Given the more race-based nature of LTTW's revolution and it's shorter length (which would presumably leave more people remembering who were cagots), what difference would be made to this ITTL? And what would the Malraux government's policy be?
Thande
Donor
Interesting find, not heard of that before (and fascinatingly mysterious). I suspect in this case that they would probably be enthusiastic embracers of the Linnaean aspect of the Revolution, as they were racially and linguistically French and thus would (at least in theory) be put on the same level as their former persecutors and other divisions would come to the fore.
Thande
Donor
They do fit the standard LTTW bill, don't they. Whereas Ed tends to do the same thing in his TLs with unlikely OTL events rather than groups or technologies.
). You finally put into words an idea I had of my own. Thanks for inadvertently doing that.
Thande
Donor
Nice work, just a couple of corrections -
- Frederick was preceded by William IV, not George II (I believe it's mentioned that part of the legal compromise of the Second Glorious Revolution was that William was retrospectively recognised as King despite Frederick denying it while he was alive)
- The children are in the wrong order.
Here's a family tree for clarification (I haven't yet updated it for volume III events). I certainly wouldn't mind you doing more wikiboxes.
Thande
Donor
Part #165: Fula Rush In Where Angles Fear To Tread
“Once upon a time, the lands that are now considered civilised ‘nation-states’ were instead composed of loosely connected villages and city-states, each with its own language, laws and customs that made them difficult to trade between. Things that we nowadays take for granted—walking a few miles down the road to go to a different town whose market might have better prices than our own—were difficult or impossible. We do not have to trust historians on these matters, for there are many parts of the world disadvantaged by local conditions where this is still the case. We can see them in the process of a transition towards the form of government we are used to, and we call it progress. Yet all such a transition does is change the scale of the problem: nations instead of villages. A scuffle between two mobs of villagers over whether the ziggurat should be blue or red has become a war between nations in which thousands lose their lives for reasons no less trivial or absurd. It behooves us to follow the amalgamation to its natural conclusion: all of humanity speaking one language, possessing one legal code. We can look at the feuding city states of today and think how their division prevents them from possessing many of the comforts and advantages we take for granted in our nations, and we call them primitive: think on, and consider how the united brotherhood of mankind of a few centuries hence will think of your life in much the same way you think of those villagers’…”
*
From “A History of West Africa” by Lancelot Grieves (1964):
The year 1835 was a turning point in the history of West Africa: it was then that the great Fulani leader Usama al-Gobiri, better known as Abu Nahda, conquered the city of Bida and cemented his rule over the Hausa city-states. It was at this point that the Board of Directors of the Royal Africa Company, chaired by Philip Lawrence, recognised that intervention was necessary if the Company’s position in the region was not to be undermined. Up until this point, the Board had been distracted both with the issue of Gabriel Brown’s Freedom Theology movement causing chaos among the native states they were attempting to trade with, and had trusted in the opinion that the Fulani and the Hausa would only weaken each other in their conflict and neither would be able to gain the upper hand. Abu Nahda’s string of victories demonstrated the falsehood of that assumption and his building of a powerful caliphate (in all but name) stretching from the shores of Lake Chad to the Nupe and Borgu city-states represented a considerable threat to the Company’s interests. As with the Company’s counterpart in India, division among the natives was generally good for business, and trade deals with a powerful united state were both subject to a fragile monopoly and suffered from the fact that the Company had a poorer bargaining position. Many feuding cities were easier to manage—the jagun troopers could usually be sent in to depose one awkward prince without the others banding together against the Company, providing the Board did not send the troops in too often. Furthermore, the Fulani successes rightly concerned the Company’s allies and partners in the region, the ruling classes both fearful for their position and repelled by the Fulani’s reputation for fundamentalist interpretations of Islam. The important Company allies of Dahomey and Oyo[1] had their own strongly held religions, which the Company had ‘respected’ by attempting to bar Christian missionaries from the region—something which they were unable to enforce when it came to the Brownites among their own ranks, but at this point they were still few in number as far east as the former Slave Coast. The prosetylising Fulani were a definite threat, particularly given Abu Nahda’s subtle strategies of encouraging conversion through economic incentives rather than the threat of the sword.
To that end, Lawrence ordered a new expeditionary force to be drawn up, composed primarily of a new composite regiment of Company Jaguns led by white officers and supplemented with smaller contributions from the Kingdom of Dahomey and the Oyo Empire. In command was General Simon Bishop, one of many Royal Africa Company men who had fought on Blandford’s side in the Inglorious Revolution and found discretion to be the better part of valour when he had lost. Bishop is often viewed as being a crude buffoon, a trend reinforced by his portrayal by Peter Gant in the 1960 film The Red Niger. In reality, though Bishop was far from the greatest of soldiers, he could not have held his fractious army together for as long as he did were he not something of a capable manager. He wrote in his journal that half his job seemed to be ensuring that he always had a force of Jaguns safely in between any of the Dahomean and Yoruba camps to stop them brawling with each other. The fact that the Ahosu of Dahomey had sent a small token force of his Amazons did not help with tensions both with the Yoruba and the Company force, with some British officers being disquieted at the idea of women fighting on the battlefield. Despite these issues, Bishop managed to control his army as it set out from Katunga (also called Oyo City) in 1836. The mission suffered reports of bad news from its scouts and spies from the start: Abu Nahda had taken the Borgu city of Bussa—which sat in a key site on the lower Niger and was vital for his plans to develop the riverine system to be the communications and trade backbone of his empire—and was now moving southwards once again.[3] His sights were thought to be set on Rabba, a Nupe city on the north bank of the Niger that would complete his design. Oyo had already lost much of its northern vassal state of Nupe to the Fulani, and Nupe was held to be of great importance to the as it had been a former enemy that had once conquered the Yoruba only to be conquered in turn. Furthermore, Rabba was uncomfortably close to the Yoruba capital of Katunga itself, not far from the south bank of the river. It was clear that the line would have to be drawn here.
The Company force arrived in Rabba and found it to be under the government of the Etsu Nupe, the ruler of the Nupe, who had fled Bida after it fell to Abu Nahda. The Etsu Nupe was understandably worried about the fate of his nation and disinclined to obey the orders of its Yoruba overlords, who had failed to prevent Abu Nahda’s ravages up to now. Once again, a careful examination of what records exist suggest that Bishop was instrumental in smoothing over the difficulties, revealing the lie of his popular portrayal. The initial plan was for the Nupe to add their own contribution to the allied expeditionary force and then for the army to march north and retake Bida before Abu Nahda’s army could return from Bussa. However, this was delayed by the aforementioned disagreements, with the result that the army remained stuck in Rabba by the time the Fulani arrived. Abu Nahda scouted out Rabba and had to make the decision whether he thought the Fulani could conquer the city given its powerful new reinforcements. From the records of Abu Nahda’s clerks that have survived, it appears that the Fulani leader was not only convinced that Rabah was vital to his empire-building plans, but also concerned that if his jihad lost its momentum, the unity of his followers would crumble. To that end, he decided that an attack was worth the risk.
Despite the fact that Rabba had been reinforced by men (and a few women) from several nations, in terms of numbers the allies were still outmatched by the Fulani, whose force was also quite diverse: Abu Nahda had allied Hausa and Bornu soldiers and a smaller number of Borgu and turncoat Nupe. The Borgu were considered more reliable than the Nupe as Abu Nahda had managed to reach an accommodation with the Kibe of Bussa, Kigera II dan Jibrim, who had agreed to convert to Islam and break with the other major Borgu cities of Nikki and Illo. The Borgu therefore considered themselves to be fighting for their own ruler, whereas some of the Nupe were fighting simply for rations and plunder and retained some loyalty to the Etsu Nupe in Rabba.
The ensuing Battle of Rabba is often over-simplified in the popular imagination, again not helped by its portrayal in film. There remains a persistent myth that the battle was fought mainly between European technology and Fulani horsemanship, and that cavalry was so unknown to the British’s African allies that it was a powerful tool of alienistic combat.[3] While this may have been true for some of the Jaguns recruited from the more coastal states, it is nonsense to suggest it was the case for the Yoruba, who had powerful cavalry of their own, and the Dahomeans, who did not but had fought the Yoruba’s horsemen on many occasions. It appears to have begun from a single second-hand story told by a bitter British soldier to a journalist two years after the battle, blaming his problems on Britain’s black allies as an easy target, and repeated by many written accounts of the war without any checking of facts. Now, of course, it seems impossible to eradicate.
Bishop has been criticised for his decision to meet the Fulani on the field rather than forcing them to give siege—some have suggested that the Fulani would have been unable to maintain a siege due to their lack of heavy artillery. This ignores both the fact that the Fulani had successfully besieged other cities in the past and that Rabba was not particularly defensible. Bishop judged that his army would be better able to press its advantages on the field, rightly or wrongly. There was certainly an element of technological disparity, but not so much as the popular impression would suggest: certainly, unlike film depictions suggest, few of the British and jagun soldiers possessed modern firearms with breech-loading and compression-lock firing.[4] Most of the Company’s weapons were older muskets left over from the Jacobin Wars, supplemented with a smaller number of rifles—sometimes breech-loading models, but almost invariably flintlock. The Company was swift to adopt compression-lock weapons where it had the capability, the waterproof firing mechanism being very useful in the often damp and humid terrain in which its soldiers fought, but at this point the expense involved had held them back. The Fulani, therefore, might be using old flintlock and even firelock muskets, but that did not hold them back as much as it might have. More powerful was the British’s artillery, which the Fulani had little answer to, but the terrain of the battlefield meant that the guns were less effective than they might have been—by one British artilleryman’s account, cannonballs would often bounce off sudden rises in the ground and sail over the enemy cavalry. Howitzers proved more effective, but Bishop only had access to a small number.
Abu Nahda was a reasonable general but his real skill was as a politician: like Bishop his problems were mainly ones of keeping his diverse army together in the face of the fact that many of its disparate groups were former enemies. Unlike Bishop he was also savvy enough to recognise that his foe had the same issue: Abu Nahda knew little of the RAC but his spies’ reports confirmed his hunch that his opponent did not command a homogenous force either. He was able to gain fairly detailed information on his enemy days before the battle commenced, and when his scouts had assessed Bishop’s formation, he created a strategy to break it. Bishop’s army was made up of a combination of Yoruba cavalry, British artillery, and infantry from the RAC (British and jagun), Dahomeans, and Nupe from the city of Rabba itself. The Fulani force meanwhile was made up of Fulani and Bornu cavalry and Hausa, Borgu and Nupe infantry. Abu Nahda’s real stroke of genius was to realise that the people in Bishop’s army most vulnerable to his cavalry tactics were not the Dahomean and Nupe infantry, but rather the Yoruba cavalry: the Yoruba were used to being the only power in their region with cavalry, and thus all their tactics centred around fighting opponents on the ground. The Dahomeans and Nupe, by contrast, had often fought Yoruba cavalry and knew some tactics that might counter cavalry attacks. But the Yoruba had little experience in cavalry-on-cavalry warfare, and might struggle to respond to a Fulani cavalry charge—the Fulani themselves being well experienced in such warfare due to their clashes with the Bornu, themselves known for skilled horsemanship. Abu Nahda also exploited a crack in Bishop’s attempt to ensure that his feuding allies were not reliant on each other: he calculated that if judged correctly, an attack on the Yoruba would force the Nupe to fill the gap, and his spies told him that the Nupe would be reluctant to put themselves in the firing line, both because of a dislike of the Yoruba failing to come to their aid before and because the Etsu Nupe was concerned about what might happen to Rabba if the Nupe fought and were defeated.
The strategy worked brilliantly. Even as his own forces sustained heavy losses from artillery and regimented fire, Abu Nahda’s attack succeeded in surprising and overpowering the Yoruba contingent, and the Nupe’s lukewarm attempt to assist was quickly ended by Borgu infantrymen; the Nupe mostly broke and ran for the gates of Rabba as the Yoruba fell. Bishop was swift to respond, but was hampered by the fact that he could not use the Dahomeans to assist the Yoruba due to the two sides’ mutual hatred of each other, meaning he had to rely on British and jagun troops to reinforce the Yoruba, which were not in the best place to pull off such a move. (Naturally, the film adaptations of the battle lazily turn this into Bishop being portrayed as an extreme Racist who thinks only the British capable of anything, even though his army would have mutinied long ago if that was the case). His initial move to reinforce was cut off by Hausa infantry, so Bishop personally led a second attempt, which managed to drive its way further into the Fulani cavalry ranks surrounding the Yoruba before Bishop was shot by a Fulani. He fell from his saddle and was trampled to death in the chaos of panicking horses. Bishop’s second-in-command, Colonel Paul Jamison, decided the battle was lost, regrouped as much of the allied forces as he could manage, and withdrew from the field. Nearly all the Yoruba force had been lost and many of the British and jaguns, while more of the Dahomeans survived—storing up bitter resentment among the allies for years to come.
Abu Nahda held the field and took several prisoners, including three British officers whom he held hostage (in rather cordial conditions) as future bargaining chips. However, he had won a Pyrrhic victory: the British guns had wrecked large portions of his army and, as the different nations making up the force had not suffered equally, he faced the same problems as his enemy counterparts. In particular the Bornu cavalry had suffered the brunt of the British howitzers and two popular Bornu princelings had been killed, which started a race riot when news filtered back to Gazargamo. Abu Nahda moved into Rabba by agreement of the Etsu Nupe, who laid down his arms in exchange for a promise of good treatment of his city. The whole of the Nupe kingdom was now under Fulani control.
The Retreat from Rabba was the greatest defeat in the history of the Royal Africa Company and several imagined images of disconsolate soldiers trudging back down the trail to Katunga have been captured by painters. When the army arrived in Katunga, naturally the Alaafin was appalled to learn of the Oyo Empire’s losses and infuriated by the Dahomeans having escaped the same. Tensions on both sides led to the Dahomean portion of the Expeditionary Force returning to its homeland under British escort. Colonel Jamison reported back to the Company in Whydah and caused a political earthquake. The scale of the defeat was staggering, and the shattering of the Company’s reputation for invincibility encouraged risings across British Guinea: often not actually aimed at the Company itself, but being struggles between native states that the Company had suppressed for the sake of trade. The jaguns were assembled once again to put down the revolts, and it was clear that heads would have to roll. One such head was that of Philip Lawrence, President of the Board of Directors, whose policies were—rightly or wrongly—blamed for the defeat. Lawrence initially intended to fight his dismissal and force it to a vote of the Board, but eventually stepped down of his own accord when he was advised by his friend and ally Arthur Spencer-Churchill that he had too many votes against him. Lawrence became the Company’s new Resident at the court of the Oba of Lagos, a position seen by many as an exile, but he continued to work as hard as ever and began to draw the important trade port—still sore from the suppression of the slave trade from which it had made great riches—into the Company’s orbit. There are persistent rumours that Lawrence had also been offered the position of Governor of Natal as a swipe at the fact that he had offered a similar exilic position to his old enemy Philip Hamilton in 1816, but there is no known evidence to support such an assertion.
And it was Philip Hamilton that was once again at the forefront of the Company. He had returned in Africa in 1833 after his time managing his father’s political party in America as a figurehead. This was not the brash young man who had explored Benin and Timbuctoo with his great friend James Wayne; Hamilton was now in his fifties, seasoned and experienced in the cut and thrust of politics, no longer a field man who could be outmaneouvred around the boardroom table as Lawrence had almost twenty years before. His time leading the Patriot Party under the auspices of eminence grise Edmund Grey had also encouraged Hamilton to learn the art of delegation, and he no longer tried to do everything himself. Still, the Board were not willing to elect him President when he had been out of Africa for so long. Instead the position went to Frederick William Yates, an enemy of Lawrence (and thus an ally of Hamilton by default), who smoothed over the Board’s internal divisions and appointed Hamilton to lead a second army northward. The chances of success against the Fulani after the great defeat seemed slim, particularly given that only a small number of troops were available due to putting down the revolts, but Hamilton rose to the challenge.
A curious factor affecting the Anglo-Fulani War was that both sides thought that the other had won. To the British, their myth of invincibility had been shattered and they had suffered the humiliation of being expelled from an ally’s city by an invader, defeated by natives.[5] To the Fulani, they had suffered grievous losses, greater than any they had seen in Abu Nahda’s jihad thus far, and for many of their soldiers it was their first exposure to the sinister new advances in warfare coming out of Europe. Abu Nahda might have taken Rabba, but it was a hollow victory: with his losses, he lacked the troops to consolidate his gain and press onwards. His poor bargaining position was reflected by the fact that he did not achieve a treaty with the Etsu Nupe that involved the king converting to Islam, as he had managed in Bida and Bussa. And the news from the north was not good. If the British had suffered from revolts after the idea of their invincibility had been destroyed, so too did the Fulani. In particular the riots in Gazargamo triggered by the Bornu losses refused to go away, and in 1838, after a decade under Fulani rule, the city finally exploded into civil war after a Bornu nobleman declared himself the new Mai (king) of Bornu, proclaimed opposition to the Fulani interpretation of Islam, and began raising an army. The Kanem-Bornu lands ripped themselves apart through conflict between Fula-phobes and Fula-philes, with both sides hiring mercenaries from Wadai and Darfur to boost their numbers.
Abu Nahda realised that, no matter how important Rabba was to his riverine plans, he could not allow the situation in Bornu to further escalate. He withdrew from Rabba, moving his army northwards, and in 1839-1840 proceeded to crush the rebellion and restore his rule in Gazargamo. A few Bornu rebels fled to Wadai rather than bow the knee to Abu Nahda, and proved to be a small but troublesome minority for the Sultanate of Darfur for years to come. Abu Nahda succeeded in holding his fledgeling empire together, though he was helped by the fact that the Hausa proved less inclined to rebel. Partly this represented the success of his moderate policies towards the Hausa city-states, and partly it came from a sense of banding together against a new threat. By 1839, Philip Hamilton had arrived in Rabba with his small army, only to find that the Etsu Nupe refused to involve himselve with either side and declared Rabba a free city. Hamilton decided not to press the case but tried an attack on Bida to dislodge the Fulani garrison. He won a victory, but like Abu Nahda, found that he lacked the troops or supply lines to consolidate his win, and was unable to gain the support from the locals he had hoped for: Fulani rule was reasonably popular among the Nupe. Hamilton elected to retreat to the Niger and consider his next move, using the RAC’s engineers to build a new fort upstream from Rabba which he named Fort St Andrew—widely suspected to be a reference not to the saint, but a veiled one to the late Andrew Eveleigh, who would doubtless be horrified to have his name applied to an institution manned by black soldiers.
Having crushed most of the Bornu rebellion, Abu Nahda heard of the trouble at the other end of his empire and returned to the Niger, leaving his subordinates to complete the job. He reoccupied Bida but chose not to move in to Rabba again. For a month the two armies viewed each other across the Niger,[6] both considerably reduced compared to the armies that had fought at Rabba, the defiantly independent city-state stuck in them iddle between them. Both the Fulani and the RAC had sent envoys to the Etsu Nupe, of course, and in the end it was the Etsu Nupe who arranged for these envoys to meet each other. Negotiations proved surprisingly productive, and a month later Hamilton and Abu Nahda themselves agreed to meet in Rabba. Accounts from both men (in journals and via eyewitnesses) suggest that each impressed the other with their scholarly aptitude; both were accustomed to being the most well-read person in a room and relished the idea of discourse with another of the same mind but from a different culture. It helped that there was no need for a translator, as both men were reasonably fluent in Arabic: Abu Nahda from his Koranic studies, and Hamilton had learned it as part of his youthful escapade in Timbuctoo. The two leaders swiftly convinced each other that there was little reason to fight. Abu Nahda was no Alexander: he knew when to stop. His goal was not to carry on conquering until he died, but rather to build a concrete and lasting empire in which the Fulani (and their version of Islam) would have a pre-eminent position, but would incorporate many other peoples as well. He wanted stable and equitable laws, peaceful coexistence, and development—causes which could align with the RAC’s goals. Abu Nahda had little desire to push his empire all the way to the coast, and the RAC had no real need to push direct control further northwards if the Fulani empire was a state with which they could do business. Hamilton ended up agreeing to open up the RAC’s territories to Fulani missionaries (though many of the native powers within it blocked them) in exchange for Abu Nahda opening up his dominions to trade with the RAC. He was particularly keen on European advances that would help him hold his empire together, such as better roads, Optel communications and perhaps even railways...
[1] Dahomey had fought for independence from Oyo with Company help only twenty years earlier, but Oyo had also become aligned with the Company over the subsequent years.
[2] Bussa (also spelled Boussa) has in OTL since been drowned by the construction of the Kainji Reservoir and its people founded New Bussa around 25 miles further south.
[3] Psychological warfare.
[4] Compression-lock is the TTL term for percussion cap firearms.
[5] Or rather the city of an ally’s vassal state.
[6] The author is speaking metaphorically—they’re not actually so close they’d be visible to each other.
“Once upon a time, the lands that are now considered civilised ‘nation-states’ were instead composed of loosely connected villages and city-states, each with its own language, laws and customs that made them difficult to trade between. Things that we nowadays take for granted—walking a few miles down the road to go to a different town whose market might have better prices than our own—were difficult or impossible. We do not have to trust historians on these matters, for there are many parts of the world disadvantaged by local conditions where this is still the case. We can see them in the process of a transition towards the form of government we are used to, and we call it progress. Yet all such a transition does is change the scale of the problem: nations instead of villages. A scuffle between two mobs of villagers over whether the ziggurat should be blue or red has become a war between nations in which thousands lose their lives for reasons no less trivial or absurd. It behooves us to follow the amalgamation to its natural conclusion: all of humanity speaking one language, possessing one legal code. We can look at the feuding city states of today and think how their division prevents them from possessing many of the comforts and advantages we take for granted in our nations, and we call them primitive: think on, and consider how the united brotherhood of mankind of a few centuries hence will think of your life in much the same way you think of those villagers’…”
– Pablo Sanchez, 1852 speech
*
From “A History of West Africa” by Lancelot Grieves (1964):
The year 1835 was a turning point in the history of West Africa: it was then that the great Fulani leader Usama al-Gobiri, better known as Abu Nahda, conquered the city of Bida and cemented his rule over the Hausa city-states. It was at this point that the Board of Directors of the Royal Africa Company, chaired by Philip Lawrence, recognised that intervention was necessary if the Company’s position in the region was not to be undermined. Up until this point, the Board had been distracted both with the issue of Gabriel Brown’s Freedom Theology movement causing chaos among the native states they were attempting to trade with, and had trusted in the opinion that the Fulani and the Hausa would only weaken each other in their conflict and neither would be able to gain the upper hand. Abu Nahda’s string of victories demonstrated the falsehood of that assumption and his building of a powerful caliphate (in all but name) stretching from the shores of Lake Chad to the Nupe and Borgu city-states represented a considerable threat to the Company’s interests. As with the Company’s counterpart in India, division among the natives was generally good for business, and trade deals with a powerful united state were both subject to a fragile monopoly and suffered from the fact that the Company had a poorer bargaining position. Many feuding cities were easier to manage—the jagun troopers could usually be sent in to depose one awkward prince without the others banding together against the Company, providing the Board did not send the troops in too often. Furthermore, the Fulani successes rightly concerned the Company’s allies and partners in the region, the ruling classes both fearful for their position and repelled by the Fulani’s reputation for fundamentalist interpretations of Islam. The important Company allies of Dahomey and Oyo[1] had their own strongly held religions, which the Company had ‘respected’ by attempting to bar Christian missionaries from the region—something which they were unable to enforce when it came to the Brownites among their own ranks, but at this point they were still few in number as far east as the former Slave Coast. The prosetylising Fulani were a definite threat, particularly given Abu Nahda’s subtle strategies of encouraging conversion through economic incentives rather than the threat of the sword.
To that end, Lawrence ordered a new expeditionary force to be drawn up, composed primarily of a new composite regiment of Company Jaguns led by white officers and supplemented with smaller contributions from the Kingdom of Dahomey and the Oyo Empire. In command was General Simon Bishop, one of many Royal Africa Company men who had fought on Blandford’s side in the Inglorious Revolution and found discretion to be the better part of valour when he had lost. Bishop is often viewed as being a crude buffoon, a trend reinforced by his portrayal by Peter Gant in the 1960 film The Red Niger. In reality, though Bishop was far from the greatest of soldiers, he could not have held his fractious army together for as long as he did were he not something of a capable manager. He wrote in his journal that half his job seemed to be ensuring that he always had a force of Jaguns safely in between any of the Dahomean and Yoruba camps to stop them brawling with each other. The fact that the Ahosu of Dahomey had sent a small token force of his Amazons did not help with tensions both with the Yoruba and the Company force, with some British officers being disquieted at the idea of women fighting on the battlefield. Despite these issues, Bishop managed to control his army as it set out from Katunga (also called Oyo City) in 1836. The mission suffered reports of bad news from its scouts and spies from the start: Abu Nahda had taken the Borgu city of Bussa—which sat in a key site on the lower Niger and was vital for his plans to develop the riverine system to be the communications and trade backbone of his empire—and was now moving southwards once again.[3] His sights were thought to be set on Rabba, a Nupe city on the north bank of the Niger that would complete his design. Oyo had already lost much of its northern vassal state of Nupe to the Fulani, and Nupe was held to be of great importance to the as it had been a former enemy that had once conquered the Yoruba only to be conquered in turn. Furthermore, Rabba was uncomfortably close to the Yoruba capital of Katunga itself, not far from the south bank of the river. It was clear that the line would have to be drawn here.
The Company force arrived in Rabba and found it to be under the government of the Etsu Nupe, the ruler of the Nupe, who had fled Bida after it fell to Abu Nahda. The Etsu Nupe was understandably worried about the fate of his nation and disinclined to obey the orders of its Yoruba overlords, who had failed to prevent Abu Nahda’s ravages up to now. Once again, a careful examination of what records exist suggest that Bishop was instrumental in smoothing over the difficulties, revealing the lie of his popular portrayal. The initial plan was for the Nupe to add their own contribution to the allied expeditionary force and then for the army to march north and retake Bida before Abu Nahda’s army could return from Bussa. However, this was delayed by the aforementioned disagreements, with the result that the army remained stuck in Rabba by the time the Fulani arrived. Abu Nahda scouted out Rabba and had to make the decision whether he thought the Fulani could conquer the city given its powerful new reinforcements. From the records of Abu Nahda’s clerks that have survived, it appears that the Fulani leader was not only convinced that Rabah was vital to his empire-building plans, but also concerned that if his jihad lost its momentum, the unity of his followers would crumble. To that end, he decided that an attack was worth the risk.
Despite the fact that Rabba had been reinforced by men (and a few women) from several nations, in terms of numbers the allies were still outmatched by the Fulani, whose force was also quite diverse: Abu Nahda had allied Hausa and Bornu soldiers and a smaller number of Borgu and turncoat Nupe. The Borgu were considered more reliable than the Nupe as Abu Nahda had managed to reach an accommodation with the Kibe of Bussa, Kigera II dan Jibrim, who had agreed to convert to Islam and break with the other major Borgu cities of Nikki and Illo. The Borgu therefore considered themselves to be fighting for their own ruler, whereas some of the Nupe were fighting simply for rations and plunder and retained some loyalty to the Etsu Nupe in Rabba.
The ensuing Battle of Rabba is often over-simplified in the popular imagination, again not helped by its portrayal in film. There remains a persistent myth that the battle was fought mainly between European technology and Fulani horsemanship, and that cavalry was so unknown to the British’s African allies that it was a powerful tool of alienistic combat.[3] While this may have been true for some of the Jaguns recruited from the more coastal states, it is nonsense to suggest it was the case for the Yoruba, who had powerful cavalry of their own, and the Dahomeans, who did not but had fought the Yoruba’s horsemen on many occasions. It appears to have begun from a single second-hand story told by a bitter British soldier to a journalist two years after the battle, blaming his problems on Britain’s black allies as an easy target, and repeated by many written accounts of the war without any checking of facts. Now, of course, it seems impossible to eradicate.
Bishop has been criticised for his decision to meet the Fulani on the field rather than forcing them to give siege—some have suggested that the Fulani would have been unable to maintain a siege due to their lack of heavy artillery. This ignores both the fact that the Fulani had successfully besieged other cities in the past and that Rabba was not particularly defensible. Bishop judged that his army would be better able to press its advantages on the field, rightly or wrongly. There was certainly an element of technological disparity, but not so much as the popular impression would suggest: certainly, unlike film depictions suggest, few of the British and jagun soldiers possessed modern firearms with breech-loading and compression-lock firing.[4] Most of the Company’s weapons were older muskets left over from the Jacobin Wars, supplemented with a smaller number of rifles—sometimes breech-loading models, but almost invariably flintlock. The Company was swift to adopt compression-lock weapons where it had the capability, the waterproof firing mechanism being very useful in the often damp and humid terrain in which its soldiers fought, but at this point the expense involved had held them back. The Fulani, therefore, might be using old flintlock and even firelock muskets, but that did not hold them back as much as it might have. More powerful was the British’s artillery, which the Fulani had little answer to, but the terrain of the battlefield meant that the guns were less effective than they might have been—by one British artilleryman’s account, cannonballs would often bounce off sudden rises in the ground and sail over the enemy cavalry. Howitzers proved more effective, but Bishop only had access to a small number.
Abu Nahda was a reasonable general but his real skill was as a politician: like Bishop his problems were mainly ones of keeping his diverse army together in the face of the fact that many of its disparate groups were former enemies. Unlike Bishop he was also savvy enough to recognise that his foe had the same issue: Abu Nahda knew little of the RAC but his spies’ reports confirmed his hunch that his opponent did not command a homogenous force either. He was able to gain fairly detailed information on his enemy days before the battle commenced, and when his scouts had assessed Bishop’s formation, he created a strategy to break it. Bishop’s army was made up of a combination of Yoruba cavalry, British artillery, and infantry from the RAC (British and jagun), Dahomeans, and Nupe from the city of Rabba itself. The Fulani force meanwhile was made up of Fulani and Bornu cavalry and Hausa, Borgu and Nupe infantry. Abu Nahda’s real stroke of genius was to realise that the people in Bishop’s army most vulnerable to his cavalry tactics were not the Dahomean and Nupe infantry, but rather the Yoruba cavalry: the Yoruba were used to being the only power in their region with cavalry, and thus all their tactics centred around fighting opponents on the ground. The Dahomeans and Nupe, by contrast, had often fought Yoruba cavalry and knew some tactics that might counter cavalry attacks. But the Yoruba had little experience in cavalry-on-cavalry warfare, and might struggle to respond to a Fulani cavalry charge—the Fulani themselves being well experienced in such warfare due to their clashes with the Bornu, themselves known for skilled horsemanship. Abu Nahda also exploited a crack in Bishop’s attempt to ensure that his feuding allies were not reliant on each other: he calculated that if judged correctly, an attack on the Yoruba would force the Nupe to fill the gap, and his spies told him that the Nupe would be reluctant to put themselves in the firing line, both because of a dislike of the Yoruba failing to come to their aid before and because the Etsu Nupe was concerned about what might happen to Rabba if the Nupe fought and were defeated.
The strategy worked brilliantly. Even as his own forces sustained heavy losses from artillery and regimented fire, Abu Nahda’s attack succeeded in surprising and overpowering the Yoruba contingent, and the Nupe’s lukewarm attempt to assist was quickly ended by Borgu infantrymen; the Nupe mostly broke and ran for the gates of Rabba as the Yoruba fell. Bishop was swift to respond, but was hampered by the fact that he could not use the Dahomeans to assist the Yoruba due to the two sides’ mutual hatred of each other, meaning he had to rely on British and jagun troops to reinforce the Yoruba, which were not in the best place to pull off such a move. (Naturally, the film adaptations of the battle lazily turn this into Bishop being portrayed as an extreme Racist who thinks only the British capable of anything, even though his army would have mutinied long ago if that was the case). His initial move to reinforce was cut off by Hausa infantry, so Bishop personally led a second attempt, which managed to drive its way further into the Fulani cavalry ranks surrounding the Yoruba before Bishop was shot by a Fulani. He fell from his saddle and was trampled to death in the chaos of panicking horses. Bishop’s second-in-command, Colonel Paul Jamison, decided the battle was lost, regrouped as much of the allied forces as he could manage, and withdrew from the field. Nearly all the Yoruba force had been lost and many of the British and jaguns, while more of the Dahomeans survived—storing up bitter resentment among the allies for years to come.
Abu Nahda held the field and took several prisoners, including three British officers whom he held hostage (in rather cordial conditions) as future bargaining chips. However, he had won a Pyrrhic victory: the British guns had wrecked large portions of his army and, as the different nations making up the force had not suffered equally, he faced the same problems as his enemy counterparts. In particular the Bornu cavalry had suffered the brunt of the British howitzers and two popular Bornu princelings had been killed, which started a race riot when news filtered back to Gazargamo. Abu Nahda moved into Rabba by agreement of the Etsu Nupe, who laid down his arms in exchange for a promise of good treatment of his city. The whole of the Nupe kingdom was now under Fulani control.
The Retreat from Rabba was the greatest defeat in the history of the Royal Africa Company and several imagined images of disconsolate soldiers trudging back down the trail to Katunga have been captured by painters. When the army arrived in Katunga, naturally the Alaafin was appalled to learn of the Oyo Empire’s losses and infuriated by the Dahomeans having escaped the same. Tensions on both sides led to the Dahomean portion of the Expeditionary Force returning to its homeland under British escort. Colonel Jamison reported back to the Company in Whydah and caused a political earthquake. The scale of the defeat was staggering, and the shattering of the Company’s reputation for invincibility encouraged risings across British Guinea: often not actually aimed at the Company itself, but being struggles between native states that the Company had suppressed for the sake of trade. The jaguns were assembled once again to put down the revolts, and it was clear that heads would have to roll. One such head was that of Philip Lawrence, President of the Board of Directors, whose policies were—rightly or wrongly—blamed for the defeat. Lawrence initially intended to fight his dismissal and force it to a vote of the Board, but eventually stepped down of his own accord when he was advised by his friend and ally Arthur Spencer-Churchill that he had too many votes against him. Lawrence became the Company’s new Resident at the court of the Oba of Lagos, a position seen by many as an exile, but he continued to work as hard as ever and began to draw the important trade port—still sore from the suppression of the slave trade from which it had made great riches—into the Company’s orbit. There are persistent rumours that Lawrence had also been offered the position of Governor of Natal as a swipe at the fact that he had offered a similar exilic position to his old enemy Philip Hamilton in 1816, but there is no known evidence to support such an assertion.
And it was Philip Hamilton that was once again at the forefront of the Company. He had returned in Africa in 1833 after his time managing his father’s political party in America as a figurehead. This was not the brash young man who had explored Benin and Timbuctoo with his great friend James Wayne; Hamilton was now in his fifties, seasoned and experienced in the cut and thrust of politics, no longer a field man who could be outmaneouvred around the boardroom table as Lawrence had almost twenty years before. His time leading the Patriot Party under the auspices of eminence grise Edmund Grey had also encouraged Hamilton to learn the art of delegation, and he no longer tried to do everything himself. Still, the Board were not willing to elect him President when he had been out of Africa for so long. Instead the position went to Frederick William Yates, an enemy of Lawrence (and thus an ally of Hamilton by default), who smoothed over the Board’s internal divisions and appointed Hamilton to lead a second army northward. The chances of success against the Fulani after the great defeat seemed slim, particularly given that only a small number of troops were available due to putting down the revolts, but Hamilton rose to the challenge.
A curious factor affecting the Anglo-Fulani War was that both sides thought that the other had won. To the British, their myth of invincibility had been shattered and they had suffered the humiliation of being expelled from an ally’s city by an invader, defeated by natives.[5] To the Fulani, they had suffered grievous losses, greater than any they had seen in Abu Nahda’s jihad thus far, and for many of their soldiers it was their first exposure to the sinister new advances in warfare coming out of Europe. Abu Nahda might have taken Rabba, but it was a hollow victory: with his losses, he lacked the troops to consolidate his gain and press onwards. His poor bargaining position was reflected by the fact that he did not achieve a treaty with the Etsu Nupe that involved the king converting to Islam, as he had managed in Bida and Bussa. And the news from the north was not good. If the British had suffered from revolts after the idea of their invincibility had been destroyed, so too did the Fulani. In particular the riots in Gazargamo triggered by the Bornu losses refused to go away, and in 1838, after a decade under Fulani rule, the city finally exploded into civil war after a Bornu nobleman declared himself the new Mai (king) of Bornu, proclaimed opposition to the Fulani interpretation of Islam, and began raising an army. The Kanem-Bornu lands ripped themselves apart through conflict between Fula-phobes and Fula-philes, with both sides hiring mercenaries from Wadai and Darfur to boost their numbers.
Abu Nahda realised that, no matter how important Rabba was to his riverine plans, he could not allow the situation in Bornu to further escalate. He withdrew from Rabba, moving his army northwards, and in 1839-1840 proceeded to crush the rebellion and restore his rule in Gazargamo. A few Bornu rebels fled to Wadai rather than bow the knee to Abu Nahda, and proved to be a small but troublesome minority for the Sultanate of Darfur for years to come. Abu Nahda succeeded in holding his fledgeling empire together, though he was helped by the fact that the Hausa proved less inclined to rebel. Partly this represented the success of his moderate policies towards the Hausa city-states, and partly it came from a sense of banding together against a new threat. By 1839, Philip Hamilton had arrived in Rabba with his small army, only to find that the Etsu Nupe refused to involve himselve with either side and declared Rabba a free city. Hamilton decided not to press the case but tried an attack on Bida to dislodge the Fulani garrison. He won a victory, but like Abu Nahda, found that he lacked the troops or supply lines to consolidate his win, and was unable to gain the support from the locals he had hoped for: Fulani rule was reasonably popular among the Nupe. Hamilton elected to retreat to the Niger and consider his next move, using the RAC’s engineers to build a new fort upstream from Rabba which he named Fort St Andrew—widely suspected to be a reference not to the saint, but a veiled one to the late Andrew Eveleigh, who would doubtless be horrified to have his name applied to an institution manned by black soldiers.
Having crushed most of the Bornu rebellion, Abu Nahda heard of the trouble at the other end of his empire and returned to the Niger, leaving his subordinates to complete the job. He reoccupied Bida but chose not to move in to Rabba again. For a month the two armies viewed each other across the Niger,[6] both considerably reduced compared to the armies that had fought at Rabba, the defiantly independent city-state stuck in them iddle between them. Both the Fulani and the RAC had sent envoys to the Etsu Nupe, of course, and in the end it was the Etsu Nupe who arranged for these envoys to meet each other. Negotiations proved surprisingly productive, and a month later Hamilton and Abu Nahda themselves agreed to meet in Rabba. Accounts from both men (in journals and via eyewitnesses) suggest that each impressed the other with their scholarly aptitude; both were accustomed to being the most well-read person in a room and relished the idea of discourse with another of the same mind but from a different culture. It helped that there was no need for a translator, as both men were reasonably fluent in Arabic: Abu Nahda from his Koranic studies, and Hamilton had learned it as part of his youthful escapade in Timbuctoo. The two leaders swiftly convinced each other that there was little reason to fight. Abu Nahda was no Alexander: he knew when to stop. His goal was not to carry on conquering until he died, but rather to build a concrete and lasting empire in which the Fulani (and their version of Islam) would have a pre-eminent position, but would incorporate many other peoples as well. He wanted stable and equitable laws, peaceful coexistence, and development—causes which could align with the RAC’s goals. Abu Nahda had little desire to push his empire all the way to the coast, and the RAC had no real need to push direct control further northwards if the Fulani empire was a state with which they could do business. Hamilton ended up agreeing to open up the RAC’s territories to Fulani missionaries (though many of the native powers within it blocked them) in exchange for Abu Nahda opening up his dominions to trade with the RAC. He was particularly keen on European advances that would help him hold his empire together, such as better roads, Optel communications and perhaps even railways...
[1] Dahomey had fought for independence from Oyo with Company help only twenty years earlier, but Oyo had also become aligned with the Company over the subsequent years.
[2] Bussa (also spelled Boussa) has in OTL since been drowned by the construction of the Kainji Reservoir and its people founded New Bussa around 25 miles further south.
[3] Psychological warfare.
[4] Compression-lock is the TTL term for percussion cap firearms.
[5] Or rather the city of an ally’s vassal state.
[6] The author is speaking metaphorically—they’re not actually so close they’d be visible to each other.
Wait, does that family tree mean that King Frederick still isn't married by the 1840s? After that whole mess with Joshua Churchill and Richard FitzGeorge, one would have thought Britain (and Frederick himself) wouldn't want the country to have yet another succession crisis...
Very nice. It makes sense for the Company and the Fulani to come to an accommodation - Abu Nahda has reached his natural border (go much further south and the tsetse flies kill off your cavalry horses) and the Company has its hands full with the territory it already controls. Add the personal liking between Abu Nahda and Hamilton, and there might be a generation of peace or even a permanent demarcation.
I assume, though, that now Abu Nahda has seen what artillery can do, he's looking for ways to get some, and I doubt the Company will be that accommodating. For that, he'll have to look north.
What religion are the Nupe at this point - Muslim, Christian, animist or Muslim/Christian overlaid on animism? Also, how many Christian missionaries are sneaking into Oyo and Dahomey despite the rules, and how many have fantasies about being in first-century Rome and stirring up the slaves against their masters?
I assume, though, that now Abu Nahda has seen what artillery can do, he's looking for ways to get some, and I doubt the Company will be that accommodating. For that, he'll have to look north.
What religion are the Nupe at this point - Muslim, Christian, animist or Muslim/Christian overlaid on animism? Also, how many Christian missionaries are sneaking into Oyo and Dahomey despite the rules, and how many have fantasies about being in first-century Rome and stirring up the slaves against their masters?
Thande
Donor
Frederick married Elizabeth Washington in the 1830s, see part #136. I did say when I posted the family tree that I haven't updated it for a while, if you read the post.
Thankee! As always, obviously I greatly value your opinion of the parts set in this region.
To be honest I don't know - I am assuming animism just based on vague ideas of when the neighbouring peoples started becoming Christian or Muslim.
Well, quite. Though the situation is complicated by the fact that you've got both British and Freedish missionaries, different denominations, and then there's Freedom Theology...
I managed to miss the previous update on West Africa until this morning; a nice slice of serendipity. Rather glad to see Philip Lawrence finally toppled (it's been, what, four years since he first showed up?) - and yet another radical Muslim leader with an adopted name...
Ah yes, I'm sorry. I had completely forgotten about that. My only excuse is that the timeline is so long and complicated. And I did realize you hadn't updated since volume II, I just hadn't realized how long that was.
Also, I don't remember if I've asked this question before, but by naming the later William IV Prince of Wales, George II de facto disinherited Frederick, and thus he succeeded to the throne, right? Well, does that mean that after William's death, a fringe movement of either contemporaries or present-day historians who don't have anything else to do, backed Anne of Hanover, Princess Royal (whom I presume still married Prince William IV of Orange) and her descendants as heirs to the throne?
- Status