Look to the West Volume VII: The Eye Against the Prism
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
I mean even beyond that, with hundreds of years on from the POD population figures would basically be unusable. That being said it's possible the Combine would take steps to ensure that the Liberated Zones remain (or become...) roughly equivalent in population.
And of course, speeding assimilation by resettling populations among other more numerous groups is a technique that goes back to the Assyrians.
Clearly a long-standing shared cultural trait, and therefore perfectly orthodox SocietismAnd of course, speeding assimilation by resettling populations among other more numerous groups is a technique that goes back to the Assyrians.
264
Thande
Donor
Part #264: I Bless the Reigns
“White Gate to Gold Dolphin. Rose Eddie Rose is getting impatient...Islington, Mayfair, Pimlico...yes. Specifics...? Southwark Mayfair Islington Tyburn Hackney is threatening to haul Orpington One Two up before the committee unless she sees some concrete results. ... Aye, I think she’s too big for her boots when she just got elected too, but you know she’s the President’s golden girl...you know involving DESCARTES was controverisal...Barking Barking Six is going to draft a memo on progress to Orpington One Two...? Abbey Wapping, let’s hope that’s enough to call off the dogs for now. White Gate out.”
*
From: Motext Pages EX128B-E [retrieved 22/11/19].
Remarks: These pages are listed under “SAAX History Revision: Syllabus C”.
Extraneous advertising has been left intact.
For those of you doing the Economic History module, you’ll probably already have gathered that examiners like to use Guinea as a case study.[1] It’s easy for them to set exam questions about! But don’t go thinking you can just memorise long lists of staple crops and sail through a question. The examiner’s also looking for critical thinking, analysis, and the proposal of hypotheses.
We’ll pass over the controversies over when crops were introduced, by whom, and in which direction. Some academics get very angry about this, but despite their best efforts to turn it into a nationalist talking point, it’s not the stuff that Heritage Points of Controversy are made of. If you are curious, check out the appendix on page EX128J.
There’s much more fodder (no pun intended!) for argument when it comes to the economic development of Guinea from the late eighteenth century to the twentieth. On the one hand this period represented a huge uptick in industrial development and agricultural production, driven in part by rising political centralism and the decline of the small squabbling kingdoms of the past. On the other hand, that unification and development were scarcely bloodless or sought for the most honourable of motives. The actions of ruthless men, whether they be native, British or American, were behind the tide of progress that turned Guinea from a mysterious blank spot on a map to the modernised powerhouse we know today.
Furthermore, let us not forget that the wheels of progress were frequently lubricated by the blood of poor peasants. The shiny graphs displaying falls in poverty and increases in life expectancy hide those whose lives were cast aside in their pursuit. Guinean history abounds with such stories, from the horrors of the slave trade to the current government’s habit of shifting entire villages without compensation to build dams and reservoirs. In recent years it has been fashionable to focus on the loss of languages and cultural uniqueness that came with Guinean centralism, as well as the decline in biological diversity from agricultural pursuits. Yet let us not focus on these Diversitarian and Steward approaches to the exclusion of concern for the lives of individual people, no matter what they farmed or which language they spoke.
Almost all foreign powers other than Britain were effectively expelled from Guinea in the wake of the Third War of Supremacy in the 1750s. While the Portuguese and Dutch maintained individual outposts on the coastline, these declined in importance. Britain first suppressed the slave trade, and then reformed the Royal Africa Company after the bubble scandal of 1782 in an attempt to develop new economic ties with Africa. The RAC, dubiously founded in 1660 by the Duke of York (the future James II, overthrown in the First Glorious Revolution) had initially focused on the slave trade (as well as seeking gold). The new, reformed Company and its Board of Directors focused on developing the trade of new and less morally questionable (at least, at first glance) commodities.
The names of the original Directors and their associates are instantly recognisable for anyone with a passing familiarity with Guinean history, or even the names of streets in Guinean cities. Leading the charge were the two experienced East India Company men, Arthur Filling and Thomas Space, and Governor of Dakar Sir John Graves Simcoe; with them came natural philosophers like Joseph Banks, James Edward Smith and Alexander von Humboldt; American adventurers like Daniel Houghton, John Ledyard and ultimately Philip Hamilton; and, of course, the great founding father of the Commonwealth of Freedonia, Olaudah Equiano. At different times in Guinea’s history, the names of the native kings who worked with those traders (such as Otumfuo[2] of Ashanti and Kpengla of Dahomey) have also been elevated to the same level, while in other times they have been largely ignored. This reflects the fact that the people of modern, democratic Guinea face the dichotomy of which historical figures to look up to. Do their honour the kings of their forefathers—who would probably consider those modern Guineans to be mere peasants and expect them to bow and scrape to them? Or do they honour the founders of the RAC, even though it was a mostly white, foreign organisation which cared more about making money than seeing justice done? Both the old RAC and the native kings, of course, had been happy to practice the abominable institution of slavery. It is an illustration in the difficulty of identity that any nation faces when it has developed gradually, without the easy clean break of being born in revolution and acquiring a new team of more recent founding fathers. One could make the same comparison to any country—can we in England admire the civilised pomp and legitimacy of our monarchy without remembering that it descends from the illegitimate grandson of a tanner who committed acts of genocide?[3]
Let’s return to the period in which the reformed RAC spread its wings after 1782. From the beginning, the RAC was entangled with the African Association and the free black colony of Freedonia, although in the beginning the two were not synonymous. Despite chaotic periods at times and some questionable electoral practices (though no more so than other countries at the time), Freedonia survived crises like the rise of Freedom Theology in the 1810s and the Fulani Explosion in the 1830s. In 1840, visionary Fulani leader Abu Nahda and respected RAC Director Philip Hamilton signed the Treaty of Rabba.[4] This treaty set the groundwork for how Guinea would develop, from a disparate collection of Company lands, princely states, freed-slave commonwealth and Islamic empire, to a unitary whole. To do so might seem ambitious even for the most fanatical disciple of Sanchez; but, while acknowledging the real concerns over the loss of some unique languages and cultures in the process, the people of Guinea achieved this better life without sacrificing all that made life worth living.
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The RAC had been inspired by the British EIC in Bengal,[5] and so it is not surprising that there are some parallels. Like Bengal, Guinea’s development was related to the fact that, though founded as a colony, it no longer felt like one following the upheavals of the nineteenth century. Guinea and Bengal were very different to colonies like, for example, French Arguin, German Puntland or even Belgian Ceylon. Though founded as trade colonies to serve the interests of a few wealthy Englishmen in London, they had long transcended that identity. Britain had turned inwards following Hoche’s invasion and the Marleburgensian regime, and even more so as a result of the Inglorious Revolution. Guinea, geographically closer to Britain, remained slightly more closely tied than Bengal did, but was still seen as nothing more than a source of income and a convenient place to dump political undesirables. Some went there of their own accord, too. Arthur Spencer-Churchill, brother of Bloody Blandford and George Spencer-Churchill the Elder, fled to Guinea in 1831 and took up a role developing railways and factories for the RAC. Many dispossessed British nobles also chose Guinea (or Bengal) as the place to rebuild their fortunes after the rise of the Populist regime.
In some places, a decline in British government attention to a colony was smoothly replaced with American interest. This applied to a certain extent with Guinea, which had longstanding ties with the ENA to to Freedonia’s foundation as a freed-slave colony, as well as the involvement of Americans such as Ledyard, Houghton and Hamilton in the re-founded Company’s history. However, there were always certain tensions to the relationship. The Confederation of Virginia had effectively paid its former slaves at gunpoint to leave for Freedonia after the Virginia Crisis, which did not endear those new Freedish citizens to their former homeland. Carolina’s increasingly shrill pro-slavery rhetoric (until 1865[6]) alienated not only Freedes themselves, but also many white Company men who found themselves associated with it by suddenly cautious native rulers. These and other reasons contributed towards a certain coolness between Dakar and Fredericksburg, which is why Philip Hamilton treated going between Africa and American politics as those they were two different worlds.[7]
It was not, however, until the end of the Pandoric War, the Third Glorious Revolution in Britain, and the rise of Lewis Faulkner in the ENA, that Guinea found herself truly alone. All but the most informal ties were severed with Britain (its successor England did, however, retain an interest in Natal) and America withdrew from most foreign entanglements. The ENA would likely have still gone to war to defend the RAC and Freedonia, but there seemed to be realistically no external threat at the time.
In many ways, this was just a “de jure” recognition of a situation that had been “de facto” the case for years. Guinea had been barely involved in the Pandoric War, save for supplying some food to Britain and palm-oil lubricant to America. Guinean troops had not served overseas, likely due to lingering American concern about black soldiers serving on the ENA’s territory; though many modern accounts like to pretend that Racialism ceased to exist north of the border with Carolina, this was decidedly not the case. The one case of the war possibly coming home to roost came with the 1897 rising of the Nupeci people, which was alleged to have come with Meridian backing.[8]
The Nupeci revolt was only the largest of a number of grumblings that had echoed around Guinea in the almost six decades of the Treaty of Rabba being enforced. The RAC had cared more about access to trade with the Fulani Caliphate than seeking justice for the other peoples under its rule, including the people of the old kingdom of Nupe. This was not to say that the RAC had always rolled over before the Fulani, either. Abu Nahda, famously, had refused the title of caliph, and had won plaudits for his humility in doing so. But when he died in 1863, the Company decided that it would be politically advantageous to be allied to a claimant Caliph, especially one ruling such a large empire. Disasters like the Great Jihad in India had been unleashed in part because of the disputed caliphal office in the Ottoman Empire; while the empire was now decidedly reunited and had just achieved the coup of taking Algiers,[9] not all Muslims accepted or were aware of that outcome. The Board of Directors helped ensure that Abu Nahda’s close ally Muhammadu Diallo not only succeeded him as Amir of the empire, but also took the caliphal office.
From the 1860s onwards, the Company’s manipulation (often with help from the Freedes) served to direct the Fulani to favourable ends. Attempts at Fula-phile Islamic coups in Company allies like the Bambara Empire were defeated with Company jagun help, while recalcitrant ones like the Kounta state ruling Timbuctoo were allowed to fall under the rule of the Caliphate.[10] In practice, the control of the Caliphs and their generals became increasingly theoretical even in the Sokoto heartland. Like the older princely states to the south like Dahomey, Ashanti, Oyo and the Nupe remnant state in Bida, the once-puritanical Fulani were bribed into admitting ever more Company influence. Patriotic causes, like that of the Nupeci revolt of 1897 in anger at the continued Fulani control of Rabba, were not the only causes against Company rule. Many poor African peasants suffered under the rule of either those princely states, the Company itself, or elitist Freedish landowners.
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Nonetheless, Guinea was not a straightforward case of colonial exploitation by outsiders. As in Bengal, the white men running the Company ‘went native’, possessing few links with their old homelands. Guinea increasingly resembled more a case of a foreign elite ruling over a restive native population. While this was still hardly a favourable situation for its ordinary people, it was quite different in character. White men and women living in Guinea began to refer to themselves as Guineans, rather than Britons or Americans who just happened to live there. Old stories of the glories of ancient empires were revived, often matched with archaeological expeditions, to give the slowly coalescing country some foundational myths. Even white Guineans increasingly looked towards figures like Mansa Musa rather than (say) Elizabeth Tudor when making historical comparisons.
This situation had a big part to play in how Guinea economically developed. Outsiders exploiting a colony might choose to focus on luxury crops rather than staples, and carelessly allow farmers to starve as a result. They might build railways and towns only where it served their own interests. They might focus on raw material extraction and suppress factory construction, allowing it to remain preferenced in their homeland. The Guinean ruling classes (both white and black) were, for the most part, not like this. They regarded the peasant farmers as their inferiors, but still essentially their people, and Guinea as their country. Guinea could not rely on her old colonial masters for help. Meridian ironsharks cut many trade conduits in the Pandoric War. Guinea must be self-sufficient.
When the RAC had first been refounded, the staple crops of the nations of Guinea had chiefly been African rice, millet, sorghum, maize, and cassava (the latter two probably introduced by the Portuguese). The Company introduced many other crops, both as staples and luxuries, using Taxonomic classification to choose appropriate plants for the climate. Most famous, of course, are the cinchona plantations that provided people with protection against malaria—initially only for the white traders and the wealthier natives, but later becoming generalised. Studies of the disease connected it to a mosquito parasite, and new poisons developed in the UPSA’s chemical labs led in the 1890s to the first of a series of attempts to drive the insect to extinction. Though not completely successful, the campaigns did reduce malaria further.
However, cinchona is only the most famous of the crop introductions. Asian rice varieties were introduced and wheat production was dramatically increased. Agricultural theorists were often ruthlessly allowed to play God with peasants’ lives in Company-ruled territories, testing out their theories of what farming strategies would produce the highest crop yields. Though much misery was inflicted in the process, this did allow the construction of far superior plantations. The Company ran roughshod over the different native Guinean notions of land ownership and damaged a number of rainforests clearing them for farmland, but famines went from a fact of life to a very occasional crisis. By the 1920s, Guinea would be a net food exporter.
Some crops were useful both as food and for other purposes. Groundnuts and peanuts were grown for food, but their oil proved a useful fuel for the Mitchell Engine. Mitchell mobiles and trains were rapidly deployed in Guinea, which formerly had been dependent on coal imports and a few, difficult mines of its own. Guinea led the way in development of many Mitchell engine types, which were also used on agricultural vehicles. Economically important spices were also introduced or popularised and grown.
Innovations in sanitation and medicine were also imported from Europe and the Novamund, often not too long after they were first developed. The ruling classes need not care about the lives of their subjects in order to recognise that having towns full of reliable workers who would not drop dead of easily-preventable diseases was good for business. Africa came with a number of diseases specific to its climate as well as the better-understood European ones like cholera, but this nonetheless made a huge difference
All of these changes were regarded as threats by those who held power in the native power structures, particularly practioners of the traditional religions—who had been left in the firing line by the Treaty of Rabba protecting both Christian and Muslim missionaries. Periodic revolts took place, of which the Nupeci revolt of 1897 was only the biggest. But without a single shared identity across Guinea, a rebellion in any given state could always be put down with troops from its neighbours.
That situation would only change with the rise of C. B. Kane...
*
From: Motext Pages CU145G-H [retrieved 22/11/19].
Extraneous advertising has been left intact.
Leaders Who Changed the World, Episode 4: C. B. Kane (1865-1938)
Caesar Bell Kane was born in Liberty on May 9th, 1865, a day that his namesake would have loved to have seen—the day that slavery was abolished in Carolina, as well as throughout the Hermandad. Forever known as C. B., Kane was born to parents of humble mixed birth[11] in the Freedish capital. He scandalised them even as a child by his crass pranks and bold defiance to authority. Thrown out of the family home aged sixteen, he became a capable thief and confidence trickster. He was best known for a scheme by which he wrote beautifully-penned letters to credulous people across three continents, claiming to be the dispossessed son of a noble expelled from Britain by the Populists. He claimed to know the location of a buried chest of jewels and tapestries hastily taken from his father’s ancestral home, and needed just a little seed money to begin... His scam was surprisingly successful, and when the Freedish police finally decided to stop taking bribes and arrest him, it was in a house that was practically a palace.
Kane was due to be hanged to make an example of. Whether he bribed the hangman, or was simply very lucky, the execution failed. Kane was left with a hanging scar around his neck (which he hid with a necklace in later life) but had escaped justice. He had to leave Freedonia, however, and he sought his fortune in the interior. After a number of poorly-attested adventures, in 1885 he reached the Hausa city of Zazzau,[12] one of many which had been conceded to the Fulani Caliphate by the British in 1840. The local emir, son of one of Abu Nahda’s generals, was unpopular and widely disliked—to the point that the local RAC forces were considering getting rid of him before a revolt broke out. Kane hatched a plan, one of his old confidence schemes writ large. He married the granddaughter of the old, Fulani-dispossessed emir, claimed to have converted to Islam, and offered himself to the Company as an alternative candidate. The Company helped pull off his coup, a decision that some of their directors would later regret.
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Over the next thirty years, Kane would hatch many more schemes, yet also took his role as emir seriously, and came to genuinely love his wife. The Company found that their profits seemed to mysteriously shrink when Kane came anywhere near them, yet were unable to prove he was skimming. Kane was also popular with some Directors for his love of grandiose ideas, which many of them shared. Some unwisely accepted his help in their latest project, which often ended with the director being dismissed and Kane pocketing the budget. Not always, though, for Kane did seriously ponder the question of what to do with the power he had obtained by guile.
Zazzau was a good central location, and he established contacts with rulers across Guinea, whether they be Freedes, Fulani, white Company men, or the princes of Dahomey, Nupe, Ashanti, Oyo and Benin. Kane established initiatives such as the Guinea Games and the Great Fair, miniature, local versions of the Global Games and WorldFests respectively. He sought to build partnerships across the region—sometimes ones he could exploit to increase his own power and wealth, but not always.
Following the Pandoric War and the ensuing geopolitical changes, Kane added a third initiative. In 1905 he called the first Grand Palaver in Zazzau. He called on representatives from all the powers in Guinea, including the Company, to assemble in his city and debate what Guinea’s future should be, in the wake of Britain ceasing to exist and America withdrawing into Social Americanism.
The move alarmed the Board of Directors but caught them offguard. While nobody was foolish enough to trust Kane anymore, they had not expected this. But they had allowed him to accrue a high profile and respect, and they could not simply overrule him without sparking discontent. In the end, the Board decided to send a trustworthy representative who had worked with Kane in the past. This was Graham Oldman, universally known as Ginger Oldman, whose work had dramatically increased the production of that spice in the Oyo lands.
To discuss what took place at the first Grand Palaver would fill a book (and has). The Board had thought it might presage a rebellion, one which America now seemed disinclined to help put down. Kane, however, seemed more inspired by the people of Bengal, who had bought their way to freedom. Yet, unlike Bengal with its single corporate entity, Guinea was divided. He sought to change that.
The Freedish representatives were strongly opposed to Kane’s moves, and for a long time Freedonia was treated as a semi-separate entity. Indeed, the controversies of later decades would rest on the attempt to introduce Freedish democracy elsewhere in Guinea. But in the short term, Kane’s bold move had solved a difficulty for the Directors. They were the Royal Africa Company, but of which royal family? Their chequered flag bore a Union Jack, flag of a country that was ceasing to exist.[13] The Company had better decide what was to become of it, or someone else would decide for it.
Thus the Directorate of Guinea came into being. Few would have thought that the Grand Palaver would one day become its parliament. Yet even now, the Palaver had significant business to attend to. For one thing, what to do about Karlus Barkalus and all those fellows waving black flags in the Kongo all of a sudden...?
[1] Note that in TTL (as the term was used in OTL until relatively recently), ‘Guinea’ refers to all of West Africa, even before a state by that name formally existed.
[2] It’s a bit questionable whether this would be the best way to abbreviate his name, but school history syllabuses rarely go into such detail.
[3] In reference to William the Conqueror and the Harrying of the North in 1069.
[4] See Part #165 in Volume IV.
[5] Of course, the East India Company originally traded over a much bigger area than Bengal—this viewpoint is tainted by hindsight.
[6] When slavery was abolished in Carolina and throughout the Hermandad (Part #211 in Volume V). Of course, the construction of this sentence implies it’s talking about the period when Carolina was still in the ENA, so this is a bit awkwardly phrased.
[7] Dakar is the titular capital of the RAC, although in practice a lot of business is conducted at Fort James (which grew into Accra, Ghana in OTL) as an outpost surrounded by formally Ashanti territory.
[8] As seen in Part #236 in Volume VI.
[9] In 1861, as described in Part #207 in Volume V.
[10] In OTL the Bambara Empire in Ségou fell to an earlier jihad, as the rise of the Fulani happened earlier in OTL.
[11] By which it means they were only partly descended from returned American slaves, and otherwise descended from natives who never left Africa.
[12] Today in OTL the city is called Zaria and only the surrounding state is called Zazzau.
[13] England continued to use the Union Jack, so this is a slight case of hyperbole.
“White Gate to Gold Dolphin. Rose Eddie Rose is getting impatient...Islington, Mayfair, Pimlico...yes. Specifics...? Southwark Mayfair Islington Tyburn Hackney is threatening to haul Orpington One Two up before the committee unless she sees some concrete results. ... Aye, I think she’s too big for her boots when she just got elected too, but you know she’s the President’s golden girl...you know involving DESCARTES was controverisal...Barking Barking Six is going to draft a memo on progress to Orpington One Two...? Abbey Wapping, let’s hope that’s enough to call off the dogs for now. White Gate out.”
–part of a transmission to or from the English Security Directorate base at Snowdrop House, Croydon, intercepted and decrypted by Thande Institute personnel
*
From: Motext Pages EX128B-E [retrieved 22/11/19].
Remarks: These pages are listed under “SAAX History Revision: Syllabus C”.
Extraneous advertising has been left intact.
For those of you doing the Economic History module, you’ll probably already have gathered that examiners like to use Guinea as a case study.[1] It’s easy for them to set exam questions about! But don’t go thinking you can just memorise long lists of staple crops and sail through a question. The examiner’s also looking for critical thinking, analysis, and the proposal of hypotheses.
We’ll pass over the controversies over when crops were introduced, by whom, and in which direction. Some academics get very angry about this, but despite their best efforts to turn it into a nationalist talking point, it’s not the stuff that Heritage Points of Controversy are made of. If you are curious, check out the appendix on page EX128J.
There’s much more fodder (no pun intended!) for argument when it comes to the economic development of Guinea from the late eighteenth century to the twentieth. On the one hand this period represented a huge uptick in industrial development and agricultural production, driven in part by rising political centralism and the decline of the small squabbling kingdoms of the past. On the other hand, that unification and development were scarcely bloodless or sought for the most honourable of motives. The actions of ruthless men, whether they be native, British or American, were behind the tide of progress that turned Guinea from a mysterious blank spot on a map to the modernised powerhouse we know today.
Furthermore, let us not forget that the wheels of progress were frequently lubricated by the blood of poor peasants. The shiny graphs displaying falls in poverty and increases in life expectancy hide those whose lives were cast aside in their pursuit. Guinean history abounds with such stories, from the horrors of the slave trade to the current government’s habit of shifting entire villages without compensation to build dams and reservoirs. In recent years it has been fashionable to focus on the loss of languages and cultural uniqueness that came with Guinean centralism, as well as the decline in biological diversity from agricultural pursuits. Yet let us not focus on these Diversitarian and Steward approaches to the exclusion of concern for the lives of individual people, no matter what they farmed or which language they spoke.
Almost all foreign powers other than Britain were effectively expelled from Guinea in the wake of the Third War of Supremacy in the 1750s. While the Portuguese and Dutch maintained individual outposts on the coastline, these declined in importance. Britain first suppressed the slave trade, and then reformed the Royal Africa Company after the bubble scandal of 1782 in an attempt to develop new economic ties with Africa. The RAC, dubiously founded in 1660 by the Duke of York (the future James II, overthrown in the First Glorious Revolution) had initially focused on the slave trade (as well as seeking gold). The new, reformed Company and its Board of Directors focused on developing the trade of new and less morally questionable (at least, at first glance) commodities.
The names of the original Directors and their associates are instantly recognisable for anyone with a passing familiarity with Guinean history, or even the names of streets in Guinean cities. Leading the charge were the two experienced East India Company men, Arthur Filling and Thomas Space, and Governor of Dakar Sir John Graves Simcoe; with them came natural philosophers like Joseph Banks, James Edward Smith and Alexander von Humboldt; American adventurers like Daniel Houghton, John Ledyard and ultimately Philip Hamilton; and, of course, the great founding father of the Commonwealth of Freedonia, Olaudah Equiano. At different times in Guinea’s history, the names of the native kings who worked with those traders (such as Otumfuo[2] of Ashanti and Kpengla of Dahomey) have also been elevated to the same level, while in other times they have been largely ignored. This reflects the fact that the people of modern, democratic Guinea face the dichotomy of which historical figures to look up to. Do their honour the kings of their forefathers—who would probably consider those modern Guineans to be mere peasants and expect them to bow and scrape to them? Or do they honour the founders of the RAC, even though it was a mostly white, foreign organisation which cared more about making money than seeing justice done? Both the old RAC and the native kings, of course, had been happy to practice the abominable institution of slavery. It is an illustration in the difficulty of identity that any nation faces when it has developed gradually, without the easy clean break of being born in revolution and acquiring a new team of more recent founding fathers. One could make the same comparison to any country—can we in England admire the civilised pomp and legitimacy of our monarchy without remembering that it descends from the illegitimate grandson of a tanner who committed acts of genocide?[3]
Let’s return to the period in which the reformed RAC spread its wings after 1782. From the beginning, the RAC was entangled with the African Association and the free black colony of Freedonia, although in the beginning the two were not synonymous. Despite chaotic periods at times and some questionable electoral practices (though no more so than other countries at the time), Freedonia survived crises like the rise of Freedom Theology in the 1810s and the Fulani Explosion in the 1830s. In 1840, visionary Fulani leader Abu Nahda and respected RAC Director Philip Hamilton signed the Treaty of Rabba.[4] This treaty set the groundwork for how Guinea would develop, from a disparate collection of Company lands, princely states, freed-slave commonwealth and Islamic empire, to a unitary whole. To do so might seem ambitious even for the most fanatical disciple of Sanchez; but, while acknowledging the real concerns over the loss of some unique languages and cultures in the process, the people of Guinea achieved this better life without sacrificing all that made life worth living.
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The RAC had been inspired by the British EIC in Bengal,[5] and so it is not surprising that there are some parallels. Like Bengal, Guinea’s development was related to the fact that, though founded as a colony, it no longer felt like one following the upheavals of the nineteenth century. Guinea and Bengal were very different to colonies like, for example, French Arguin, German Puntland or even Belgian Ceylon. Though founded as trade colonies to serve the interests of a few wealthy Englishmen in London, they had long transcended that identity. Britain had turned inwards following Hoche’s invasion and the Marleburgensian regime, and even more so as a result of the Inglorious Revolution. Guinea, geographically closer to Britain, remained slightly more closely tied than Bengal did, but was still seen as nothing more than a source of income and a convenient place to dump political undesirables. Some went there of their own accord, too. Arthur Spencer-Churchill, brother of Bloody Blandford and George Spencer-Churchill the Elder, fled to Guinea in 1831 and took up a role developing railways and factories for the RAC. Many dispossessed British nobles also chose Guinea (or Bengal) as the place to rebuild their fortunes after the rise of the Populist regime.
In some places, a decline in British government attention to a colony was smoothly replaced with American interest. This applied to a certain extent with Guinea, which had longstanding ties with the ENA to to Freedonia’s foundation as a freed-slave colony, as well as the involvement of Americans such as Ledyard, Houghton and Hamilton in the re-founded Company’s history. However, there were always certain tensions to the relationship. The Confederation of Virginia had effectively paid its former slaves at gunpoint to leave for Freedonia after the Virginia Crisis, which did not endear those new Freedish citizens to their former homeland. Carolina’s increasingly shrill pro-slavery rhetoric (until 1865[6]) alienated not only Freedes themselves, but also many white Company men who found themselves associated with it by suddenly cautious native rulers. These and other reasons contributed towards a certain coolness between Dakar and Fredericksburg, which is why Philip Hamilton treated going between Africa and American politics as those they were two different worlds.[7]
It was not, however, until the end of the Pandoric War, the Third Glorious Revolution in Britain, and the rise of Lewis Faulkner in the ENA, that Guinea found herself truly alone. All but the most informal ties were severed with Britain (its successor England did, however, retain an interest in Natal) and America withdrew from most foreign entanglements. The ENA would likely have still gone to war to defend the RAC and Freedonia, but there seemed to be realistically no external threat at the time.
In many ways, this was just a “de jure” recognition of a situation that had been “de facto” the case for years. Guinea had been barely involved in the Pandoric War, save for supplying some food to Britain and palm-oil lubricant to America. Guinean troops had not served overseas, likely due to lingering American concern about black soldiers serving on the ENA’s territory; though many modern accounts like to pretend that Racialism ceased to exist north of the border with Carolina, this was decidedly not the case. The one case of the war possibly coming home to roost came with the 1897 rising of the Nupeci people, which was alleged to have come with Meridian backing.[8]
The Nupeci revolt was only the largest of a number of grumblings that had echoed around Guinea in the almost six decades of the Treaty of Rabba being enforced. The RAC had cared more about access to trade with the Fulani Caliphate than seeking justice for the other peoples under its rule, including the people of the old kingdom of Nupe. This was not to say that the RAC had always rolled over before the Fulani, either. Abu Nahda, famously, had refused the title of caliph, and had won plaudits for his humility in doing so. But when he died in 1863, the Company decided that it would be politically advantageous to be allied to a claimant Caliph, especially one ruling such a large empire. Disasters like the Great Jihad in India had been unleashed in part because of the disputed caliphal office in the Ottoman Empire; while the empire was now decidedly reunited and had just achieved the coup of taking Algiers,[9] not all Muslims accepted or were aware of that outcome. The Board of Directors helped ensure that Abu Nahda’s close ally Muhammadu Diallo not only succeeded him as Amir of the empire, but also took the caliphal office.
From the 1860s onwards, the Company’s manipulation (often with help from the Freedes) served to direct the Fulani to favourable ends. Attempts at Fula-phile Islamic coups in Company allies like the Bambara Empire were defeated with Company jagun help, while recalcitrant ones like the Kounta state ruling Timbuctoo were allowed to fall under the rule of the Caliphate.[10] In practice, the control of the Caliphs and their generals became increasingly theoretical even in the Sokoto heartland. Like the older princely states to the south like Dahomey, Ashanti, Oyo and the Nupe remnant state in Bida, the once-puritanical Fulani were bribed into admitting ever more Company influence. Patriotic causes, like that of the Nupeci revolt of 1897 in anger at the continued Fulani control of Rabba, were not the only causes against Company rule. Many poor African peasants suffered under the rule of either those princely states, the Company itself, or elitist Freedish landowners.
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===
Nonetheless, Guinea was not a straightforward case of colonial exploitation by outsiders. As in Bengal, the white men running the Company ‘went native’, possessing few links with their old homelands. Guinea increasingly resembled more a case of a foreign elite ruling over a restive native population. While this was still hardly a favourable situation for its ordinary people, it was quite different in character. White men and women living in Guinea began to refer to themselves as Guineans, rather than Britons or Americans who just happened to live there. Old stories of the glories of ancient empires were revived, often matched with archaeological expeditions, to give the slowly coalescing country some foundational myths. Even white Guineans increasingly looked towards figures like Mansa Musa rather than (say) Elizabeth Tudor when making historical comparisons.
This situation had a big part to play in how Guinea economically developed. Outsiders exploiting a colony might choose to focus on luxury crops rather than staples, and carelessly allow farmers to starve as a result. They might build railways and towns only where it served their own interests. They might focus on raw material extraction and suppress factory construction, allowing it to remain preferenced in their homeland. The Guinean ruling classes (both white and black) were, for the most part, not like this. They regarded the peasant farmers as their inferiors, but still essentially their people, and Guinea as their country. Guinea could not rely on her old colonial masters for help. Meridian ironsharks cut many trade conduits in the Pandoric War. Guinea must be self-sufficient.
When the RAC had first been refounded, the staple crops of the nations of Guinea had chiefly been African rice, millet, sorghum, maize, and cassava (the latter two probably introduced by the Portuguese). The Company introduced many other crops, both as staples and luxuries, using Taxonomic classification to choose appropriate plants for the climate. Most famous, of course, are the cinchona plantations that provided people with protection against malaria—initially only for the white traders and the wealthier natives, but later becoming generalised. Studies of the disease connected it to a mosquito parasite, and new poisons developed in the UPSA’s chemical labs led in the 1890s to the first of a series of attempts to drive the insect to extinction. Though not completely successful, the campaigns did reduce malaria further.
However, cinchona is only the most famous of the crop introductions. Asian rice varieties were introduced and wheat production was dramatically increased. Agricultural theorists were often ruthlessly allowed to play God with peasants’ lives in Company-ruled territories, testing out their theories of what farming strategies would produce the highest crop yields. Though much misery was inflicted in the process, this did allow the construction of far superior plantations. The Company ran roughshod over the different native Guinean notions of land ownership and damaged a number of rainforests clearing them for farmland, but famines went from a fact of life to a very occasional crisis. By the 1920s, Guinea would be a net food exporter.
Some crops were useful both as food and for other purposes. Groundnuts and peanuts were grown for food, but their oil proved a useful fuel for the Mitchell Engine. Mitchell mobiles and trains were rapidly deployed in Guinea, which formerly had been dependent on coal imports and a few, difficult mines of its own. Guinea led the way in development of many Mitchell engine types, which were also used on agricultural vehicles. Economically important spices were also introduced or popularised and grown.
Innovations in sanitation and medicine were also imported from Europe and the Novamund, often not too long after they were first developed. The ruling classes need not care about the lives of their subjects in order to recognise that having towns full of reliable workers who would not drop dead of easily-preventable diseases was good for business. Africa came with a number of diseases specific to its climate as well as the better-understood European ones like cholera, but this nonetheless made a huge difference
All of these changes were regarded as threats by those who held power in the native power structures, particularly practioners of the traditional religions—who had been left in the firing line by the Treaty of Rabba protecting both Christian and Muslim missionaries. Periodic revolts took place, of which the Nupeci revolt of 1897 was only the biggest. But without a single shared identity across Guinea, a rebellion in any given state could always be put down with troops from its neighbours.
That situation would only change with the rise of C. B. Kane...
*
From: Motext Pages CU145G-H [retrieved 22/11/19].
Extraneous advertising has been left intact.
Leaders Who Changed the World, Episode 4: C. B. Kane (1865-1938)
Caesar Bell Kane was born in Liberty on May 9th, 1865, a day that his namesake would have loved to have seen—the day that slavery was abolished in Carolina, as well as throughout the Hermandad. Forever known as C. B., Kane was born to parents of humble mixed birth[11] in the Freedish capital. He scandalised them even as a child by his crass pranks and bold defiance to authority. Thrown out of the family home aged sixteen, he became a capable thief and confidence trickster. He was best known for a scheme by which he wrote beautifully-penned letters to credulous people across three continents, claiming to be the dispossessed son of a noble expelled from Britain by the Populists. He claimed to know the location of a buried chest of jewels and tapestries hastily taken from his father’s ancestral home, and needed just a little seed money to begin... His scam was surprisingly successful, and when the Freedish police finally decided to stop taking bribes and arrest him, it was in a house that was practically a palace.
Kane was due to be hanged to make an example of. Whether he bribed the hangman, or was simply very lucky, the execution failed. Kane was left with a hanging scar around his neck (which he hid with a necklace in later life) but had escaped justice. He had to leave Freedonia, however, and he sought his fortune in the interior. After a number of poorly-attested adventures, in 1885 he reached the Hausa city of Zazzau,[12] one of many which had been conceded to the Fulani Caliphate by the British in 1840. The local emir, son of one of Abu Nahda’s generals, was unpopular and widely disliked—to the point that the local RAC forces were considering getting rid of him before a revolt broke out. Kane hatched a plan, one of his old confidence schemes writ large. He married the granddaughter of the old, Fulani-dispossessed emir, claimed to have converted to Islam, and offered himself to the Company as an alternative candidate. The Company helped pull off his coup, a decision that some of their directors would later regret.
===
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Over the next thirty years, Kane would hatch many more schemes, yet also took his role as emir seriously, and came to genuinely love his wife. The Company found that their profits seemed to mysteriously shrink when Kane came anywhere near them, yet were unable to prove he was skimming. Kane was also popular with some Directors for his love of grandiose ideas, which many of them shared. Some unwisely accepted his help in their latest project, which often ended with the director being dismissed and Kane pocketing the budget. Not always, though, for Kane did seriously ponder the question of what to do with the power he had obtained by guile.
Zazzau was a good central location, and he established contacts with rulers across Guinea, whether they be Freedes, Fulani, white Company men, or the princes of Dahomey, Nupe, Ashanti, Oyo and Benin. Kane established initiatives such as the Guinea Games and the Great Fair, miniature, local versions of the Global Games and WorldFests respectively. He sought to build partnerships across the region—sometimes ones he could exploit to increase his own power and wealth, but not always.
Following the Pandoric War and the ensuing geopolitical changes, Kane added a third initiative. In 1905 he called the first Grand Palaver in Zazzau. He called on representatives from all the powers in Guinea, including the Company, to assemble in his city and debate what Guinea’s future should be, in the wake of Britain ceasing to exist and America withdrawing into Social Americanism.
The move alarmed the Board of Directors but caught them offguard. While nobody was foolish enough to trust Kane anymore, they had not expected this. But they had allowed him to accrue a high profile and respect, and they could not simply overrule him without sparking discontent. In the end, the Board decided to send a trustworthy representative who had worked with Kane in the past. This was Graham Oldman, universally known as Ginger Oldman, whose work had dramatically increased the production of that spice in the Oyo lands.
To discuss what took place at the first Grand Palaver would fill a book (and has). The Board had thought it might presage a rebellion, one which America now seemed disinclined to help put down. Kane, however, seemed more inspired by the people of Bengal, who had bought their way to freedom. Yet, unlike Bengal with its single corporate entity, Guinea was divided. He sought to change that.
The Freedish representatives were strongly opposed to Kane’s moves, and for a long time Freedonia was treated as a semi-separate entity. Indeed, the controversies of later decades would rest on the attempt to introduce Freedish democracy elsewhere in Guinea. But in the short term, Kane’s bold move had solved a difficulty for the Directors. They were the Royal Africa Company, but of which royal family? Their chequered flag bore a Union Jack, flag of a country that was ceasing to exist.[13] The Company had better decide what was to become of it, or someone else would decide for it.
Thus the Directorate of Guinea came into being. Few would have thought that the Grand Palaver would one day become its parliament. Yet even now, the Palaver had significant business to attend to. For one thing, what to do about Karlus Barkalus and all those fellows waving black flags in the Kongo all of a sudden...?
[1] Note that in TTL (as the term was used in OTL until relatively recently), ‘Guinea’ refers to all of West Africa, even before a state by that name formally existed.
[2] It’s a bit questionable whether this would be the best way to abbreviate his name, but school history syllabuses rarely go into such detail.
[3] In reference to William the Conqueror and the Harrying of the North in 1069.
[4] See Part #165 in Volume IV.
[5] Of course, the East India Company originally traded over a much bigger area than Bengal—this viewpoint is tainted by hindsight.
[6] When slavery was abolished in Carolina and throughout the Hermandad (Part #211 in Volume V). Of course, the construction of this sentence implies it’s talking about the period when Carolina was still in the ENA, so this is a bit awkwardly phrased.
[7] Dakar is the titular capital of the RAC, although in practice a lot of business is conducted at Fort James (which grew into Accra, Ghana in OTL) as an outpost surrounded by formally Ashanti territory.
[8] As seen in Part #236 in Volume VI.
[9] In 1861, as described in Part #207 in Volume V.
[10] In OTL the Bambara Empire in Ségou fell to an earlier jihad, as the rise of the Fulani happened earlier in OTL.
[11] By which it means they were only partly descended from returned American slaves, and otherwise descended from natives who never left Africa.
[12] Today in OTL the city is called Zaria and only the surrounding state is called Zazzau.
[13] England continued to use the Union Jack, so this is a slight case of hyperbole.
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME
DID YOU JUST THROW OUT AT US THE "COMPANIES HATE US!" AND NIGERIAN PRINCE SCAM MEMES ALL AT ONCE?!
REEEEEEEEEEEE
I like how the early 419 scams are being perpetuated by actual Nigerian royalty.
I think the original Spanish prisoner scam actually predates the POD, but yes, it is fun to see it happening in Nigeria.
So Guinea's like a... nice South Africa? Okay, let's say "well-intentioned"-- some of those agricultural experiments may have been deadly duds.
Oof, making the Fulani state a Caliphate was a misjudgement-- now Guinea has to justify how the Fulani system of ranks and titles can still have a place in the political culture even as a "Caliph" ends up the subject of a mere Emir. Are Freedonia and the Caliphate going to be the two opposing poles of political change fro here on out?
Oof, making the Fulani state a Caliphate was a misjudgement-- now Guinea has to justify how the Fulani system of ranks and titles can still have a place in the political culture even as a "Caliph" ends up the subject of a mere Emir. Are Freedonia and the Caliphate going to be the two opposing poles of political change fro here on out?
I would like to make the question of whether or not to make the introduction of crops to Guinea a Heritage Point of Controversy a Heritage Point of Controversy.
So, did Kane unify all the lands, apart from Freedonia, that were in green colour in the pre- and post-Pandoric War maps in Western Africa into the Directorate or what was it exactly he did here?
Why did you have to write that before I had the chance?
Try saying that quickly three times in a row.
Well... maybe. This is LTTW, cliffhanger hints that seem pretty straightforward might actually be something else. Something more insane.
On the other hand, if they did, it's probably RIP Angola as well.
Why did you have to write that before I had the chance?
Try saying that quickly three times in a row.
Well... maybe. This is LTTW, cliffhanger hints that seem pretty straightforward might actually be something else. Something more insane.
On the other hand, if they did, it's probably RIP Angola as well.
I don't think Angola ever really stood much chance.
Kongo might be more convoluted, though I now expect it (and Guntoor, and probably Spain) to become the wake-up call that begins the road to the First Black Scare in the Twenties.
Really, the fairly smooth non-violent integration of the Caliphate into the Guinea corporate system seems unlikely, given it's OTL fondness for slaves and slave raiding, it's abundance of religious, er, enthusiasts, and loose central control over the actions of such enthusiasts. Perhaps it's rulers can bond with the whites over common contempt for southern "heathen" Africans, but then the Europeans and Americans seem less racist than and more prone to treating with local princes and emirs like in OTL India (similarly to the way events develop in "Male rising"). It could be because a move into interior Africa seems to have come earlier than OTL, before racist ideas had developed so far and before the European technological edge as great as it was later, but even in India OTL the British view of Indians was loaded with a lot more assumptions of racial superiority at the end of the 19th century than at the beginning. I suppose it could be in part because there are several non-European Great Powers in this world, including South America. (As I believe I have said before, we do seem to get quite a few wanks in this world - they're not all going to go well, but China, Russia, South America, the Ottomans, even Persia are more powerful than they were at this time OTL.) Is "scientific" racism simply a weaker meme in this world than OTL?
Ah, but isn't Diversitarianism supposed to avoid convergence on a norm?