I just had an idea, Jon: what about a cultured Wolof man who, having been in Paris, decides to give Naturalism an African twist, writing a Zola-inspired (yet less cynical) novel set in Senegal, in both French and his mother tongue? He would be viewed in France as a great writer, and in Senegal as a sort of father of modern Wolof literature. This could spark interest among the French for African literature in general, and since we're talking about West Africa, for the griots' epic poetry: it will be by listening to griots that Parry's opinion about Homer will be born, albeit in France, by a Frenchman, some decades earlier.
Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
I just had an idea, Jon: what about a cultured Wolof man who, having been in Paris, decides to give Naturalism an African twist, writing a Zola-inspired (yet less cynical) novel set in Senegal, in both French and his mother tongue? He would be viewed in France as a great writer, and in Senegal as a sort of father of modern Wolof literature. This could spark interest among the French for African literature in general, and since we're talking about West Africa, for the griots' epic poetry: it will be by listening to griots that Parry's opinion about Homer will be born, albeit in France, by a Frenchman, some decades earlier.
Assuming that Conrad exists - he was born after the POD, but in an area where butterflies would be minimal at that point - his fascination with Africa began when he was a child, so he may well visit it at some point and use it as a setting for a novel. It won't be Heart of Darkness, because there will be no Belgian Congo - but on the other hand, it may be something similar, because rubber colonialism is always brutal, and the methods used by whoever does control the Congo basin may not be that different from Leopold's. (See, e.g., French Congo and Ubangi-Shari in OTL.) The Congo is, unfortunately, not destined to be a happy place in this timeline - it will be better than OTL (it could hardly be worse), but not necessarily by much.
This is an amazingly cool idea. Consider it done, and you may even see some of the story.
I'd guess that naturalism will probably exist in much the same fashion as OTL, given that it's an outgrowth of late 19th-century scientific advances and social change as well as previous French literary forms. The Senegalese in France, particularly those who are cultural Francophiles, will take part in the movement. A naturalist work set in Senegal - say, a family saga somewhat like Maryse Condé's Segu, exploring social change and conflict through several generations - could become part of the French canon.
Another possible offshoot might be more depiction of the gritty reality of colonialism - for instance, if a retired tirailleur officer writes a naturalist novel set in one of the more exploitative and brutally run colonies.
And there will definitely be more attention paid to African epic poetry. In this timeline, Africa will not be seen as a land without myths. And it won't only be the griots - some Zanzibari trader will translate the Mwindo saga before the nineteenth century is out.
wolf_brother
Banned
Indeed, and with butterflies already a-fluttering in South America there certainly is a lot of potential to play with in the native land of the rubber tree. 'Scramble for the Amazon', anyone?
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Anita van der Merwe, The Trekkers’ Land (Cape Town: New Holland, 2003)
… The history of southern Africa is the history of folk migrations: some voluntary and some not, driven by economics, ecology, the logic of empire and the fortunes of war. For more than a century, southern Africa was a land of peoples in motion, and the conflicts created by their movements would persist long after they had settled down.
The Dutch colonists were first, setting up a way station at the Cape in 1652 and expanding to occupy the coastal farmland and the Khoikhoi grazing lands in the interior. They, the ancestral Boers, were the first of the Afrikaner peoples. They brought the second, the Cape Malays, with them as slave laborers and political exiles, and through intermarriage with the Africans, they created the third and fourth – the Cape Coloureds and the Griquas.
The British took the Cape temporarily in 1795 and permanently in 1806, and they too colonized the land, with more than 4000 people arriving in 1820 to settle the Eastern Cape and found the towns of Bathurst and Port Elizabeth. They didn’t stay put any more than the Dutch did. As more settlers came, they expanded inland; some encroached further on the lands of the Xhosa who had already lost territory to trekboers and border warfare, and others moved on to Natal to encounter the Zulu and the other Nguni peoples. And the arrival of British settlers and British law set the Boers and Griquas off on their great treks, moving into the interior to found Griqualand West, the Orange Free State and the South African Republic.
At the same time, the Africans were undergoing their own great migration. The rise of the Zulus, and later the Ndebele, pushed many of the neighboring peoples from their ancestral lands in a chain reaction of warfare and movement – the Mfecane – that was the genesis of the modern Sotho and Swazi nations. And as Africans, Europeans and mixed-race Afrikaners sought new homelands, they often came into conflict over the same territories. The borders of Natal, the eastern Cape Colony, the Orange Free State and the South African Republic were marked by endemic low-level conflict over agricultural and grazing land, with raids occasionally flaring into border warfare and punitive expeditions.
By the 1850s, the European-settled parts of southern Africa had divided into fairly well-defined core and frontier zones. The western Cape, and to a lesser extent the Cape Colony as a whole, was core; by mid-century, Cape Town was no more threatened by conflict with the indigenous peoples than Halifax or Sydney, and in 1852, the Cape Colony was granted its own parliament with control over many of its internal affairs. Parts of the Orange Free State and Natal were also core, under the firm occupation of Boer and British farmers and with relatively well-organized governments and administrative structures.
The rest was frontier. The borders of the South African Republic, in particular, were constantly in flux; throughout the 1850s and 1860s, parties of Boers pushed the frontier forward and established short-lived splinter republics, some of which failed while others were absorbed into the growing and increasingly anarchic state ruled from Pretoria. As the borders moved, so did people: the Boers would advance after a successful conflict and retreat after a lost one, while the bordering peoples who they displaced moved on to new lands and displaced others in their turn.
Similar dynamics played out, in varying ways and to different extents, in the other areas where European and indigenous-held territories met: the northern Cape, the Transkei, Griqualand, northern Natal and the Orange Free State’s border with the Sotho. British colonial officials, at least in theory, attempted to manage these conflicts by concluding treaties with African rulers which demarcated the borders and placed the indigenous peoples under British protection: the Griquas, who the British regarded essentially as a mixed-race tribe, were the beneficiaries of one such treaty. But these pacts often yielded to realities on the ground: British authorities were often unable or unwilling to control individual settlers who encroached on African-held territories, and when those encroachments led to border conflict, the natural inclination of the British military officers and colonial officials was to side with the settlers.
This was not lost on the Orange Free State, which was waging its own frontier battles and which felt itself hemmed in by borders that Britain had fixed without consulting it. During the early 1850s, the Boer republic’s Volksraad twice voted to recognize British sovereignty, hoping that by coming under the British umbrella, they would receive support in their colonial wars. But although they initially received a sympathetic hearing, London was uninterested in expanding further into the southern African interior at that time, and in 1854, it abandoned all claims to the Boer-occupied land.
Moshoeshoe the Great in 1854
This left the Orange Free State to wage its war against the Sotho alone, and under their king Moshoeshoe the Great, the Sotho armies put up a determined resistance. They inflicted several defeats on both British and Boer raiding parties, and in 1858, they repelled an invasion by Orange Free State commandos, holding their stronghold at Thaba Bosiu against a Boer assault and using guerrilla tactics to harass the Boer columns until they were forced to leave. The Orange Free State again invaded Moshoeshoe’s kingdom in 1865, and although it was able to occupy part of the western lowlands, it again failed to take Thaba Bosiu and, after a winter of bush warfare, accepted a peace that left the Sotho with most of their territory.
The other indigenous peoples who faced the British or the Boers did not fare as well. Between 1850 and 1870, there were more than two dozen frontier wars, of which only the most significant were named. Typical of these conflicts is the war that the British called the Eighth Frontier War and the Xhosa called Nongqawuse’s War, which began in 1851. Although the trigger for this war was the murder of a nine-year-old Xhosa girl named Nongqawuse by British-allied Khoikhoi, the conflict was in fact driven by territorial disputes left unfinished after the “War of the Axe” four years earlier, as well as the increasing losses of Xhosa cattle to lung disease which was believed to have been transmitted by British herds. The scattered British forces in the Ciskei region suffered initial reverses, but the Xhosa failed to take any fortified British positions, and the British forces were able to regroup and occupy much of the Transkei by the end of the year. By treaty in 1852, the Xhosa accepted British sovereignty over the Transkei and many of them were forced east into “No Man’s Land,” although a proposal to annex their territories into the Cape Colony was narrowly rejected and the British agreed to separate their herds from the Xhosa cattle.
Outside the Sotho domains, therefore, the pattern appeared to be one of slow but inexorable expansion by the Boers and the British colonists, and equally slow but inevitable dispossession of the indigenous Africans. Beginning in the late 1860s, however, several things happened to recast the conflict.
In 1867, diamonds were discovered along the border between the Orange Free State and the lands claimed by the Griquas. Three years later, a prospector discovered gold in the Witwatersrand. These discoveries were the trigger for yet another migration, this one of miners from throughout Africa and the world (including, nearly unnoticed at the time, a baker’s dozen of Malê families who set up as provisioners on the gold fields), and it would be simultaneously a blessing and a curse for the Boer republics. On the one hand, the discoveries restored their credit and gave them the resources to restore their governments from bankruptcy and near-anarchy. On the other hand, they saw that they would soon be outnumbered by uitlander migrants, putting their sovereignty in danger, and with the diamond fields in a border region, the conflict between the Orange Free State and the militant Griquas led by Adam Kok III became more intense.
Adam Kok III
So, too, did tensions with Britain. With so many British citizens in the gold and diamond fields, London now showed an increasing interest in taking control throughout the region. This was accentuated by the simultaneous growth of the Anglo-Omani empire in East Africa and the expansion of British interests in the coastal West African kingdoms: the growth of these holdings led many Colonial Office nabobs to think in terms of a long-term British future in Africa, and there was also talk of establishing a strategic corridor from the Cape to Tanganyika.
These tensions first became manifest in Griqualand, where colonial authorities supported the Griquas against the Boers and cited a treaty with Kok’s grandfather in support of their claim to the diamond fields. But British aims went much further. Sir Henry Bartle Frere, an old India and Zanzibar hand who was appointed High Commissioner of Southern Africa in 1872, had designs to replicate the Anglo-Omani hinterland empire by joining the Boer republics, and the remaining African-held regions, in a federation controlled from the Cape.
Some of the putative members of this federation were willing to entertain the idea. The Griquas were willing to recognize British sovereignty as long as they retained internal self-government, and the Volksraad of the Orange Free State was split down the middle; despite the simmering border conflict, many still believed that British protection would be the best way to safeguard their interests. The South African Republic, however, which had fewer burghers and felt itself more threatened by the influx of uitlanders, was very much opposed. The British settlers in Natal were also wary; only whites had the vote in that colony, and they had no desire to be subjected to the Cape electoral system, in which certain African property owners had the franchise. And in the Cape itself, many argued that a federation would be unwieldy and would destabilize both the Cape Colony’s politics and those of the region.
Given sufficient time and diplomacy, these issues might have been resolved. But Bartle Frere, while a capable administrator and enthusiastic modernizer, was no diplomat, and he did himself no favors in his relations with the local authorities. He responded to opposition from the Cape parliament by dissolving it and unilaterally canceling its plans for responsible government. He rejected a proposal to add Transkei, Basutoland and Griqualand to the federation as separate crown colonies – which might have reconciled them to the idea, if protection from further settler encroachment were included – and annexed them outright to the Cape Colony, which put them under Cape land law and opened them to legalized dispossession. He put heavy-handed pressure on the Natal government to join the union while at the same time favoring the British settlers’ expansion and making increasing demands on the Zulus. And his proposals to both Boer republics can best be described as high-handed and dismissive of the Afrikaner peoples’ concerns.
Matters came to a head nearly simultaneously in Basutoland and the South African Republic. The Sotho, who had sometimes been beaten but never conquered, reacted as one might expect to the revocation of their autonomy. The final straw was the Cape government’s enactment of a law in 1875 requiring all Africans to surrender their firearms, and the dispatch of government commissioners to enforce the legislation. By July, the Sotho were in open rebellion, and although Moshoeshoe was dead, their soldiers were still disciplined and experienced in guerrilla warfare, inflicting heavy casualties on the forces sent in to suppress them.
While the Sotho conflict was still brewing, Bartle Frere dispatched Theophilus Shepstone, Natal’s secretary of native affairs, to settle matters with the South African Republic. In August, Shepstone crossed the border with two thousand soldiers and six hundred police auxiliaries, which Bartle Frere believed to be all that was necessary to subdue a republic of 30,000 burghers which had been in virtual anarchy a few years before. He learned differently at Majuba Hill on September 30, 1875, when the Boers inflicted a humiliating defeat on the British force, forcing them to retreat with more than a hundred dead.
Bishop Colenso
By early 1876, the British were falling back on multiple fronts, and the need to mobilize more troops was proving enormously damaging to the Cape Colony’s finances. There was a growing sense in Whitehall that the federation proposal had backfired badly. At the same time, Bishop John Colenso of Natal had arrived in London to plead the case of the Africans who had been pushed to the wall by Bartle Frere’s policies. Colenso, a larger-than-life character whose heterodox views on Biblical interpretation and justice for indigenous Africans had prompted two unsuccessful attempts to oust him from his bishopric, had opposed the annexation of the Sotho and Xhosa territories as well as the growing provocations against the Zulus, and believed that the premature attempt to unify southern Africa was leading to disaster.
In March, Colenso met with John Alexander MP, a member of that year’s Liberal government who was active in colonial affairs and who had himself sympathized with African causes since his days as a political officer in Sokoto. What took place at these meetings has never been reported; however, they were followed closely by Bartle Frere’s recall, the appointment of more conciliatory Cape politician Thomas Charles Scanlen as commissioner for southern Africa, and the commencement of peace negotiations. In January 1877, Britain concluded a treaty with the Sotho restoring their status as a protected nation under British sovereignty and guaranteeing their borders; that March, it formally recognized the Boer republics’ independence and re-established the Griquas’ buffer state.
The status quo ante had largely been restored, but Britain’s weakness in the region had been exposed: it had lost considerable prestige, and the local forces’ ability to resist the Boers should they go on the offensive was very much in question. Nor was the British army, already overstretched by its commitments in Tanganyika and West Africa, able to reinforce the Cape Colony’s and Natal’s defenses. As a stopgap measure, two Indian brigades were dispatched to the region, but the chosen long-term solution – suggested by another India hand turned southern African governor, Sir Robert Napier – was to recruit sepoy troops from the African nations who, in the British estimation, had shown themselves to be “martial races.” One such group, obviously, was the Sotho; the others were the Zulu, whose martial prowess in the region was well established, and the Xhosa, who had given both British and Boers a hard fight in multiple wars.
Few citizens of the Cape or Natal cared for the idea of recruiting African regiments, and neither did Colenso, who famously argued that he hadn’t fought to save the Africans from dispossession in order to turn them into mercenaries. But Napier’s plan accomplished one of Colenso’s key goals: the restoration of the eastern Transkei as a separate crown colony, and the creation of a Zulu reserve that was off limits to white settlement. It also, ironically, fulfilled one of the Natal settlers’ aspirations by removing the Zulus as a military threat. Although King Cetshwayo, urged by his trusted British advisor John Dunn, agreed to allow Britain to recruit four Zulu regiments, many subchiefs and members of his court resisted, and by 1878, they had begun to split off from the kingdom, leaving Cetshwayo to rule a shrunken domain, albeit one secure from intrusion. In time, most of the splinter clans would be displaced, slaking the settlers’ thirst for land and being absorbed into the colonial labor force, while the main kingdom, with many of its young men serving under the Queen’s colors, would be reduced to a shadow of its former military strength.
That year, an uneasy peace settled on southern Africa, giving a much-needed respite from the turmoil of the previous decade. But more changes, both political and social, were on the horizon…
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I apologize for the delayed update: southern African history is very complex and interwoven, I'm not an expert in it, and even after considerable research, I'm still not sure I've done it justice. This update changed several times during its creation, as I found new factors to take into account. I'm grateful to Julius Vogel for the advice he has provided; any other thoughts and criticism are appreciated, and the above is open to change.
What I was aiming for was to have very subtle changes up to the late 1860s - the Xhosa don't kill their cattle, the Sotho do slightly better against the Boers than in OTL, and enough Xhosa are pushed into No Man's Land that Adam Kok stays in Griqualand West rather than going there. The butterflies expand enormously in the 1870s; the earlier Wits gold rush is the primary trigger and accelerates certain other developments (e.g., drawing British interest north in time to put the confederation wars before the conquest of the Zulu), but events are also shaped by this Britain's experiences elsewhere in Africa and by this timeline's generally more sympathetic and respectful attitude toward Africans. The Zulu and Xhosa won't benefit as much as the Malê, because they're in a settler colony and because the British will regard them as martial-race savages rather than partly civilized, but they'll end up with shrunken reserves somewhat like what the Sotho got in OTL, and so will the Griquas.
Anyway, the next update will return to more familiar territory - east Africa, then the Malê heartland, then French West Africa, then the Ottomans, and finally some very formative events that will take place in 1878 and 1879. Somewhere in there, I'll also include Brazil and Grão Pará, where, as wolf_brother has correctly guessed, the rubber boom will lead to a clash of empires. Then it will be on to the 1880s as the Scramble for Africa begins in earnest, the stage is set for the Great War, and the Malê continue to navigate through uncharted political waters.
What I was aiming for was to have very subtle changes up to the late 1860s - the Xhosa don't kill their cattle, the Sotho do slightly better against the Boers than in OTL, and enough Xhosa are pushed into No Man's Land that Adam Kok stays in Griqualand West rather than going there. The butterflies expand enormously in the 1870s; the earlier Wits gold rush is the primary trigger and accelerates certain other developments (e.g., drawing British interest north in time to put the confederation wars before the conquest of the Zulu), but events are also shaped by this Britain's experiences elsewhere in Africa and by this timeline's generally more sympathetic and respectful attitude toward Africans. The Zulu and Xhosa won't benefit as much as the Malê, because they're in a settler colony and because the British will regard them as martial-race savages rather than partly civilized, but they'll end up with shrunken reserves somewhat like what the Sotho got in OTL, and so will the Griquas.
Anyway, the next update will return to more familiar territory - east Africa, then the Malê heartland, then French West Africa, then the Ottomans, and finally some very formative events that will take place in 1878 and 1879. Somewhere in there, I'll also include Brazil and Grão Pará, where, as wolf_brother has correctly guessed, the rubber boom will lead to a clash of empires. Then it will be on to the 1880s as the Scramble for Africa begins in earnest, the stage is set for the Great War, and the Malê continue to navigate through uncharted political waters.
Hnau
Banned
I like it. It seems that while Southern Africa's history was complex in OTL, the divergences ITTL will only make it more complex. I'm a fan of seeing the Xhosa doing better than in OTL. The cattle-killing episode was such a tragic historical episode of shooting yourself in the foot, it really is a shame that that happened (all because of a girl's tall tale about talking to spirits...) But did you have to kill Nongqawuse to avoid it?! 
That was harsh, Jonathan.
As an aside, I sometimes have trouble in the installments detecting what is divergent. I have to go through Wikipedia to figure out what went different exactly. I don't want to make your job more difficult, but maybe a footnote or two could help readers like me identify the divergences of TTL with OTL. Wolf_brother, Jared, EdT and others do a great job of it, and while it has become something of a cliche on here, idk, it might help some of us out.
Looks like we still have a lot more fun up ahead! How many installments do you think the divergent Great War will take up?
That was harsh, Jonathan.As an aside, I sometimes have trouble in the installments detecting what is divergent. I have to go through Wikipedia to figure out what went different exactly. I don't want to make your job more difficult, but maybe a footnote or two could help readers like me identify the divergences of TTL with OTL. Wolf_brother, Jared, EdT and others do a great job of it, and while it has become something of a cliche on here, idk, it might help some of us out.
Looks like we still have a lot more fun up ahead! How many installments do you think the divergent Great War will take up?
wolf_brother
Banned
So the situation of the 1850s in Southern Africa is extended well into the later parts of the 19th century, probably right up until your alt-WWI. This sounds... messy.
Jonathan Edelstein, do the Basters, Hottentots, Griqua, Oorlam, and etc. tribal groupings still migrate further north into OTL Nambia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe? Or are the differences in this timeline, especially the earlier wars for confederation and a more lenient British hand, alter events enough so as to prevent such a move?
Jonathan Edelstein, do the Basters, Hottentots, Griqua, Oorlam, and etc. tribal groupings still migrate further north into OTL Nambia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe? Or are the differences in this timeline, especially the earlier wars for confederation and a more lenient British hand, alter events enough so as to prevent such a move?
Good work on a difficult update to the story.
The future of Southern Africa is quite likely to be very different now, as you have deployed combat units of the British Indian Army to SA (not done IOTL as far as I can tell), you have indigenous armed Sepoy / native levies (again not done IOTL) and you have kept the native / mixed entities separate from the Cape/Natal.
If there is a future war against the Afrikaners (or non Zulu tribes), Britain, if it can afford it, will bring Indian Army troops back and have a large trained Zulu reserve ready. That will mean that if there is a long war, Britain will be strongly tempted to call up far more indigenous/mixed levies against the Afrikaners.
Further, the Afrikaner states are perhaps a little weaker here than OTL. They have been in the war a few years earlier and now, while victorious, have a pretty similar geopolitical situation, but now with the spectre of armed Zulu regiments!
I could see a future federal movement that is very different from the Union
The future of Southern Africa is quite likely to be very different now, as you have deployed combat units of the British Indian Army to SA (not done IOTL as far as I can tell), you have indigenous armed Sepoy / native levies (again not done IOTL) and you have kept the native / mixed entities separate from the Cape/Natal.
If there is a future war against the Afrikaners (or non Zulu tribes), Britain, if it can afford it, will bring Indian Army troops back and have a large trained Zulu reserve ready. That will mean that if there is a long war, Britain will be strongly tempted to call up far more indigenous/mixed levies against the Afrikaners.
Further, the Afrikaner states are perhaps a little weaker here than OTL. They have been in the war a few years earlier and now, while victorious, have a pretty similar geopolitical situation, but now with the spectre of armed Zulu regiments!
I could see a future federal movement that is very different from the Union
I like it. It seems that while Southern Africa's history was complex in OTL, the divergences ITTL will only make it more complex. I'm a fan of seeing the Xhosa doing better than in OTL. The cattle-killing episode was such a tragic historical episode of shooting yourself in the foot, it really is a shame that that happened (all because of a girl's tall tale about talking to spirits...) But did you have to kill Nongqawuse to avoid it?!
I think some kind of millennialism would be inevitable among the Xhosa, given the wrenching changes to their way of life and the heavy losses suffered during the frontier wars, and I'll touch on that the next time I visit southern Africa. But there's no need for the millennialist movement to be as spectacularly self-destructive as the cattle-killing episode. They'll do quite a bit better in this timeline - some will be absorbed into the Eastern Cape labor force or become seasonal laborers as in OTL, but they'll also have their own colony, and military service will provide a (limited) means of social mobility.
And yeah, killing Nongqawuse was harsh, but I couldn't think of a plausible way for a historian in 2003 to say "one day in the spring of 1856, a random Xhosa girl who nobody remembers went out to fetch water and absolutely nothing unusual happened."
I did footnote a couple of the updates which featured particularly obscure characters or which relied on scholarly sources. Maybe I'll do so more often, or else follow each update with a short explanatory note like post #605. I certainly don't want my writing to be inaccessible.
At the moment, it's looking like four, and then we're on to the dawn of the twentieth century. Thus far, I've only got the twentieth century plotted out in general terms (although a few specific events are already planned), but the way forward should be clear by the time I get there.
They'll get the same Southern and Eastern European immigrants as in OTL, and the Boer republics - especially the ZAR - won't like it. The uitlanders in the ZAR will be an even bigger political flashpoint than in OTL, because they'll be coming at a time when the republic has fewer citizens and a less organized government. Some of the Boers may push even further north - the beginning of a Third Trek - although by that time, the British will have established a presence in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe in order to outflank them.
Plenty of the Cape and Natal settlers won't like the immigrants either, but they'll do better at co-opting the European ones - the British don't have quite as much of a sense of demographic threat, and if anything, they'll see the new immigrants as political allies against the Afrikaners and additional white bodies on the electoral rolls. The Malê, though, will make some waves, especially after they make common cause with the (Muslim) Cape Malays and the Coloured middle class. Abdullah Abdurahman won't exist in this timeline, but he'll have an equivalent, and maybe more than one.
Some will, some won't. The existence of a self-governing Griqualand colony will be a powerful draw, and will convince many of them to stay put - but on the other hand, the border between Griqualand and the Orange Free State will sometimes be hot, and the Griquas will face the same kind of pressure from agricultural and mining immigration that the Boers will. There will also be those who, as in OTL, have personal disagreements with the Griqua leadership or problems with the law. The Witboois will still go to Namibia, and there will be a settlement (albeit a smaller one) at Rehoboth; I'm not sure about some of the others.
This raises the question of who will control Namibia. Before the diamonds were discovered, it wasn't really a priority for colonization, so I don't see the British expanding beyond Walvis Bay in the nineteenth century. I think it may actually become German as in OTL - German missionaries were there since before the POD, and the North German Confederation may be looking for a salve to its pride after the stolen victory against France.
I haven't decided yet whether there will be (a) no federation at all, (b) a federation of the white colonies only (or maybe the whites plus the Griquas); or (c) a federation of both white and black states, with the Africans possibly starting out as subordinate members but eventually becoming full ones.
The "author" of the last update did, however, indicate that by 2003, the Griquas, the Cape Malays and the Cape Coloureds will all be considered Afrikaner peoples ("Boers" will be used specifically to refer to the whites), which suggests that even if there isn't a more complex federation, there will at least be some cross-racial merging of identities.
As noted above, they're also facing a wave of mining immigration at a time when they're less capable of handling it; most will respond by trying to consolidate, but a few will push even further north. They'll also still have to resolve conflicts with the Venda, Pedi and Tswana without British help.
The Indian and African regiments will certainly change things - some of the Indians will stay, but that will be the least of it. The British army will give the Africans - or at least those from the "martial race" peoples - a recognized social status and will make it harder to take their rights away. And while there will be considerable political opposition to using them, they will be used if there's a total war, particularly if hostilities break out between the British and the Afrikaners in the middle of the Great War.
I could see that causing quite a bit of bitterness - possibly even more than OTL. Some Africans did serve on both sides of the OTL war, but there was an unspoken agreement that it would be primarily a "white man's war," and the Boer republics went so far as to criticize the British for using black auxiliaries against them. If, in this timeline, the republics are effectively conquered by Zulus and Sotho who are armed by the British, it could give rise to a Dolchstosslegende of epic proportions. On the other hand, an overwhelming enough victory could forestall or reduce the guerrilla resistance and avert the concentration camps. But that again assumes that there will be another war.
There will definitely be a federalist movement - in fact, probably more than one, with competing federal visions. Whether it (or they) will succeed is yet to be determined.
Wow.
I've just started in on your timeline, and it's simply beautiful. It's especially valuable for the details on precolonial Africa, something that I find difficult to research from China. Truly great work.
I've additional comments that I'll be sending to you by PM.
I've just started in on your timeline, and it's simply beautiful. It's especially valuable for the details on precolonial Africa, something that I find difficult to research from China. Truly great work.
I've additional comments that I'll be sending to you by PM.
There are precious few examples of mixed Settler-Indigenous/Black/Non-white colonial federations IOTL* and probably no successful example that I can think of, so you could be in uncharted territory if that is where it ends up.
However, if we widen the range of comparable entities, the example of India does show that it is at least possible to construct a large multi-ethnic federal state, although it is fraught with difficulty. Switzerland too gives an example.
It would seem that you would need to have a slow build-up under one supervising authority (Britain), a reasonably strong local consensus/or thereabouts to the outcome national unity and perhaps some sort of crisis (OTL WW2, Partitition, Wars with Pakistan) to forge national consensus
*I am thinking of CAF, EAF and the various West Indian attempts, although I concede there may be others
However, if we widen the range of comparable entities, the example of India does show that it is at least possible to construct a large multi-ethnic federal state, although it is fraught with difficulty. Switzerland too gives an example.
It would seem that you would need to have a slow build-up under one supervising authority (Britain), a reasonably strong local consensus/or thereabouts to the outcome national unity and perhaps some sort of crisis (OTL WW2, Partitition, Wars with Pakistan) to forge national consensus
*I am thinking of CAF, EAF and the various West Indian attempts, although I concede there may be others
While it did'nt last their was the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.
Yup, I mentioned them but by a different name, as they were also referred to as the Central African Federation/CAF
wolf_brother
Banned
Switzerland is perhaps a bad example. Swiss Neutrality was enforced vigorously after the Vienna Congress, and when one power(s) might wish to intervene in Swiss affairs the others would prevent them from doing so; even more so after the 1848 Revolutions when the Swiss started to evolve into their modern stereotype of neutral bankers and watchmakers armed to the teeth. As well the Swiss themselves were not always wholly committed to the ideal of the confederation, or at least not in the sense that modern readers would expect. I don't think its really comparable here unless another power becomes seriously involved in Southern Africa; perhaps the Portuguese expand Mozambique southward, or someone decides to claim the Skeleton Coast, and the various Boers, British colonists, coloureds, and native Africans decided it would be better to hang together rather than apart.
You are of course quite right about Switzerland. I wasn't so much intending to say that the ATL SA federation would be like Switzerland, more that the former was an example of a multi-ethnic federation that worked. As you say, it took a long time and various external events for that to develop. Which sort of leads onto my point, to make some sort of stable, or nice ATL SA federation, we would need to see a lot of different things happen.
The problem with the CAF, as I understand it, was that it wasn't really envisioned as a federation between settler and non-settler colonies, but was instead a way for Southern Rhodesia to dominate the resources of its hinterland. Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland weren't majority-rule cantons; instead, the same property-weighted voting qualifications applied throughout the federation, and I believe even Nyasaland, where there were only a couple of thousand settlers, had white-dominated electoral rolls. This meant inevitably that the federation came to be seen as something of, by and for the settlers - an impression that Welensky didn't do much to dispel - and African nationalists demanded that it end as part of the decolonization process.
I'm envisioning a somewhat different process in this timeline's southern Africa, assuming of course that a federation develops. It would start with an imperial customs union, and over time, there would be various agreements between the settler states and crown colonies - transportation, labor rights, electrical and water infrastructure, postal service, and various other things where economies of scale (and the economic realities arising from Africans seeking work in the industrial cities) would favor regional management. At first, these regional accords would be handled by the British, but as the crown colonies achieve self-government and ultimately independence, their management would devolve to a regional council in which both the settler and indigenous states would have representation. Then, that council would gradually take a greater political role - possibly in things like military policy - and eventually an elected legislature would be added. The end result would be more a confederation than a federation, with the constituent states having broad internal self-government.
The two obvious models are the unification of Germany and the creation of the European Union, both of which developed along similar lines; the EU, particularly, involves the kind of multi-polar, cross-cultural confederation that this southern Africa would be. On the other hand, as you say, both of these were given impetus by external events. I wonder if the British imperial umbrella would be a sufficient external force to get this kind of union started, or if there would have to be something more, like a defensive war. In any event there's plenty of time to work things out.
I'm envisioning a somewhat different process in this timeline's southern Africa, assuming of course that a federation develops. It would start with an imperial customs union, and over time, there would be various agreements between the settler states and crown colonies - transportation, labor rights, electrical and water infrastructure, postal service, and various other things where economies of scale (and the economic realities arising from Africans seeking work in the industrial cities) would favor regional management. At first, these regional accords would be handled by the British, but as the crown colonies achieve self-government and ultimately independence, their management would devolve to a regional council in which both the settler and indigenous states would have representation. Then, that council would gradually take a greater political role - possibly in things like military policy - and eventually an elected legislature would be added. The end result would be more a confederation than a federation, with the constituent states having broad internal self-government.
The two obvious models are the unification of Germany and the creation of the European Union, both of which developed along similar lines; the EU, particularly, involves the kind of multi-polar, cross-cultural confederation that this southern Africa would be. On the other hand, as you say, both of these were given impetus by external events. I wonder if the British imperial umbrella would be a sufficient external force to get this kind of union started, or if there would have to be something more, like a defensive war. In any event there's plenty of time to work things out.
wolf_brother
Banned
Vaguely related to all of this, but we haven't heard much about butterflies in Portugal. Do the Portuguese and the British still have a falling out over the Pink Map and the 1890 Ultimatum, and if so is that going to feed into your alt-WWI? If so I'm not sure that the Portuguese, even if attacking from Angola & Mozambique, would be considered strong enough opponents to warrant confederation in the face of a common foe.