Sade Abbott [1], “The First Africans in Britain,” London Journal (May 2005)
… Legend has it that an elderly dowager – it’s always an old woman in these stories – buttonholed Gladstone at the Golden Jubilee and demanded that he explain British politics to her. His reply: “Madam, I will answer in the style of Rabbi Hillel. Labour, Ireland and Empire: all else is commentary.” It’s doubtful that the Grand Old Man ever said that, and not only because of his ambivalent attitude toward Judaism, but if he had, he wouldn’t have been far wrong.
In the 1880s, British trade unions had come into their own. Gone were the days of the Combination Acts and the post-Peterloo repression: the unions had won the right to organize and picket, and a series of laws – most enacted by Liberal governments, but some passed under the Conservatives – limited child labour and set a ten-hour day for factory workers. The reform acts of 1881 and 1885 reduced voting qualifications to the point where about two thirds of adult males had the franchise, making the working class dominant in more than eighty parliamentary constituencies.
But Britain was hardly a utopia for workers: working conditions at many factories remained abysmal, wages for unskilled workers were barely enough to survive, there were few provisions for those who suffered injury or illness on the job, and strikes were often violent affairs. The unions’ leadership wanted more than the paternalistic legislation that the political class was willing to provide: they wanted a real share of power as well as a stake in the ownership of the country. Whether this was to be accomplished within the existing political parties, or whether it required the working class to form their own faction, was a topic of fierce debate.
Still fiercer was the Irish Question, which was no closer to solution in 1888 than it had been in 1848. There were some improvements in the climate during the 1870s when Irish nationalists held the balance of power in Parliament; the Coercion Acts were repealed, and a fund of £ 5 million (later increased to £ 12 million) was set up to provide loans to tenant farmers who wished to purchase their plots. But the issue of home rule was as intransigent as ever. In 1883 and again in 1889, the House of Commons passed home-rule bills, but neither of them granted sufficient autonomy to satisfy the nationalists, and both failed in the Lords in any event.
The Prince of Wales, in a rare moment of public involvement in politics, suggested in 1890 that Britain and Ireland become a dual monarchy like Austria-Hungary, but the Queen was vehemently against this suggestion and he found himself with few supporters. The status quo remained as the default option, but was increasingly untenable, and the differences between nationalists and unionists were starting to take on the appearance of an underground war.
The Empire controversy had evolved considerably by the late 1880s: where once there had been a large faction who questioned the need for an empire at all, its existence had become a broad consensus and a source of pride. That had merely shifted the battleground rather than settling the question: the disputes of the Jubilee years related to what regions should be brought into the British sphere, whether the empire’s growth and preservation were worth conflict with other European powers, and how the imperial subjects should be treated. The growth of the All-India Reform Congress and George Gordon’s Jamaica Reform Party had made the last of these increasingly contentious, and now Africa too was added to the mix.
It was in this Britain that the first large African communities – as opposed to small transient settlements – were established. In the decade prior to the Great War, eleven thousand Africans, most of them Malê but with representation from Sierra Leone and the rest of Britain’s African empire, settled in the United Kingdom. Many fetched up in the East End of London, in neighbourhoods that had traditionally been home to working-class immigrants, especially Canning Town where a small community of discharged black soldiers and seamen already existed. The wealthier merchants and industrialists, keen to extend their business connections to the metropole, found their way to more fashionable London districts. The largest settlement, however, was not in London but in the Medway Towns, where Malê who had worked in naval industries in Africa became skilled tradesmen at the Chatham naval yard. The 1891 census saw 4,722 people of African origin in the Chatham borough constituency, mostly men but with an increasing number of families.
The Africans were in most ways like any other group of new immigrants in Britain. But in a very important way, they were not: because they came from the British empire, they were British subjects without any need for naturalization. Like the Indians and dominion citizens resident in Britain, they could vote if they met the property qualifications, and as skilled labourers, many of them did. And as Malê, steeped in Abacarist doctrines of democratic self-rule and resistance to injustice, they wasted no time in forming civic clubs and staking out positions on the controversies of the day.
Of the Grand Old Man’s big three, the Irish Question concerned the Africans the least. The examples of Oyo and Sokoto were sometimes raised by Irish nationalists, who asked why they should be denied a right that a bunch of black savages had, to which the unionists’ rejoinder was that Sokoto and Oyo had no peerage and no representatives in Westminster. But to the Africans themselves, as opposed to those who used them to make a point, Irish home rule wasn’t a matter of concern.
Labour and Empire, though, were quite the opposite. As industrial workers with a strong tradition of labour activism, the Malê were quick to form unions and seek alliances with the labour organisations already existing in Britain. This was not as simple a matter as one might think, due both to divisions within the African community and the disparate Sahelian and British trade union histories.
For instance, Africans found themselves on both sides of the controversy about whether to form an independent working-class political party. Most of those from Ilorin were quite willing to organise under the Liberal umbrella. The Liberals’ program of paternalistic labour legislation matched what they were used to; two generations of Abacarist qadis had enforced minimum wages, maximum hours and workplace safety codes, and these limitations had been codified with little controversy under Usman Abacar’s premiership. But the immigrants from Sokoto and the Adamawa industrial towns, for whom the battle for workers’ rights had been quite literal, saw British factories as a mirror of their own countries, and believed that trusting customary authority figures to enforce
gemeinschaft norms in a
gesellschaft society was futile.
So, too, the Englishmen’s trade unions were organised differently from the African ones. The Malê unions were religious brotherhoods: they performed many of the same mutual-aid functions as the British labour organisations and sought many of the same goals, but their rhetoric and internal leadership principles were informed by an Islamic jurisprudence that was alien to the British trade union movement, especially the part of it that was of a Marxist bent.
There was indeed an even more basic disagreement within the British labour movement: as in Paris, the London unions wondered if the Africans were working-class allies at all, or whether they had instead come to take British jobs and depress Englishmen’s wages. The fact that the Malê had their own unions, and that they fought for labour justice just as fiercely as any British worker, tipped the scales in favour of the former; by 1890 most of the British trade union movement recognised the Africans as part of their alliance, although the two would continue to have tactical disagreements and would sometimes work to cross-purposes.
And finally, the Africans, who were from the Empire, had an obvious interest in its rule. Their own status was not least among the questions of empire: some believed they ought not to be allowed to settle in Britain at all, and between 1885 and 1892, several proposals to that effect were mooted. All these proposals were turned back, but the Malê used their civic clubs and newspapers to argue against them, and also to oppose disabilities for Africans in Britain and to fight the race prejudice often shown by police and government officials.
By the 1890s, the subjects of their advocacy had grown to the African empire in general. Although the Malê themselves came from countries with broad self-rule, life in London and Chatham had brought them into contact with many other Africans who did not, and also gave them firsthand contact with those who believed black men incapable of such things. The African newspapers began to speak in favour of reforms in colonial administration and inclusion of more colonial subjects in the civil service, and this would lead them into alliance with like-minded unions and political parties at home, and with the All-India Reform Congress and the West Indian organisations resident in Britain.
It was only a matter of time before some Malê – both of the trade-unionist and the merchant variety – argued for taking their own place in the nation’s political life. These discussions were interrupted by the outbreak of war, but they were hardly ended…
*******
Ahmadu Odubogun, Faith and Ferment: The Sahel and Sudan in the Nineteenth Century (Ibadan Univ. Press 2005)
… The half-decade before the Great War was a relatively quiescent time in the lower Niger. Sokoto and the Oyo constituent states had achieved a workable relationship with Britain through their status as Imperial Domains [2], and the regions under direct colonialism or princely-state rule saw the departure of the Company as the beginning of a modus vivendi. Some of those under direct rule, especially those Igbo who had embraced Christianity, actually prospered: they had an inside track for the lower tier of British Africa’s two-level civil service, and the standardization of law and administration, as well as the enforced peace imposed upon the colonies, enabled Igbo merchants to expand their areas of operation. The 1890 census of Lagos colony was the first to record Igbo businessmen along with the existing Coaster merchant colony, marking the beginning of an Igbo merchant diaspora that would spread through much of the Niger. While colonial rule would go on to create its own problems, these were just beginning to appear when the war broke out, and the period before was the calm before the storm.
Ilorin, whose position within the New Oyo Confederacy gave it two layers of insulation from British rule and whose economy had begun to stabilize as its industries adapted to European competition and its new industrial bank distributed investment, was similarly muted. After the 1888 election, a factional split within the Abacarist party briefly cast Usman Abacar out of the premiership, but this was due more to personal than ideological disagreement, and within months, Abacar was able to placate enough of the rebels and recruit enough independent legislators to regain the prime minister’s chair. That non-affair would be the most exciting political event in a period otherwise marked by broad consensus and renewed development.
Not so Adamawa. Wracked by years of inconclusive war with Bornu and the remaining Hausa states, the economic shock of European imports, and the rebellion of the Zaria Commune, the nation suffered another blow with Emir Sanda bin Adama's death in 1890. A third brother-emir, Zubeiru bin Adama, reigned for barely two months before a palace coup brought Sanda's son, Muhammad Iya bin Sanda, to power.
The new emir's rule was met with opposition from Zubeiru's partisans on the one hand and from the Zaria, Kano and Kaduna unions on the other. Zubeiru had the support of many Fulani clans in the east of the country; in the west, where the capital-starved workers' cooperatives were slowly being forced to surrender their factory ownership in exchange for credit, they saw Muhammad Iya's accession as a chance to turn the tables. Fortunately for Muhammad Iya, he had inherited two qualities from his uncle Lawalu: canniness and modernizing zeal.
He initially made common cause with the industrial cities, promising an elected legislature and government loans in exchange for their support. With the aid of regiments recruited from the labor brotherhoods, he defeated the rebellious clans; henceforward, although the ruling dynasty would still be Fulani, its primary base of support would be the Hausa and Malê townsmen. But then, after decreeing his promised reforms, he stole a march on the unions: as the emir of Sokoto had done, he asked to be incorporated into the British empire.
Muhammad Iya was well aware that by doing so, he would give up some freedom of action and would bind himself to British foreign and economic policy. But unlike his father, he had little desire to expand Adamawa's borders - he believed that the state had reached its maximum workable size - and he realized that Britain would protect the status quo from both external and internal threats. As the ruler of an Imperial Domain, his own position would be secure, and he would be able to erode the powers of his newly-created parliament. It is likely that Muhammad Iya also considered an association with Britain beneficial, in terms of modernizing Adamawa's physical and governmental infrastructure, but from all appearances, his primary motive was to double-cross his working-class supporters.
And it worked. In August 1892, a rigged parliament ratified the treaty of accession, and Adamawa became Britain's third and last Imperial Domain. The industrial elite, the army officers and the Yola courtiers, who were the ones to win out from any preservation of the status quo, were easily reconciled to their position in the empire. The Fulani clansmen and labor brotherhoods were far less so, and this would have repercussions later...
David Marsden, The Colonial Century: Britain's Strange Career in Africa (London: Macmillan, 1990)
... For more than thirty years, the Dahomey and Asante kingdoms were the forgotten stepchildren of the British Empire. Britain, with Paulo Abacar's aid, had subdued Dahomey to suppress the slave trade, and had intimidated the Asante into signing unequal treaties to the same end, but at the time, it was uninterested in actually ruling inland Africa. Both kingdoms thus persisted as princely states, with compliant monarchs and suborned armies but with little change for the majority of the people.
But stasis could not persist. Ideas traveled, both from the coastal areas that Britain had brought under direct rule and the Malê states to the east. Missionaries brought several flavors of Christianity; peddlers and itinerant teachers brought news of Abacarist Islam and its more orthodox cousin; and as everywhere in West Africa, both the bottom and the top of the social order found many of these notions attractive.
At the same time, Britain was reworking its conception of empire, and by the 1880s, as its rivalry with France heated up, it determined to bring the Dahomey and Asante monarchies more closely to heel. Unlike Oyo and Sokoto, they had not chosen to belong to the empire, nor did they have the military strength to resist it effectively, so Britain was able to put them on a considerably shorter leash. In 1879, a British resident was installed at Abomey, and another arrived at Kumasi two years later; by 1890, most provincial towns had district officers appointed from the new African Civil Service, whose mission was ostensibly to assist the local chiefs but who in fact had the power to make or break them.
The nobles accepted the change with predictably bad grace, but they accepted: they still had more autonomy than the crown colonies, and the British system of indirect rule guaranteed their status and privileges. Others had their own idea of what imperial rule might bring. In some villages, the people were able to establish the district officer as a rival authority figure, someone to whom they could appeal in the event of official injustice and whose legal system provided rights they lacked under the monarchies. In other settlements, the district officer himself was a symbol of injustice, whose demands on the nobles were passed on to the peasants in the form of higher taxation and forcible connection to the cash economy. And as the monarchs, too, used the British administration to settle scores, discontent also spread among the nobles who had fallen out of favor.
Both Dahomey and Asante had sizable cities, but neither had begun to industrialize, so they had no working class as such; instead, the peasants' dissatisfaction took the form of withdrawals or Jacqueries with an occasional Abacarist tinge in the north. The nobles' rebellions were somewhat more organized, especially in the Asante kingdom which bordered on the French-held Côte d'Ivoire. Rebels against the Asante monarchy could seek shelter on the French side of the frontier, as rebels against France did on the British side, and in time, the rebellious forces formed loose alliances and pacts of mutual aid. A few of the discontented nobles, realizing that more than personal allegiance was needed to keep their rebellions going, adopted nationalist rhetoric and set themselves up in opposition to London as well as Kumasi.
Naturally, the colonial power took a dim view of these revolts, and although it preferred to let the king's British-trained army deal with them, an increasing number of British troops were also committed to the border region. This coincided with a similar buildup on the French side, where the UPF government elected in 1891 claimed the right of hot pursuit across the border. In the summer of 1892, a standoff occurred between French troops and a mixed British-Asante garrison just inside the frontier; this was resolved peacefully, but another incident early the following year...
_______
[1] Diane Folasade “Sade” Abbott (b. 1953) is an athlete, journalist and politician of mixed European, West Indian and Malê descent, with ancestors in the Gordon political family of Jamaica and the Abacar family of Ilorin and Sokoto. In her youth, Abbott was a gifted runner, representing Britain in the 1976 Olympics where she placed fourth in the women’s 400-meter hurdles and won a bronze medal in the women’s mile. She graduated from the University of London and pursued a career in journalism, holding jobs with the BBC, the Times and the Guardian. In 1989, she was elected to the London city council as a Progressive Conservative; three years later, she won the parliamentary seat of Hackney North and Stoke Newington and has held it ever since. She is Secretary of State for Culture and Sport in the current Progressive Conservative-Stewardship coalition government.
[2] See post 839.
