Brian Lewis; Catastrophe - Africa's Path to Subjugation: Routledge
Gordon and the Tragedy of the Congo
Belgium had been accepted as a state, in part, because of a desire for a neutral buffer between the three main powers in Western Europe. In 1885 its ambitious King Leopold II, who had long desired his own African colony, convinced the other colonial powers involved in Africa to accept his creation of a Congo Free State largely thanks to the same rationale. An enormous portion of Central Africa was awarded not to the Belgian state, but to King Leopold himself. Leopold had made a number of lofty promises for what his colony would achieve. The slave trade in the eastern part of the country, dominated by Arab-Swahili slave traders based in Zanzibar would be destroyed. The Congo basin would be opened up to European trade, offering a vast market not only for Belgian businessmen but for those of Britain, France, and Germany too. He would also provide a safe environment for missionaries to spread the Christian faith in the Congo. These were all high-minded goals but the reality of the Free State’s rule was to be vastly more insidious.
Initially, it seemed as if Leopold had made all the right moves to establish his colony. The famous Victorian explorer Henry Morton Stanley had helped Leopold set up his initial colonies in the West of the Congo, and with the creation of the Congo Free State, Leopold appointed another famous Victorian hero, the British soldier Charles “Chinese” Gordon as the governor of the Congo. This appeared to be a match made in heaven, with Gordon nothing that Leopold “seemed much concerned with the mission to abolish this horrid traffic in innocent lives”. Gordon had misgivings about Stanley and hoped that he could set the colony on a different course, writing to his friend Richard Burton that he hoped he could “establish a civilized rule in the dark heart of the continent, without any the cruel methods employed by that man (Stanley)”. Gordon relished undertaking expeditions to the east of the Congo, fighting the Zanzibari slave traders who had begun to operate in the Congo to seize ever more slaves for the hungry plantations of the coast and islands. In 1887 a confrontation between soldiers loyal to Tippu Tip, the infamous Zanzibari slave trader, and those of the Force Publique, ended in a Free State fort being captured by Tip.
Gordon responded furiously, leading a large expedition that began to push Tip out of eastern Congo. However, his own force was ravaged by supply issues and disease, and it took the best part of 1888 to steadily reduce the Zanzibari presence in the area. At numerous times it seemed as if Gordon’s insufficient force was on the brink of disaster, and it is only through some luck and an unwillingness by Tip to commit fully to the destruction of Gordon’s force that he was able to survive. Furthermore, Gordon’s expedition was incredibly costly, and these were costs that Leopold did not wish to incur in a war that risked his still-vulnerable colony. By the end of 1888, Leopold issued a decree which stated that the native African population could only sell their products, such as ivory and rubber, to the state. This action violated one of Leopold’s promises to the other European powers, namely that the Congo would be open to free trade. This led to protests from many companies, and this forced Leopold to backtrack and explore other ways to raise revenues. For the time being, he commanded Gordon to stop his war against the Zanzibari slave traders in the east, but this incensed Gordon, who subsequently decided to resign his position as governor of the Congo.
But this was not the end of Gordon’s adventures in Africa. After he left the Congo, Gordon traveled to South Africa where he met Cecil Rhodes, who at that point was attempting to expand British (and his own) influence within central Africa. When presented an opportunity to foil the ambition of Leopold to expand his Free State into Katanga, Gordon agreed to lead an expedition which resulted in the defeat of the native King Msiri who Gordon regarded as the “worst kind of cruel, slaving despot” and bringing Katanga into the British Empire. It was just the kind of action that the late Victorian public was enamored with, a brave soldier fighting to replace a savage chieftain with the civilized rule of Britain. He finally returned to Britain in 1891 to a hero’s welcome, furthering his legend as a soldier for the empire and for what was seen as the virtues of Britain’s empire.[1]
As for the Congo, the situation for the locals deteriorated as the 19th century came to a close. Although the power of the Arab slavers had been weakened by Gordon, they still launched slave raids from the few bases that they maintained west of the Great Lakes, and there remained an uneasy equilibrium of power in the eastern province of the Congo until 1893 when Leopold, confident in the strength of his Force Publique at last, sent it to destroy what was left of the Arab presence in the Congo Free State. He presented this as finally fulfilling the aim of destroying slavery, which went some way toward mollifying opinion toward his Free State. However, this would prove to be short-lived as throughout the 1890s, stories of atrocities within the Congo Free State, caused in part by Leopold’s rapaciousness and desire to increase the profitability of his colony, began to filter into the European consciousness. One of the most influential and damning accounts of the situation in the Congo came from the Polish-born British novelist Joseph Conrad in his book Heart of Darkness, which painted a harrowing picture of the situation within the Congo. By the 20th century, the picture became clear. Arab slavery had been removed from the Congo, but it had been replaced by something that was far more horrifying.
[1] – Gordon’s recklessness in the Congo is forgotten, for the time being, it seems.
* * * * * *
Zanzibar - A Colony of India?
The Swahili coast had a complicated history and had been ruled by Oman until 1856 when the Omani Empire was divided between the two sons of Said bin Sultan. Even before the creation of the Sultanate of Zanzibar, the area was dominated economically by the British through their Indian subjects. Americans too had been influential in the trade with Zanzibar but under British political pressure, their trade waned as the 19th century progressed. By the 1870s Zanzibar was firmly in the British sphere of influence, an important part of their informal empire. Attempts by Said bin Sultan to break free of the grip of the British had come to naught, and as a result, the British had to some extent encouraged the division of his realm between his two sons, though this was not seen as a partition by the people of both Oman and Zanzibar themselves.[1]
The Sultanate of Zanzibar thrived in this era of growing commerce in the Indian Ocean. Zanzibar’s trade increased briskly, including both imports of cloth and weaponry, and exports of ivory and cloves. This trade was particularly strong with India, which was by far the largest trading partner of Zanzibar. Not only did Indians dominate Britain’s trade, but Indians resident in Zanzibar filled the role of financiers for the Sultan, and their interests were often protected by their British overlords. Zanzibar was the entrepot of the East African coast, and British commercial houses in the area saw the task of maintaining British influence as paramount. Following the call of David Livingstone to claim Africa by commerce and Christianity, both businesses and missionaries were increasingly interested in the opportunities presented by the interior, which was claimed by the Sultan of Zanzibar but which in reality was dominated by powerful slave traders such as the infamous Hamad al-Murjabi, better known as Tippu Tip. By the mid-1880s however, the power of these slavers was declining, as they were challenged to the west by forces of the Congo Free State led by the British military hero Charles Gordon.
Tales of Gordon’s fight against slavery inspired those in Britain who wished to see the abolition of the institution globally, but British policy did not push the abolition of the slave trade onto her Zanzibari allies too forcefully.[2] Indeed prior to the signing of the Anglo-Zanzibar treaty of 1891 which confirmed Zanzibar’s status as a British protectorate, Zanzibar was an informal colony of India as much as it was of Britain. But this had already begun to change in the latter half of the 1880s when trading companies based in Britain, attracted by the numerous raw materials and products to be found in the interior, began to set up trading posts there. The interior of Zanzibar was also seen as an important gateway to Uganda, which became a British protectorate in 1894. As the British began to build infrastructure such as railways and ports, both British and particularly Indian migrants came to build the railways and administrate the country which was steadily falling out of the hands of the Arab-Swahili elite based in Zanzibar. By 1900 the influence of the old ruling class on the island of Zanzibar itself was waning in the interior, replaced instead by a new British ruling class which although theoretically serving only in an advisory capacity, had instead usurped control of the vast interior of the Sultanate.
[1] - Loyalties were still based along personal and tribal lines rather to the idea of a nation-state.
[2] – Although British pressure in OTL resulted in the end of slavery in Zanzibar (it was a slow process that took decades), they were happy to turn a blind eye when convenient. In German East Africa even German officials traded in slaves as late as the 1890s however.
* * * * * *
Author's notes - Hand-wringing over slavery within Africa was a common justification for the expansion of European colonies toward the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Of course, the Arab-Swahili slave trade was a very real thing, as was slavery in West Africa, but as I was researching this update (that German officials buying slaves thing is totally true), the more horrified I was at the sheer hypocrisy. It takes all kinds, I suppose...
