The World полностью

While France celebrated its conquests abroad, at home the nation edged towards civil war over a case of grotesque injustice. On 5 January 1895, a Jewish officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, son of a self-made Alsatian textile manufacturer, was found guilty of spying for Germany and sentenced to life on the hellish Devil’s Island off French Guiana. Yet the army command knew that he was innocent and knew the identity of the real culprit, an aristocratic officer. The Dreyfusard novelist Zola exposed the outrage in ‘J’accuse’, an open letter to the president – for which the novelist may have been poisoned by anti-Dreyfusards. The army falsified more evidence, finding Dreyfus guilty again, but the president pardoned him. L’affaire Dreyfus had exposed the fragility of France – and the special role of the army in holding together patrie and empire.^*

The British too were seizing as much as they could – as cheaply as possible – through the usual armed companies. ‘British policy,’ said the prime minister, the marquess of Salisbury, formerly Disraeli’s foreign secretary, ‘is to drift lazily downstream occasionally putting out a boathook to avoid collision.’ But his hand was repeatedly forced by imperialistic ministers and entrepreneurial conquistadors. In east Africa, when the empire-building kabaka Mutesa died in 1884, his son’s murder of Christian converts provoked a dynamic British merchant-soldier, Frederick Lugard, yet another vicar’s son, veteran of the Afghan and Sudan wars, to outmanoeuvre the German psychopath Peters and take control of Uganda; his successors added the Kikuyu lands (Kenya). When the sultan of Zanzibar, Khalid, poisoned his British-backed uncle Bargush and defied the British, the Royal Navy opened fire as 150 marines stormed the palace and overthrew him in thirty-eight minutes – the shortest war in history. Khalid’s successors agreed to Zanzibar becoming a British protectorate, freed 60,000 slaves and kept their throne.

In west Africa, a secretive, sex-obsessed, hard-drinking Scottish-Manx merchant, Sir George Goldie, was conquering an empire north of the British colony of Lagos. ‘I conceived the ambition of adding the region of Niger to the British empire,’ said Goldie, who had once lived ‘a life of dissipation’, including some years with an Arab paramour in Egypt. On African visits, he fathered children with an Igbo woman. He was a master of political canvassing, orchestrating a charter for his Royal Niger Company on the Niger River run by Lugard, fresh from the conquest of Uganda, enforced by the Royal Niger Constabulary, a militia of British officers and African auxiliaries, which regularly launched raids and executed any opposition. The prize was palm oil, which was used to make industrial lubricant and soap.

In 1895, in the Gold Coast, the British forced a protectorate on the asantehene Agyeman Prempeh, who was exiled to the Seychelles. But just five years later the crassness of a British governor demanding to sit on the sacred Golden Stool of the Asante sparked a rebellion led, in the absence of the asantehene, by a sixty-year-old female leader, Yaa Asantewaa, queen mother of the Fon fiefdom of Ejisu, who took command of 12,000 Asante warriors. After ferocious fighting, she was captured, but the Golden Stool remained hidden.^*

In 1897, Goldie’s militia attacked and conquered the two amirates of Bida and Ilorin, partly to stop their slaving raids but also to beat the French. The next year, Goldie advised London to conquer the northern slave-owning emirates of Sokoto, and then to merge the multi-ethnic, multi-religious region into one colony. He was bought out (his company later became the conglomerate Unilever), but his plan was executed: Lugard and his West Africa Frontier Force conquered Sokoto, liberating two million slaves. It was Lugard’s wife, Flora Shaw, who argued that the colony should be called Nigeria, of which he became the first governor-general.

By now, France ruled the largest portion of Africa, followed by Britain. In terms of population, Britain ruled almost 30 per cent of Africans, France 15 per cent. The more aggressive imperialists in both countries aspired to contiguous empires: the French east–west, from Senegal to the French colony of Djibouti; the British north–south, from the Cape to Cairo. But their visions were about to clash.