* Yohannes’s rival Solomonic prince, Menelik, submitted and was crowned as king of Showa; his daughter Zewditu was married to his emperor’s son. Menelik would become the formative emperor of modern Ethiopia; Zewditu would be empress; and her regent would be Haile Selassie.
* Back in 1844, as his novel Coningsby first became successful, Dizzy had met Lionel de Rothschild, Nathan’s heir as head of the British bank. He was fascinated by Lionel’s power and by his wife, Charlotte, intelligent daughter of the Neapolitan branch. ‘The young bride from Frankfurt,’ he wrote, ‘was tall, graceful, dark and clear.’ In Coningsby, Disraeli based his Sephardic Jewish potentate Sidonia on a mixture of Lionel, Montefiore and himself. While running the bank, Lionel raised funds for the Irish famine and with his uncle Montefiore led the long campaign to win Jews the right to serve in the House of Commons, winning three elections (without being allowed to sit in the chamber) before the Jews Relief Act was finally passed in 1858.
* An American inventor Richard Gatling created this first machine gun to save lives during the civil war: ‘If I could invent a machine – a gun – which could, by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle-duty as a hundred, it would … supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease.’ It did not work like that.
* Cetshwayo was exiled, but when his kingdom dissolved into civil war he was returned as king. But, now sixty and wounded in battle, he was poisoned by rivals. His son Dinuzulu recruited Afrikaner commandos to restore his kingdom, but was captured and exiled by the British to St Helena. The kingdom was incorporated into South Africa, but the house of Shaka still reigns.
* Such ideas were developed simultaneously by British, German and French thinkers. The biologist-sociologist Herbert Spencer, whose Progress: Its Law and Cause (1857) came out just before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, argued that human species perfected themselves by fighting for mastery – ‘survival of the fittest’. A wealthy cousin of Darwin, Francis Galton, obsessed with how to breed Hereditary Genius (the title of his 1869 book), believed that admirable characteristics could be encouraged by selective breeding: ‘superiors’ must be encouraged to breed; ‘inferiors’ – who lived off charity or in lunatic asylums – should not be allowed to breed or they would overrun society. He called his theory eugenics and it came to be widely held. Simultaneously the French diplomat Gobineau, disgusted by the ‘age of national mediocrity’, had invented modern scientific racism in his Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, published in 1855, in which he argued that ‘The white race originally possessed the monopoly of beauty, intelligence and strength,’ and in which he used the term ‘Aryan’ to describe a master race, la race germanique. The theories were embraced by his friend Wagner, whose wife wrote to Gobineau, ‘My husband is quite at your service, always reading The Races.’ The American racists Josiah C. Nott and Henry Hotze, as well as Kaiser Wilhelm II, espoused his views, which later inspired Hitler.
* The first governor of German South West Africa was Heinrich Göring, father of Hitler’s Reichsmarschall.
* Yet Peters remained a hero to many in Germany, keeping a job at the Colonial Office, embarking on expensive ‘explorations’ and writing a book expounding racist social Darwinist philosophy, Willenswelt und Weltwille (The Will to Power and the Power to Will). In 1914 he was pardoned by Kaiser Wilhelm and after his death rehabilitated by Hitler.
* In November 1898, two psychopathic officers – Captain Paul Voulet, known for his ‘love of blood and cruelty’, and Lieutenant Julien Chanoine, ‘cruel out of hard-heartedness and pleasure’ – embarked with a mainly African force of Senegalese Tirailleurs and Berber Spahis, armed with Gatling guns and artillery, to complete the conquest of Mali and Chad. Having made their names taking Ouagadougou and been given carte blanche by the war minister, their ‘infernal column’ burned villages and killed thousands, with men suspended so they were eaten by hyenas and vultures, women raped and hanged, children roasted – until their own officers denounced them. When a colonel was sent to stop them, Voulet and Chanoine murdered him. ‘I’m no longer a Frenchman,’ declared Voulet, ‘I’m a black chief. With you, I’ll found an empire.’ But French officers and Senegalese Tirailleurs killed the two men. As in the case of Dreyfus, the army proved untouchable: an inquiry decided that these monsters had merely suffered the madness of ‘soudanite aiguë’ – African heat.
