Colonial invasion

P1: RNK 0521864381c09 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 16:18 9 Colonial invasion during the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, European Powers swiftly and painlessly partitioned the map of Africa among themselves. To implement the partition on the ground, however, was anything but swift or painless. Widespread possession of arms, codes of military hon- our, and long hostility to governmental control made popular resistance to conquest more formidable in Africa than, for example, in India. In creating states in a turbulent and underpopulated continent, colonial administrators faced the same problems as their African predecessors and often met them in the same ways, but they had technological advantages: firepower, mechan- ical transport, medical skills, literacy. The states they created before the First World War were generally mere skeletons fleshed out and vitalised by African political forces. But European conquest hadtwo crucial effects. As each colony became a specialised producer for the world market, it acquired an economic structure that often survived throughout the twentieth century, with a broad distinction between African peasant production in western Africa and Euro- pean capitalist production in eastern Africa perpetuating the ancient contrast between the two regions. And the European intrusion had profound effects on Africa’s demography. partition The slow European penetration of Africa during the nineteenth century began to escalate into a scramble for territory during the late 1870s, for a complex of reasons. One was a French initiative in Senegal launched in 1876 byanew governor, Bri ` ere de l’Isle. Faidherbe had pursued an expansionist policy there twenty years earlier, but his departure in 1865 and France’s defeat by Prussia in 1871 had aborted it. Bri ` ere de l’Isle, however, belonged to a faction determined to revitalise France with colonial wealth, especially that of the West African savanna. The faction included many colonial soldiers, eager for distinction and accustomed in Algeria to extreme independence of action, and certain politicians who secured funds in 1879 to surveyarailway from Senegal to the Niger. The military used the money to finance military advance to the river at Bamako in 1883.This forward policy extended to two other West African 193 P1: RNK 0521864381c09 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 16:18 194 africans: the history of a continent 10.Colonial invasion. P1: RNK 0521864381c09 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 16:18 Colonial invasion 195 regions. First, French agents sought treaties with local notables on the lower Niger that threatened long-established British trading interests. Second, in 1882 the French Assembly ratified a treaty in which the Tio ruler at Lake Malebo on the River Congo professed to cede his hereditary rights to the traveller Savorgnan de Brazza. This treaty, the basis of French empire in equatorial Africa, threatened the plans of King Leopold II of Belgium, who, since 1876, had used his private wealth to establish commercial stations on the lower Congo but now felt obliged toadvanceterritorial claims. Fearing aFrench protectionist regime on the lower Congo, but not desiring responsibility there themselves, the British recognised Portugal’s ancient claims in the region in return for freedom to trade there. This angered other European statesmen, especially the German chancellor. Bismarck had no wish for German colonies, but to protect German com- mercial interests in Africa was a responsibility that might also earn him some political support. He therefore authorised German protectorates in Southwest Africa, Cameroun, and Togo during 1884, taking advantage ofa dispute between his main European rivals, France and Britain. The dispute arose from events in North Africa. In 1881 France declared a protectorate over deeply indebted Tunisia, chiefly to prevent Italian predominance there. Egypt too was indebted and was under joint Anglo-French financial control. When the Europeans secured the Khedive Ismail’s deposition in 1879,Egypt’s political vacuum was filled by Arabic-speaking landowners and army officers, led by Colonel Arabi, hostile to foreign control. France and Britain drew up plans to invade, but a new French government abandoned them. British officials in Cairo told their government that order in Egypt was collapsing, enabling an imperialist faction within the British Cabinet to insist on invasion of Egypt in August 1882.They intended to entrench an amenable Egyptian regime, stabilise the finances, and withdraw, but found this impossible. The resulting Anglo-French antagonism left Bismarck great authority. He used it to convene the Berlin Conference of 1884–5.This recognised Leopold’s claims to the Congo Independent State (subsequently Belgian Congo), acknowledged French rights in equatorial Africa, and insisted on free- dom of trade throughout the region. The delegatesaccepted the British position on the lower Niger and French primacy on its upper reaches. Most important, the conference laid down that future European claims to African territory must be more substantial than the informal predominance that Britain had hitherto enjoyed through her naval and commercial power. The subsequent partition was shaped by Britain’s attempts to defend her most valuable claims, either strategic positions guarding sea routes to India or areas of especially extensive trade, such as Nigeria. The first step took place one day after the Berlin Conference ended, when Bismarck declared a protectorate over mainland territory opposite Zanzibar P1: RNK 0521864381c09 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 16:18 196 africans: the history of a continent where German adventurers had obtained treaties. Hitherto content to exercise indirect influence here through the ruler of Zanzibar, Britain now partitioned the region in a treaty of 1886 which gave modern Kenya to Britain and mainland Tanzania to Germany. A further treaty in 1890 gave Britain a free hand in Uganda, where the headwatersof the Nile were thought vital to Egypt’s security. The Berlin Conference also precipitated rapid European expansion in West Africa. The British declared a protectorate over the Niger Delta, whence they later expanded into Igboland and Benin. They also asserted predominance in Yorubaland in 1886 by brokering a peace treaty ending nearly a century of warfare, subsequently persuading war-weary Yoruba states to accept British residents. Britain thereby gained control of southern Nigeria, the richest part of the West African forest. The main French conquests in this area were Dahomey, taken after fierce resistance in 1892, and C ˆ ote d’Ivoire, initially seen as a route from the coast to French positions on the Niger. The upper Niger was France’s chief interest in West Africa. In 1888 her army resumed its advance inland from Bamako, capturing the Tukulor capital at Nioro in 1891,taking Jenne and Timbuktu in 1893–4, and expanding southwards to conquer Futa Jalon and the Mossi capital in 1896.Thechiefadversary here was Samori Ture, who during the 1870shad created a Mande-speaking state between the upper Niger and the forest edge, dominating it through bands of young professional gunmen financed by massive slave-raiding. His long resistance ended with his capture in 1898.The French could now advance to Lake Chad, where columns from the Niger, the Congo, and Algeria met in 1900.This advance eastwards had led coastal colonies to expand northwards to secure their commercial hinterlands. Sierra Leone and Liberia were confined quite closely to the coast, but the British had time to occupy Asante in 1896, without resistance, and to declare a protectorate over the Sokoto Caliphate in 1900. In West Africa the British were content that France should occupy huge areas of ‘light soil’, as Britain’s prime minister described it. In northeastern Africa, concern for Egypt’s security made the British more sensitive, but they had no need toactuntil 1896 because the middle NileValley wascontrolled not bya rival European power but by the Mahdist state. The Sudanese Mahdi, Muhammad ibn Abdallah, had revealed himself in 1881 as leader of Sudan’s stateless peoples against Egyptian rule, then weakened by political turmoil in Cairo. Three years later his forces took Khartoum and established a theocratic regime, which the British were content to contain. More alarmed by French ambitions in Ethiopia, Britain encouraged Italian interests there, leading to the occupation of Eritrea in 1889 and the advance southwards into the Christian kingdom that Emperor Menelik repelled at the Battle of Adwa in 1896, the greatest African victory against foreign invaders. This undermined British policy, as did French schemes to approach the Nile from equatorial Africa. In 1898 Britain destroyed P1: RNK 0521864381c09 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 16:18 Colonial invasion 197 Mahdist forces at Omdurman and took control of the Sudan. Six years later France abandoned her opposition to British policy in Egypt in return for a free hand in Morocco, which she invaded in 1911.The Italians were compensated by similar freedom to invade the Ottoman province of Tripoli (modern Libya). The interconnections between events in different regions that converted gradual expansion into a scramble also embraced southern Africa. Here the main initiative was Britain’s unsuccessful annexation of the South African Republic (Transvaal) in 1877 in an attempt to create a South African Confederation under Cape leadership that would secure Britain’s imperial communications. SevenyearslaterBismarckchallenged Britain’s regional hege- mony by creating German Southwest Africa (Namibia). To prevent a junc- tion between this and the hostile South African Republic that would block expansion northwards, Britain declared her own protectorate over interven- ing Bechuanaland (Botswana) in 1885.Ayear later, the discovery of gold in the South African Republic transformed the situation, for with gold, and per- haps European allies, the Republic might dominate southern Africa. Britain’s first response was to encourage the diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes to launch a pioneer column northwards intoSouthern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) in 1890, hoping that gold discoveries there might offset the South African Republic. Britain also occupied Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and Nyasaland (Malawi), defying Portugal’s claims there but giving recognised borders to Mozambique and Angola. Yet Southern Rhodesia’s gold proved disappointing. Instead, with covert British acquiescence, Rhodes organised in 1895 an abortive invasion of the South African Republic to provoke insurrection by British immigrants. Its failure left no means of domination except the threat of war. In 1899 Britain’s High Commissioner at the Cape, Sir Alfred Milner, manoeuvred President Kruger of the South African Republic into issuing an ultimatum that drew the reluctant British Cabinet into the Anglo-Boer War, not to control the gold mines but to protect Britain’s position in South Africa against the threat aris- ing from the gold mines. Victory cost Britain three years of war, nearly 500,000 troops engaged, 22,000 dead, and £ 222 million. By the First World War, the European Powers had, on paper, partitioned the entire African continent except Liberia and Ethiopia, both of which had used firearms to extend their territories. On the ground, however, many large and remote areas remained outside European control. Darfur in the Sudan and Ovamboland in northern Namibia were conquered during the First World War, the interior of British Somaliland in 1920.Berberfollowers of Abd el- Krim in the Rif Mountains of northern Morocco resisted 250,000 Spanish and French troops until 1926,while the High Atlas escaped colonial administration until 1933.The Beduin of Libya had submitted two years earlier. Even in 1940 the interior of the Western Sahara was outside European control.Yet these wereonly major instances. Throughout the continent smaller groups, usually stateless, P1: RNK 0521864381c09 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 16:18 198 africans: the history of a continent defied European overlords as they had defied all previous government. ‘I shall of course go on walloping them until they surrender’, a 27-year-old district officer wrote from central Nigeria in 1925.‘It’s rather a piteous sight watching a village being knocked to pieces and I wish there was some other way but unfortunately there isn’t.’ 1 Only thirty-two years later he became the first governor-general of independent Ghana. In Africa the experience of colonial rule was often very brief indeed. There had been no single European motive for the partition. Africa was not central to European economies: during the 1870sitaccounted for little more than 5 percent of Britain’s trade, most of it with Egypt and South Africa. Com- mercial interests in tropical Africa were vital to annexations on the west coast, but elsewhere merchants such as the Germans in Zanzibar often opposed colo- nial conquest lest it disrupt existing trade. Successful businessmen left risky colonial investments to less prosperous competitors or to enthusiasts with noncommercial motives. Rhodes’s British South Africa Company never paid adividend during the thirty-three years it administered Rhodesia. Only after others had borne the costs of pioneering did the great German investment banks or Belgium’s dominant trust, Soci ´ et ´ eG ´ en ´ erale, put money into Africa. The important economic motives in the partition were Britain’s wider imperial interests and such long-term hopes and fears as Leopold’s vision of Congolese wealth, French dreams of Eldorado in Timbuktu, or British fears of exclu- sion from protected French colonies. These motives might move statesmen, although less than their strategic concerns to control the southern shores of the Mediterranean or the routes to India. YetEuropean statesmen did not always control imperial expansion. Bis- marck certainly controlled his country’s, and so generally did British cabinets, although their agents on the spot took the lead in Egypt in 1882 and to some degree in South Africa, while missionary agitation outweighed other considera- tions in Nyasaland. Such sectional interests were especially powerful in France’s multiparty political system, where imperial expansion was driven forward by ambitious colonels on the frontiers and the parti colonial in Paris, a pressure group of colonial deputies, geographical and commercial interests, civil ser- vants, retired officers, publicists, and professional patriots. They framed the policies that took French troops to Lake Chad, threatened Britain on the Nile, and acquired Morocco. Moreover, Africa was partitioned not only because European statesmen or soldiers willed it but because they for the first time possessed the technological capacity to do it. Two obstacles had hitherto confined European power to the African coastline, except in the north and south. One was disease, especially malaria, which in the early nineteenth century killed within a year roughly half of all Europeans reaching West Africa. The introduction of quinine pro- phylaxis during the 1850sreduced the deathrate by about four-fifths and made P1: RNK 0521864381c09 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 16:18 Colonial invasion 199 European military operations possible. The other obstacle had been the absence of overwhelming military superiority so long as early nineteenth-century mus- kets took at least a minute to load, had an effective range of only eighty metres, and misfired three times in ten. Breech-loading rifles were first used extensively in 1866.Two decades later, they gave way to repeating rifles, which French forces in West Africa began toadoptin1885,oneyear after the patenting of the Maxim machine-gun, firing eleven bullets a second. Field artillery dev- astated the palisaded strongholds of East Africa and the baked-mud defences of the savanna, sparing the French a single casualty when driving the Tuku- lor from Segu. Whereas Abd al-Qadir’s followers had fought the French in the 1830swith a near-equality of weapons, the British at Omdurman in 1898 killed at least 10,800 Sudanese for the loss of only 49 dead on their own side. Both those campaigns wereexceptionalin employing large white forces. Most colonial armies were warbands of African mercenaries barely distinguishable from Mirambo’s or Samori’s. The Tirailleurs S ´ en ´ egalais who conquered the West African savanna for France were mostly slaves, while many African troops were deliberately recruited from ‘martial tribes’ in remote regions. Yet even these forces had weapons vastly superiortothe muzzle-loaders that Buganda’s warriors fired from the hip or at arm’s length from a range of about ten metres, wearing their whitest cloth to display their courage. Several African leaders acquired breech-loaders; Samori, for example, had perhaps six thousand at his peak. But in tropical Africa only Ethiopia, Dahomey, the Tukulor, and the Mahdists possessed a few artillery pieces, while Menelik and the Mahdists alone used machine-guns. Abd el-Krim, however, employed over two hundred cap- tured machine-guns and bought (but never used) three aeroplanes during the 1920s. By then Europeans were losing the near-monopoly of modern weapons that had briefly made their conquest cheap enough in men and money to be possible. resistance and negotiation Constrained by technological inferiority, Africans had to decide whether to fight or negotiate with invaders seeking to convert their paper-partition into power on the ground. This was a question of tactics, for the African objective was the same in both cases: to preserve as much independence and power as was possible in the circumstances. In choosing their tactics, Africans had to consider their total situation. Those with previous experience of European fire- power might think resistance futile, as did Asante in 1896 after experiencing in 1874 ‘guns which hit five Ashantees at once’. Others might be given no choice but to fight. Ambitious French commanders, schooled in the Algerian tradi- tion that Islam was irreconcilable, brushed aside attempts by Tukulor leaders P1: RNK 0521864381c09 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 16:18 200 africans: the history of a continent to find a modus vivendi, just as British officers in Uganda treated Bunyoro as an inevitable enemy because it had previously conflicted with visiting Euro- peans and with the Buganda kingdom where the British made their base. Even if negotiation were possible, some peoples could not hope to preserve their way of life under European control, notably the slave-trading Yao chiefdoms of Nyasaland, which resisted stockade by stockade. For others, by contrast, the advantages of accepting an initially remote European paramountcy might seem to outweigh its costs, as for most of the war-weary Yoruba kingdoms that signed treaties with the British after one kingdom, Ijebu, had resisted and been heav- ily defeated. Africans learned quickly from their neighbours. King Lewanika of Bulozi asked his ally Khama in Bechuanaland whether, given his experience of British ‘protection’, he recommended it, and accepted his assurance that he did – advice coinciding with that given to Lewanika by a resident missionary, another element in the situation. This Central African region illustrated the full com- plexity of the historical circumstances within which Africans had to make their choices. It was still dominated by the consequences of its invasion by Ndebele, Kololo, and other South African groups during the first half of the nineteenth century. The Ndebele military kingdom tried to coexist with Rhodes’s Pioneer Column but was forced into war in 1893 by white aggression and the militancy of its own young warriors. The whites found allies among some Shona peoples who saw them as potential protectors against Ndebele aggression. Lewanika also feared the Ndebele, which was one reason for negotiating with the British, but more important was the instability of his Lozi throne, recaptured from Kololo invaders only in 1864 and threatened by royal rivals, dissident subjects, and numerous slaves. He wanted a British protectorate, he declared in 1888,‘to protect myself against those [Lozi]. You do not know them; they are plotting against my life.’ 2 Amidst these complexcalculations, the one common feature was that African polities were divided. Like the European Powers, each had its war and peace parties, its hawks and doves. Sometimes, as in Asante and Dahomey, advocates of the two policies had long contested power. Sometimes they were virtually at war, as in Buganda, where the weaker Protestant party used the British forces that arrived in 1890 as allies to secure its own predominance over Roman Catholic, Muslim, and traditionalist parties. More commonly, the European advance itself polarised opinion. In 1879,following the British victory over the Zulu, the Pedi ruler, Sekhukhuni, proposed at a public meeting to accept European rule, only to be denounced as a coward and compelled to resist. Twelve years later, the Mpondo people on the northeastern border of the Cape Colony fought a civil war over whether to fight the British. Such anguished dispute divided the Sokoto Caliphate when British forces invaded in 1900.Each emir made his own decision for war or submission. Kontagora, a militarised frontier chiefdom deeply engaged in slaving, resisted in arms. Zaria, on poor P1: RNK 0521864381c09 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 16:18 Colonial invasion 201 termswith Sokoto, opened its gates. Kano strengthened and manned its walls but made little resistance once the field guns breached them. Opinion in Sokoto itself was divided between resistance, negotiation, and withdrawal. A minority fought to the death outside the city, but others departed eastwards towards Mecca, found their way blocked, had no chance to surrender, and died on 27 July 1903 with their Caliph Attahiru at the Battle of Burmi, some roped together so that they could not retreat. Where aims were so similar and decisions so complex, it would be idle to think that ‘warrior societies’ inevitably fought or more pacific peoples invari- ably negotiated. Sotho fought the Orange Free State in the 1850s and 1860s, negotiated a British protectorate in 1868,fought in 1880 to prevent the Cape government from disarming them, and in 1884 negotiated the restoration of British protection. What mattered at any moment was whether the circum- stances gave predominance to hawks or doves, on both African and European sides. Yet hawks were especially numerous in two kinds of societies. Locally dominant, militarised polities formed one category. They did not always fight – Ibadan, the dominant Yoruba state, chose to negotiate – but the reasons against resistance had to be compelling. Neither Sekhukhuni of the Pedi nor Lobengula of the Ndebele could convince his young men to negotiate. Military honour was vital here, as it was also for those like the Mahdists for whom resistance was holy. The other societies with especially strong war parties were state- less peoples who lived amidst continuous intervillage feuding, cherished their own notions of honour, and had no experience of external rule. Often remote and amorphous, they were exceptionally difficult to conquer. The Baoul ´ eof C ˆ ote d’Ivoire, for example, fought the French village by village until 1911.The Igbo of Nigeriawerenot fully defeated until 1919,theJola of Senegal not until the 1920s, and the Dinka of southern Sudan not until 1927.Pastoralists like the Somali or the Beduin of Libya were even more intractable, for their statelessness and fierce independence were compounded by mobility and Islamic fervour. Such societies – the militarily dominant and the stateless – not only resisted most stubbornly but also launched the major rebellions against early colonial rule. To rebel against a colonial government was more difficult than to resist initial conquest, for rebellion had to be organised both secretly and on a large scale if it were to have hope of success. Most leaders of large armed rebellions were therefore established political and military authorities in major states, espe- cially where initial resistance to conquest had been muted, colonial demands for tax and land and labour were heavy, and a favourable opportunity presented itself. The Ndebele of Southern Rhodesia launched such a revolt in 1896, three years after their defeat by Rhodes’s white pioneers in a war that had engaged only part of the Ndebele forces. Embittered by seizure of land and cattle and emboldened by the absence of many white policemen on the Jameson Raid, P1: RNK 0521864381c09 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 16:18 202 africans: the history of a continent the Ndebele rose under their leading military commanders, mobilised subject peoples and surrounding Shona clients who had not participated in the earlier resistance, and spread the revolt to hitherto hostile Shona chiefdoms, which now had their own reasons for insurrection. After besieging Bulawayo, Ndebele leaders won important concessions before acceptingpeace. In Buganda, Kabaka Mwanga launched a rebellion in 1897 mobilising many of those excluded from the colonial and Christian order, but it was defeated by the British and the dominant Christian chiefs. Three years later Asante sought to remedy by rebel- lion its failure to resist British occupation in 1896,rising under the leadership of a queen mother and military chiefs during the king’s exile and besieging the British in Kumasi for four months until reinforcements suppressed the revolt. The last great rebellion drawing chiefly on established political and military institutions took place in Mozambique in 1917,whenthe Barwe people (a Shona group) restored an ancient kingship and won widespread support at a time of wartime grievances and Portuguese weakness. Because grievances against early colonial rule were widespread, stateless peo- ples and small chiefdoms launched many local revolts, but they generally lacked the organisation to threaten European control on the scale achieved by Nde- bele or Asante, even when they utilised institutions stretching across politi- cal divisions such as the Nyabingi cult, which led opposition to German and British control on the border between Rwanda and Uganda until 1928,orthe secret society that organised the Ekumeku resistance to British rule in western Igboland between 1898 and 1910. One exception to this narrowness of scale was the Maji Maji rebellion of 1905–7 in German East Africa (modern Tan- zania), which spread widely among stateless peoples through the leadership of a prophet, Kinjikitile, who operated within the framework of a territorial religious cult, spoke with the authority of divine possession, and distributed water-medicine (maji)alleged to give invulnerability to bullets. Similar revolts with religious inspiration took place in Upper Volta (Burkina Faso) in 1915–17 and in French Equatorial Africa in 1928–32. Elsewhere, however, large-scale rebellion by stateless peoples took place only under Islamic inspiration. The Sudanese Mahdi’s revolt against Egyptian rule had employed the same com- bination of divine authority and multiethnic appeal as Kinjikitile’s. The chief Islamic revolt against early European control took place in Niger in 1916–17, when Tuareg tribes besieged Agades at a time of French weakness and decline in the desert economy. Christianity inspired only one significant rebellion, in 1915,byplantation labourers in southern Nyasaland led by John Chilembwe, an African clergyman with American training. His followers harboured mil- lennial expectations and launched a brief and bloody attack on their employers but gained no widespread support, for Christians were still few and engaged in building up their strength within the colonial order, a task to which most Africans turned once armed revolt was defeated. [...]... May 15, 2007 16:18 africans: the history of a continent 11 Colonial boundaries Source: Adapted from Roland Oliver, The African experience (London, 1991), p 215 P1: RNK 0521864381 c09 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 Colonial invasion 16:18 205 or (rarely) a private employer Recruiting for private employers was often an early colonial official’s most distasteful duty Administrators took... history For growth points, the voracious colonisation of land had future costs, but the early colonial period was prosperous Labour reservoirs, by contrast, suffered crippling decay P1: RNK 0521864381 c09 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 16:18 Colonial invasion 215 environment and demography Early colonial Africa did not experience a wholesale demographic catastrophe on the scale that conquest... c09 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 16:18 Colonial invasion 209 their prestige in practice ‘There is in every society’, Morocco’s first French governor had declared, ‘a ruling class born to rule Get it on our side.’11 His compatriots had been slow to heed, but by the 1930s officials everywhere in Africa shared his approach early colonial economies A crucial issue for each colony was whether... 0521864381 c09 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 Colonial invasion 16:18 213 towns, while peasant cotton growers drove European planters out of business in Nyasaland and Uganda Like Nigeria or the Gold Coast, Uganda remained a black man’s country because its peasants became commodity producers supplying European merchants and supporting the colonial state through taxation, growing cotton from 1903...P1: RNK 0521864381 c09 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 Colonial invasion 16:18 203 colonial rule Because most African colonies were acquired in hope of long-term advantage, their early governments were only holding operations Their subjects were impressed by their strength,... was probably more destructive in West Africa during the slave trade than in the early colonial period Yet certain regions had experienced less contact with Europe, while others were especially vulnerable owing to the nature of their environments or of the colonial intrusion Such regional diversity made the early colonial period a demographic crisis, but a muted crisis The African peoples once more... every seventy thousand Frenchmen headed the cercles and subdivisions into which the two federations of West and Equatorial Africa P1: RNK 0521864381 c09 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 Colonial invasion 16:18 207 were divided Below them African chiefs administered cantons (often the old kafu units) and villages Direct rule forced African political systems into this framework Monarchs gave... base of a bureaucratic pyramid Thus even ‘direct rule’ was in practice rule through Africans; the question was the level in the indigenous society at which the link with the colonial bureaucracy was made and the contradictions of colonial rule were therefore most acute That was the originality of ‘Indirect Rule’, which the British devised in the Sokoto Caliphate (Northern Nigeria) before the First World... produce or labour to the colonial economy Early tax collection involved much brutality and provoked much resistance, notably the Sierra Leone Hut Tax War of 1898 and the Bambatha Rebellion of 1906 in Zululand There are accounts of men in Uganda killing themselves when unable to find the cash to pay tax For most individuals, however, tax was probably less burdensome than early colonial demands for labour... before colonial rule Its population was sparse and its physical and climatic environment made railway construction especially difficult Its main ruler, King Leopold II, lacked the financial resources available to a state, while the neighbouring French regime was notoriously short of men and money For all these reasons, the equatorial region experienced the most brutal exploitation of the early colonial . history of a continent 10 .Colonial invasion. P1: RNK 0521864381c09 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 16:18 Colonial invasion 195 regions. First,. 0521864381c09 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 16:18 Colonial invasion 203 colonial rule Because most African colonies were acquired in hope