Wars of imperial conquest in Africa, 1830–1914 Warfare and History General Editor Jeremy Black Professor of History, University of Exeter Published European warfare, 1660–1815 Jeremy Black The Great War, 1914–18 Spencer C. Tucker Wars of imperial conquest in Africa, 1830–1914 Bruce Vandervort German armies: war and German politics, 1648–1806 Peter H. Wilson Forthcoming titles include: Air power and total war John Buckley English warfare, 1511–1641 Mark Charles Fissel Ottoman warfare, 1500–1700 Rhoads Murphey European-Indian warfare in North America, 1675–1795 Armstrong Starkey Vietnam Spencer C. Tucker Wars of imperial conquest in Africa, 1830–1914 Bruce Vandervort Virginia Military Institute © Bruce Vandervort 1998 This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. No reproduction without permission. All rights reserved. First published in 1998 by UCL Press UCL Press Limited 1 Gunpowder Square London EC4A 3DE UK This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001. The name of University College London (UCL) is a registered trade mark used by UCL Press with the consent of the owner. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data are available ISBNs: 1-85728-486-0 HB 1-85728-487-9 PB ISBN 0-203-00593-7 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-17350-3 (Glassbook Format) Contents List of maps vii Preface viii 1 Lords of the land: Africa on the eve of conquest 1 2 Masters of the water: the European invaders 26 3 A shifting balance, 1830–80 56 4 Flood tide, 1880–98 113 5 Ominous portents, 1898–1914 185 6 Legacies 209 Notes 220 Select bibliography 237 Index 265 For my children Mark, Emily, Lucy and Nick List of maps Africa before the Scramble: indigenous and alien powers in 1876 xviii Battle of Isandlwana, 22 January 1879 107 West Africa on the eve of European Conquest 118 Battle of Adowa, 1 March 1896 161 Battle of Omdurman, 1–2 September 1898 172–3 Africa after the Scramble, 1912 183 vii Preface The aim of this book is to examine the origins and conduct of colonial warfare in Africa in the late nineteenth century, as far as possible from the perspectives both of the European invaders and the African resisters, and in the process to demonstrate the impact, both immediate and long-term, of these wars upon the societies, political structures and military theory and practice of both victors and vanquished. I have written this book with the student and general reader in mind. Scholarly apparatus has been kept to a minimum. Notes are limited to indicating the sources of direct quotations and of viewpoints on matters about which there is some controversy. The bibliographical entries have been annotated where appropriate in an effort to point students toward the more important works in the field. For present purposes, Africa is defined as including North Africa and the Horn of Africa as well as the sub-Saharan portion of the continent. There are at least three good reasons for this. First, the French experience in Algeria from 1830 onwards exercised a potent influence upon French military practice and relations with African peoples (especially Muslims) south of the Sahara. Secondly, the events of 1898 in the Sudan, beginning with the suppression of Mahdism at the battle of Omdurman and culminating in the Franco-British confrontation at Fashoda, forced a reappraisal of the aspirations of all the imperial powers in Africa–Belgian, German and Italian as well as British and French. Finally, news of the defeat of an Italian army by the Ethiopians at Adowa in 1896 reverberated throughout the imperial world and served as a beacon of hope, both then and later, for colonized people across Africa and for oppressed people of colour everywhere. The treatment in the book of European imperial powers and the African peoples who joined with or resisted them is intended to be even-handed. The reader will learn as much about the role of the historical memory of conquest and resistance in the viii PREFACE forging of the modern African identity as about that of “Queen Victoria’s Little Wars” in fostering popular imperialism in late-nineteenth-century Britain. On the imperial side, coverage is more inclusive than has usually been the case. While the British and French experiences must bulk large in the narrative because of the greater scope of their activity in Africa, the German, Italian, Belgian and Portuguese imperial ventures also receive considerable attention. Even so, limitations of space have forced me to be selective. The reader will therefore find here only peripheral references to, for example, the French conquest of Dahomey in the early 1890s, the Portuguese campaigns in Angola and Guinea-Bissau in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the revolts of the Ndebele and Shona peoples against settler role in Zimbabwe in the 1890s, and the “pacification” of Kenya and Somalia in the years before the First World War. Readers who wish to know more about these episodes will find a number of helpful titles listed in the Notes and Bibliography. Perhaps the most significant omission concerns the First (1880–1) and Second (1899– 1902) Boer Wars. It is my view that these wars, important as they may have been to the future of the British Empire and, indeed, to that of South Africa, still fall only partly within the scope of this book. My overriding concern here is with the wars fought in Africa between Africans and Europeans. The Boer wars, as I see them, were European wars fought in Africa. And, just as the American War of Independence cannot be considered an episode in the American Indian resistance to European invasion, so the Boer wars cannot be seen as part of the saga of African resistance to European encroachments. Nevertheless, both wars are at least of peripheral interest to our story, in that, by way of comparison, they shed further light on warfare elsewhere in Africa during the same period. The two wars will be considered together in this light at the beginning of Chapter Five. The approach taken here has been inspired by the “New Military History”, a way of writing about warfare now some twenty years old (but still hotly contested in some quarters), which agrees with Georges Clemenceau that war is too important to be left to the generals. The “New Military Historians” contend that War is more than military operations. Modern war, above all, came to enlist every aspect of life. This enlargement has altered the way historians write about war. Traditional military history has evolved into a broader and deeper approach to the relationship between war and society.1 The “New Military History” is at least as much concerned with the impact of war on society and culture as it is with the strategies and tactics of armies. It seeks to measure the impact upon the rise and decline of states of military establishments and the wars they wage. It is interested in the role of warfare in propagating the myths and legends ix