Wars Of Imperial Conquest In Africa, 1830-1914

293 Pages·2000·3.43 MB·English

by  Bruce Vandervort

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