Britain, Northern Rhodesia and the First World War

Forgotten Colonial Crisis

Edmund James Yorke

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137435798
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

An insightful account of the devastating impact of the Great War, upon the already fragile British colonial African state of Northern Rhodesia. Deploying extensive archival and rare evidence from surviving African veterans, it investigates African resistance at this time.

1

Pre-War Northern Rhodesia: The Structural Weaknesses of Colonial Control

The political overlords and problems of policy formulation: the BSAC and Northern Rhodesia – commercial estate or settler colony?

In 1911 two contemporary observers, both BSAC employees, commenting upon the politico-economic development of the north-east Rhodesian Plateau, were forced to admit to its state of stagnation as a ‘colossal Might-Have-Been [ … ] of gloomy unproductiveness’.¹ It was a description applicable to other substantial areas of the Territory before the outbreak of the First World War. Moreover, the lack of development reflected very much the region’s anomalous position as a declining asset of a profit-orientated commercial company. Once the political hegemony of the British South Africa Company had been finally established north of Zambesi, albeit precariously so, with the crushing defeat of Mpeseni’s Ngoni impis in 1898, the BSAC Directors based in London Wall Street, London, were confronted by the pressing problem of how best to develop such a vast expanse exhibiting, apparently, severely limited commercial potential.

In terms of lucrative mineral development, for instance, prospects seemed patently discouraging compared to the expanding resources of Northern Rhodesia’s sister-state, south of the Zambesi. By 1914, after nearly a decade of copper mining, the two principal mines situated at Kansanshi and Bwana M’kubwa had produced only £268,544 worth of copper but at minimal profit and great production cost.² Zinc, another important mineral produced, was valued at only £85,000 for the same period. The gold and silver output for the year 1913–14 represented a mere £900 in value and was described as ‘very small’.³ Output fluctuated wildly, the scattered mines being frequently closed down and reopened as production costs mounted or labour difficulties arose. Such was the lack of political interest in mineral exploitation that a Mining Proclamation was not promulgated until 1912, specifically encouraging prospecting in selected areas of the Territory, notably the East Luangwa District. Thus, in 1910, the Company confirmed to the North Charterland Exploration Company that, as a result of the Government notices of 15 February 1907 and 29 January 1910, ‘a prospector has no rights at all in Northern Rhodesia’, but that ‘A Mining Law for Northern Rhodesia has now been drafted which, it is hoped, will be put into force at an early date when prospecting will be recommended and mining allowed’.⁴

Similarly, from London Wall’s perspective, the potential for white settlement and consequently for commercial agricultural development seemed restricted. The tsetse fly problem, ‘discovered’ in 1907 and pervading large tracts of north-east and north-west Rhodesia, had emerged as a potent barrier to extensive white settlement particularly in respect of the north-east Plateau. Reviewing the Company’s land assets in 1912, H. Wilson Fox, the Company’s commercial manager, while observing that BSAC land holdings in Rhodesia were ‘prima facie far greater than in Southern Rhodesia’, nevertheless pointed out that as land ‘infested by tsetse fly is in the present state of knowledge useless for settlement or stock-raising, a serious deduction has to be made from the land at present available for these purposes’. Its effect was to reduce available land totalling 141.6 million by 75.6 million acres to just 66 million acres.⁵

From the prevailing Company viewpoint therefore, until at least 1912, and, in some quarters for the whole of the pre-war period, Northern Rhodesia represented a pauperised extension of her mineral-rich and relatively tsetse-free Southern Rhodesian neighbour. Her role was designated as merely that of a client state, feeding the increasingly rapacious mine and farm labour demands south of the Zambesi, and more recently, west of the Luapula River. Moreover, it was to be an area of exploitation but at minimum extractive cost. In Wilson Fox’s own much quoted words: ‘The problem of northern Rhodesia is not a colonisation problem. It is [ … ] the problem of how best to develop a great estate on scientific lines so that it may yield the maximum profit to the owner’.⁶ Southern Rhodesia remained the primary focus for development. As Wilson Fox put it: ‘My inclination [ … ] would be to postpone action in the North if to take it would mean reduction of the programme for the South’.⁷

It was not until as late as 1912 that this prevailing policy strategy was seriously challenged at London Wall. Among the Directors, the principal advocate of a new revised policy towards the north was H. Birchenough whose report (based on favourable impressions gained on a recent visit to white farming areas in the north-west), severely criticised the previous decade and a half of neglect. In regard to land settlement, the ‘pressing problem’, he openly admitted was that ‘we have not had any clear idea in London during the past few years of what was going on north of the Zambesi’. Such was London Wall ignorance that, ‘we have had no map in London showing the position and extent of alienated land nor have we known of the number or quality of the settlers in occupation of farms’. He argued that, in view of the significant influx of white settlers during the past five years and the proven success of cattle-raising in parts of north-west Rhodesia, the Territory could no longer be perceived as ‘a sort of “terra clausa” which could be held in reserve in case we sold our interests in Southern Rhodesia “lock, stock and barrel” and retained the north [ … ] the time has clearly gone by when we could deal with the north in this way’. Birchenough stressed: ‘The events of the last three or four years have made it impossible to “lock up” the territory in any sense [ … ] too many people have already come in for us to say we wish to discourage settlement altogether’. This, he postulated, would involve an initial heavy financial commitment: ‘At present our administration is in the main a native administration and to adapt it to a white community means large added expenditure’; but, he argued, ‘the increase of administrative expenditure would be out of all proportion to the increase of revenue that would immediately accrue’. Birchenough concluded: ‘We have, perhaps, inadvertently passed the parting of the ways where the choice between opening up the country to settlers or closing against them was open to us. We must now go on placing settlers on the land.’⁸

Within a year Birchenough’s northern policy initiative had attracted the support of a powerful ally. In 1913, L. S. Jameson, President of the Board of Directors, spoke at a rally in Southern Rhodesia in which he stressed the necessity of expanding white settlement in the north.⁹ Although H. Wilson Fox remained sceptical of the proposals, by December 1914 a firm commitment to development in Northern Rhodesia had belatedly emerged in the Company’s Rhodesian policy. In a speech to shareholders, Jameson described the recent change of policy during the previous two years, a period in which, he pointed out, the number of white settlers in Northern Rhodesian had almost doubled from 1,500 to 2,500:

Up to within a few years past we really looked upon Northern Rhodesia as an estate to be developed in the interests of shareholders and merely that, but now we have got to take a different view [ … ] we now find that we have come to a stage when it has to be treated as a growing-up white community which is going to have its requirements and is going to demand these requirements.¹⁰

The escalating administrative deficit,¹¹ the outbreak of war and the protracted negotiations concerning the political future of both Rhodesias, overshadowed this significant policy shift. Consequently, no actual development programme regarding the expansion of white settlement in Northern Rhodesia ever emerged after 1914 and the Territory remained unchanged in real terms as a cheap, black labour-reservoir for the south and west. Nevertheless, the markedly more positive Company attitude towards the colonisation of Northern Rhodesia was, as we shall see, to be a significant reinforcement to the politico-economic position of the white settler community during much of the ensuing war period.

The imperial perspective: the great dilemma

In December 1914, L. S. Jameson bluntly informed a shareholder’s meeting:

We are not ‘persona grata’ with the Colonial Authorities. I do not know why. The only reason, which comes to my mind is that they know that we are doing the work which they ought to have done themselves. It is only human nature; we know that you are much more severe on those who benefit you than on those you have conferred benefits upon.¹²

Jameson’s comments summed up the profound ambiguity of the pre-war Company-imperial relationship. The raison d’être of the grant of the BSAC Charter in 1889 had been to secure imperial strategic interests primarily north of the Limpopo and ultimately, north of the Zambesi rivers at minimum cost to the British Treasury. During the subsequent two and a half decades the Company, as administering authority over both territories, had proved a creditable servant of this aspect of the imperial cause. By 1914 British supremacy in the Central African area had been adequately safeguarded.¹³

Imperial gratitude for the Company’s valuable imperial service, however, obviously engendered serious implications for the successful operation of concepts of ‘Trust’ policy.¹⁴ ‘In delegating administrative authority to the Company and refusing to reassume it, the Colonial Office also delegated the power to give full effect to [ … ] Trust duties’.¹⁵ Acceptance of the Company’s political hegemony in the area meant inevitable acceptance of much of the Company’s ruthless economic policies underpinning its own long-term commercial viability. The dilemma became acute when such policies involved the expanding extraction of cheap African labour through political mechanisms such as hut tax, in order to secure the profitability of the mining and farming interests of Southern Rhodesia.

In the case of the South, the imperial guardians of African welfare could at least devolve responsibility for the Trusteeship ‘burden’ upon a significant white polity acting politically in concert (albeit often antagonistically) with the Company government, a strategy that ‘salved English consciences without cribbing the exercise of white supremacy’.¹⁶ North of the Zambesi, however, with a Territory incorporating, by 1914, a mere 2,500 white settlers and well over 800,000 Africans, the realities of trusteeship were more uncomfortably obvious. In Northern Rhodesia ‘there was no white representative body to provide a cover for imperial inaction’.¹⁷ From the very beginning, the northern Territory was identified as a black man’s country to which white settlement was purely peripheral. Successive High Commissioners had confirmed this. In 1899 Milner had argued that the Zambesi was ‘the natural boundary of what would one day be a self-governing British Africa. The North [ … ] must ultimately become a black imperial dependency, like Uganda or Nigeria’.¹⁸ Selbourne similarly ruled out the possibilities for large scale white settlement and Gladstone had gone so far as to suggest buying out the Company north of the Zambesi although Harcourt, the Colonial Secretary, had suppressed the idea for fear of prejudicing the possible political claims of the Union of South Africa.

Moreover, the Colonial Office’s political commitments to the Territory as a whole were far more pronounced than in Southern Rhodesia. The imperial authorities retained special obligations to the maintenance of Barotseland’s political status resembling that of a black protectorate with a significant degree of autonomy from Company rule.¹⁹ Until 1911, moreover, north-west Rhodesia remained under the direct responsibility of the High Commissioner in South Africa.

Nevertheless, by 1914 imperial control over Northern Rhodesia did exhibit important structural weaknesses. The extent of the Company’s misrule, as revealed to the imperial authorities during the aftermath of the 1896–7 rebellions and the earlier Jameson Raid, resulted in an apparently major reassertion of imperial control over both Rhodesias. The 1898 Southern Rhodesian Order-in-Council theoretically ‘established an extensive series of Imperial controls over legislative and administrative action by the Company’.²⁰ Local imperial control was to rest primarily upon two local posts, that of the Commandant-General who would control military and police forces, and more importantly, a Resident Commissioner to act as a ‘political watch-dog’ for the imperial authorities. ‘Such an officer’, wrote Milner ‘would be distinctly our man, not the Company’s tool, and [ … ] while getting on with them will be the “eyes and ears” of the High Commissioner and of H M’s Government’.²¹

In the case of Northern Rhodesia, however, the Resident Commissioner, based in Salisbury, remained physically very remote from the policy-making of the local Livingstone executive. The even greater remoteness of the High Commissioner based in South Africa added to the problems of effective imperial scrutiny. In other ways, imperial control could be circumvented. The Supplemental Charter, for instance, provided that within eight days copies of all resolutions, minutes, orders or proceedings of the Board of Directors which related to the administration of the Company’s territories were to be sent to the Secretary of State who would have the right to cancel, suspend or amend any decision. Nevertheless, the Company was able to evade this by making use of private correspondence between officials and members of the Board. Furthermore, correspondence of a political nature could often be placed under a heading of ‘commercial’, thereby escaping imperial scrutiny.

Theoretically, however, at the time of amalgamation of north-east and north-west Rhodesia, the imperial authorities could have rectified some of these weaknesses. Clause eight of the Northern Rhodesian Order-in-Council, for instance, promulgated in August 1911, stated that: ‘A Secretary of State may, if and when he should think fit, appoint an officer who shall be called the Resident Commissioner.’²² In fact, no appointme...