The History and Practice of Humanitarian Intervention and Aid in Africa

B. Everill,J. Kaplan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137270023
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

The history of humanitarian intervention has often overlooked Africa. This book brings together perspectives from history, cultural studies, international relations, policy, and non-governmental organizations to analyze the themes, continuities and discontinuities in Western humanitarian engagement with Africa.

1

Freetown, Frere Town and the Kat River Settlement: Nineteenth-Century Humanitarian Intervention and Precursors to Modern Refugee Camps

Bronwen Everill

In 2005, a former rock star announced that ‘Every single day, 50,000 people are dying, needlessly, of extreme poverty. More than were dying at the time of Live Aid. Dying of AIDS, dying of hunger, dying of diseases like TB and Diarrhoea. Dying, often for want of medicines which we can buy over the counter in a chemist’, continuing on that this was ‘the starting point for THE LONG WALK TO JUSTICE – we will not tolerate the further pain of the poor while we have the financial and moral means to prevent it’.¹

Pre-dating Geldof’s announcement by over a century, F. W. Fox addressed the Aborigines Protection Society outlining a similar approach to Africa:

We have to lend a listening ear to the cries of the suffering and oppressed, from whatever part of the Continent they may arise, we have to declare to the nations of Great Britain, Germany and other European countries, that the Bible shall not be forced into Africa, by the bullet and at the point of the sword, that African explorations and discoveries can be efficiently and effectually carried out in the future, without the destruction of so much human life and the shedding of so much human blood, as has been the case in the past, that commerce shall not be conducted at the expense of the happiness and prosperity of the helpless and innocent and that European and other traders shall not fatten upon the miseries of the people by the importation and sale of fire-arms and poisonous spirits. In a word the principles of Freedom justice and Brotherhood must be promulgated and enforced by moral influences and forces, so as to uproot oppression, injustice and rapine, which have too long reigned everywhere supreme on the African Continent.²

Despite the changes in the intervening centuries – most notably the end of European colonialism in Africa – these two quotations share more than hyperbolic style. They share an approach to Africans and Africa that is grounded primarily in the humanitarian movement. At the height of the new ‘globalization’ craze of the early twenty-first century, human rights campaigners, humanitarians and INGOs seized upon the role of global economic structures in creating poverty in Africa. At the same time, historians were examining the lineages of that globalization in the imperialisms of the nineteenth century. Frederick Cooper notes that

[w]hat was most ‘global’ in the nineteenth century was not the actual structure of economic and political interaction, but the language in with slavery was discussed by its opponents: a language of shared humanity and the rights of man … used first to expunge an evil from European empires and the Atlantic system and, from the 1870s onwards, to save Africans from their alleged tyranny towards each other.³

This language and attitude towards Africa emerged as a by-product of the anti-slavery campaign in Britain.⁴

This chapter will explore the rise of a certain type of humanitarian interventionist institution that also emerged from the anti-slavery movement: the anti-slavery settlement. The idea of the anti-slavery settlement, first proposed in the late eighteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic, spread beyond its initial remit throughout the nineteenth century. It began as a government–missionary joint project in Freetown, Sierra Leone, with non-British iterations in Liberia and Gabon. Its initial success – and the perceived success of similar projects in North American and Australian settler contexts – spawned a distinct project in South Africa, introduced as a response to settler encroachment on indigenous lands and wars along the colony’s border. By the late nineteenth century, the model had spread to East Africa, with the renewed campaign against the slave trade. By the twentieth century, the model was fully formed and was a recognized way for both colonial governments and missionaries to deal with displaced populations, ultimately giving rise to the modern refugee camp.

Of course there were other European and colonial influences feeding into British models for settling displaced peoples, particularly coming from the Indian subcontinent, Australia and New Zealand, North America and from those fleeing the pogroms and wars of Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. However, the conscious use of African examples by colonial officials, humanitarians in the metropole and missionaries on the ground in dealing with African freed slaves and other displaced groups was notable – and is notable in its absence from discussions of refugee policy development in discussions of humanitarian interventions, which primarily focus on European refugee camps in the Second World War.⁵ In fact, Malkki argues that there was ‘not a more encompassing apparatus of administrative procedures’ for dealing with refugees until ‘the standardizing, globalizing processes of the immediate postwar years’.⁶ However, this seems to overlook the ‘globalizing processes’ of empire formation, which were pervasive throughout the nineteenth century and which dealt extensively in the humanitarian realm. Zolberg, Suhrke and Aguayo also focus exclusively on European refugees as the origin for modern refugee camps.⁷ Despite Malkki’s (and others’) reluctance to identify the roots of humanitarian tools in the imperial period, the description of what post-war refugee sites represented belies their imperial origin:

The segregation of nationalities; the orderly organization of repatriation or third-country resettlement; medical and hygienic programs and quarantining; ‘perpetual screening’ … and the accumulation of documentation on the inhabitants of the camps; the control of movement and black-marketing; law enforcement and public discipline; and schooling and rehabilitation.⁸

These tools of governance, control and humanitarian action were in use, however, long before the Second World War and, in fact, most likely have more to do with the shaping of responses to African displaced populations than European post-war developments.⁹ Although European refugee camps have an obvious lineage in Europe, African sites should have an African refugee lineage as well. An analysis of the deeper history of humanitarian relief and settlement plans in the sites that are the focus of this chapter reveals the gradual development of the model and its emergence as a model for humanitarian intervention in Africa.

Although this work is framed in the discipline of history, it takes a comparative, case study approach to the sites under observation. The reason for this approach is not to suggest that these sites are the same, or to neglect the historical specificity of each of their situations. However, it is valuable to use a political science approach and look at them as establishing a ‘model’ of engagement with refugees not least because the missionaries and humanitarians involved in their establishment consciously built a model from previous experiences and thought of their own project as fitting into that model and adding to it. They were consciously developing a paradigm for dealing with displaced Africans throughout the nineteenth century and the creation of these sites – Freetown, Kat River and Frere Town – established that model, as well as contributing significantly to its continued implementation into the twentieth (and twenty-first) century.

This chapter builds on the significant body of historiography on the links between anti-slavery and imperial expansion in Africa to argue that the paradigm for Western engagement with Africa, established in the eighteenth century as one based on humanitarian interventions, has remained continuous.¹⁰ This chapter looks particularly at three settlements – Freetown in Sierra Leone; Frere Town in Kenya; and the Kat River Settlement in South Africa – as three sites which helped to form British thinking about human rights, refugees, governance and forms of humanitarian state-building. It will begin with the history of these three settlements, before moving on to look at them comparatively with regard to metropolitan and colonial writing about them and then finally, drawing out brief, preliminary ways in which these sites provide parallels with modern refugee and state-building interventions in Africa. Although the sites are separated by vast distances on the continent, by changing realities and priorities in the metropole and the colonies and by the groups who advocated their settlement, they demonstrate the development of a standardizing approach to the settlement of refugees from slavery that expanded to all refugees and has continued to inform the processes of refugee resettlement to the present. Looking at them in comparison allows us to draw out the parallels in behaviour and attitudes and see the change and continuity over the long nineteenth century.

History of the settlements

In the late eighteenth century, working together with the evangelical Clapham Sect, who were pushing for the abolition of the slave trade in parliament, the anti-slavery advocate Granville Sharp helped to raise money and interest in a new ‘Province of Freedom’ on the Freetown peninsula in Sierra Leone. The settlement was intended to be a utopian settlement for ‘Black Poor’ from London. Although the first settlement faced obstacles including disease and violent disputes with indigenous populations, the experiment was not abandoned. Instead, the Sierra Leone Company (1791) took over administration of Sierra Leone. The company was run by a group of humanitarians including members of the Clapham Sect – William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, Henry Thornton – but it combined humanitarian aims with the attempt to make the colony economically self-sufficient through the introduction of ‘legitimate commerce’. Finally, in 1808, the company dissolved and reformed itself as the humanitarian organization, the African Institution, handing official authority over the colony to the British government, but continuing to act in an advisory capacity.

The colony had expanded with the settlement of the roughly 1200 Black Loyalists who fought with the British in the American Revolution, had been transported to Nova Scotia and were brought to Sierra Leone by John Clarkson. In 1800, 500 Maroons, a group of free black Jamaicans joined them. In 1807, both Britain and the US abolished the slave trade and began operating squadrons along the west coast of Africa to capture slave ships. The population of Freetown grew quickly as slave ships were impounded by the navy and the slaves on board – referred to as ‘recaptives’ or ‘Liberated Africans’ – were integrated into Sierra Leone society.

In Freetown, the African Institution and the Church Missionary Society (CMS) had an important role ensuring that the humanitarian aims of the freed slave settlement would be tightly connected to the governance of the colony. The CMS was founded in 1804 with the goal of promoting the spread of the Gospel in Britain’s colonial territories and the board of the CMS frequently overlapped with the African Institution and other anti-slavery organizations. Together with an early governor of the colony, they were vital institutions in the development of the anti-slavery settlement model. Governor Charles MacCarthy (1816–24) created a ‘parish plan’ for administering the colony in districts run by CMS missionaries. MacCarthy expanded the colony into the interior, establishing a number of ‘parishes’ run by CMS superintendents responsible for administering the smaller settlements, providing education and conducting religious duties. Each of these parishes housed a CMS manager who would oversee the apprenticeship of Liberated Africans in various necessary trades.¹¹

Under MacCarthy’s governorship in the 1810s and 1820s, new Liberated Africans were assigned to a village where they were required to stay (movement between villages or out of the colony was restricted). There they were encouraged to marry local women, contribute labour to the colony and expected to attend church on Sundays and mission schools throughout the week with their families, thereby promoting the development of ‘civilization’ among recaptives and indigenous groups. The CMS managers in turn relied heavily on the ‘class leaders’ or self-selected ‘kings’ to mediate their authority in the parishes and organize labour for the villages, particularly after Governor MacCarthy’s death and the scaling back of colonial investment in the parishes. Despite the initial attempts to mix up the Liberated Africans, villages increasingly became ethnically homogeneous as ‘Aku’ (Yoruba), Egba and ‘Ibo’ (Igbo) recaptives moved to areas populated with their countrymen.¹² The Aku had their own king (King John Macaulay) who was recognized as their leader by the Freetown government and dealt with as the representative of Aku interests, responding to their requests for education provision, jobs and rations for new arrivals.

Despite the entirely different nature of the British settlements in South Africa and Sierra Leone, beginning in 1829, startlingly similar policies to the MacCarthy plan of humanitarian resettlement were attempted in the Kat River settlement of recently emancipated Khoi in the Eastern Cape. Although this settlement was not strictly an antislavery measure, it introduced the idea that another oppressed group could benefit from the same type of methods being used concurrently in Freetown. Given the amount of correspondence, collaboration and competition between the British missionary societies, it seems likely that this attempt at resettlement was part of a wide-ranging idea of reform through settlement circulating in the empire at this time. The names of some ...