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Africa During the Scramble: White on White Crime
- Thread starter Gary Oswald
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The Boer successes against undisciplined British troops lacking in elan fits nicely with the discussion earlier in the week on the Courage article.
(Bloody hell, imperial policy always turns out to be messier than I ever thought)
(Bloody hell, imperial policy always turns out to be messier than I ever thought)
Treasury Brain strikes again.
The Boer Wars are always fascinating because of two things they say about the British Empire and the British approach to colonialism:
- The fact that the Boers were treated similarly to black African powers who wouldn't pay taxes illustrates that, on the ground in the colonies, any kind of racial ideology generally took a back seat to making money;
- However, the fact that stuff like putting Boers in concentration camps led to outrage and shock back home, when it didn't for similar ruthlessness towards black African powers, shows that racial ideology still very much filtered the perceptions of the public (and politicians) back home.
Which is a part of the broader trope that can be seen in late 19th and early 20th century fiction, of how the way the home public viewed 'the Empire' was very different to the reality (not necessarily just in terms of morality, but actively misunderstanding its purpose and the priorities of colonial administrators). Which leads to things like the stereotype of the retired British Indian Army general who everyone in his sleepy village regards as a half-alien bore who no longer fits in to English society (see: every Agatha Christie-a-like mystery), or even Edgar Wallace's Sanders of the River character, a colonial administrator in Fictional Part of Nigeria who regards the interfering politicians, businessmen and missionaries with more contempt than he does any of the native rulers.
Getting back to the second Boer War (or South African War), I think this was also largely responsible for creating the vision of Empire as the Brotherhood of the English-speaking World (America Doesn't Count) which became crucial in the World Wars; it was the first time that troops recruited from all of the dominions (and beyond) converged on a single trouble spot. Much of what we think of as the enduring Empire image in this way was probably fairly fleeting in reality and based on depictions of this war - a bit like how the Wild West in fiction long outlasted the actual brief period in American history.
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Yes, we probably won't get into the Second Boer War for a while (I have already written articles about Angola, Rhodesia, Tanzania, Kenya, Equatorial Guinea, Ghana, Nigeria, Morocco, Mali, Tunisia and Libya to go up first) but when we do I very much hope to cover what it meant in Canada, Australia and New Zealand too, it was hugely influential in all those countries.
It will never stop amusing me that Churchill in Canada was named that in 1902, when Winston escaped from a boer pow camp and got famous then, a decision that must have felt so ahead of its time in 1941.
I didn't know it was back then, but I already knew of the strange irony that the Churchill way up at the top of the thinly populated part of Canada on the Hudson's Bay was named after John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough in 1717, whereas the Churchill named after Winston is in the long-settled Prince Edward Island. Does feel like it should be the other way around.
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I cannot stress enough how much this is not born out by the evidence.
Limiting our focus to colonies where you had populations of both white and non-white workers, so as to make a comparison, we might look at plantation economies in Northern Australia; mining territories through Zimbabwe and South Africa; and of course the Caribbean and pre-1783 the Thirteen Colonies.
In all those cases- in all those cases- racial ideology absolutely overcame making money. In every single case, non-white populations are dehumanised and treated as chattel in ways that the white workers are not, and that in every one of those cases is explained by the people there as being due to race.
Look at Australia: the colony of Queensland has a problem. It's ideal territory for a plantation economy- sugar, pineapples, etc. The thing is, workers keep dying. The heat, the disease, wildlife, the awful living conditions.... and there's the problem of food, accommodation, and above all wages.
Now, you could spend money on making sure that the plantations operate humanely, that you have lots of workers with minimal time in the fields, sufficient living standards to keep them alive and decent wages so they do the job.
But then the plantation wouldn't be economical.
So you look at your killing system, and decide that the reason white workers won't do the job is not because, for example, they can get better work elsewhere.
No, it's because the tropics will cause them to 'racially degenerate,' and they physically can't do the job.
So you go and forcibly traffick thousands of Melanesians instead, and get Anthony Trollope to explain to the British public that this is Very Definitely Not Slavery.
Here's the thing: You could still say 'that's putting money-making above racial ideology, because it's capitalists compromising with White Australia for profit.' But that ignores that the way in which profits were sought is entirely constrained by the racial ideology- because the Melanesians died too.
The idea that non-white peoples from the islands would do better was complete bullshit. They died and were injured or sickened in enormous amounts. But they were cheaper to employ, and they were cheaper to employ because they were not white. You cannot separate racial ideology and capitalism.
The death rate among white workers in north Queensland was an existential threat to British settlement across the whole of Australasia because it suggested that British people might not be able to colonise the whole continent; the same death rate among non-white workers was also an existential threat, because it suggested that ordinary British workers could be undercut by bosses using slave labour.
If, on the ground, racial ideology took a back seat to money making we'd expect to see that in areas like Rhodesia or the Rand where you had large populations of both black and white workers. We don't, unless @Sulemain is going to tell me I'm wrong.
We'd expect to see it in the way British slaving ideology developed. We don't.
We'd expect to see it in the way indigenous peoples were treated, because locals who became useful trade partners or integrated parts of society would make more money for their British rulers than they would if their possessions were expropriated and their trade structures destroyed. Guess what happened?
I have a lot of respect for you @Thande, but this is wildly off-base.
I thought when I wrote that I was probably being too simplistic and binary with the phrasing (i.e. contrasting the colonial administrators with the home attitudes), so I'm not surprised it gave the wrong impression - I don't disagree with the points you made, I would only add the caveat that specifically discussing the 'Second Empire' post-1783 (but should have been clearer that I meant that). However, your Queensland example is a good counterpoint for how this could still happen in the 'Second Empire' period.
I was trying to make the point that I've always felt the outraged reaction from some quarters about how the Boers were treated (at home) from some quarters highlights the racial hypocrisy of how people judged the treatment of native peoples in the same region, but I made it sound more all-or-nothing binary than I intended so I apologise if that sounded like whitewashing (no pun intended).
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No worries- I was surprised, because I don't associate you with that sort of whitewashing!
No harm, no foul.
It's fine, I kind of wrote it as the starting point to a discussion and was expecting Gary to reply with "well actually it's more complicated than that"
- you know, the best way to get the right answer on the internet is to confidently state a wrong one.- Pronouns
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It's fine, I kind of wrote it as the starting point to a discussion and was expecting Gary to reply with "well actually it's more complicated than that"
Its rare that I'm at fault for not being a pedantic corrector.
Of course, it is more complicated than that, I think with the Boers in particular, they got a much better deal if they were willing to become British citizens then blacks in the same area did. Rhodes uniting the white voting bloc in the Cape by disenfranchising non white voters, etc.
Which is not to downplay the brutality of the second boer war but like boer generals were then firmly recruited into the British army in the aftermath. Cetshwayo could not possibly have had the career, for the British, that Jan Smuts had.
I just didn't want to say that, because I'd kind of covered that in the article, and I assumed you were just being too simplistic to make an (interesting and true) point about the warped perspective of the colonies back in the homeland.
I very much need to do an article talking about the British khaki elections and the German hottentot elections, in terms of when the voting class discussed the empire back in europe.
Indeed, that would be very interesting when you get to that era.
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Okay, I have been summoned.
My own take on the issue of inter-white conflict in Africa, and this forms the basis for my entire PhD so which is based on a lot of primary source reading, is as follows:
Racialised whiteness, cultural Britishness and political imperial loyalism all achieved different levels of importance at different times and places to different peoples.
Jan Smuts was very much aware of his racialised whiteness, wasn't culturally British and considered himself to be a loyal subject and defender of the British Empire. His ideal was that all of Southern Africa up to and including Katanga should be part of a Greater South Africa, united under the British Empire and held together by a Pan-White ideology in which non-whites had nothing more than an inferior position.
Someone like J. B. M. Hertzog was just as much aware of his racialised whiteness, wasn't culturally British either but wasn't a pan-white imperial loyalist proponent of Greater South Africa either. His ideal was of a fully independent republic of South Africa dominated by white Afrikaners-white anglophones wouldn't be inferior but they wouldn't be directing it. Non-whites were once again cast under the bus if anything even more so than in Smuts' vision.
Rhodes was very aware of his whiteness, very culturally British and very much a Greater South Africa proponent of Pan-White rule, although his vision had white anglophones very much dominant.
Someone like Ethel Tawse Jollie was very aware of their whiteness (they all were!), very culturally British, and viewed Greater South African Pan-Whiteness to be as much a threat to the British Empire politically and culturally as Hertzog's Afrikaner Republicanism.
All of these people were aware, though, that the differences between themselves were minor compared to the differences between them collectively and their subjects. The Portuguese New State, UDI Rhodesia and Apartheid South Africa all worked together to try and suppress resistance and rebellion, and whilst that happened at a later date, it was rooted in a common fear and hatred of non-whites. White anglophones and white Afrikaners alike publically and privately spoke of their hatred of race mixing and of their instance dislike of non-whites having power. The Rand Rebels openly spoke that their hostility to higher black African wages was motivated by the idea of social interaction between white women and black men. The BSAP Police Commissioner in the late 20s said that white women must maintain social and emotional distance from their black African servants.
The Rand Rebels and your average white farm housewife in Southern Rhodesia had large and important distinctions in their world view. Their class and countries were distinct. But they shared a common caste identity, and it is instructive to note that white rebels against the caste system were much rarer then white rebels against the class system. White Southern Rhodesians might have found White Labourism disagreebale, but in the end they found the labourist and white populist Rhodesia Front much more acceptable then Garfield Todd's modest attempts at multiracial democratic reform.
My own take on the issue of inter-white conflict in Africa, and this forms the basis for my entire PhD so which is based on a lot of primary source reading, is as follows:
Racialised whiteness, cultural Britishness and political imperial loyalism all achieved different levels of importance at different times and places to different peoples.
Jan Smuts was very much aware of his racialised whiteness, wasn't culturally British and considered himself to be a loyal subject and defender of the British Empire. His ideal was that all of Southern Africa up to and including Katanga should be part of a Greater South Africa, united under the British Empire and held together by a Pan-White ideology in which non-whites had nothing more than an inferior position.
Someone like J. B. M. Hertzog was just as much aware of his racialised whiteness, wasn't culturally British either but wasn't a pan-white imperial loyalist proponent of Greater South Africa either. His ideal was of a fully independent republic of South Africa dominated by white Afrikaners-white anglophones wouldn't be inferior but they wouldn't be directing it. Non-whites were once again cast under the bus if anything even more so than in Smuts' vision.
Rhodes was very aware of his whiteness, very culturally British and very much a Greater South Africa proponent of Pan-White rule, although his vision had white anglophones very much dominant.
Someone like Ethel Tawse Jollie was very aware of their whiteness (they all were!), very culturally British, and viewed Greater South African Pan-Whiteness to be as much a threat to the British Empire politically and culturally as Hertzog's Afrikaner Republicanism.
All of these people were aware, though, that the differences between themselves were minor compared to the differences between them collectively and their subjects. The Portuguese New State, UDI Rhodesia and Apartheid South Africa all worked together to try and suppress resistance and rebellion, and whilst that happened at a later date, it was rooted in a common fear and hatred of non-whites. White anglophones and white Afrikaners alike publically and privately spoke of their hatred of race mixing and of their instance dislike of non-whites having power. The Rand Rebels openly spoke that their hostility to higher black African wages was motivated by the idea of social interaction between white women and black men. The BSAP Police Commissioner in the late 20s said that white women must maintain social and emotional distance from their black African servants.
The Rand Rebels and your average white farm housewife in Southern Rhodesia had large and important distinctions in their world view. Their class and countries were distinct. But they shared a common caste identity, and it is instructive to note that white rebels against the caste system were much rarer then white rebels against the class system. White Southern Rhodesians might have found White Labourism disagreebale, but in the end they found the labourist and white populist Rhodesia Front much more acceptable then Garfield Todd's modest attempts at multiracial democratic reform.
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Ricardolindo
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- Portugal
What do you think of this quote from https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1986/jul/04/south-Africa?: "My Lords, forty years ago I was sent to South Africa—my first ever diplomatic post—by the then Dominions Office, later the Commonwealth Relations Office. I was surprised to discover that to Smuts and his contemporaries the words "racial problem" meant the relationship between the British and the Boers. The reconciliation between them on which Smuts's rule as Prime Minister was based, was one of his major achievements; and the liberal Afrikaner element, to whom the noble Lord, Lord Cledwyn, referred, contributed notably to it. But would that Smuts had addressed himself with equal zeal to what he called "the native problem". It would have been an easier one to solve then than it is now..."