Roberts A.D. The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 7: from 1905 to 1940
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
EXPANSION
Among the vast majority of newly-converted Muslims, not
touched by the printed word, the Islamic cultural revival was
identified with the adoption of the long Rowing
ja/Zabiyja
or dress
commonly associated with traditional Middle Eastern wear. In
areas as far removed as Nyasaland and Sierra Leone, visitors
commented on the growing popularity of Muslim dress, equated
with conversion to Islam; this trend stimulated cloth imports,
tailoring and embroidery (which was popularised by Middle
Eastern imports). There were local variations in the style or
colours of customary dress, the use and styles of hats or turbans
or the types of rosaries, but it is the dramatic expansion of the
general style of dress during our period that attests to a popular
confirmation of the Islamic cultural revival.
During the first forty years of the twentieth century, Africa's
Islamic communities exhibited the full range of contemporaneous
forces and contradictions at work in the Muslim world: resistance,
adaptation to infidel overrule, receptivity to proselytising by Sufi
orders, and a new political consciousness encouraged by both
fundamentalist and modernising Pan-Islamic influences. For the
two centuries prior to 1900 and independent of European contact,
the Muslim world had generated numerous reform movements
which sought a social and moral reconstitution of Islamic society,
attacked economic and social injustices and called for political
action. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century jihads in West
Africa, the Sanusiyya in Libya and Mahdism in the Sudan were
thus part of a phenomenon that included Wahhabism in
eighteenth-century Arabia, the Padri movement in nineteenth-
century Indonesia and diverse reform movements in India. It was
this momentum, however highly fragmented and dispersed, that
was channelled into confrontation with the West during the
nineteenth century. This confrontation elicited two broad patterns
of response which were illustrated with a certain irony in the
fortunes of the two spiritual centres of Islam during our period:
Istanbul and the sultanate under the modernising pressures of the
Young Turks, and Mecca, representing the traditional values of
Wahhabism. The contradictions are profound, for Sa'udi control
over the holy lands and their rise in influence as champions of
Wahhabi norms for tens of thousands of annual pilgrims was
contemporaneous with the flowering of the modern press,
nationalism, and educational ideas that were forcing secular,
221
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
ISLAM
Western liberal notions, first embraced on a national scale by the
Turks,
upon the world of
Islam.
During our period the common
anti-colonial struggle largely overrode these divergent forces in
the Muslim world.
The most remarkable feature of Islam in twentieth-century
Africa has been the rapidity with which diverse communities
embraced the Faith. Muslim Africa not only mirrored and shared
the contradictions and vitality of Islam in the Middle East and
Asia; it proved to be one of the most rapidly expanding regions
in the Islamic world. The agents of this Islamisation, mainly the
Sufi brotherhoods, and the catalysts that promoted it, such as
better communications and rapid urbanisation, may explain how
and where Islam expanded. To understand why this process
moved with such vigour in such widely varying social and
political settings requires, in part, an assessment of the impact of
the European presence in colonial Africa. Islam was widely
perceived as a modernising influence which, at least until the late
1930s, could compete with Western and missionary education
systems; it was an ideology that offered believers a wider world
that was not exclusively tied to the colonial order. This served
to link sub-Saharan Africa to Pan-Arab issues just as it created
a bridge that brought North Africa and Egypt into Pan-African
causes, especially from the late 1940s onward. But Islam was also
highly compatible with notions of corporate responsibility stressed
in many African societies and religions, and the faith was well
served by able and imaginative interpreters whose energies
brought about religious change in diverse communities.
222
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
CHAPTER
5
AFRICAN CROSS-CURRENTS
This chapter
is
concerned with
the
circulation
of
ideas among
Africans south
of
the Sahara, and
in
particular those ideas which
travelled across
the
frontiers
by
which
the
succeeding regional
chapters are circumscribed. Growing awareness of belonging to a
particular colonial territory was one very important feature of our
period,
but
the units
of
colonial government were
by no
means
the only
new
frames
for
social action. They overlapped with
spheres
of
economic pressure and religious affiliation which also
created new routes
for
travel and new occasions for the exchange
of
ideas.
These routes led Africans from one part of the continent
to another, and for a tiny but most important group they also led
overseas,
to
Europe
and the USA. As
their social horizons
expanded, Africans refined their comprehension
of
the colonial
condition and reflected
on
their multiplying social identities:
as
blacks,
as
Africans,
as
colonial subjects;
as
workers, soldiers,
students
or
professional
men; as
Christians
or
Muslims;
as
members of tribes and as potential citizens of future nation—states.
This process had
of
course begun well before 1900. The great
expansion
of
trade
in
much
of
sub-Saharan Africa during
the
nineteenth century had caused free Africans to move further from
home than ever before. Caravan routes were extended or created.
The old networks across the Sahara linked up with routes across
the length
and
breadth
of
West Africa. South
of
the equator,
traders pushed into the interior from both east and west coasts;
the great lakes, and the rivers
of
the middle Zaire basin, became
important highways. This greatly accelerated the interchange
of
information, customs
and
beliefs between African peoples.
Languages were learned,
and
some, such
as
Hausa, Swahili
or
Lingala, became lingua francas. Religious cults acquired
new
followings; wars of conquest extended
fields
of political allegiance;
and
as
people became more aware
of
cultural difference they
acquired a sharper sense of their own ethnic identity: many of the
223
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
AFRICAN CROSS-CURRENTS
tribal names current in Africa today were invented by Africans
in
the
last century. Meanwhile, religions
of
alien origin were
developing their own networks
in
Africa: those
of
the Muslim
brotherhoods and the already bewildering variety
of
Christian
missions. These enabled
a
very few Africans not only
to
leave
Africa (which all too many had had to do) but to come back again
and share with their fellows their experience of the outside world.
Thus,
even outside the ' westernised' enclaves in the Cape and
along
the
West African coast,
the
social experience
of
many
Africans
was
more rich
and
varied than European intruders
commonly appreciated. All the same, the changes
of
the earlier
twentieth century enormously extended
the
range
of
social
contacts. As the colonial presence was extended and intensified,
so more and mbre Africans were drawn into
a
variety of large-scale
structures and developed appropriate forms of solidarity. It seems
helpful here
to
consider four types
of
structure which could
transcend territorial
or
regional frontiers: those
of
capitalism,
those
of
the imperial powers, those
of
Christian missions, and
those of higher education.
THE MOVEMENT
OF
PEOPLE
Networks of
empire
By the early twentieth century, the pressures of capitalist enterprise
had begun
to
draw Africans along new routes
to
congregate
in
new centres of production. Southern and Central Africa, from the
Cape
to
Lake Victoria, comprised
in
effect one vast market
for
black labour. This was dominated by the gold mines on the Rand,
though countervailing force was exerted
by
mines, plantations
and farms throughout the region. The search
for
higher wages
and better working conditions moved
men to
cover great
distances, on foot as well as by train
or
truck, with small regard
for political frontiers, despite
the
efforts
of
governments
to
regulate the flow. Workplaces, towns and wayside labour camps
became forums
for
the exchange
of
news and ideas.
A
colonial
labour official remarked in
1933:'
The degree to which the African
is
not
only travelling,
but
also observing,
is
probably
not
generally recognised;
it is,
however, easy
to
hear
a
camp-fire
conversation in the Congo during which conditions in the Union,
224
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
THE MOVEMENT OF PEOPLE
Rhodesia, Tanganyika and Angola are all discussed and com-
mented upon...
M
Within this great region, the incidence of labour
migration was on average far higher than anywhere else in Africa.
Nonetheless, other patterns of movement were also important.
Cotton and coffee farmers in Buganda employed migrant workers
from north-western Uganda, Ruanda and Burundi. In the Sudan,
cotton-growers in the Gezira made use of workers from the
impoverished hinterlands of West Africa, whence others migrated
to cocoa farms in the Gold Coast or the Ivory Coast, or groundnut
farms in Senegal and the Gambia. And throughout Africa the
growth of exports caused harbour towns to become magnets for
workers on the move. Seamen saw strange countries, and some
settled abroad: between the two world wars, there was probably
an annual average of well over a thousand West Africans and
Somalis living in British ports. For literate Africans there were
special opportunities for travel in the service of trading firms: in
the late nineteenth century a few from British West Africa had
worked as agents in French territory, and by 1914 one Nigerian
had twice visited London on behalf of his employers in Lagos.
For most purposes, colonial government was organised in
territorial or at most regional compartments. In British Africa,
there was little movement between territories among white civil
servants, except at the highest level. To be sure, movement from
one civil service post to another within the same territory could
be an important experience for Africans, and like other forms of
employment requiring literacy the civil service provided oppor-
tunities for Africans to work outside their native territories.
Nyasaland was especially productive of such migrants. But the
colonial powers had various ways of making Africans feel that
they belonged to empires wider even than the shores of Africa.
The British Crown was one such instrument: the main occasions
for its use were the coronations in 1911 and 1937 and the Prince
of Wales's African tour in 1925.
2
Africans were occasionally
rewarded by Britain with imperial and royal honours. Empire Day
(24 May) was marked in schools by sports competitions, parades
and concerts. Loyalty to a distant sovereign, and pride in
belonging to so great an empire, were characteristic of those
blacks in West or South Africa who aspired to British culture.
1
G. Orde Browne,
The
African
labourer
(London, 19}5), 120.
1
The Belgian king and queen toured the Congo in 1928; the crown prince in 1933.
225
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
AFRICAN CROSS-CURRENTS
However, mounting racial discrimination in the early twentieth
century strained it severely, and the more precise attribute of
imperial citizenship was restricted to a narrow circle. Indeed, it
was only France which conferred, however sparingly, formal
citizenship in the sense of civil rights equal to those of natives
in the metropolitan country; to be 'British subjects', as were
Indians and a handful of Africans in colonial Africa, brought no
comparable advantage. Blacks in British Africa perhaps came
closest to imperial citizenship when in 1931 ten were summoned
from East Africa to testify before a parliamentary committee.
War, however, compelled many thousands of Africans to travel
in the service of empire. Before and after the First World War,
Senegalese soldiers served in Morocco. In the Allied struggle
against the Germans, men from British West Africa fought in East
Africa; men from French North and West Africa fought on the
Western Front, and black men from South Africa served in
non-combatant roles. For some, at least, these experiences pro-
foundly altered their perspectives of white rule. And for a small
but crucial minority soldiering became a way of life. For them,
social life was principally defined by membership of a regiment,
an organisation no less totalitarian than the average mine com-
pound but probably a good deal more satisfying. Indeed, army
or police service was likely to offer the best hope of social
advancement to members of the 'martial tribes' favoured by
colonial recruiting officers, for in the last analysis their supposed
martial qualities consisted in the lack of sophistication consequent
upon lack of access to economic and educational opportunities.
Recruitment ignored imperial frontiers: many Hausa and Mossi
from French West Africa served in British units. One minor
offshoot of war deserves passing mention here. Baden-Powell's
Boy Scout movement, influenced by his experience of African
campaigns, was explicitly dedicated to imperial
ideals.
In the 1920s
it was established among Africans in West and South Africa,
though in the latter country blacks could only become 'path-
finders ' or' wayfarers' and the founder himself was unable in 1937
to blaze a trail for them into the company of white Scout troops.
3
3
In 1938, when there were nearly 15,000 Pathfinders in South Africa, the Chief
Pathfinder there was Senator J. D. Rheinallt Jones, a leading member of the Institute
of Race Relations. In the Gold Coast,.where the governor was Chief Scout, there were
3,500 Scouts in 1934-
226
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
THE MOVEMENT OF PEOPLE
Christian missionaries formed yet another new series of networks
criss-crossing Africa. Some had established spheres
of
influence
in the nineteenth century which were overlaid, but not abolished,
by later economic
and
political developments.
By
1910
the
Universities' Mission to Central Africa had
a
base in Zanzibar, two
centres
in
German East Africa
and
outposts
in
Nyasaland,
Mozambique
and
Northern Rhodesia.
The
Free Church
of
Scotland had one base
in
the eastern Cape and another on
the
shores of Lake Nyasa (Malawi); the Paris Missionary Society had
one
in
Basutoland
and
another
on the
upper Zambezi.
The
Catholic White Fathers were pre-eminent over
a
huge region
centred
on
Lake Tanganyika.
In
West Africa, the Church Mis-
sionary Society maintained links between Sierra Leone
and
south-western Nigeria.
As in
colonial government,
it was
European management which
was
most conscious
of
wide-
ranging institutional affiliation,
but as
Africans
too
became
teachers and even priests they also tended to move from one post
to another within the sphere of their mission. Moreover, certain
missions had been much involved
in
the liberation
of
African
slaves: the networks
of
employment organised
by
the CMS
in
West Africa
or by the
UMCA served
to
redistribute African
freedmen who
had
been gathered
by
slavers from still larger
catchment areas.
Links were also made
in
Africa with
the
descendants
of
Africans once shipped
to the
New World. American blacks
worked
as
Protestant missionaries
in the
Belgian Congo
and
Angola. Elsewhere, two black American churches were especially
influential: the African Methodist Episcopal Church in southern
Africa and the AME Zion Church in West Africa. Between 1902
and 1910 graduates
of
Tuskegee, the black college
in
Alabama,
assisted cotton-growing schemes in Togo, Nigeria, the Sudan and
the Belgian Congo.
Education
For the widening of African perspectives, institutions for secondary
and higher education were
of
fundamental importance.
In
our
period, these were still very thin on the ground. Few schools for
Africans provided classes beyond
the
eighth
or
ninth annual
grade. In 19
3 8
there were some 5,5 00 Africans receiving secondary
227
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
AFRICAN CROSS-CURRENTS
education in this sense in South Africa; there were probably no
more than this in tropical Africa.
4
Only in the Union, the Gold
Coast and Sierra Leone did they even approach one-tenth of one
per cent of the total population, and in these countries, as
elsewhere, access to all kinds of education was heavily biased
towards certain areas. Any school which offered post-primary
instruction was likely to attract Africans from far and wide,
perhaps more indeed than those who lived nearby:
Every boarding school is a cosmopolitan place, and there is no guarantee in
setting up a school' for a territory' that it will really serve that territory. Thus,
too,
when the little cathedral schools of the twelfth century branched out into
higher studies, men in England travelled to Paris and students from Bohemia
found themselves in Oxford. There is something almost sacramental in all this
coming and going. It is as if a new world of thought required for its due
appreciation a change of circumstances.
5
In southern Africa, the most significant schools of this sort had
been founded by the Free Church of Scotland, at Lovedale in the
eastern Cape and at Livingstonia in northern Nyasaland. In 1936
there were about fifty Africans from Southern Rhodesia studying
in South Africa for want of secondary education at home. In
French West Africa, the most able, determined and fortunate
found their way to the government's William Ponty School in
Dakar: between 1918 and 1939 only 1,500 completed courses
there. By 1930 British colonial governments had added Achimota,
near Accra, in the Gold Coast, Yaba in Lagos, southern Nigeria,
and Makerere in Kampala, Uganda. Makerere had to cater for
students from all over East Africa, but Lovedale's catchment area
was even larger. From Northern Rhodesia, for example, came
sons of the Lozi king in 1908; some years later, a young man from
near the Tanganyika border paid his way through Lovedale with
what he had saved from working as a foreman in the Belgian
Congo.
To begin with, the emphasis at such schools was on vocational
training, but by the 1930s Lovedale, Makerere and Achimota were
teaching up to university entrance standard. Lovedale, indeed,
enlarged its pupils' sense of community in terms of time as well
as space: a visitor in 1927, struck by its far from utilitarian library,
4
Figures
for
children
in
secondary schools
in
tropical Africa would
be a
good deal
higher, since such schools often included classes
at
primary levels.
s
A. V.
Murray,
The school in
the
bush
(London,
1929; 2nd edn.
1958),
98.
228
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
THE MOVEMENT OF PEOPLE
remarked that 'what Lovedale really does, whether it teaches
carpentry or Latin, is to put its students into a historical succession
and to give them a sense of belonging to a distinguished
company'.
6
There was a 'university feeling about the place', and
this was scarcely surprising, for out of Lovedale had grown the
nearby Fort Hare, a university college where between 1923 and
1936 some fifty BA degrees were obtained from the University
of South Africa; the first woman graduated in 1928. In 1938 the
Fort Hare graduates included one from Kenya; in 1939, the first
from Southern Rhodesia. Outside the Union, university education
was available south of the Sahara only at Achimota, where in 1938
there were 37 students working for London degrees, and at
Fourah Bay College, in Sierra Leone. This had been founded in
the nineteenth century and attracted students from all parts of
British West Africa; two or three each year obtained degrees
awarded by the University of Durham.
The development of higher education for Africans both in
South Africa and in British colonial Africa was intended to reduce
the flow of African students overseas. This subject is still too little
known. In 1913 about forty Africans attended a conference for
African students in London. West Africans had for some time
gone to London to read law. By the late 1920s there were some
sixty African lawyers in the Gold Coast and about as many in
Nigeria; in both countries there were several lawyers from Sierra
Leone. Smaller numbers of West Africans studied medicine in
Britain, usually at Edinburgh; in 1913 there were seven African
doctors in Nigeria.
7
In 1920 there were hardly any West Africans
who had obtained British degrees in arts or sciences, but between
1930 and 1937 there was an annual average of
53
West Africans,
other than law students, at British universities; and in 1938-40
the average had risen to 71,
8
reflecting Nigeria's provision from
1937 of scholarships for study in Britain. By 1939 there were also
a dozen students from East Africa in Britain, though few were
black.
6
Ibid., 117.
7
The composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
(i
875-1912) was
the son
of a Sierra Leonean
doctor;
the
band-leader Reginald Foresythe (1907-58)
was the son of
a
West African
barrister. Both musicians were born
and
educated
in
England,
and
made their careers
there; both also worked
in the USA.
* A. T.
Carey,
Colonial students
(London, 1956),
28.
There were about twice
as
many
West Indian university students
in
Britain
in the
1930s.
229
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
AFRICAN CROSS-CURRENTS
Black South Africans seldom went to Britain as students; the
first black barrister in South Africa qualified in London in 1909.
But by 1906 at least 150 were said to have gone to study in the
USA; most would have been following up contacts established
through American missionary networks. One was Charlotte
Maxeke, the first black woman graduate from South Africa; she
went to the USA in a touring choir and in 1905 graduated from
the AME church's Wilberforce Institute, Ohio. The First World
War interrupted the diaspora, but in 1919 fifty African students
attended
a
conference in Chicago
at
which the African Student
Union of America was formed. The first Kenyan (a Masai) went
to the USA in 1908; in the 1920s the Phelps-Stokes Fund helped
some Africans, including three from Uganda, to study in the USA;
a
few
obtained postgraduate teaching diplomas
at
Columbia
University.
In
1931 the white South African educationist C.
T.
Loram moved to
Yale
University, and this led to three black South
Africans, including Z. K. Matthews, pursuing graduate studies
there. Between 1920 and 1937 twenty students went to the USA
from Nigeria; most had been sent
by
missionary societies
to
pursue religious studies. Twelve more came in 1938; most had
private African sponsorship and
all
but one went
to
Lincoln,
Pennsylvania,
a
black university whose graduates included
Nnamdi Azikiwe (1931) and Kwame Nkrumah (1939). Several
Africans remained in
the
USA after qualifying as teachers, doctors
or lawyers: perhaps sixty by 1940. One who did not stay was
Hastings Banda, from Nyasaland, who
in
1925 had come
to
Wilberforce with the help of AME contacts made in J ohannesburg;
he studied at Indiana and Chicago, and finally obtained a medical
degree in Nashville; in 1938 he moved on to Edinburgh in order
to obtain British qualifications.
Most African students in France during our period came from
North Africa. In the early 1920s the government of French West
Africa sent 23 Ponty graduates
to
France
for
further teacher-
training. It later sent nine Africans to French universities, mostly
for veterinary studies; Leopold Sedar Senghor, from Senegal, was
the only one to take a degree in arts or letters. Perhaps no more
than
a
dozen black students from French West Africa obtained
university degrees in our period, while in the late 1920s there were
only two African lawyers in the region. It offered even less scope
for African professional men than did British West Africa, and
230
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008