Lion's Share by Porter Bernard;

Author:Porter, Bernard;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1710580
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Nationalists and imperialists

Judged, however, from the point of view of imperial security, the Liberals’ policy was a great success. As Liberals were not particularly concerned to do anything with the empire anyway, the restriction on their freedom of action did not matter much to them. The important and triumphant point was that friction within the empire was greatly reduced, and it seemed a happier place, and cheaper to run. A comparison between the last ten years of Conservative government and the first ten years of Liberal government in the colonies was an illuminating lesson in the virtues of collaboration. It was a lesson the Liberals were never reluctant to point.

Yet they had not conciliated away all opposition to their colonial rule. Resistance was endemic in the colonial situation, though there were many different strains of the disease, and many different symptoms. Only relatively rarely between 1905 and 1914 did opposition break into armed insurrection or violence. Egypt and India had their bombs and assassinations and the occasional riot. There were urban riots in British Guiana. There was a rebellion in Sokoto, in the north-west of Nigeria, in 1906, which cost the rebels 2,000 lives113. In the East African Protectorate (Kenya), which was the least ‘pacified’ of Britain’s colonies in the 1900s, there was considerable resistance to the extension of British rule, and many African lives lost in the process: 1,117 Nandi people killed in battle between 1905 and 1906, 407 Embu in 1906, and over 200 Kisii between 1905 and 1908, which Churchill thought looked ‘like a butchery’114. He was as disturbed by the aftermath of the Zulu rebellion in Natal in 1906–08, in which over 3,500 Africans were killed, 7,000 gaoled and 700 (reportedly) had their backs ‘lashed to ribbons’ for their defiance115. Another kind of rebellion in the same part of the world was one by 10,000 inveterate Afrikaner republicans against the British in 1914. Yet such violent resistance was exceptional, and on nothing like the same scale as in, for example, Germany’s African colonies, where between 1905 and 1907 two-thirds of the Herero people of south-west Africa were exterminated, and 75,000 ‘Maji-Maji’ rebels in Tanganyika. Opposition to the British was in general less desperate: but in most places it was there. It could be seen in certain religious, cultural and industrial movements as well as overtly political ones. The Hindu revival in India, the Gaelic League in Ireland, the Mumbo cult in south-western Kenya, Dutch Calvinism in South Africa, neo-Mahdism in the Sudan, were all to some degree symptoms of, or vehicles for the expression of, strong anti-colonial feeling. Politically, there were sophisticated and influential secular nationalist movements in India and Egypt, as we have seen. In tropical Africa straight political agitation was much slower to grow, chiefly because Africans had hardly yet been shown what politics was. But in South Africa the political scene by 1914 was fairly teeming with activity by the three racial groups there who felt excluded: Afrikaner republicans had a new ‘National’

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