When Brazza clasped the hand of brother
Richard West
THE SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICA by Thomas Pakenham Weidenfeld, £20, pp.738 Ais an enemy of the slave trade, Samuel Johnson prayed each night that the Europeans would stay out of Africa. He denounced as a fraud the Scottish explorer, James Bruce, who had written a book on his travels in Ethiopia. One hundred years later, the British enemies of the slave trade carried on by the Arabs in eastern and central Africa, read and believed the books of another Scottish explorer, David Living- stone, who had striven so hard to 'heal this open sore of the world'. When Livingstone died, and his body was brought back to the coast by his black servants, the opening up of Africa became a pious crusade. Living- stone's funeral in 1874 is the starting point for Thomas Pakenham's vast, scholarly and delightful account of the Scramble for Africa, or as the French called it, 'the steeplechase through the unknown'.
One of the many joys of this book is the way it tells an exciting story, like Stanley's descent of the Congo River, without the more humdrum passages of a full bio- graphy. Or to use the metaphor of a steeplechase, we see the race but not the parading round in the paddock before and afterwards. Moreover, Pakenham has the gift of putting new life into an oft-told tale. For example, I have read more than I want to know about General Gordon's life and his death at Khartoum. Perhaps Pakenham feels the same way, for he has focussed attention on the relief column led by the odious Garnet Wolseley, who blamed his failure not on his own conceit but on his Commander-in-Chief, the Duke of Cambridge, 'with his great square fat bottom to the fire in the Horse Guards', or on the politicians like Joseph Chamberlain `and all other screw-makers and carpet- makers from Birmingham'.
While writing a chapter about the first Boer War of 1880, Pakenham keeps short his account of the greater but well-known conflict of 20 years later. He confines him- self largely to the important revelation made in his last book, The Boer War, that Sir Alfred Milner, the British High Commissioner at the Cape, deliberately engineered the conflict on behalf of the gold magnates like Beit and Wernher. A few years after the war, when Milner was found to have sanctioned the illegal flogging of Chinese coolies on the Witwatersrand, the Liberals woke up to the truth. The MP and historian Herbert Paul said in 1906:
What excited such intense indignation about Chinese labour in this country was the fact that it was the sign and symbol of that gigantic swindle, that colossal fraud, the policy of the late government in South Africa. Five and a half years ago the people of this country were humbugged and deceived. .. [It was] a war for cheap labour.
Other Liberals were on the alert for injustices in the more recent palls of our African empire:
The chronic bloodshed which stains the West African seasons is odious and disquieting. Moreover, the whole enterprise is liable to be misinterpreted by persons unacquainted with imperial terminology as the murdering of natives and stealing of their land.
That was Winston Churchill in 1906, enjoying his first government job as Under- Secretary for the Colonies.
British brutality in West Africa was not as bad as the conduct of newer colonial powers. Pakenham tells once more the revolting story of how the Germans in South-West Africa drove the Herero nation into the Kalahari Desert and shot all those who tried to return to land with food and water. Having described the way that the Germans in Tanganyika burnt the crops of the highland natives, he adds a topical comment on wild life conservation:
When the famine ended, the survivors returned to a country which was almost unrecognisable. Miambo forests had begun to take over the maize fields and cotton plots, and soon the forests gave sanctuary.to rhino, buffalo and elephant. In due course the hills of Ungindo, once teeming with people, became the largest game park in the world.
Although the book covers a continent during more than 30 years, it nevertheless has a central, continuous theme in the opening up of the Congo basin by two extraordinary men, the villain and hero of Pakenham's story. The villain is King Leopold of the Belgians who, under the guise of fighting the slave trade, created his own private Congo empire, exploiting forced labour under the threat of flogging, mutilation and death. Pakenham's hero is Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, an Italian- born officer in the French navy, who explored and won for his adopted country the territory north of the river, including the present states of Congo, Gabon, Chad and the Central African Republic. Whereas Leopold's man in the Congo, the explorer Stanley, imposed his will on the natives through force and fear, the patient and good-tempered Brazza won the hearts of the people by showing respect and sym- pathy. Although he would fight if attacked, Brazza established his empire because its inhabitants trusted him.
Brazza and Stanley met in the Congo, and later in Paris during a public debate at which Stanley called his opponent a bare- foot adventurer. Although France made Brazza the governor of his colony, the merchants complained of his leniency to the natives, and using a public relations campaign financed by King Leopold, obtained his removal in 1898. There was a rubber boom to make tyres for bicycles, and the French concessionary companies took a lead from King Leopold's Congo by forcing the natives to pick wild rubber under the threat of flogging or the removal of their families. A scandal broke in 1905 when two French officials were charged with multiple murder, and Brazza was sent back to the Congo to lead a commission of enquiry.
The story of Brazza's return to the colony he had founded 30 years earlier is almost too painful to read. Whereas many natives greeted him as a friend, the whites were openly scornful towards this 'nigger- lover'. In a long, last journey through what he had known as primaeval Africa, Brazza saw everywhere the effects of the forced labour system, in ruined, deserted farms and a cowed, starving people. Heartbroken, ill, and jeered at by the white community, Brazza took ship for home but died on the way at Dakar. France buried him in state but suppressed his report on the Congo. Having myself studied Brazza's career, I salute Pakenham's scholarship as well as the skill with which he has told the tragic story. Brazza's name is almost unknown in Britain and scarcely remembered In France, but is uniquely honoured by some of the people of Africa. The capital of the Marxist Congo Republic is still called Brazzaville.
Richard West is the author of Brazza of the Congo.
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