2. Brute Capitalism

 

“In former years the universal aim was to steal the African from Africa. Today the determination of Europe is to steal Africa from the African.”

– Alexander Mackay, British missionary to Uganda, 18891

 

Around the same time as Confederation, when Canadian businessmen decided it was in their economic interest to create a new country from the Atlantic to the Pacific, European capitalists were looking for opportunities in Africa. And some of the skills learned in dispossessing First Nations, putting down the Riel Rebellions and transforming the northern most part of North America into a vast profit-generating economy would prove useful in the conquest of Africa.

But the story used to justify this economic and political conquest, and Canadian participation therein, was generally cloaked in fine sounding phrases, religion, or the rhetoric of pseudo-science. (In an example of social Darwinism an 1899 editorial in the Toronto Mail and Empire, which later merged with The Globe, explained that “partly by the process of natural selection of the fittest, there had devolved upon Britain the task of controlling and administering vast territories in the tropics with enormous populations.”2)

Interestingly, after dominating the slave trade for much of a century, the British shamelessly justified colonial expeditions through the need to stop slavery. Three hundred years of draining Africa of its people quickly morphed into a bid for the continent’s natural resources.

Previously stuck on the coast, in the mid-1800s European ‘explorers’ were now reaching ever further into the continent. Largely representing various business interests, hundreds of Europeans mapped the continent and began staking their claims. Individuals such as David Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley, Carl Peters, Henry Hamilton Johnston and Pierre Paul de Brazza became world famous as African “explorers”.

As these individuals pushed their way across the continent, governments began taking on a greater role. The European “scramble for Africa” was formalized at a multi-country conference held in Germany in 1884-85. Nominally convened to discuss eradicating the slave trade, controlling arms sales and protecting missionaries, the “Berlin Conference” established the ground rules for carving up the continent.3 In a bid to avoid war among themselves, the European powers decided African territory could only be formally claimed once effectively occupied. The fourteen states represented in the German capital also agreed to notify each other about their territorial plans and granted Belgian King Leopold II the area along the Congo River to administer as a free trade/navigation zone.

Prime Minister Salisbury (Robert Cecil), head of the British delegation to the Berlin Conference, later explained the European powers’ actions: “We have been engaged in drawing lines upon maps where no white man’s foot has ever trod; We have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where the mountains and rivers and lakes were.”4

Europeans controlled about 10 percent of the continent in 1870 but by 1914 only Ethiopia was independent of European control (with Liberia effectively a US colony).5 During this defining period of European colonialism thousands of Canadians helped Britain (and the Belgian King) conquer Africa. Four hundred Canadians traveled halfway across the world to beat back anti-colonial resistance in the Sudan while thousands more fought in defence of British imperial interests in the southern part of the continent. Canadians also led military expeditions, built rail lines and surveyed colonial borders.

The Royal Military College (RMC) in Kingston, Ontario, was the training ground for many of the Canadians who helped colonize Africa. Opened in 1876, the RMC was partly designed to train “proper white gentlemen”, in the words of Canadian Army Journal editor Andrew B. Godefroy, to be officers of British imperialism.6 “Suffering from its own shortage of officers, especially those with technical educations and military training, the British Army offered over a dozen commissions annually to graduates of RMC during the 1880s.”7 And the annual allotment was supplanted with more sizable recruitment drives on a number of occasions. In its first decade and a half, four times more graduates of “Canada’s West Point” were commissioned into the British army than the Canadian Permanent Force or Royal Canadian Mounted Police.8

Between 1880 and 1900 RMC-trained soldiers participated in at least 28 imperial campaigns, mostly in Africa.9 Over the next 15 years ex-RMC cadets fought in dozens more expeditions.

Most of the RMC graduates who fought in Africa were commissioned to the Royal Engineers, Royal Artillery or Royal Infantry. But many Canadian soldiers in Africa remained officers in the Canadian Permanent Force (militia) and were simply seconded to British units. In Bush Warfare Godefroy notes, “Canadians serving both in the Canadian and British Armies played a substantial role there in shaping the future of that continent.”10

The editor of the Canadian Army Journal further describes the importance of Canadian officers to British policy in Africa. “As the British Empire continued to expand its influence across the African continent, its forces and in particular its officer corps were overstretched. Constantly increasing demands for new subalterns since the end of the Second Afghan War (1870-1880), especially technically trained ones such as artillery officers and engineers, pushed the War Office in London to begin scouting for new officers among its colonies to fill the widening gap. Canada offered a tempting and easy source. With a nascent army of its own and a recently created Royal Military College that showed great promise and focused on technical education and training, the country soon became the preferred audience for targeted recruiting for British operational needs overseas.”11

Thrusting the “scramble” forward, Britain invaded Egypt in 1882. In Canadians on the Nile, 1882-1898 Roy MacLaren describes Canada’s connection to this conquest: “[British commanding General Garnet] Wolseley and his two lieutenants in Egypt, Graham and Buller, had all served in Canada. Two future Governor Generals of Canada and the commanding officer of the Canadian militia served under Wolseley in Egypt in 1882, and a former Governor General was assigned the conundrum of what to do with Egypt. And Egypt in 1882 did not merely involve British officers who had served in Canada. Canadians serving in British forces were also present.”12

At least 10 Canadians helped Britain assert control over North East Africa. RMC graduate Wyatt Rawson played a substantial role in the final defeat of Egyptian nationalists at Tel-el-Kebir. An aide-de-camp to General Wolseley, the Québec City born Rawson led a brigade of men on an important silent night march across a flat desert. The Royal Navy lieutenant used his knowledge of celestial navigation, acquired during an expedition in the Arctic, to gain enemy positions without being easily spotted.13

About 2,000 Egyptians were killed at Tel-el-Kebir, while only 57 British troops died in this final battle of a two-month campaign to crush the nationalist resistance.14 In its celebration of the battle at Tel-el-Kebir the Ottawa Daily Citizen declared, “Belonging to the Empire” is “our proudest political boast. Ours its greatness, ours its wealth, ours its treasure, ours its security, ours its renown.”15

London’s immediate aim in Egypt was to ensure debt repayments continued to flow northwards. They also wanted to secure control over the recently built Suez Canal, which had become a strategic route to Britain’s lucrative Indian and Far East colonies. Britain would maintain predominant influence over Egypt for seven decades.
The British conquest of Egypt accelerated intra-European rivalry in Africa. It also led Canada to participate in a major military expedition on Egypt’s southern border.

When Britain occupied Egypt it took control of the Sudan, which had been under Egyptian rule for half a century. But indigenous forces increasingly challenged foreign rule. Tens of thousands of Sudanese laid siege to British/Egyptian controlled Khartoum from March 13, 1884, to January 26, 1885. After cutting the 60,000-person city off from its supplies, the indigenous forces wrested control of Khartoum from famed English General Charles Gordon.

Four hundred Canadian boatmen were recruited to transport soldiers and supplies to rescue Gordon and defend Britain’s position on the upper Nile.16 A veteran of the 1870 Red River expedition to defeat Louis Riel in Manitoba, the British General in charge of the mission to save Gordon explicitly requested “Canadian Voyageurs”. General Wolseley believed these Canadian watermen, with experience in the fur trade, were best suited to navigate the raging cataracts of the Nile River.17

Revealing their racist sentiment, some Voyageurs told the Toronto Globe that Egyptians were “filthy”, “detestable” and “dirty”.18 Another more sympathetic Voyageur described the impact of the expedition on communities along the Nile. “We unavoidably did more or less damage to the crops, which must’ve caused serious loss to these poor people by whom… every inch of the spare soil is utilized.”19

Arguing in favour of the expedition, the Toronto Daily Mail claimed “Central Africa is not destined to remain always in the condition in which it is found today. The interest which is beginning to be concentrated upon the valley of the Nile are [sic] watched. There are also many indications of the feeling that exists throughout the civilized world that the Dark Continent is to be the next great theater upon which the dominant races of man are destined to play a conspicuous and important part.”20

The Voyageurs were deployed to Sudan under the British flag. But Canadian officials helped recruit the men, got some of them leave and organized a farewell for the expedition.21 They also celebrated the expedition’s return and provided them with a special commemorative medal.22 John A. McDonald’s government was even prepared to help Britain recruit three battalions if further reinforcements were needed in Sudan.23

Militaristic minded Canadians celebrated the Voyageurs’ contribution to creating a sense of Canadian nationhood. In a history of the expedition Roy MacLaren notes, “the Canadian boatman had shown in a unique fashion that Canada was indeed becoming a nation.”24

Benefiting from the mission’s profile, Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Denison, who led the Canadian boatmen, became a Conservative Member of Parliament (West Toronto) two years afterwards and today the names of the Canadians who ventured to Sudan are recorded in the book of remembrance in the memorial chamber of the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill.25

The Voyageurs weren’t the only Canadians deployed to Sudan. A Canadian Regiment of Artillery Major-General James “Cupid” Wilson fought with the Royal Artillery. His fighting was “Mentioned in Dispatches”, a form of recognition for bravery in action, and he was decorated with Egypt’s Khedive Star.26 Wilson was recalled from the Sudan to help quell the Métis-led North West Rebellion in Saskatchewan.27 Throughout these missions Wilson received his pay from Ottawa.28

Son of an influential Toronto politician, Commander Edmund Van Koughnet held a number of positions with the Royal Navy in Sudan.29 Van Koughnet led his unit on a long desert trek, commanded a navy steamer and was in charge of a vessel’s machine gun battery during a bloody battle near Khartoum. Under General Wolseley’s command, Van Koughnet was awarded the campaign medal and Khedive Bronze Star.30

Another Canadian helped plan the Nile expedition from London. As Director of Supplies and Transport at the War Office, Nova Scotia’s Arthur Lawrence Haliburton was “intimately connected with its complicated planning and organization.”31 Director of supplies and transport from 1878 to 1888, the King’s College (Halifax) educated Haliburton was assistant under-secretary of state for war and under-secretary at the War Office between 1888 and 1897.

As director of supplies and transport, Lord Halliburton oversaw the provisioning of a half-dozen British wars in Africa. His biography notes, “In 1879 came the Zulu war: this was followed in rapid succession by the first Transvaal War, by the Tel-el-Kebir campaign, by General Graham’s operations in the Sudan in 1884, by the Bechuanaland Expedition, and by the operations up the Nile and round Suakin, undertaken in the vain hope of relieving general Gordon and ‘smashing the Mahdi at Khartoum.’”32 As assistant under-secretary of state for war and under-secretary at the War Office, Halliburton planned numerous other military campaigns in Africa.

While this author found little information about Halliburton’s specific planning actions, a footnote from a biography published in 1913 provides a sense of his attitude towards Africans. “[Charles Dickens character] Caddy Jellyby, whose views on Africa were summed up in the comprehensive verdict that Africa was a beast, was one of Lord Halliburton’s favorite characters in fiction.”33 Dickens’ portrayal of Africa has been criticized as racist.34 For his significant contribution to British imperialism, the Queen conferred the peerage on Arthur Halliburton. According to his biography, “as a loyal Canadian he took the title of ‘Baron Haliburton of Windsor, in the province of Nova Scotia and Dominion of Canada.’”35

Despite failing to save Gordon or maintain control of Khartoum, British forces left a great many dead. In one battle 300 to 400 Sudanese died with 14 killed on the Egyptian/British side.36 In another confrontation 1,100 Sudanese lost their lives in contrast to the 74 British/Egyptian fighters who died.37

While Britain had overwhelming superiority of arms, moving men and supplies up the Nile was incredibly laborious. As such, the Sudanese “Mahdist” forces captured Khartoum before the British reinforcements reached the city. With Gordon dead and the expedition having various logistical difficulties, they put off attempting to recapture Khartoum.

Though defeated in the Sudan, the British were ultimately undeterred. A decade later, in Queen Victoria’s words, they “avenged” the death of Gordon and secured control of the Upper Nile.38

RMC graduate Lieutenant James Jay Bleecker Farley participated in the 1896 Dongola Expedition into northern Sudan. Up to 1,000 Mahdist soldiers were killed by the British-led forces (20 Egyptians died on the British side). In a speech at the RMC, Farley described participating in a number of skirmishes. “One of our patrols, after a very exciting chase, succeeded in capturing three ‘suspicious looking niggers,’ but they only turned out to be harmless villagers and rather badly frightened ones at that.”39

Montreal-born Sir Edouard Percy Girouard made a significant contribution to reconquering Sudan. The RMC graduate and former junior civil engineer with the Canadian Pacific Railway oversaw the construction of two hard-to-build rail lines from southern Egypt towards Khartoum. Queen Victoria’s Little Wars explains, “The problems involved in building a railway into a desert inhabited by hostile tribesmen were formidable. Railway experts and experienced soldiers alike agreed that it was an impractical idea but [British commander Herbert] Kitchener disagreed and Girouard made it a reality.”40

The railway allowed British forces to bypass 800 km of treacherous boating, which made moving troops and supplies much easier than during the time of the Canadian Voyageurs. Describing the strategic value of the rail he helped build, Girouard wrote: “It had now become possible with convenience and speed to send into the heart of the Sudan great armies independent of the season of the year and of the resources of the country; to supply them not only with abundant food and ammunition, but with all the varied paraphernalia of scientific war. … Though the battle was not yet fought, the victory was won.”41

The British re-conquest of the Sudan was a slaughter. At least three Canadians participated in the final battle at Omdurman where some 11,000 Sudanese were killed and 16,000 wounded.42 Forty-eight British/Egyptian soldiers were killed and about 400 wounded. According to Winston Churchill and other witnesses, at least 100 injured Sudanese were murdered after the battle.43 Additionally, British gunboats shelled civilians in Omdurman and the city was subsequently looted.44

Winston Churchill reported on the aftermath of the battle. “Here was where the artillery had opened on the swarming masses. Men had fallen in little groups of five or six to each shell. Nearer to the zeriba — about 1000 yards from it — the musketry had begun to tell, and the dead lay evenly scattered about — one every 10 yards. 200 yards further the full force of the fire — artillery, Maxims and rifles — had burst on them. In places desperate rushes to get on at all costs had been made by devoted fearless men. In such places the bodies lay so thickly as to hide the ground. Occasionally there were double layers of this hideous covering. Once I saw them lying three deep. In a space not exceeding 100 yards square more than 400 corpses lay festering.”45 Girouard’s rail enabled this killing and paved the way to six decades of British rule.

After successfully laying track towards Khartoum, Girouard was appointed president of the Egyptian State Railway and was given the British military’s prestigious Distinguished Service Order.46 Some considered Girouard’s contribution to the re-conquest of the Sudan second in importance only to General Kitchener.47 At an 1899 dinner in Montréal Canadian minister of militia Frederick Borden celebrated Girouard’s work. “Major Girouard has added luster, not only to his own name, but also to Montréal, to the dominion of Canada. He has also added luster to that military Institute of learning, the Royal Military College of Canada, which has sent out so many able graduates, a number of whom are in the Imperial Army and who have distinguished themselves.”48

British officials agreed with this assessment, as Girouard would be called on to oversee rail construction in south, west and east Africa. “Girouard occupies a central place in the historiography of railway development in Africa,” explains John Mwaruvie in an article on the Canadian imperialist’s career.49 “As the most experienced and successful authority on railway construction in Africa”, adds A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, Girouard would write several books detailing the strategic importance of railways.50

Girouard wasn’t the only Canadian tasked with building railway during the Scramble for Africa. To the south of Sudan, a number of Canadians helped survey possible rail routes from the East African Coast to Lake Victoria Nyanza on the border between modern Uganda and Kenya. The objective was to strengthen Britain’s grip over recalcitrant indigenous groups and to better integrate the area into the Empire’s North East Africa-India corridor.51 The railway also enabled the movement of commodities to international ports.52

Halifax-born Sir Philip Geoffrey Twining was sent by the Royal Engineers to Mombasa in 1891 to survey railway routes inland.53 The 29-year-old led a 10-month expedition that surveyed over 4,000 km.54 Twining was joined by another RMC-trained cadet, Huntley Brodie MacKay.55 Having already served British imperialism in West and South Africa, the Kingston-born MacKay was appointed acting administrator of the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEAC).56 Owned by British India Steam Navigation Company founder William Mackinnon, the IBEAC was granted the right to tax, administer justice and make treaties in 1888. The forerunner of the East Africa Protectorate, which became Kenya, in 1891 the IBEAC applied to the Commandant of the RMC for graduates to enter their service.57

To extend IBEAC control northwards from Mombasa the British Admiralty led the Witu Expedition in 1890. IBEAC leader Huntley MacKay was first over the wall and into the town in the decisive battle that left 100 locals dead and wounded (12 were hurt on the British side).58 British forces also burned Witu and a number of other “minor villages that offered resistance as well as [the second biggest centre] Mkonumbi.”59 After the Witu Expedition the IBEAC garrisoned the area with an Indian Police force.60

The IBEAC was bought out by London and soon thereafter British officials began promoting white settlement. The British encouraged European migration to modern Kenya by giving land to settlers on leases as long as 999 years.61 In White Mischief James Fox explains, “the first wave of settlers arrived in 1903 from Britain, Canada, Australia and South Africa. The photographs depict them as ‘Fortyniners’ from the Yukon [gold rush].”62

Many of the Canadians who settled in Kenya migrated from South Africa after fighting in the Second Boer War (see below).63 Just after the war RMC graduate George Henry Ronald Harris worked as a mining engineer for the East Africa Syndicates. After a stint with the Canadian Mounted Rifles in South Africa Walter D.M. Bell hunted elephants and sold ivory in British East Africa. In one single day he killed nine bull (male) elephants and over two decades of hunting he felled another thousand.64

Canadian/American businessman Sir Northrup McMillan was a prominent member of the white settler community. According to Origins of European Settlement in Kenya, McMillan “was allowed to purchase 14,351 acres in addition to the 15,000 acres acquired from the Crown in his own and his wife’s name.”65

The former “Cattle King of Ontario” did even better. Origins of European Settlement in Kenya explains that “Canadian timber merchant, F. R. Lingham received a 50-year lease over 128,000 acres of the Eldama Ravine forest and 50 acres of valuable waterfront land at Kilindini harbor.”66 Among the largest estates in the colony, this property was shared between Lingham and Ewart Grogan, president of the Colonists Association. While little is recorded about Lingham’s attitude towards Africans, his partner in the “Grogan and Lingham syndicate” was notoriously racist and brutal. Grogan wrote “the African native… is fundamentally inferior in mental development and ethical possibilities… to the white man… On principle he never tells the truth.”67

From Kenya to the Congo Canadians helped conquer Africa. Canadian doctor Rolph Leslie participated in an expedition organized by Belgian King Leopold II into the Congo in 1884. For his services the University of Toronto graduate was decorated with the Order of Leopold and the Congo Star.68

William Grant Stairs played an important role in two controversial expeditions to expand European influence over Central Africa. Like many in Halifax, the Stairs family’s wealth was partly accrued by stocking the Caribbean slave system. A family biography explains: “By 1787-88 he [John Stairs] was sending cargoes of fish, hogsheads (barrels), salmon, shingles, lumber and cod liver oil to Grenada, in exchange for rum… Much of what John was shipping to Grenada was either to construct houses for slave masters or to make containers to export sugar and molasses and other commodities to Britain, and much of the food went to feeding slaves.”69

In 1887 Stairs joined the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, which was ostensibly designed to “rescue” the British-backed governor of Equatoria, the southern part of today’s South Sudan. An appointment of General Charles Gordon, the Emin Pasha was thought to be threatened by the “Mahdist” forces that displaced the British from Khartoum in 1885. The aforementioned Scottish merchant, William MacKinnon, asked famed American “explorer” Henry Morton Stanley to lead a relief effort. Framed as a mission of mercy, according to The Last Expedition, “MacKinnon wanted Stanley to act as British East African Company agent, negotiating treaties and trading agreements on behalf of the company with the kings and chiefs through whose territories the expedition passed.”70 Partly successful on this front, another aim of the expedition was to get access to the area’s ivory.71

At the time of the expedition King Leopold II, for whom he had helped carve out the “Congo Free State”, employed Stanley. Seeing an opportunity to add to his already large personal colony, Leopold wanted Stanley to take a circuitous route all the way around South Africa, up the Congo River and across the interior of the continent.

While not an official British expedition, the War Office supported Stanley’s mission.72 One of ten whites, Stairs quickly became second-in-command of “the most ambitious, most expensive, and, ultimately, most disastrous expedition in Anglo African history.”73

Read from a humanistic or internationalist perspective, the RMC graduate’s diary of the three-year expedition is incredibly damning. Or, as prominent poet George Elliott Clarke put it, “Stairs’ account of his atrocities establishes that even Canadians, blinded by racism, can become swashbuckling mass murderers.”74

Stairs’ extensive diary, which he asked to be published upon his and Stanley’s death, makes it clear that locals regularly opposed the mission. One passage notes, “The natives made a tremendous noise all night and canoes came close to us, the natives yelling frantically for us to go away” while another entry explains, “the natives destroyed their food rather than let it fall into the hands of the invaders.”75

Stairs repeatedly admits to “ransacking the place”.76 A December 11, 1887 diary entry notes: “Out again at the natives, burned more houses and cut down more bananas; this time we went further up the valley and devastated the country there. In the afternoon [white officer, A. J. Mounteney] Jephson and I went up to some high hills at the back of the camp and burnt all we could see, driving off a lot of natives like so much game. I managed to capture some six goats and yesterday I also got six, which we gave to the men. The natives now must be pretty sick of having their property destroyed in the way we are doing, but it serves them right as they were the aggressors and after taking our cloth, fired on us.”77

On a number of occasions the expedition displayed mutilated bodies or severed heads as a “warning” to the locals.78 Stairs notes, “I often wonder what English people would say if they knew of the way in which we go for these natives; friendship we don’t want as then we should get very little meat and probably have to pay for the bananas. Every male native capable of using the bow is shot. This, of course, we must do. All the children and women are taken as slaves by our men to do work in the camps.”79

Stairs led numerous raiding parties to gather “carriers”, which were slaves in all but name.80 According to The Last Expedition, “[the mission] routinely captured natives, either to be ransomed for food, to get information, or simply to be used as guides for a few days.”81

To cross the continent the expedition relied on its superior firepower, which included the newly created 600-bullet-per-minute Maxim gun. Stairs describes one battle, stating that his men were “ready to land and my Maxim ready to murder them if they should dare to attack us.”82 On another day the firearm aficionado explained, “I cleaned the Maxim gun up thoroughly and fired some 20 or 30 rounds at some howling natives on the opposite bank.”83 Twenty months into the mission Stairs coyly admits “by what means have we traveled over 730 miles of country from the Congo to the lake? Why by rifle alone, by shooting and pillaging.”84

Beyond the immediate death and destruction, the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition opened new areas of the African interior to Arab slave traders and it is thought to be the source of a sleeping sickness epidemic that ravaged the region.85 The expedition was also devastating for its participants. With little food and much abuse from the white officers, only 253 of the 695 African porters and soldiers who started the mission survived.86 Additionally, hundreds of other Africans who became part of the expedition at later stages died as well.

There are disturbing claims that some white officers took sex slaves and in one alarming instance even paid to have an 11-year-old girl cooked and eaten. This story scandalized the British public.87

For his part, Stairs became almost pathologically inhumane. His September 28, 1887 diary entry notes: “It was most interesting, lying in the bush and watching the natives quietly at their days work; some women were pounding the bark of trees preparatory to making the coarse native cloth used all along this part of the river, others were making banana flower by pounding up dried bananas, men we could see building huts and engaged at other such work, boys and girls running about, singing, crying, others playing on a small instrument common all over Africa, a series of wooden strips, bent over a bridge and twanged with the thumb and forefinger. All was as it was every day until our discharge of bullets, when the usual uproar of screaming of women took place.”88

Even with some criticizing the expedition in Britain, Stairs’ efforts were celebrated in Canada. An honouring committee established by the mayor of Halifax decided to give him a sword made in London of Nova Scotia steel and the city organized a reception attended by the Lieutenant-Governor with a military band playing “Here the Conquering Hero Comes.”89

Within two years of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition Stairs helped King Leopold II conquer the resource-rich Katanga region of the Congo. Suggested to Leopold by British investors and having already impressed Stanley with his brutality, Stairs headed up a heavily armed mission that swelled to 2,000.90

The goal of the expedition was to extend Leopold’s authority over the Katanga region and to get a piece of the copper, ivory and gold trade. Stairs’ specific objective was to get Msiri, the ruler of the region, “to submit to the authorities of the Congo Free State, either by persuasion or by force.”91 In his diary Stairs says more or less as much, writing that his goals were “above all, to be successful with regard to Msiri ... to discover mines in Katanga that can be exploited ... to make some useful geographic discoveries.”92 Investigating the area’s suitability for European settlement and for raising domestic animals were other aims of the mission.

As leader of the mission Stairs prepared a daily journal for the Compagnie du Katanga. It details the terrain, resources and inhabitants along the way as well as other information that could assist in exploiting the region.93 It also explains his personal motivations for taking on the task despite spotty health. “I wasn’t happy [garrisoned with the Royal Engineers in England] in the real sense of the word. I felt my life passing without my doing anything worthwhile. Now I am freely making my way over the coastal plain with more than 300 men under my orders. My least word is law and I am truly the master.”94 Later, he describes his growing force and power. “I have thus, under my orders, 1350 men — quite a little army.”95

Stairs admitted to using slaves even though Leopold’s mission to the Congo was justified as a humanistic endeavour to stop the Arab slave trade.96 He wrote about how “the anti-slavery society will try and jump upon me for employing slaves as they seem to think I am doing… however, I don’t fancy these will disturb me to a great extent.”97 The RMC graduate also regularly severed hands and reportedly collected the head of an enemy.98

The expedition accomplished its principal objective. Stairs had Msiri killed and threatened Msiri’s brothers with the same fate unless they accepted Leopold as sovereign. After securing their submission Stairs divided the kingdom between Msiri’s adopted son and brothers.99

Stairs used a series of racist rationalizations to justify conquering Katanga. He describes the population as “unfortunate blacks who, very often, are incapable of managing their own affairs” and asked in the introduction of his diary: “Have we the right to take possession of this vast country, take it out of the hands of its local chiefs and to make it serve the realization of our goals? … To this question, I shall reply positively, yes. What value would it have [the land he was trying to conquer] in the hands of blacks, who, in their natural state, are far more cruel to one another than the worst Arabs or the wickedest whites.”100

At another point Stairs cites another standard colonial justification: “Only rarely do the natives think of improving their lot — that’s the great weakness among the Africans. Their fathers’ ways are theirs and their own customs will be those of their sons and grandsons.”101

Stairs found official support for his mission. The Royal Engineers gave him a leave to conquer Katanga. They did so because Stairs was working to colonize the Congo on behalf of Leopold and the British preferred Belgian control over the area rather than French possession.102

While Stairs died in the Congo his exploits were lauded in Ottawa when Senator W.J. Macdonald sought to move “a parliamentary resolution expressing satisfaction for Stairs’ manly conduct.”103 Two brass plaques honour Stairs at the RMC (one for him alone and another dedicated to Stairs as well as the aforementioned Huntley Brodie McKay and William Henry Robinson). The main plaque reads: “William Grant Stairs, Captain the Welsh Regiment. Born at Halifax Nova Scotia 1 July 1863. Lieutenant Royal Engineers 1885-91. Served on the staff of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition 1887 under the leadership of H.M. Stanley and exhibited great courage and devotion to duty. Died of fever on the 9 June 1892 at Chinde on the Zambesi whilst in command of the Katanga Expedition sent out by the King of the Belgians.”104 Another plaque was erected for Stairs (as well as McKay and Robinson) at St. George Cathedral in Kingston, Ontario. And a few hundred kilometres to the southwest “Stair’s Island” was named in his honour in Parry Sound.105

Stairs’ mission to Katanga added 150,000 square kilometres to Leopold’s massive Congo Free State.106 In a bid to extract rubber and other commodities from his personal colony, Leopold instituted a brutal system of forced labour. Individuals and communities were given rubber collection quotas that were both hard to fulfill and punishable by death. To prove they killed someone who failed to fulfill a quota soldiers from the Force Publique, the colonial police, were required to provide a severed hand. With Force Publique officers paid partly based on the number collected, severed hands became a sort of currency in the colony and baskets of hands the symbol of the Congo Free State.

Between 1891 and 1908 millions died from direct violence, as well as the starvation and disease, caused by Leopold II’s terror.107 Up to half the population died during Leopold’s reign, which sparked a significant international solidarity movement that forced the Belgian government to intervene and buy the colony.

While the Congolese were brutalized, Leopold and some other European capitalists did quite well. According to Belgian scholar Jules Marchal, Leopold extracted some 220 million francs (or US $1.1 billion in 1998 money) from the Congo and there are many monuments in Brussels that attest to this wealth.108

Canadians also played a role conquering Western Africa. In an article titled “Canadian Soldiers in West African Conflicts 1885-1905” Godefroy details how “Canadian officers both in British and Canadian service were present in [pacification] operations in Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast [Ghana], and Northern and Southern Nigeria.”109 They also helped survey rail lines and demarcate colonial borders.

Before becoming administrator of the Imperial British East Africa Company Huntley Brodie Mackay was Commanding Royal Engineer in West Africa. In 1887 the 29-year-old RMC graduate took charge of all Royal Engineers in the region.

During his time there Mackay was part of an expedition to destroy the Yonnie stronghold of Robari in what is now southeast Sierra Leone.110 In the fighting the British employed the first ever Maxim gun, reported MacMillan’s magazine. “Maxim, which here administered rather than received its baptism of fire, was turned on them, and they dropped off the roofs by dozens… When the leading troops entered the gates … there was not a living Yonnie left in the town, although there was no lack of their dead.”111

The relatively obscure expedition is mentioned in a 2005 United States Army command paper titled “Punishment, Revenge, and Retribution: A Historical Analysis of Punitive Operations”. It explains: “After the defeat of Yonni natives in Sierra Leone in 1887, Colonel [Sir Francis de] Winton told the assembled chiefs ‘the Queen has shown you her power by sending her force and taking her country which now belongs to me and the governor. When the people make war, those who have been conquered have to suffer for their misdeeds.’ Winton followed up this speech with some Maxim fire, to impress upon the natives his almost supernatural power.”112

Soon after this display of military prowess, the British convinced a number of chiefs in the region to build roads into their communities. At no cost to the colonial administration, these roads strengthened British control over the area.113

For his courage in fighting the Yonnie, Captain Mackay won the British military’s Distinguished Service Order and two memorial plaques honour him in Kingston, Ontario.114 Upon his death from “fever” in Mombasa the Montréal Star lauded Mackay. Describing him as “the best authority on Africa”, the paper praised his role in saving the “life of a wretched, naked little savage” and “work under a broiling tropical sun, with no assistance but that of the ignorant indolent natives.”115

Saint John-born William Henry Robinson replaced Mackay as West Africa’s Commanding Royal Engineer in 1889.116 In 1892 the 29-year-old RMC graduate led a small force to destroy a rebellion not far from the former Yonnie stronghold. Godefroy explains: “When Robinson and his party of Sierra Leone Frontier Police attacked his stockade on 14 March, however, [rebel leader] Karimu was ready to receive them and repulsed their initial assault. The momentum lost, Captain Robinson tried to rally the attack by personally setting explosive charges at the gates, hoping to blow them open and allow for his men to rush through.”117 Robinson was shot in the battle and ultimately became the first RMC graduate to give his life fighting for British colonialism.

Two years later Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Gerard Fairtlough also died fighting in Sierra Leone.118 An RMC graduate, turned instructor, Fairtlough “distinguished” himself fighting Fodi-Silah.119

Captain Bertie Harold Oliver Armstrong was a Royal Engineer intelligence officer during the 1898-1899 “Hut Tax War”, which mainly took place in the north of Sierra Leone. The RMC graduate helped assess enemy strengths and develop plans to defeat what Walter Rodney described as “the expression of widespread resistance against the imposition of colonial rule.”120

The Hut Tax War was a response to a tax imposed on all dwellings to pay for British administration. Established just after London declared Sierra Leone a Protectorate in 1896, the tax often amounted to more than the value of the dwelling and was coupled with a much-disliked demand for peasants to maintain roads. (The imposition of tax by colonial authorities precipitated major socio-economic changes across the continent, forcing ordinary people to earn money usually by seeking employment on a plantation or in a mine.)121

Colonial forces killed hundreds suppressing a well-orchestrated guerrilla campaign led by Bai Bureh. The British destroyed entire towns, no matter whether they resisted or not.122 Ten months into the uprising, British forces exiled Bai Bureh and hanged a number of his comrades.123 Still, resistance spread to the southern provinces of the protectorate and today Bai Bureh is a revered figure with his picture on several Sierra Leonean paper bills.

After the revolt was suppressed, Bertie Armstrong was appointed Commanding Royal Engineer for West Africa. He was the fourth Canadian to hold this post between 1887 and 1899.124 (RMC graduate Henry Sloggett was the third Canadian Commanding Royal Engineer during this period.)125

Just before the Hut Tax uprising the British consolidated their forces in the region into one command. Partly in response to growing competition with France, in 1897 the British military created the West African Frontier Force (WAFF), which Walter Rodney called, “The most important force in the conquest of West African colonies by the British … The [WAFF] soldiers being Africans and the officers English.”126 Or Canadian.

At the start of the 1900s Canadian Militia officers, Robert Cockburn, A.W. Boddy and F. Homer-Dixon, fought with the WAFF.127 So did Canadians G.M. Sutherland, W.F.W. Carstairs and W.H. Gundry. Two brothers from the Canadian Militia, Captain B.M. Read and Lieutenant Henry Read, as well as a member of the Canadian Engineers, J.T.M. Burnside, joined these men.128

Seconded to the WAFF, Toronto-born Lieutenant Archibald Hayes Macdonell served as a scout as well as a platoon and company level commander in seven separate expeditions between 1901 and 1904.129 Throughout his time in West Africa Macdonell was an officer of the Canadian Militia and he would later command the Royal Canadian Regiment. After he retired from the military Macdonell was appointed to the Senate.130

Among numerous flashpoints the WAFF helped extend British influence over the valuable Gold Coast colony. Between 1820 and 1900 England fought numerous battles/wars to conquer the Ashanti in today’s northern Ghana. A difficult adversary, London was prepared to spill significant blood to get more of Greater Ashanti’s vast quantities of gold.

Godefroy writes that “Canadians began entering this theatre sometime after [1873], with many seeing action against the Ashanti at one point or another.”131 Prior to helping conquer Egypt, the aforementioned Wyatt Rawson fought in the Third Anglo-Ashanti War of 1873-1874.132 Wounded during the capture of Amoaful, Wyatt was promoted to lieutenant afterwards.133

During the fighting in Ghana the British employed the first rapid-fire Gatling gun in Africa, killing thousands of Asante.134 The war was commanded by General Grant Wolseley, notes The Fall of the Asante Empire, who believed “‘the African’ was an ‘objectionable animal’ who was intended to be ‘the white man’s servant.’”135 African Times described another element driving British thinking. The newspaper published an article titled “The Ashanti War: Gold, Gold, Gold” that claimed victory would bring tens of millions of pounds worth of gold to Britain each year.136

As part of the peace London demanded, “The King of Ashanti promises to pay the sum of 50,000 ounces of approved gold as an indemnity for the expenses he has occasioned to Her Majesty the Queen of England by the late war.”137 In the years after the war, according to The Fall of the Asante Empire, “Danish, Canadian and Scottish gold prospectors” made their way to the area.138

When the Ashanti refused to accept a British Protectorate two decades later, London claimed they’d failed to fulfill their financial obligations under the 1874 peace treaty and launched another invasion. Casimir van Straubanzee was a special service officer with the Royal Artillery during the fourth Ashanti war of 1895-1896.139 Another RMC graduate, Captain Duncan Sayre MacInnes, who was responsible for communications and logistics, as well as a number of engineering duties, joined the 28 year old.140 MacInnes helped construct an important fort at the Ashanti capital of Kumasi.141 Son of a senator, MacInnes participated in a number of subsequent expeditions to occupy the hinterland of modern Ghana.142 For more than half a century a selected fourth year RMC cadet has been awarded the Duncan Sayre MacInnes Memorial Scholarship.

A Royal Canadian Artillery captain seconded to the Gold Coast Regiment of the West African Frontier Force, John F. Crean fought against the Asante in 1900.143 After artefacts he compiled appeared in a controversial 1990 Royal Ontario Museum exhibit titled Into the Heart of Africa John Crean’s relative called her great-uncle someone who “spent his entire adult life in one part or another of the globe killing native people on behalf of God, Queen and Empire. His job was to provide the brute force necessary to keep open ‘Pax’ Britannica operating in the interests of the British merchant class.”144

A few years thereafter the Canadian militia’s Hugh Albert Kortright joined the Gold Coast Constabulary, which oversaw internal security and policing in the colony.145 From 1900 to 1918 Kortright held various positions including Assistant Inspector Gold Coast Constabulary and then became the colony’s District Commissioner Volta River District.146

Control over the Gold Coast brought significant wealth to some British capitalists. Ashanti Gold Corporation, for instance, extracted six million ounces of gold from the colony between 1898 and 1946.147

In a bid to locate resources and solidify its control, the Colonial Office employed Galt Ontario born Sir Frederick Gordon Guggisberg to survey Ashanti and the Gold Coast Colony in 1902.148 Three years later he was appointed director of surveys in the colony. During his time surveying the Gold Coast Guggisberg helped mark over 300 mining and timber concessions and mapped almost the entire colony.149

A decade earlier RMC graduate John Irvine Lang-Hyde helped survey the Gold Coast Railway and the most western boundary of the colony.150 During his time in the region he was also second-in-command of the Attabalu Expeditionary Force. For his contribution to the conquest of Ghana, Lang Hyde was made a Companion of Saint Michael and St. George.151

A few years later Lang-Hyde participated in the 1900-1901 Anglo-French boundary commission that demarcated territory between today’s Nigeria and Niger.152 Subsequently, Lang-Hyde became commissioner of Lagos, which was then its own separate colony.153 In praise of his efforts, Lang-Hyde was made a Companion of the Order of the Military Garter.154

A couple of Canadian military men helped survey Nigeria. Captain L.C.A. de B. Doucet, an expert geographer, played a prominent role in the 1906 Yola to Lake Chad Boundary Agreement. This accord between the United Kingdom and Germany demarcated the border between today’s southern Nigeria and Cameroon.155

After his role in Ghana the aforementioned Sir Frederick Guggisberg was appointed director of surveys in southern Nigeria in 1910.156 The next year he published The Handbook of the Southern Nigeria Survey. When the southern and northern protectorates were combined in 1913 Guggisberg became surveyor-general of Nigeria.157

But it wasn’t just mapping and surveying; many Canadians helped the British conquer Nigeria. A History of Nigeria explains how this was accomplished: “The use or threat of violence on the part of the British must be seen as the single most important factor allowing them to assume political control over the territories that made up the various protectorates of Nigeria.”158

A lieutenant in the West African Frontier Force, Canadian Gore Munbee Barrow was one of 25 European officers who led a thousand-man expedition in 1903 to conquer the Sokoto Caliphate in northern Nigeria.159 With four Maxims and four 75mm cannons, it took a 90-minute battle to capture the capital of Sokoto, which had been West Africa’s largest single state in the nineteenth century. According to Wars of Imperial Conquest in Africa, 1830-1914, “as the WAFF column neared the city, hordes of horsemen and footmen armed with swords, spears, old guns and bows and arrows appeared, charging the square over and over again, only to be mown down by machine gun and carbine fire.”160

In 1894 RMC graduate Kenneth Jeffrey Campbell was “Mentioned in Dispatches” and awarded the Distinguished Service Order for fighting to capture the town of Brohemie (Ebrohimi) on the Benin River. Speaking to the Royal Military College Club about the attack, Campbell described how “a hail of led [was] ‘pumped’ on them from our Maxim guns, together with rockets discharged into the town from the rocket party.”161 The gunboat HMS Phoebe fired 1,100 4 x 7 shells onto the secluded town.162

For weeks the British blocked food from entering the town and ultimately, as they’d done to a number of villages on route, they burned Brohemie.163 Campbell told the RMC audience, “It was fired and so effectually razed to the ground that not a stick remains standing. The rebel Nanna is now confined … Half measures are of no avail in dealing with the West African. If obliged to strike, hit hard.”164 According to the area’s chief/governor, 500 of his followers were killed in the attack on Brohemie.165

The aim of the campaign was to destroy a ruler, Nanna, whose economic prowess impeded the Royal Niger Company and other British business interests from capturing more of the area’s wealth and trade. In Merchant Prince of the Niger Delta: The Rise & Fall of Nana Olomu, Last Governor of the Benin River Obaro Ikime notes: “This struggle was occasioned by the determination of the British to impose their rule effectively on the Nigerian peoples, and the equally strong determination of the Nigerian people to resist the imposition of British rule. The Nana episode must be seen therefore as only one act in the drama that was to be enacted throughout southern Nigeria in the period from 1891 to 1914.”166

At the time of the expedition Campbell served as deputy consul-general and acting commissioner of the Oil River Protectorate (and ultimately became its consul general).167 Taking its name from the area’s palm oil riches, the Oil Rivers Protectorate was established in the delta of the Niger River in modern Nigeria in 1885. Campbell explained, “Britain true to [her] instincts annexed the Oil Rivers, the largest and best share of that part of West Africa, but with a feeling that we should have had [it] all.”168

A few years after destroying Nanna’s power, London moved to extend its writ further into the interior of Nigeria. Born in Sherbrooke, Quebec, William Heneker helped conquer this part of the Benin Empire. After the British took charge of the area during the Benin Expedition of 1897 Captain Heneker guarded an imprisoned chief, Oba.169 Not long thereafter Heneker helped capture Oba’s son. Benin Under British Administration explains, “The exiled Oba’s son, Aiguobasimwin, was also dislodged from Igbanke by troops under Captains Heneker and Sheppard.”170

In May 1898 Heneker was part of a small force that conquered the town of Ehor and surrounding villages. One account notes how British forces “seized the opportunity to utterly destroy it [Ehor], burning it and knocking down the walls.”171

The next year Heneker was an intelligence and survey officer in the Benin Territories Expedition, which the overall commander described as “the sequel” to the larger campaign two years earlier. In Correspondence Relating to the Benin Territories Expedition, 1899 consul general Sir R. Moor mentioned Heneker leading a force that destroyed the towns of Udo and Idumere and a company under the RMC graduate’s command “burnt and completely destroyed the large town of Ugiami, including the king’s house.”172

The invasions of Benin gave the British access to valuable commodities. Author William N. M. Geary remarks, “the results of the operations opened up 3000 or more square miles rich in rubber forests and other African produce.”173 After the expedition British capitalists intensified efforts to exploit the area’s rubber forests and the Royal Niger Company expanded deeper into Benin. 174

As he rose through the ranks of the Southern Nigeria Regiment, which was part of the West African Frontier Force, Heneker led ever more soldiers. With a force of more than 200 men, he commanded the Ulia and Ishan Expeditions.175 In his 1906 book Bush Warfare Heneker described the scorched-earth policy the Ishan Expedition employed: “A fighting column left camp every morning, and one after another each town in the country was attacked and taken. All the juju groves [sacred natural forests] were cut down, and stores of food either destroyed or carried back to camp.”176

Heneker and other Canadians’ role in the region steadily grew. “Canadian participation in the pacification of West Africa,” notes Godefroy, “appeared to climax in late 1901 when the British launched a substantial civil-military operation against the Aro group of the Ibo tribe.”177 At least a dozen Canadians were among the white officer corps who led a force of some 2,000 soldiers and 2,000 porters to open a 193 km wide and 144 km long area of today’s eastern Nigeria to British directed commerce.178 Early planning for the Anglo-Aro War was actually initiated by the Royal Niger Company, which wanted a bigger piece of the area’s trade.179

Canadian Militia Lieutenant J.L.R. Parry was “Mentioned in Dispatches” for his services during the Aro Expedition.180 So was Canadian Militia Lieutenant James Wayling.181 During a major battle at Edimma, wrote overall British commander A. F. Montanaro, “Lieutenant A.E. Rastrick, Canadian Militia … who was in command of the Maxim [gun], used it with great effect, and so good was the fire control and discipline that the enemy was forced to retreat.”182

Heneker was the senior Canadian during the Aro campaign. Second in authority to Montanaro, the RMC grad led one of the four columns dispatched in November 1901 towards Arochukwu, the capital of the Aro families. His force consisted of 19 European officers, one local officer, 479 local rank and file, one Maxim gun and crew, 13 gun carriers and 225 general carriers.183

The capture of Arochukwu was a brutal, one-sided affair. S. O. Onwukwe describes the “total destruction of the Empire” in The Rise and Fall of the Arochukwu Empire, 1400-1902.184 “The British invaders did not spare Arochukwu, they were waging a punitive war and had no respect for any shrine. The order to the troops was ‘attack, destroy and burn’. The field force took this instruction literally.”185

Afterwards the British hanged some Aro leaders and blew up what they thought was an important religious site. The defeat of the Aro Confederacy extended British control further into the interior of Nigeria but resistance would continue for a number of years.

Between 1897 and 1906 Heneker fought in a dozen separate campaigns in West Africa. During this time he received several “Mentions in Dispatches” and a series of awards including the Distinguished Service Order.186 “One of the most successful British combat leaders on the West African coast”, Heneker would later be promoted to major general, lieutenant general and finally general.187

After completing his service in West Africa Heneker published Bush Warfare, which for years was “required reading and a resource for all commanders” and would inform the later War Office manual Notes on Imperial Policing.188 In a section of his book titled “General Dealings” Heneker writes: “Savage nations have, as a rule, to be cowed, either by having their warriors severely beaten in action and made to suffer heavy losses, as, in the case of the taking of Benin City, and in the advance on Ulia in the Ishan Expedition, or, should the nation avoid a stand-up fight, and resort to guerrilla warfare, the power of the invading force must be shown by advancing into the most inaccessible and sacred juju parts of the country, eating up the food supplies and raiding rapidly to all points of the compass.

“The great thing is to impress savages with the fact that they are the weaker, and that it is intended to occupy the country, enforce the will of the white man, and accomplish the object for which the expedition is organized. No leniency or half measures are of any use until the savage has felt the power of force. Leniency is treated as a sign of weakness, and half measures as an undecided and wavering policy.”189

Like other parts of the continent, Canadians helped Britain colonize southern Africa. In 1879 the British moved to conquer the Zulu Empire in what is now most of the South African state of KwaZulu-Natal. A former Northwest Mounted Police officer, Captain Montague White Fraser fought there and the aforementioned Edmund Van Koughnet headed up a series of boat expeditions during the Zulu war.190 The aforementioned Lord Arthur Halliburton was made a Companion of the Order of Bath for his role as the War Office’s Director of Supplies and Transport during the Zulu war.191

Upwards of 10,000 Zulus died in the fighting, as did 1,000 British troops.192 During their “heroic” victory at Rorke’s Drift British forces committed war crimes. According to a 2003 Guardian article, “In the hours after the battle senior officers and enlisted men of a force sent to relieve the garrison are said to have killed hundreds of wounded Zulu prisoners. Some were bayoneted, some hanged and others buried alive in mass graves.”193

London’s desire to conquer the Zulu was motivated by a mix of economic, political and geostrategic considerations. The discovery of diamonds near the Vaal River in 1867 led to massive growth in Kimberley and in 1873 London annexed the area as part of Griqualand West. Some colonial officials wanted Griqualand West to unite with the other colonies in the area similar to the Confederation of Upper and Lower Canada established a few years earlier. But the Zulu (and Boer) were an obstacle to such a plan, which would have strengthened Britain’s position over an important naval passageway.

Having nearly defeated the Boer two years earlier, the large Zulu army was viewed as a threat to white domination of the region.194 By crushing the Zulu the British removed this threat and also sped up the process of turning these Bantu people into a source of cheap labour for British capitalists.195

As part of its bid to dominate southern Africa, London conquered the interior. Before becoming administrator of the Imperial British East Africa Company and Commanding Royal Engineer in West Africa, Huntley Brodie Mackay served as a Special Service Officer in the Bechuanaland Expedition.196 The 1884-1885 military expedition gave the British control over a large area to the north of today’s South Africa, which was eyed by the Germans and Boers. Beyond this competition, the British wanted to stop Boer “freebooters” from dissuading black labourers from traveling to work in the diamond mines. In White Men’s Dreams, Black Men’s Blood Christopher Paulin argues that “the possibility of the [the Boer state of] Transvaal shutting off an important supply of labour to the diamond mines … played the most prominent role in [British general] Derby’s decision to force a settlement on [President of the Transvaal, Paul] Kruger.”

After asserting control of the area the British worked to drive the Tswana people from their land and onto reserves to increase the pool of cheap labour. Paulin notes, “The proletarianization of the southern Tswana occurred between 1885 to 1887. The Bechuanaland Land Commission officially laid the foundations of the native reserves as labour pools and initiated what would be called apartheid in the second half of the 20th century.”197 The British Bechuanaland Protectorate lasted until the 1960s when modern Botswana was created.

Within a few years of its conquest, Bechuanaland would be the staging ground for an unsuccessful British invasion of the two Boer republics (Orange Free State and Transvaal).198 In the late 1800s these descendants of Dutch settlers increasingly found themselves at odds with British interests in southern Africa.199 Large quantities of gold were found thirty miles south of the Boer capital, Pretoria, in 1886 and the prime minister of UK’s Cape Colony, Cecil Rhodes, and other British miners wanted to get their hands on more of the loot. There was also a geostrategic calculation. The Boer gold and diamond fields were drawing the economic heart of southern Africa away from the main British colonies on the coast. If this continued London feared that the four southern African colonies might unite, but outside of the British orbit, which threatened its control of an important shipping lane.200

Between 1898 and 1902 London launched a vicious war against the Boer. With Cecil Rhodes’ Imperial South African Association promoting anti-Boer sentiment in this country, some 7,400 Canadians fought to strengthen Britain’s position in southern Africa.201 Similar to the Voyageurs in the Sudan, militaristic-minded Canadians claimed the battles in South Africa were a sign of nationhood, a declaration “to the world that a new power had arisen in the West.”202

Many previously mentioned RMC graduates fought in the Boer War. After his success in Sudan Edmund Van Koughnet was responsible for Naval Transport at Durban and was made a Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George in recognition of his fighting.203 For his part, Montréal’s Girouard was Director of Imperial Military Railways during the war and received awards for his service. Afterwards he became Commissioner of Railways for the Transvaal and Orange River colonies, which are now part of South Africa.204

The war was devastating for the Boers. As part of a scorched-earth campaign the British-led forces burned their crops and homesteads and poisoned their wells.205 About 200,000 Boer were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. Twenty-eight thousand (mostly children) died of disease, starvation and exposure in these camps.206

In Another Kind of Justice: Canadian Military Law from Confederation to Somalia Chris Madsen points out: “Canadian troops became intimately involved in the nastier aspects of the South African war.”207 Whole columns of troops participated in search, expel and burn missions.208 Looting was common. One Canadian soldier wrote home, “as fast as we come up the country … we loot the farms.”209 Another wrote, “I tell you there is some fun in it. We ride up to a house and commandeer anything you set your eyes on. We are living pretty well now.”210 There are also numerous documented instances of Canadian troops raping and killing innocent civilians.211

The British brutalized the Boer during the war but out of racial solidarity and a need to draw them into the British orbit (rather than the German) they reversed course immediately afterwards. In The Great War in Africa Byron Farwell writes: “The conquerors behaved with remarkable magnanimity and generosity, pouring millions of pounds into the new colonies to rehabilitate the people and resettle them on the land; agriculture and mining were reestablished. … Even more remarkable, in 1907, only five years after the end of the war, free elections were permitted, first in the Transvaal and then in the Orange River colony, as the Orange Freestate had become, and the old Boer leaders again took up the reins of political power. … In 1910 all four South African colonies united to become the Union of South Africa with [former Boer leader Louis] Botha as prime minister.”212

As with the Boer, the war was devastating for many Africans. Over 100,000 blacks were held in concentration camps but the British failed to keep a tally of their deaths so it’s not known how many died of disease or starvation.213 Some estimate that as many as 20,000 blacks were worked to death in camps during the war.214

Unlike the Boer, the Africans’ plight didn’t improve much after the war. In Painting the Map Red: Canada and the South African War, 1899-1902 Carman Miller notes, “Although imperialists had made much of the Boer maltreatment of the Blacks, the British did little after the war to remedy their injustices.”215 In fact, the war reinforced white/British dominance over the region’s indigenous population.

The peace agreement with the Boer included a guarantee that Africans would not be granted the right to vote before the two defeated republics gained independence. In The History of Britain in Africa John Charles Hatch explains: “By the time that self-government was restored in 1906 and 1907, they [the Boer] were able to reestablish the racial foundations of their states on the traditional principle of ‘No equality in church or state.’”216 Blacks and mixed race people were excluded from voting in the postwar elections and would not gain full civil rights for nine decades.

In the years after the war British forces also suppressed any sign of African resistance. Some Canadians participated in this repression. No Colours, No Drums: Canadians in the South African Constabulary explains, “A number of Canadians remained in the Constabulary until 1908 when it was divided and continued into the South African police in 1913.”217 Established at the end of 1900, the South African Constabulary was a paramilitary police force designed to take over once British forces pacified the Transvaal and Orange River Colonies during the Boer War. At least 1,500 Canadians served in the South African Constabulary during and after the war.218

In 1906 the South African Constabulary repressed an anti-tax uprising in Natal and when Swaziland appeared on the verge of insurrection two mobile columns of the constabulary were deployed there.219 Canadian Lieutenant John French helped put down the rebellion in Natal, as did trooper Walter Bradley who was part of the Natal police.220 Morrisburg Ontario’s Sergeant Lorne Bouck was part of a squadron that killed 21 Zulus and was himself killed soon after.221

After the war Henry Rivington Poussette joined the constabulary. The RMC graduate was appointed Durban District Commandant and later became the first Canadian Trade Commissioner in that city.222

During this period Captain George Beer became inspector and deputy commissioner in the South African police.223 The aforementioned Duncan Sayre MacInnes served as assistant director of works to the South African Constabulary in the Cape Colony.224 The aforementioned West African commander William Heneker, who was deputy assistant adjutant and quarter-master-general of the Orange River Colony District from 1906 to 1910, joined him.225

In addition to suppressing African resistance to white rule, the South African Constabulary tracked down Chinese workers brought in to do the most backbreaking jobs after the war. With no right to property or free movement, many of the 60,000 Chinese miners fled their worksites in the hopes of returning home or simply finding a better life elsewhere.226

In 1913 Mahatma Gandhi organized a march from Natal to Johannesburg to draw attention to the Indian community’s legally enforced disenfranchisement. Victoria, B.C.’s Charles Slingsby Fall, a district commandant along the way, arrested Gandhi and then the 2,000 civil rights protesters accompanying him.227 In the years after the war Colonel Fall held a number of top policing posts, including deputy commissioner of the South African police.228

South Africa was a major prize. Its resources and geostrategic location greatly enhanced British power on the continent. During World War I South Africa led the conquest of two German African colonies. A largely South African force conquered German South West Africa (Namibia) and German East Africa (Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi).

Canada was modestly involved in two African theatres of World War I, which arguably represents the end of the European Scramble for Africa. From the Queen Charlotte Islands (Haida Gwaii) in British Columbia, naval air serviceman H. J. Arnold helped destroy a major German naval vessel, the Königsberg, during the British/Belgian/South African conquest of German East Africa.229 Two other Canadian airmen, London’s John Robinson and Toronto’s Rudolf Delamere, also served in what is now mostly Tanzania/Rwanda/Burundi.230

Commandant of the RMC from 1909 to 1913, Colonel J.H.V. Crowe commanded an artillery division for famed South African General Jan Christiaan Smuts and later published General Smuts’ Campaign in East Africa.231 Crowe, English born, but an individual with deeper roots in this country, commanded the force that extended Britain’s control over the other side of the continent.

The son of a Québec City MP and grandson of a senator, Sir Charles MacPherson Dobell commanded an 18,000 man Anglo-French force that captured the Cameroons and Togoland.232 Gazetted as Inspector General of the West African Frontier Force in 1913, the RMC grad’s force defeated the Germans in fighting that destroyed many villages and left thousands of West Africans dead.233 Early in the two-year campaign Dobell’s force captured the main centres of Lomé and Douala and he became de facto governor over large parts of today’s Togo and Cameroon. A telegram from London said “General Dobell should assume Government with full powers in all matters military and civil.”234

British officials justified seizing the German colony as a response to the war in Europe, but to a large extent World War I was the outgrowth of intra-imperial competition in Africa and elsewhere. In The Anglo-French “Condominium” in Cameroon, 1914-1916 Lovett Elango points to “the imperialist motives of the campaign”, which saw the two allies clash over their territorial ambitions. Elango concludes, “the war merely provided Britain and France a pretext for further colonial conquest and annexation.”235 After the German defeat the colony was partitioned between the two European colonial powers.

For his part Dobell was praised for helping to extend the British Empire. He was knighted, promoted to lieutenant general and given a command position in the 1917 Egyptian Expeditionary Force.236

Beyond Dobell and Crowe, 600,000 Canadians fought in World War I. Nearly 60,000 died and another 150,000 returned home wounded fighting in a war with no clear and compelling purpose other than rivalry between up-and-coming Germany and the imperial powers of the day, Britain and France.237 In fact, support for the British Empire was Ottawa’s primary motive in joining the war. As Prime Minister Robert Borden saw it, the fight was “to put forth every effort and to make every sacrifice necessary to ensure the integrity and maintain the honour of our empire.”238

Canada’s massive contribution to World War I propped up British (as well as French, Belgian and South African) rule in Africa. It also added to it. Similar to the Berlin Conference of 1885, after World War I European leaders gathered to redraw Africa’s borders. But this time the Canadian prime minister attended.

World War I greatly reshaped colonial borders in Africa. Germany lost what is now Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi and part of Mozambique (German East Africa) as well as Namibia (German West Africa) and Cameroon and Togoland. South Africa gained Namibia, Britain gained Tanzania and part of Cameroon, France gained Togo and part of Cameroon while Belgium took Burundi and Rwanda.

The other British Dominions (Australia, New Zealand and South Africa) that fought alongside London were compensated with German properties. With no German colonies nearby Ottawa asked the Imperial War Cabinet if it could take possession of the British West Indies as compensation for Canada’s defence of the Empire.239 London balked.240

Ottawa was unsuccessful in securing the British Caribbean partly because the request did not find unanimous domestic support. Prime Minister Borden was of two minds on the issue. From London he dispatched a cable noting, “the responsibilities of governing subject races would probably exercise a broadening influence upon our people as the dominion thus constituted would closely resemble in its problems and its duties the empire as a whole.”241 But, on the other hand, Borden feared that the Caribbean’s black population might want to vote. He remarked upon “the difficulty of dealing with the coloured population, who would probably be more restless under Canadian law than under British control and would desire and perhaps insist upon representation in Parliament.”242