Chris Peers - The African Wars: Warriors And Soldiers Of The Colonial Campaigns

First published in Great Britain in 2010 by
Pen & Sword Military
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
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Barnsley
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Copyright Chris Peers 2010

ISBN 978 1 84884 121 5
epub ISBN 9781848841215
prc ISBN 9781844687633

The right of Chris Peers to be identified as Author of this Work has been
asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.

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The author especially wishes to thank the following for assistance with illustrations, and for their advice and encouragement: John Catton, Alan Colquhoun, Mark Copplestone, David Le Breton and the staff of the Birmingham City Reference Library. Also my wife, Kate, who has not only supplied some of the photographs but, as always, supported the entire project well beyond the call of duty. Of course none of the above are responsible for any of the opinions expressed in these pages.

The theme of this book is warfare in sub-Saharan Africa during the nineteenth century. During that century European involvement in the affairs of the continent, which began with no more than a handful of enclaves and trading posts around the coast, gradually became the most important factor in the lives of its people, culminating in the scramble for Africa of the 1880s and 1890s and the incorporation of the bulk of the continent into the empires of the European powers. This period also coincided with the Industrial Revolution in Europe, and the development of ever more sophisticated rifles, steamships and other materials of war. Native African armies, which had developed their own methods of fighting against similarly equipped opponents, now had to adapt to deal with enemies whose technological superiority increased almost year by year. The varying success with which they did this, and the adaptations which they and the African environment forced on the invaders in their turn, makes this a fascinating story. It is also, of course, an immense subject, and popular military history has traditionally concerned itself only with a few of the highlights. So in the English-speaking world the Anglo-Zulu war of 1879 and the Sudan campaigns of 1885 and 1898 are among the best-known episodes of the colonial era, while most of the smaller-scale bush wars which raged across the continent remain in obscurity. In a book of this size it has still been necessary to concentrate on a few subjects which are of particular interest from a historical or tactical point of view. But many of these campaigns may be unfamiliar, while it is to be hoped that a discussion of the better known ones will benefit from being placed in a wider context.

In recent years archaeology, genetics and other scientific disciplines have confirmed what had been suspected since the days of Charles Darwin: that Africa was the original home of the human race, and that until the last few thousand years most of the people living on earth have been Africans. There is a paradox here, because no other inhabited continent appears so hostile to human life. Most of the interior is a vast, elevated plateau cut off from the narrow coastal plain by mountains and escarpments. To the north, access from Europe is cut off by the Sahara Desert, an obstacle as formidable as any ocean. South of the Sahara the coast has few useful harbours, and formidable rapids make most of the rivers unnavigable. Deserts and jungles cover huge areas, while elsewhere the soil is often too poor to support a dense agricultural population, or alternating droughts and floods make farming a precarious business. Malaria and a host of other endemic diseases affect people and their livestock, and in places make life impossible for newcomers without the benefit of natural immunity or modern medicines.

Like the malarial mosquito, the tsetse fly has had a profound influence on the course of African history. It can carry sleeping sickness in some areas, but in most of its range it is not harmful to humans. It does, however, transmit a parasite which is fatal to unacclimatized cattle and horses. Even in the tropics its distribution is patchy, and elevated areas such as the Kenya Highlands are generally free from its ravages, but in most of tropical Africa north of the Zambezi River its presence severely restricted the use of horses for transport and warfare. South of the Zambezi white settlers found it possible to employ ox-drawn wagons, but elsewhere the small native breeds of cattle, the only ones which could survive the tsetse fly, were unsuitable for use as draught animals. Military expeditions were therefore forced to rely on human muscle to transport their food and munitions. In some places, especially in East Africa, whole tribes specialized in this carrying trade, but all too often it was necessary to conscript reluctant porters from the local population at gunpoint, and to maintain a constant watch to keep desertion down to manageable proportions.

These adverse environmental factors placed a variety of constraints on human societies and forced them to adapt in different ways, so that over thousands of years of relative isolation a staggering diversity of lifestyles evolved, ranging from centralized kingdoms and well-organized city states to nomadic herdsmen and hunter-gatherers with no organization beyond the family group. They also combined to ensure that the armies which operated in most parts of Africa were very small by European standards. Even when external invaders or powerful native kingdoms did manage to muster large forces, supply problems restricted their movements. In many areas supplies of either food or water (often both) were chronically scarce, and the unpredictable climate did not permit local farmers to build up the sort of food reserves which might have been commandeered for the benefit of military expeditions. Writing in the 1880s, the missionary W P Johnson remarked on the strain which even a small party could place on local resources, since, even if it was prepared to pay its way, there would often be nothing to buy. Therefore in East and Central Africa a military or exploring expedition of 400 or 500 soldiers and 1,000 porters would be a very large one indeed, and even lightly equipped native armies seldom exceeded 2,0003,000.

Inland from the west coast, travel was even more difficult. The long-range trade routes of the east were lacking here, as each tribe was accustomed to trade only with its immediate neighbours. So there were no professional long-distance carriers such as the Swahilis and Nyamwezi who provided manpower for caravans coming from the east coast, but only an endless succession of communities linked by poor tracks, many of them with a vested interest in obstructing attempts to penetrate beyond them and possibly cut them out of the trade. Here most long-distance movement had to be by river, but it was often necessary to interrupt a journey to negotiate land routes around the ubiquitous rapids. Even the steam-driven gunboats which became such a potent symbol of European power had frequently to be dismantled into manageable loads and carried round impassable stretches of the rivers on the heads of local labourers, to be reassembled further upstream.