Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (22 page)

Elgin, although he shared Churchill’s dislike of punitive raids, was not prepared to entertain his radical suggestion of a partial withdrawal.
¹²⁰
Churchill did not press the point, but it is clear that, at this stage of his career, he remained open-minded and flexible to a significant degree.

From Churchill’s point of view, the main events of 1907 were the Colonial Conference in the spring and his tour of Africa in the autumn. He was well aware that the conference would be a mere ‘business meeting which cannot arrive at any positive decision’, as there was no chance that a Liberal government would grant trade preferences to the colonies, which was the chief demand of the visiting Empire politicians.
¹²¹
Anticipating the hostility of Alfred Deakin, the pro-tariff reform Australian Prime Minister, he nagged Elgin to invite the premiers of the individual Australian States. For this he offered the rationale ‘
Divide et impera!
’ – the state premiers would counterbalance Deakin’s influence, he thought – but his arguments for divide and rule were to no avail.
¹²²
Churchill’s most notable contribution to the conference itself was ‘a rasping & injudicious speech full of highsounding phrases’, in which he developed his established theme that imperial preference would threaten the concord of the Empire.
¹²³
Asquith and Lloyd George were more soothing in their negatives, and in the end the visiting dignitaries were appeased with some small-scale concessions on inter-imperial transport and communications.

Such occasions gave Churchill the chance to thrust himself into the limelight; his African journey was another opportunity to earn publicity and (by writing about his adventures) money. Naturally, this produced satirical comment.
Punch
published spoof despatches in which the running gag, based on a genuine Reuters telegram, was Churchill’s failure to bag any lions. He was said to have been interrogated by ‘Twysta, Chief of the Pozas, a very intelligent tribe’, who asked who ruled England in Churchill’s absence and when did he intend to give Lord Elgin an old-age pension.
¹²⁴
(A topical joke, this: state pensions were introduced in Britain the following year.) The
Crown
, a short-lived publication, printed a similar set of ‘Unofficial Despatches’ in cartoon form. In one frame, African tribesmen, in typical racist caricature, form a deputation demanding ‘free fetishes’ and ‘fatter missionaries’. In another, the radical Labour MP Keir Hardie is seen springing naked out of the bush, greeting Churchill, who is dressed in African tribal costume, as ‘My long lost black brother’.
¹²⁵

Churchill was away from Britain between September 1907 and January 1908. This prolonged absence was possible because there was no autumn session of Parliament that year – a testament to the comparatively relaxed (albeit even then steadily increasing) pace of government in those days. Before reaching Africa he visited the British dependencies of Malta and Cyprus, where he engaged in detailed discussion of local affairs. This was a sign of things to come. Elgin later complained that the tour had originally been intended as ‘a purely sporting and private expedition – & I really don’t know how it drifted into so essentially an official progress’. Churchill began to spew forth missives making proposals which Elgin thought hopelessly impractical.
¹²⁶
An early example was a letter from Cyprus to Sir Francis Hopwood, Permanent Secretary at the Colonial Office. Churchill argued that the island’s majority population’s aspirations to unity with Greece – ‘Enosis’ – might be countered through ambitious schemes of economic development. Churchill expressed concern for the island’s minority Muslim population, ‘who have always behaved so well to us & to whom we have given so many pledges’, but also looked forward to a time ‘when the Moslem minority has been more or less painlessly submerged or extinguished’, presumably through intermarriage and cultural assimilation.
¹²⁷
From Cyprus he travelled to Aden and then Somaliland, where he spent several days, before sailing to Mombasa in the East African Protectorate (later the Crown Colony of Kenya). He journeyed onwards to Uganda and thence to Cairo via Sudan. In Uganda, in the absence of train or steamboat, he went on safari; his party of ten was accompanied by between three and four hundred African porters. Edward Marsh, who was himself writing about the trip for the
Manchester Guardian
, reported these arrangements to a friend, observing that ‘one can’t help feeling that it is a great personal convenience to belong to a dominant race’.
¹²⁸
A subsequent American visitor claimed that it was possible to trace Churchill’s route by the empty champagne and beer bottles he had left by the side of the trail.
¹²⁹

In addition to letters and memoranda, he also produced articles for
Strand
magazine (later published in book form as
My African Journey
) for which he was paid handsomely. H. Hesketh Bell, the Governor of Uganda, recorded that Churchill kept him awake one night by dictating to a clerk while he was in the bath.
¹³⁰
The time spent on politics and journalism did not mean that sport was neglected altogether. Churchill reported to his mother that in one day’s hunting he killed ‘1 zebra, 1 wildebeeste, 2 hartebeeste, 1 gazelle, [and] 1 bustard (a giant bird)’. A couple of days later he helped kill two rhinos; and a lion
was
bagged, although not by him.
¹³¹
He addressed gatherings of African leaders who were clad in traditional attire. According to the Governor of Kenya’s official report:

To all these assemblies of chiefs short suitable speeches were delivered, thanking them for the welcome he had accorded him, impressing upon them the advantage of working and developing their lands, and the benefits they would receive by contact with white men from whom they would learn many arts of which they were ignorant, and assuring them of the pleasure with which he had heard that they had settled down quietly under the aegis of the Government, and of the fact that the lands which had been allotted to them would be theirs for ever, to be enjoyed by them and their children’s children so long as they lived at amity with the Government.
¹³²

These promises about security of land tenure were doubtless well meant but they were, as time would show, completely worthless. Over the years, and with the collusion of the authorities, the settlers were to use unfair means to dispossess Africans wherever they could. The resultant land hunger would be a major cause of the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s.

The evidence permits us to catch only the barest glimpses of the impression that Churchill made on ordinary Africans, mediated through the eyes of the whites. According to a woman settler in Uganda, writing in the
Daily Graphic
, ‘One of my “boys” wanted to know if this white man is the King’s brother. I explained by saying that he was a big chief. He replied: “He must be a Saza chief,” which means the chief of a whole county.’
¹³³
Hesketh Bell, introducing Churchill to a gathering of chiefs at Kampala, tried to give a simple explanation of the position of the Colonial Under-Secretary in relation to the King and the Empire. The young Bagandan who translated simplified things further, saying that Churchill was the ‘toto’ of one of the King’s servants. According to Bell, ‘The amusing part of this matter is that, in Uganda, a
toto
is the small black urchin which a cook or other servant pays to help him in his job and who is usually remunerated by pickings from the master’s table.’
¹³⁴

The views of the settlers themselves can be traced much more easily. For these people, oppressed by the heat and perhaps bored and frustrated with colonial life, Churchill’s visit was a big event. According to the
Star of East Africa
, ‘Practically all European Nairobi’ turned out to meet him at the station, ‘from the lordly official strutting it proudly in his uniform’ to the humble worker. They felt that his arrival might signify ‘the beginning of a new epoch’, presumably hoping that the London government would now take a greater interest in their doings and welfare.
¹³⁵
He met deputations tirelessly even though he thought many of their complaints trivial; he blamed their vexatiousness partly on the recent influx of ‘a vy low class of S. African’.
¹³⁶
But although he seems to have won the settlers over at the personal level, many of them were deeply suspicious of the Liberal government, with its element ‘which always sticks up for the “poor native” ’, and wondered if he could have real influence over its doings.
¹³⁷
The
Star of East Africa
declared that ‘Mr Churchill has to be considered – and with sympathetic insight it may be divined that he considers himself – as an able, energetic statesman struggling with a fate too strong for him.’
¹³⁸
He had clearly succeeded, without saying very much that was concrete, in conveying a sense that he understood the settlers’ aspirations. This was a notable contrast with his reputation in South Africa.

Churchill had to contend with racial questions that were just as toxic in East Africa as in the Transvaal. He encountered the well-established demand for Kenya to become ‘a white man’s country’. He was prepared to pay lip-service to the desirability of this ‘respectable and impressive policy’ but he did not hide his scepticism about its practicality.
¹³⁹
It should be noted that – as Churchill was surely aware – that the idea was not to be taken absolutely literally, in the sense of demand for the complete expulsion of non-whites. The tiny settler population clearly did not intend to do without African labour.
¹⁴⁰
The slogan was in large part motivated by resentment against the substantial and entrepreneurial British Indian population, and the settlers did their best to claim that an end to further non-white immigration was in the Africans’ own best interests.
¹⁴¹
‘We are strongly of the opinion that the people of our own Race and the African should progress hand in hand [. . .] and that the Asiatic should have no place in the country whatsoever’, declared one settler petition presented to Churchill.
¹⁴²
At the same time, they made no efforts to disguise their desire to control all the best land themselves. In particular, they wanted the temperate highlands of Kenya to be reserved for their own use, something Elgin had in practice granted in 1906 using a classic obfuscatory formula: ‘It would not be in accordance with the policy of H.M.G. to exclude any class of H.M. subjects from holding land in any part of a British protectorate, but that in view of the comparatively limited area in the Protectorate suitable for European colonization, a reasonable discretion will be exercised in dealing with applications for land on the part of natives of India and other non-Europeans.’
¹⁴³
Naturally, this provoked a reaction from the Indians. Churchill – according to one anonymous contributor to the
Manchester Dispatch
, who claimed to have accompanied him throughout much of his tour – experienced ‘a decided embarrassment’ in dealing with delegations of Indians concerned about their future and prospects. He offered them only generalized assurances, but his soothing words were enough to make the whites worry about the ‘traditional curse’ of Whitehall interference with colour problems.
¹⁴⁴

In fact, his own conviction (expressed the previous year in connection with South Africa) was that ‘the practice of allowing European, Asiatic, and native families to live side by side in mixed communities is fraught with many evils’.
¹⁴⁵
It is unsurprising, then, that in
My African Journey
he endorsed the general reservation of the highlands to the whites – in spite of his doubt that Europeans could live at such high altitudes for more than fifteen or twenty years without suffering ‘degeneration’. But – and this won him the praise of the Liberal
Daily Chronicle
– he did not support the ‘squeezing out’ of Indians from East Africa as a whole. Rather, he thought that they should be encouraged to settle ‘in the enormous regions of tropical fertility’ to which they were ‘naturally adapted’.
¹⁴⁶
One reviewer summarized the book’s message approvingly: ‘Mr Churchill, with long vision, foresees Africa partitioned off both racially and economically – a peaceful, self-sufficing, equal division of labor and of material. But before that millennium is reached there must be an endless succession of particular stages calling for every quality of tact and sympathy in the ruling race.’
¹⁴⁷

Although he favoured the settler viewpoint in regard to the highlands, Churchill felt no great sympathy for the settlers themselves. A few years later, he wrote, ‘Although they are only a few thousand, they firmly believe they are entitled to monopolise the whole fortunes of East Africa and to be the sole beneficiaries of the resources of the country and to the work and contributions of the Imperial Government.’ They were ‘a very troublesome crowd’ who needed to be dealt with firmly.
¹⁴⁸
For this reason he opposed giving self-government to the whites of the East Africa Protectorate: there could be no question of handing over millions of Africans ‘to the control of the first few thousand white men who happen to arrive in the country’. He believed that the British imperial officials, in contrast to the potentially exploitative colonists, were disinterested and praiseworthy.
¹⁴⁹
This was particularly evident in his comments on Uganda: ‘A class of rulers is provided by an outside power as remote from, and in all that constitutes fitness to direct, as superior to the Baganda as Mr Wells’s Martians would have been to us.’
¹⁵⁰
It was more than a little ironic that Churchill should have used this illustration, not only because the Martians in
The War of the Worlds
(1898) are utterly malevolent, but also because they ultimately fail in their war of conquest due to their poor adaptation to local conditions.