Churchill and Africa: Empire, Decolonisation and Race

By C. Brad Faught

This timely book fills a lacuna in the extensive literature on Churchill's life and times. It covers his long relationship with Africa during the most important period in Anglo-African history, from nineteenth-century imperial rule to independence and the emergence of modern Africa.

Churchill first went to Africa during the British re-conquest of Sudan in 1898 and would spend almost the next sixty years dealing with Africa as soldier, journalist, government minister, and finally prime minister. Churchill's story is one of transition from the height of late-Victorian British imperialism to the acceptance of African nationalism in the middle years of the twentieth century. He helped to shape British colonial policy in Africa from the first decade of the twentieth century through the Second World War and colonial Kenya's Mau Mau crisis of the 1950s. Few British leaders were as closely involved with Africa as was Churchill.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Release date: Sep 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526768551

Book preview

Churchill and Africa

Churchill and Africa

Empire, Decolonisation and Race

C. Brad Faught

First published in Great Britain in 2023 by

Pen & Sword Military

An imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

Yorkshire – Philadelphia

Copyright © C. Brad Faught 2023

ISBN 978 1 52676 854 4

eISBN 978 1 52676 855 1

KINDLE 978 1 52676 855 1

The right of C. Brad Faught to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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To Roland Quinault

Contents

Preface & Acknowledgements

Chapter 1 A Child of Queen Victoria’s Empire

Chapter 2 Churchill’s First Steps in Africa: the Sudan, 1898

Chapter 3 Churchill versus the Boers: the South African War, 1899–1900

Chapter 4 Colonial Under-Secretary and My African Journey , 1905–1908

Chapter 5 Churchill, the Colonial Office, and Africa: 1921–22

Chapter 6 Churchill, Africa, and the Second World War

Chapter 7 African Nationalism, Decolonisation, and Mau Mau: Almost the End of the Story

Conclusion: Churchill, Africa, and Race Today

Notes

Bibliography

Preface & Acknowledgements

‘This is really a wonderful country’

The words above were written by Winston Churchill to his younger brother Jack in the autumn of 1907 while touring British East Africa as Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies.¹ Churchill’s extended visit to the future British colony of Kenya marked a return to Africa for the fast-rising Liberal government junior minister. Nine years earlier, he had reported on the British re-conquest of the Sudan as a Fleet Street journalist, and then a short time later did likewise in relation to the South African (Anglo-Boer) War. To Churchill’s experience in South Africa could be added ‘war hero’, as he had escaped from a Boer prison to much subsequent acclaim. During this time, he had also spent a handful of years with his infantry regiment in India, as well as briefer periods in Canada, the United States, and Cuba. Altogether, by the turn of the twentieth century, Churchill had become exceedingly well-travelled, especially to those parts of the world over which flew the Union Jack. There was a restlessness about his life during these years, demonstrative of a young person’s desire to maximize the elixir of personal experience. ‘Twenty to twenty-five!’, Churchill would exclaim later in the memoir of his youth, My Early Life. ‘These are the years! Don’t be content with things as they are. The earth is yours and the fullness thereof’.²

By September of 1907 when Churchill departed England bound ultimately for the East African coast, he was keen to return to the continent where he had enjoyed such great personal success and believed himself to have been at the centre of world events. A short time later, just before setting foot in Africa, as suggested by a note scribbled to his redoubtable and ever-faithful mother, Jennie, Lady Randolph Churchill, the feeling remained: ‘An Under-Secretary is a rara avis in these out of the way places & everyone wants to see him’.³ As predicted, Churchill would be on view in Africa, a ‘rare bird’ indeed, from the moment of his landing at Mombasa at the end of October until his departure for home close to three months later. His time in Africa saw him journey upcountry as far as Uganda and from there go along the Nile River all the way to Cairo. For Churchill, this re-acquainting with Africa marked the continuation of what would become nearly sixty years of episodic but regular involvement in the affairs of the continent, made almost wholly in relation to the prevailing interests of the British Empire.

This book’s aim is to illuminate that longtime connection with Africa: from Churchill’s first direct contact with the continent as a soldier-journalist in the Sudan in 1898, to 1955, when he left office as prime minister for the last time in the midst of the tension-wracked and protracted Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya.⁴ How and why did Churchill move from being an imperialist – a type well-known at Westminster and elsewhere at the turn of the twentieth century – to later accepting, if reluctantly, the reality of decolonisation. Of books and articles on Churchill’s life there seems to be an almost unending and variegated flow. But on the specific question of the totality of his relationship with Africa, this book stands essentially as the first.⁵ To be sure, there are a number of excellent studies on Churchill and the British Empire more generally, most especially that published in recent years by the leading Churchill scholar, Richard Toye.⁶ But on the targeted topic of Churchill and Africa, my intention is to elucidate the connection in a way that has not been done before. On most questions pertaining to the scope and impact of the British Empire Churchill remained bullish for most of his life, and it was with just this staunchness of purpose that he viewed the place of Africa within the larger British imperial world. Churchill’s protracted defence of the British Empire has, in our own day, resulted in him being called a racist or worse by critics.⁷ This labelling has come about even though throughout the time that he was an active participant in British political and military affairs Churchill’s views on Africa were ones held commonly by most other people in government and society, both in Britain and around the world. Still, on Africa, as the historian Roland Quinault has suggested persuasively, Churchill can be seen as having been relatively enlightened, his attitude ‘more complex and, in some ways, more sympathetic than has generally been recognized’.⁸

The key lines of this study, therefore, aim to capture Churchill’s considered position on the place of Africa in the British Empire, as well as within the twentieth-century world of rising political independence and state-building. Churchill – whose minatory stance, adamantine spirit, and winning politics were essential to first confronting and then defeating Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 40s – still found it necessary before, during, and after the Second World War to give over much of his time to the compelling and sometimes pressing question of the relationship between the British Empire and Africa. Indeed, the continuing nature and depth of the political, economic, racial, and social questions of modern, independent Africa make Churchill’s interaction with its developmental trajectory during the first half of the twentieth century highly resonant in our own day. By book’s end, I intend to show that Churchill’s knowledge and understanding of Africa and Africans was more nuanced and of greater sophistication than is often believed.

*   *   *

Over the past decade or so I have spent a considerable amount of time reading and thinking about Churchill, of which this book marks a sort of culmination. During this period, I have also developed a university course on Churchill’s life and times, which most of the undergraduates I have taught have found to be enjoyable and stimulating, or so I am told. Altogether, my research, writing, and teaching about Churchill have combined to make him a lively presence in my professional life. I would like to thank my editor, Dr Lester Crook, for suggesting to me that pursuing the topic of ‘Churchill and Africa’ would make for a valuable study in its own right, as well a necessary contribution to the large body of Churchill historiography. This book represents the fifth time that I have collaborated with Lester, each one of which has been an enjoyable experience. He has seen this book through from start to finish, and I offer him my best thanks. Thanks are due also to the other staff at Pen & Sword for their friendly and skillful professionalism and – I would like to point out especially – for the art department’s excellent cover design. I should like to thank also the Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge, as well as The National Archives, Kew, and the John P. Robarts Library at the University of Toronto, all of which I have used in researching this book. My home institution, Tyndale University in Toronto, is owed my thanks too, for its library, to be sure, but also for the provision of research funding that allowed for archival work to be carried out in England that skirted the worst days of the Covid-19 pandemic. As always, I would like to thank my wife, Rhonda, who has seen this and other books come and go over the years and has been cheerfully helpful and endlessly tolerant each time around.

Finally, I have dedicated this book to Professor Roland Quinault, senior research fellow at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. I first got to know Roland at a conference that he helped organize in 2009 to mark the bicentenary of the birth of William Gladstone. Since then, he has become both colleague and friend. Roland is a longtime and leading scholar of modern British political history, including of Churchill, and was an inspiration in writing this book, for which I am grateful. Its shortcomings and conclusions of course are mine alone.

Chapter One

A Child of Queen Victoria’s Empire

On 30 November 1874, Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill was born amidst the palatial surroundings of Blenheim Palace, his family’s ancestral seat in Oxfordshire. During that year, and far removed from Blenheim, the British were engaged in what Churchill would later blithely say was an example of the many ‘jolly little wars against barbarous peoples’ that marked the late-Victorian world.¹ In this case, he was referring to the Ashanti Campaign of 1873–4 in the British Gold Coast (modern Ghana), which was led by the inimitable General (later Sir) Garnet Wolseley. By the time of this expedition, Wolseley was an experienced hand at undertaking punitive British campaigns designed to cow rebellious indigenous peoples, having proven himself expert in such activities during the Red River Expedition to Canada’s prairie west in 1869–70. While there, he had fought against Metis rebels led by their charismatic leader, Louis Riel. The Metis were put down by a force of determined redcoats and the new Canadian government’s reach westward had been extended and confirmed. Now, a few years later, a similar kind of campaign in West Africa’s Gold Coast had led in turn to another success for Wolseley. His resulting widespread popularity as the ‘very model of a modern major-general’ – as Gilbert and Sullivan would put it in their comic opera success of the time, The Pirates of Penzance – was matched by a phrase that would soon enter common parlance: any situation found to be in good order was simply called, ‘all Sir Garnet’.

For Churchill, born in the lead-up to what would become barely a decade later the European geo-political partition of Africa, his later recollection of the ‘jolly’ nature of at least some elements of late-Victorian British imperialism was certainly by then anachronistic, if not in extremely bad taste. But at the time, indeed, right up until the turn of the century, such a paternalistic view of Africa was shared by many people besides Churchill, especially after the partition or ‘scramble’ for Africa had been given its head by the diplomatic participants at the Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884–5. Convened by the German Empire’s ‘Iron Chancellor’, Otto von Bismarck, the Conference sought to apply a series of rules to what had devolved into a European-driven African land rush. The worst case outcome, believed Bismarck, was that unbridled imperial competition in Africa would lead to war between the great states of Europe. The Conference, therefore, achieved what it had set out to do. Indeed, war between European states was to be avoided, at least for a generation. ‘My map of Africa lies in Europe’, Bismarck would later state famously, which was one way of not allowing imperial competition in Africa to spark war at home.² And the absence of war prior to 1914 would signal to Europe’s leaders and diplomats that Bismarck-style realpolitik of this kind had worked.

Churchill’s privileged childhood and youth, meanwhile, which took place during the years in which the British Empire had begun a fast gallop in Africa, were bathed in the unreconstructed imperial verities of the late-Victorian era. Such beliefs of course had done much to power the post-1885 partition of Africa by Europeans.³ A few years earlier in 1879, by contrast, there had been considerable shock in London and throughout the chancelleries of Europe at the defeat of a well-armed British force in southern Africa by a large Zulu army. A couple of years after that in 1881, the (first) Anglo-Boer War had dealt another such blow to assumptions about British imperial invincibility, even if the enemy in this case were descendants of the original seventeenth-century Dutch colonists, and not indigenous Africans. ‘Remember Majuba’ would become a British cry of vengeance for the comprehensive defeat that they had suffered at the hands of the Boers at the eponymous Majuba Hill in Natal. To this war cry was soon added the protracted drama of General Charles Gordon’s imperial ‘martyrdom’ at Khartoum in 1885. His death had resulted from the Mahdi’s raising of jihad amongst his devoted followers, known collectively as the ansar, and their defeat of the British in the Sudan.⁴ All told, by the time that the Berlin Conference was set to inaugurate a ‘new’ era of imperialism in 1885, the British might well have thought that within their African empire they were, indeed, more than ready for the advent of something ‘new’. Something new, to be sure, as Britain would swiftly expand its African territorial holdings during the latter 1880s and the decade to follow. By the time the young Winston Churchill began to become aware of the country’s imperial position in Africa, therefore, Britain was well on its way to controlling around fifteen different colonies, a number exceeding that of any other European state.

*   *   *

The reasons for this rapid imperial expansion in Africa are many and varied and have been debated vigourously by historians for generations. They range from the geo-strategic and military, to the economic and commercial, to the religious and humanitarian. The building of the Suez Canal by the French from 1854 to 1869, a preponderant interest in which was purchased by the British government under Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in 1875, made the ‘spine’ of empire argument especially persuasive to many. This argument would be given permanent shape beginning later in the 1950s by the influential Oxbridge historians, John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, when they argued that Egypt’s severe financial crisis of the early 1880s – of which the Khedive Ismail’s selling of forty-four per cent of the Canal’s shares to the British was early evidence – had sparked the African partition by drawing into a regional power vacuum all the great states of Europe.⁵ The Nile, and the vast amount of African territory through which it flows on its twisting, 4,000-mile course all the way from the highlands of Central Africa to the Mediterranean Sea, thus became a battleground for the imperial states of Europe to compete for regional domination, especially between Britain and France.⁶

Humanitarianism, as represented especially by the rapid expansion of Christian missionary endeavour in Africa following the death of the famous physician-explorer David Livingstone in 1873, as well as the international outcry over the demonstrably brutal practices of the Belgian rubber trade later in the Congo, are among other common reasons put forward as generative of the so-called ‘new’ imperialism.⁷ So too, the apparent ‘crisis of capitalism’ in the 1880s and 1890s, which J.A. Hobson and V.I. Lenin would later describe as having come to dominate the international economy of the time. In their view, this overwhelming financial crisis had spurred the leading states of Europe to penetrate the African hinterland in an attempt to bolster their faltering domestic economies in ways that had never been seen before, even during the defining age of Euro-African encounter as represented by the Atlantic Slave Trade.⁸

None of these events, however persuasive or unconvincing for the expansion of the British Empire in Africa, nor the explanations that came later, would matter much to the young Churchill as he progressed through his various tutors and preparatory schools before arriving as a precocious 13-year-old at Harrow School in 1888. Once there, he would remain until 1892. Harrow had a significant influence on Churchill, especially regarding how he came to think about matters imperial, both then and throughout his life. He took the essential necessity and rightness of the British Empire, it seems, simply as part of ‘the air he breathed’, as one of his biographers has written.⁹ Indeed, some years earlier in 1883, his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, a leading Conservative, had helped found the Primrose League, the aim of which was to advocate for a further infusion of Tory party principles – that is to say, imperial principles – into British public life. The League had been named in memory of the revered Conservative Party leader and two-time prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, who had died in 1881. By the end of his career Disraeli had become a staunch imperialist, whose favourite flower was said to be the primrose. The Primrose League would go on to become the most important extra-Parliamentary lobby group in the country for supporters of contemporary British imperialism. In 1885, these keen supporters included Jennie, Churchill’s mother, who became a member of the League’s Grand Council. Two years later, in 1887, a young Churchill would join the League also.

Not very long afterwards, in March of 1888, Churchill passed the entrance examination for Harrow and the next month he took up his place at the school. He arrived at Harrow keenly anticipating what lay in store for him at one of the great English public schools of the day. ‘Harrow is such a nice place – beautiful view – beautiful situation’, he wrote to his mother soon after his arrival. But, in what would become a familiar reprise in his youthful letters to Jennie, he went on to emphasize [the italics are his] that: ‘my funds are in rather a low condition the Exchequer would bear replenishing’.¹⁰

Harrow’s headmaster at the time was the Rev’d J.E.C. Welldon, an Anglican clergyman devoted to both church and empire. He sought to instil in all of his youthful charges a properly imperial attitude, with an emphasis on duty and service to the nation. In Churchill, as in most of the boys at Harrow, Welldon would find a receptive audience. To a later generation, Headmaster Welldon’s prevailing attitude might suggest a suffocating patriarchy or worse, but at the time his views were of the mainstream in their assumption that Britain had been called upon from above to render to the world good governmental and economic service. This divine imperative meant that the nation was expected to act up to its historical world destiny as an enlightened imperial state. It was of poetic coincidence that just a few years earlier in 1883, John Robert (J.R.) Seeley, the well known Cambridge historian, had published a monumental book, The Expansion of England, timed perfectly to bolster the intellectual bona fides of the so-called ‘new’ imperialism. Eventually, a few years after Churchill had departed Harrow, Welldon would leave the school to become the Anglican bishop of Calcutta. But his early influence in shaping an imperial habit of mind in the schoolboy Churchill had done its work and would remain long-lasting.¹¹

So, likewise, was the impact on Churchill of various occasional visitors to Harrow, many of whom advocated for the British Empire’s call of duty on succeeding generations. Lord Wolseley himself was one such visitor, as was the ‘finder’ of Livingstone in 1871, the explorer Henry Morton Stanley, as well as the Canadian publicist of empire and future secretary of the Rhodes Trust, George Parkin. Altogether, while a student at Harrow, Churchill found himself swathed in the bands of imperial kith and kin. In 1890, he would summon the muse to compose a prize-winning poem on the empire’s indispensability in protecting Britain from all manner of national peril. As a sixteen-year-old, Churchill wrote the following lines:

God shield our Empire from the might

Of war or famine, plague or blight

And all the powers of Hell,

And keep it ever in the hands

Of those who fought ‘gainst other lands

Who fought & conquered well.¹²

For Churchill, these bred in the bone influences within the pervasively imperial atmosphere of Harrow, meant that his formative teenaged years were ones in which his