• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1199 0

nothing and sleeping in mud huts. They died of malaria and blackwater fever in great numbers, but where others might have seen courage and conviction, they often earned only contempt. The first colonial proconsul in the area, Sir Harry Johnston (said to have been the inspiration for Edgar Wallace’s imperialist potboiler Sanders of the River), thought it ‘pathetic … to see highly educated men from Oxford and Cambridge hollow-eyed and fever-stricken, crouching in little huts which no native chief would deign to occupy’. But they were people who practised what they preached. When Bishop Hine, for example, discovered that the (white) church council at the new church of St Andrew’s in the town of Livingstone (named after the explorer) planned to reserve it for white use, he simply refused to consecrate the place until they recognized the principle of racial equality. ‘I am better among native races than pushing bigoted colonists,’ said the Bishop.

The lasting memorial to these men and women is the array of schools they established. Without them, great swathes of the developing world would simply have had no education. Blantyre in Malawi (named after Livingstone’s birthplace), for example, became a fiefdom of the Church of Scotland, and even today the Synod is associated with dozens of Malawian primary schools. The town’s church of St Michael and All Angels, which claimed to be the first permanent Christian church between the Nile and the Zambezi, is an extraordinary piece of architecture, built to no preordained plan from over eighty different types of brick, all made by local people. At Nkoloti primary school, a much more modest collection of single-storey tin-roofed buildings on the outskirts of the town, the roll has grown so enormously that it now numbers almost 8,000 children, who have to be accommodated in two separate shifts.

By the twentieth century, the missionaries had justified the enmity of some of the empire-builders, for they preached freedom and the mission schools educated many of the heroes of the independence struggle. The man whose face adorns Malawian banknotes, for example, the Reverend John Chilembwe – still celebrated as the first Malawian freedom fighter – was an alumnus of the missions in Blantyre.*

In a sense, all empire-builders were missionaries. How else was a chap to justify to himself the suffering he experienced in his moments of loneliness, sickness and introspection than that it was all being endured in the name of some greater cause? The most eminent claim in the moral justification of empire was the fact that the British had made the trading and keeping of slaves illegal. Frederick Lugard, who was later to become the splendidly moustached governor general of Nigeria, had begun his African career in 1888 fighting Arab slave traders, saying, ‘I can think of no juster cause in which a soldier may draw his sword.’ Even those, like the young Winston Churchill, who considered that the British might as well continue to pile up colonies, if only because everyone else was at it, talked up the moral justice of the cause. In The River War, his account of how Kitchener’s machine guns made short work of poorly armed Sudanese, Churchill justified the imperial mission in characteristically rolling sentences. ‘To give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains from the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to plant the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain – what more beautiful ideal or more valuable reward can inspire human effort?’ In the eyes of people like that, the entire imperial purpose was a vocation to civilize the world, an enterprise in salvation.

It rested on a conviction not merely that different races had different characteristics, but that the qualities of the British were superior to all others. The belief is anathema in the twenty-first century, both because it is offensive and because it is scientific nonsense. Yet it is illuminating to