THE RACE TO FASHODA
European Colonialism and African Resistance
in the Scramble for Africa
David Levering Lewis
New York: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1989
304 pp., $24.95
Ninety years ago the name of Fashoda, a mud village on the upper reaches of the White Nile, could be found on the front pages of every English and French newspaper. The name and the place have since disappeared into the mists of history, but Britain and France seemed on the verge of war because at Fashoda, half a world away, French officers leading African troops confronted British officers leading African troops, each commander claiming sovereignty and demanding the withdrawal of the other.
With rare common sense, the Fashoda incident, as it came to be called, was peacefully resolved and became merely a fascinating episode in the larger picture known as the scramble for Africa. David Levering Lewis has now resurrected this international crisis and used it as centerpiece for a collection of episodes great and small that illustrate European greed and the extent of African resistance.
For centuries European interests in Central Africa had been confined to the purchases of slaves, ivory, hides, and such from Africans who carried their wares to the few ports on the African coasts. But beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, missionaries such as David Livingstone and explorers such as Henry Morton Stanley, Richard Francis Burton, John Hanning Speke, James Augustus Grant, Georg Schweinfurth, Verney Lovett Cameron, and others penetrated the interior of Central Africa, and their descriptions of the potential wealth of the continent aroused the cupidity of European politicians, statesmen, and rulers.
The scramble for Africa
All of the major European powers, and even the king of little Belgium, rushed to stake huge territorial claims in the Dark Continent, justifying their claims to the land of black Africans by announcing that they came bearing the blessings of Christianity and civilization, which they would bestow on barbarous peoples. Only when Italy, somewhat belatedly, got into the act, did Fernando Martini, a clear-eyed Italian politician, speak the truth about European government when he said: "Leave civilization alone, and speak of things without hypocrisy; say that all the states of Europe practice colonialism and that we must practice it too."
Each nation entertained its own imperialistic dreams. The British envisioned a line of telegraphs and roads running through British colonies and protectorates that would stretch from the Cape to Cairo. The French lusted for a string of colonies across the fattest section of the continent, from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. As these dreams were incompatible, conflict seemed inevitable.
It was one thing to draw boundaries on a map and to make treaties with other European powers concerning African frontiers; it was quite another matter actually to occupy the ground and to convince the people living there that strange white men would make better rulers than their own tribal leader and that
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