R1.8 Colonialism in Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal and Uganda (1890–1980)

Between about 1890 and 1980 most of Africa was ruled by European powers and then regained its independence. Colonialism in Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal and Uganda shows the full range of colonial rule in Africa: three colonial powers, settler and non-settler colonies, and routes to independence that ran from negotiation to eleven years of war.

The chart of the six colonies shows how short colonial rule was in most of them, about sixty to seventy years, and how much of it fell under the shadow of the two world wars. It also shows that the independence of five of the six countries came within four years (1960–1963), while Portuguese rule in Mozambique lasted until 1975.

Colonial rule in Africa: aims, ideas and methods

The partition of Africa between about 1880 and 1900 gave European states claims to territory on paper. Turning those claims into government took much longer. In 1890 the British, French and Portuguese controlled the coasts of the six countries studied here, but their power in the interior ranged from treaties with local rulers to no presence at all. The conquest and partition themselves are a separate regional study; this one begins with the building of colonial states.

The 1913 map shows how much of the continent had been claimed by the eve of the First World War. Claims were not the same as control. In Côte d’Ivoire the French fought until about 1915 to occupy the forest zone, and in northern Mozambique the Portuguese were still fighting in the 1910s.

Why rule colonies cheaply?

All three colonial powers wanted their colonies to pay for themselves. Britain’s Treasury expected colonies to cover their own costs from local taxes and customs duties, and a French law of 1900 made each colony responsible for its own civil budget. A few hundred European officials therefore had to govern millions of people. In the 1930s Nigeria, with a population of about 20 million, was run by only a few hundred British administrative officers.

This shortage of money and staff explains much about colonial rule. It is why every colonial state relied on African intermediaries, why taxation in cash was introduced so early, and why governments preferred economies that produced exports quickly, either through African farmers or through European settlers and companies.

Four methods of rule

Colonial powers described their methods in terms of a few big ideas. In practice the methods overlapped, and most colonies combined two or more of them.

From about 1905 the French government moved away from assimilation towards association, which accepted that most Africans would remain subjects under their own customs while French officials governed them directly. Assimilation survived for the citizens of the Four Communes of Senegal and for a small educated elite.

Direct rule meant governing through colonial officials and appointed chiefs who had no authority except what the colonial state gave them. The French ran their territories in this way, dividing them into cercles under French commandants and cantons under appointed African chiefs. The Portuguese did the same in Mozambique, with appointed régulos (chiefs) under Portuguese administrators.

Ideas that justified colonial rule

Colonial rulers justified their power with the idea of a civilising mission, the claim that European rule would bring Christianity or modern education, law and commerce to peoples assumed to be backward. These claims were often combined with Social Darwinism, the belief that races were ranked and that some were fit to rule others. Lugard gave the British version its best-known form in The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (1922).

Let it be admitted at the outset that European brains, capital, and energy have not been, and never will be, expended in developing the resources of Africa from motives of pure philanthropy; that Europe is in Africa for the mutual benefit of her own industrial classes, and of the native races in their progress to a higher plane; that the benefit can be made reciprocal, and that it is the aim and desire of civilised administration to fulfil this dual mandate.

Frederick Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, 1922, page 617. Lugard wrote after retiring as Governor-General of Nigeria, partly to answer critics of empire in Britain and partly to set out a doctrine for colonial officials. The source is valuable for showing how a leading administrator presented colonialism as a dual mandate: profit for Europe and "progress" for Africans. It is not evidence that the benefit was in fact shared.

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Nigeria: indirect rule in a divided colony (1900–1960)

Nigeria was the largest British colony in Africa by population. It was made from three very different regions: the Muslim emirates of the north, the Yoruba kingdoms of the south-west, and the many small, often chiefless communities of the Igbo and other peoples of the south-east. How the British ruled these regions, and the different ways each was changed, shaped Nigerian politics up to and beyond independence in 1960.

Establishing colonial authority

British rule grew in stages. Lagos was annexed in 1861, and the coast of the Niger Delta became the Oil Rivers Protectorate in 1891 (the Niger Coast Protectorate from 1893). Inland, the Royal Niger Company, chartered in 1886, governed the trade of the Niger valley until its charter was revoked on 1 January 1900. On that day the British government took over directly, creating the Protectorates of Southern and Northern Nigeria.

The north still had to be conquered. Frederick Lugard, High Commissioner of Northern Nigeria from 1900 to 1906, led the West African Frontier Force, an African army under British officers, against the emirates of the Sokoto Caliphate. Kano fell in February 1903 and Sokoto in March 1903. A rising at the village of Satiru, near Sokoto, in February 1906, inspired by a Mahdist preacher, destroyed a British-led company before it was crushed. The village was razed and many of its people killed or enslaved; the Sultan of Sokoto’s forces fought on the British side.

Why indirect rule?

Lugard governed the north through the emirs he had defeated, and the choice had several causes. He had too few officials and too little money to do anything else. The emirates already had what indirect rule needed: rulers obeyed by their subjects, Islamic courts, and a tax system that could be turned to British use. Ruling through the emirs also reduced the risk of revolt, because it left Islam, the courts and much of daily life unchanged.

On 1 January 1914 the north and south were joined as the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria, with Lugard as Governor-General. Amalgamation was mainly financial: the south’s customs revenue could now pay for the north’s deficit. Lugard then tried to extend indirect rule to the whole colony.

The flow chart of indirect rule shows that the same system worked differently in the north and the south-east. In the north each emir became a Native Authority. He kept part of the tax he collected in a native treasury, which paid his salary and that of his officials, and the alkali courts went on judging cases under Islamic law. A British Resident "advised" him, but in practice could remove him.

There are not two sets of rulers — British and native — working either separately or in co-operation, but a single Government in which the native chiefs have well-defined duties and an acknowledged status equally with British officials.

Frederick Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, 1922, page 203, quoting what he had written when the system began. The passage shows the ideal of indirect rule as a partnership. Its value is as a statement of intent by the system’s author, writing to defend his own record; it says nothing about how emirs and their subjects experienced the "single Government", or about how often Residents overruled the emirs.

Indirect rule in the south

In Yorubaland the British worked through the obas (kings) of the Yoruba kingdoms, but they often gave them more power than custom allowed. The Alaafin of Oyo, for example, gained authority over towns that had been independent of him. Resentment of new taxes and of chiefs backed by the British led to risings at Iseyin and Okeiho in 1916 and among the Egba around Abeokuta in 1918 (the Adubi War), both put down by troops.

The south-east had no kings or emirs. Many Igbo, Ibibio and other communities governed themselves through councils of elders, age-grades and assemblies of all adult men and women. To rule them the British appointed warrant chiefs, men given a warrant to sit in the new native courts. Some were respected local figures; many were simply men who had made themselves useful to the British. They had no customary authority, and many used their positions to take bribes, seize land and demand labour.

Maintaining power: law, security and force

Colonial law was divided. Customary law, as interpreted by colonial courts and native courts, governed most Africans in land, marriage and minor criminal cases, while English law applied in Lagos and in the higher courts. Ordinances gave Native Authorities power to make rules, collect taxes and call out labour for roads. Other laws punished sedition, controlled the press and allowed collective fines on whole communities.

The colonial state could call on two kinds of armed force. The Nigeria Police Force, united in 1930, kept order in the towns and along the railways; the Nigeria Regiment of the West African Frontier Force fought the early campaigns and later served in both world wars. Force was used against risings (Satiru, 1906; Abeokuta, 1918), against protests (the Women’s War of 1929) and against strikes (Enugu, 1949).

The Women’s War, 1929

The most serious challenge to indirect rule in the south-east came from women. Direct taxation of men was introduced there in 1928. In November 1929 a census of households at Oloko, in Owerri Province, convinced women that they too were to be taxed. Thousands of women gathered to "sit on" warrant chiefs: they surrounded a man, sang, danced and mocked him until he gave in, a customary way for Igbo women to punish men who abused their position.

The protest spread across two provinces. Women attacked native courts, freed prisoners and looted European trading stores. Troops and police fired on crowds at several places, and by the end of December about 55 women had been killed. Two commissions of inquiry followed. Officials then studied the political institutions of the south-east and in the 1930s replaced the warrant chiefs with "native authorities" based on councils of elders and lineage heads, closer to local custom. Sir Donald Cameron, governor from 1931 to 1935, carried these reforms further, separating the native courts from the British administrative officers and allowing the higher courts to hear appeals from them.

Economic policies and their impact

Nigeria was a "peasant" colony: Africans grew the export cash crops on their own land. The British considered allowing European plantations, and before the First World War the soap maker William Lever asked for land to grow oil palms. The government refused, and the West African Lands Committee (1912–1917) confirmed that land should stay in African hands. The policy rested on a mix of motives: fear of unrest, the view that African farmers already produced cheaply, and the interests of trading firms that bought from them.

The table of Nigeria’s exports shows how the colonial economy was organised around the railways and the ports. When the railway reached Kano in 1912, Hausa farmers began to grow groundnuts for export in large quantities within a year, a response to new prices and transport that historians use as evidence of African enterprise. The railways ran from the interior to the coast, linking producers to Europe rather than Nigerian regions to each other.

Trade was dominated by a few European firms, above all the United Africa Company (formed in 1929), which bought crops and sold imported goods. In 1937 cocoa farmers in western Nigeria, like those in the Gold Coast, held back their crops in protest when the big firms agreed to fix prices. During the Second World War the government took over crop buying, and in 1947 created the first marketing boards, which paid farmers fixed prices below world prices and kept the difference. The boards built up large reserves, which regional governments later used for development and for political patronage.

Wage labour grew more slowly. Coal miners at Enugu went on a go-slow over wages in 1949, and on 18 November 1949 police opened fire at the Iva Valley mine, killing 21 miners. The shootings provoked protest across the south and fed the nationalist movement. Oil was discovered at Oloibiri in the Niger Delta in 1956 and exported from 1958, too late to change the colonial economy but with large consequences after independence.

Social and cultural continuity and change

Religion and education

Missions shaped southern Nigeria. Anglican, Methodist, Baptist and Catholic missions ran almost all schools, and education was the main route to jobs as clerks, teachers and catechists. In the north, Lugard promised the emirs that the government would not interfere with Islam, and missions were kept out of most of the emirates. The result was a deep educational gap: by the 1950s the south had far more schools and graduates than the north, which helped to explain northern leaders’ fear of southern domination. Higher education came late: Yaba Higher College opened in Lagos in 1934 to train assistants for government service, and University College Ibadan, the first university in the colony, in 1948.

Many Africans adapted Christianity to their own needs. In the Niger Delta the preacher Garrick Braide led a mass movement of prayer and healing in 1915–1916 and was imprisoned by the British. After the influenza epidemic of 1918, Yoruba prayer groups that stressed healing, prophecy and dreams grew into the Aladura churches ("people of prayer"), such as the Cherubim and Seraphim (1925), the Church of the Lord (Aladura) (1930) and the Christ Apostolic Church (1941). They were among the largest of the African independent churches, which kept Christian belief but were led by Africans and used African forms of worship.

Towns, migration and new identities

Colonial towns grew quickly, above all Lagos, which grew from about 74,000 people in 1911 to about 270,000 in 1952. In the towns, migrants formed ethnic and "hometown" associations, such as the Igbo State Union and the Yoruba cultural society Egbe Omo Oduduwa (founded by Obafemi Awolowo in London in 1945), which paid for schools and scholarships and later supported political parties. Colonial rule thus strengthened ethnic identities at the same time as it created a single Nigerian state.

Nigeria is not a nation. It is a mere geographical expression. There are no 'Nigerians' in the same sense as there are 'English,' 'Welsh,' or 'French'.

Obafemi Awolowo, Path to Nigerian Freedom, 1947 (as quoted by Martin Meredith, The State of Africa). The passage goes on to call "Nigerian" no more than a label for those who lived inside the colony’s boundaries. Awolowo, a Yoruba lawyer and later leader of the Action Group, wrote this in London as an argument for a federal constitution that would protect each ethnic group. It is evidence of how an educated nationalist saw the colony the British had made: a state without a shared national identity. His purpose, to argue for federalism, shaped how strongly he stated the point.

Experiences of different social groups

Women’s experience shows that colonial rule could both open and close opportunities. Market women in Lagos, led by Alimotu Pelewura, resisted price controls and taxes in the 1930s and 1940s. In Abeokuta, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, a teacher, turned a women’s club into the Abeokuta Women’s Union (1946), which campaigned against the taxation of women and the abuses of the Alake (king), Ademola II. After months of protests the Alake left his throne in January 1949, and he returned only in 1950 after accepting reforms. Ransome-Kuti went on to campaign for women’s votes at a national level.

Resistance and the road to independence

Political resistance began in Lagos. The Clifford Constitution of 1922 created a Legislative Council with four elected African members (three for Lagos, one for Calabar). Herbert Macaulay, an engineer and journalist, founded the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP) in 1923 to contest the Lagos seats. The Nigerian Youth Movement (1934, renamed 1936) campaigned for better education and African jobs, and Nnamdi Azikiwe, who returned from the United States in 1937, used his newspaper the West African Pilot to spread nationalist ideas.

The Second World War brought new grievances and new demands. Estimates of the number of Nigerians who served in the forces range from about 45,000 to more than 120,000, because records mix soldiers, carriers and labourers; many fought in Burma. In June 1945 about 30,000 government and railway workers began a general strike over wages and prices, which lasted about six weeks. The NCNC (National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons), founded by Macaulay and Azikiwe in 1944, became the first mass nationalist party.

The vertical timeline of Nigeria’s constitutions shows how British reforms after 1946 shaped the nationalist movement. The Richards Constitution (1946) created regional assemblies for the North, West and East. Each later constitution moved more power to the regions, and the main parties grew up as regional parties: the NCNC in the East, the Action Group (1951, Awolowo) in the West, and the Northern People’s Congress (NPC, 1951, Ahmadu Bello) in the North.

The 1959 election chart shows the outcome. The NPC, with seats almost only in the North, became the largest party, and Abubakar Tafawa Balewa of the NPC led Nigeria to independence on 1 October 1960 in a coalition with the NCNC. The regional structure built under colonial rule broke down within six years: military coups in 1966 were followed by the secession of the Eastern Region as Biafra and a civil war (1967–1970) in which hundreds of thousands, perhaps more than a million, people died, mostly from famine.

Senegal: citizens and subjects in French West Africa (1890–1960)

Senegal was France’s oldest colony in sub-Saharan Africa and the centre of its West African empire. It was also the colony where French ideas of assimilation went furthest, and where the gap between those ideas and the treatment of most Africans was easiest to see.

Establishing colonial authority: assimilation and association

French trading posts at Saint-Louis and Gorée dated from the seventeenth century. The four towns of Saint-Louis, Gorée, Rufisque and Dakar became full French municipalities (communes de plein exercice) between 1872 and 1887. Their African inhabitants, the originaires, could vote for municipal councils, for a General Council of Senegal and for a deputy in the French National Assembly in Paris. The rest of Senegal, conquered between the 1850s and the 1890s, was a protectorate whose people were sujets (subjects).

In 1895 France grouped its West African colonies into the federation of French West Africa (Afrique-Occidentale Française, AOF), and from 1902 its Governor-General sat in Dakar. Dakar became the administrative, military and commercial capital of a federation of eight colonies, with a deep-water port, the federation’s main schools and its naval base.

The flow chart of citizens and subjects shows the two systems that existed side by side. In the communes French law, elections and newspapers created a lively political life. In the protectorate the French ruled through chefs de canton, African chiefs appointed by French commandants of cercles (districts). Some came from ruling families, but many were former interpreters, soldiers or clerks chosen for their loyalty. They collected the head tax, recruited labour and soldiers, and could be dismissed at any time. A small number of educated Africans outside the communes, known as évolués, hoped for citizenship but rarely obtained it.

Maintaining power: the indigénat, labour and soldiers

Subjects were ruled under the indigénat, introduced in Senegal in 1887. It allowed French administrators to punish subjects without trial, with fines or up to fifteen days in prison, for a long list of offences that included disrespect towards an official, failing to pay tax and refusing labour. Subjects also owed prestations, several days of unpaid labour a year on roads and public works, and could be called up for longer periods of forced labour.

The French army recruited West Africans as tirailleurs sénégalais ("Senegalese riflemen"), a name used for soldiers from the whole of French Africa. Recruitment was often forced, carried out by chiefs under quotas. About 200,000 West and Central Africans served France in the First World War, more than 135,000 of them in Europe, and about 30,000 were killed.

Blaise Diagne and the citizenship laws

In May 1914 the originaires elected Blaise Diagne, a customs official born on Gorée, as deputy for Senegal: the first Black African in the French parliament. Colonial officials had been trying to restrict the originaires’ rights, arguing that Muslims who lived under Islamic family law could not be full citizens. Diagne made a bargain. In return for originaires serving in the French army on the same terms as French citizens, parliament confirmed their citizenship in laws of 1915 and 1916.

Les natifs des communes de plein exercice du Sénégal et leurs descendants sont et demeurent des citoyens français soumis aux obligations militaires prévues par la loi du 19 octobre 1915.

Law of 29 September 1916, single article, signed by President Raymond Poincaré: "The natives of the full communes of Senegal and their descendants are and remain French citizens, subject to the military obligations laid down by the law of 19 October 1915" (own translation). The words "are and remain" present citizenship as a right the originaires already held, which was Diagne’s argument; the link to military service shows the price paid for it in wartime.

In 1918 Diagne agreed to lead a recruitment drive across French West Africa as a government commissioner, in return for promises of better treatment for soldiers and veterans. His mission raised more than 60,000 recruits. Supporters saw him as a defender of African rights; critics, then and since, saw him as a collaborator who sent young men to die in a European war. Both views draw on the same evidence of a politician working inside the colonial system.

The bargain looked different after the Second World War. On 1 December 1944, at the Thiaroye camp near Dakar, tirailleurs recently released from German prisoner-of-war camps protested about unpaid wages and allowances. French troops fired on them. The official figure was 35 dead, later revised upwards; historians and veterans have argued for much higher numbers, and the true toll is still disputed.

Economic policies: the groundnut economy

Senegal’s colonial economy rested on one crop, the groundnut (peanut), exported to France for cooking oil and soap. The railway from Dakar to Saint-Louis (1885) and the line from Thiès to Kayes on the Senegal River, completed in 1923 as part of the Dakar–Niger railway, opened up the interior, and exports rose from about 140,000 tonnes in 1900 to nearly 500,000 tonnes by 1930. The head tax, payable in cash, pushed farmers to grow the crop.

Most groundnuts were grown by African farmers, not on plantations. French commercial houses in Bordeaux and Marseille bought the crop and sold imported goods, while Lebanese and Syrian traders, who began arriving in the 1890s, became the middlemen in the interior. African merchants, who had prospered in the nineteenth-century trade, were squeezed out. Farmers grew more groundnuts and fewer food crops, and by the 1930s Senegal was importing large amounts of rice from French Indochina.

The Mourides and the groundnut basin

An unexpected ally of the groundnut economy was a Sufi brotherhood. Amadou Bamba, a Muslim scholar who founded the Mouride brotherhood (Muridiyya) in the 1880s, taught that work was a form of devotion. The French saw his growing following as a threat and exiled him to Gabon (1895–1902) and Mauritania (1903–1907), then kept him under watch in Senegal until his death in 1927.

Yet the Mourides and the French came to need each other. Mouride disciples cleared new land in the east of the groundnut basin and grew groundnuts in organised work groups, and the brotherhood’s leaders, the marabouts, became major producers. The French accepted Mouride autonomy in return for order and exports, and Bamba gave his support to French recruitment in the First World War. The town of Touba, which Bamba founded, became the centre of a religious community that the colonial state left largely alone.

Social and cultural continuity and change

Islam spread faster under French rule than before it. Colonial peace, railways and the weakening of the old Wolof kingdoms helped the Sufi brotherhoods (the Mourides, the Tijaniyya and the Qadiriyya) to win followers, and by the end of the colonial period the great majority of Senegalese were Muslim. Christian missions made few converts outside the towns and the south-west. French officials learned to rule through the marabouts, which preserved much of rural social structure while changing its economic base.

French education was limited but created an influential elite. The École William Ponty, founded in Saint-Louis in 1903 and moved to Gorée in 1913, trained teachers, clerks and doctors’ assistants for the whole AOF; its graduates included many of the later political leaders of French West Africa. Dakar grew from a town of a few tens of thousands before the First World War into a city of several hundred thousand by 1960, and it became a meeting place for Africans from across the federation.

Léopold Sédar Senghor, born in 1906 at Joal, became the first African to pass the agrégation, the highest French teaching qualification, in 1935. In Paris in the 1930s he and the Caribbean poets Aimé Césaire and Léon-Gontran Damas developed Négritude, a literary and cultural movement that rejected the idea that assimilation meant giving up African identity and celebrated African culture as equal to European culture.

Experiences of different social groups

Colonial rule in Senegal produced clear winners and losers. The originaires gained political rights and jobs in the colonial administration across French West Africa; marabouts gained wealth and influence; chiefs gained power from the French. Peasants carried the burdens of tax, forced labour and conscription, and the Lebanese community held an uneasy position between French firms and African farmers.

Women’s experiences varied. In the communes, women of the originaire families could not vote until 1945, the year women in France first voted. In the groundnut basin, men controlled the cash crop while women grew food, so the shift to groundnuts often increased women’s work without increasing their income. In Casamance, in the south, Aline Sitoé Diatta, a young Diola woman and religious leader, urged people to refuse French demands for rice and recruits during the Second World War. She was arrested in 1943 and died in exile in Timbuktu in 1944.

Resistance and the road to independence, 1944–1960

After the war the French government tried to reform the empire to keep it. At the Brazzaville Conference (January–February 1944), French colonial officials recommended reforms such as ending the indigénat and forced labour, but rejected self-government for the colonies, even in the distant future. In 1946 the indigénat and forced labour were abolished, and the Lamine Guèye law of 7 May 1946, named after Senegal’s socialist deputy, made all subjects of the overseas territories citizens.

Workers used the new freedoms. A general strike in Dakar in January 1946 won large wage rises, and the railway workers of the Dakar–Niger line struck from October 1947 to March 1948 for equal treatment with French workers, an event later told in Ousmane Sembène’s novel God’s Bits of Wood (1960). Senghor, elected deputy in 1945 on Guèye’s list, broke with him in 1948 and founded the Bloc Démocratique Sénégalais (BDS). The BDS won rural voters, newly enfranchised, through alliances with the marabouts and chiefs.

The loi-cadre (enabling law) of June 1956 introduced universal suffrage and elected governments in each territory. In the referendum of 28 September 1958 Senegal voted to join de Gaulle’s French Community. Senghor wanted the former AOF to stay united, and in 1959 Senegal and French Sudan (Mali) formed the Mali Federation, which became independent on 20 June 1960. The federation broke up in August 1960, and Senegal became a separate independent state with Senghor as president, a post he held until he resigned on 31 December 1980.

Côte d’Ivoire: conquest, forced labour and the planters’ revolt (1893–1960)

Côte d’Ivoire became a French colony on 10 March 1893, but for twenty years French rule hardly reached beyond the coast and a few posts inland. It then became the most coercive of France’s West African colonies, and later the most prosperous. Its history shows how forced labour, cash crops and a planter elite produced a nationalist movement that ended by cooperating closely with France.

Establishing colonial authority: "pacification", 1908–1915

The peoples of the forest zone, such as the Baoulé, the Abbey and the Gouro, were organised in many small, independent communities, and they resisted taxes and porterage. In the north, Samori Touré’s state fought the French until his capture in 1898. Gabriel Angoulvant, governor from 1908 to 1916, decided that the colony could be developed only after it had been fully conquered.

Angoulvant’s "pacification" was a series of military campaigns against one region after another. Villages were burned, tens of thousands of guns were confiscated, leaders were deported, heavy collective fines were imposed, and scattered settlements were forced to regroup in larger villages along roads where they could be controlled and taxed. The Abbey rising of January 1910, which attacked the new railway, was put down in the same way. By about 1915 the French controlled the whole colony.

Maintaining power: chiefs, the indigénat and forced labour

Côte d’Ivoire was ruled by the same system of direct rule as the rest of French West Africa: French commandants of cercles, appointed canton and village chiefs, the indigénat and the head tax. Because most of the forest peoples had no large kingdoms, the canton chiefs were usually French appointees with little customary authority, and their main tasks (collecting tax, finding labour and recruits) made them unpopular.

Forced labour was the heart of the system. Every adult man owed about ten days a year of unpaid prestation labour, and the administration also recruited workers for longer terms for public works and private employers. Thousands built the Abidjan–Niger railway, begun in 1904, which reached Bouaké in 1912 and Bobo-Dioulasso in 1934. From the 1920s European planters and timber companies used forced labour recruited by the administration. When local workers ran short, the French recruited men from Upper Volta (today’s Burkina Faso), especially the Mossi; between 1932 and 1947 much of Upper Volta was even joined to Côte d’Ivoire to supply this labour.

Economic policies: coffee, cocoa and the planters

Cocoa and coffee spread through the south-east of the forest zone from the 1910s, grown above all by African farmers such as the Agni and Baoulé, who hired migrant labourers. European planters, a few hundred in number, were favoured by the colonial state: they received forced labour and, especially under the Vichy regime of 1940–1943, higher prices and priority in buying. African planters had to compete with them for workers while their own men were taken for forced labour.

The French built the infrastructure of an export economy. Abidjan became the capital in 1934. The Vridi Canal, opened in 1950, cut through the sandbar that separated the lagoon from the sea and made Abidjan a deep-water port. After 1946 the FIDES (the French development fund for the overseas territories) paid for roads, schools and the port, and coffee and cocoa exports grew quickly in the 1950s.

The chain diagram of the planters’ movement shows how an economic grievance became a national movement. In 1944 Félix Houphouët-Boigny, a doctor, wealthy cocoa planter and Baoulé canton chief, founded the Syndicat Agricole Africain (African Agricultural Union, SAA) with the support of the Free French governor, André Latrille. It demanded equal treatment with European planters and an end to forced labour, and it attracted migrant workers by paying them instead of relying on the administration.

Resistance: from evasion to the RDA

Before 1944 most resistance was quieter. Thousands of people in the east of the colony escaped forced labour, the head tax and military recruitment by moving across the border into the British Gold Coast, where cocoa farmers paid wages and the demands of the state were lighter. Others hid from recruiters, worked slowly on labour sites or deserted. This day-to-day resistance cost the administration labour and revenue, and officials complained of it, but it did not change policy until African planters organised.

Houphouët-Boigny was elected to the French Constituent Assembly in November 1945 by a small African electorate. On 11 April 1946 the assembly passed the law that bears his name, abolishing forced labour throughout the French colonies. The Houphouët-Boigny law made him a hero across French Africa; in Côte d’Ivoire his followers called him the man who had freed them from forced labour.

In April 1946 he founded the Parti Démocratique de Côte d’Ivoire (PDCI), and in October 1946, at a congress in Bamako, he became president of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA, African Democratic Rally), a federation of parties across French West and Equatorial Africa. In the French parliament the RDA allied with the French Communist Party, the only party that had backed its demands.

The colonial administration answered with repression. From 1949 Governor Laurent Péchoux backed rival parties, banned meetings and arrested PDCI leaders. Clashes followed in Abidjan, Bouaflé and Dimbokro, where 13 Africans were shot in January 1950. According to official figures, by 1951 about 52 Africans had been killed and around 3,000 arrested. In October 1950 Houphouët-Boigny broke the alliance with the Communists and turned to cooperation with France.

Cooperation worked for him. He became a minister in French governments from 1956 to 1959 and helped to shape French policy in Africa. He opposed Senghor’s plans for a federation of the former AOF, arguing that rich Côte d’Ivoire should not pay for its poorer neighbours, and in 1959 formed the Council of the Entente with Niger, Upper Volta and Dahomey instead. Côte d’Ivoire became independent on 7 August 1960, with Houphouët-Boigny as president and the PDCI as the only party.

Society, culture and social groups

The most dramatic religious change came from an African preacher. William Wadé Harris, a Grebo prophet from Liberia, walked along the Ivorian coast in 1913–1914 dressed in a white robe and carrying a cross. He told his hearers to destroy their religious objects, keep the Sabbath and wait for teachers with the Bible, and he baptised over 100,000 people in about eighteen months. The French, alarmed by his following, expelled him at the end of 1914. His converts founded the Harrist Church, one of the largest African independent churches in West Africa, and many others later joined the Catholic and Methodist missions.

Social groups experienced colonial rule very differently. A class of wealthy African planters grew up in the south-east and became the core of Houphouët-Boigny’s party. Lebanese and Syrian traders, as in Senegal, became the middlemen of the produce trade. Mossi and other migrant workers from the north and from Upper Volta did much of the hardest labour; their presence in the south laid the basis for later conflicts over land and citizenship. Women did much of the farm work on family plots, but the cash crops and the planter associations were controlled by men, and women had less access to mission schools. A small European community, never more than a few thousand before 1945, controlled the trading firms and the best jobs.

Independence did not end French influence. French advisers, troops and businesses stayed, and the economy grew rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s, a period often called the "Ivorian miracle". Coffee and cocoa output rose steeply, and by the late 1970s Côte d’Ivoire had become the world’s largest producer of cocoa. The growth rested on the same exports, foreign capital and migrant labour as the colonial economy, which is why historians use Côte d’Ivoire as a clear example of continuity across independence.

Kenya: a settler colony (1895–1963)

Kenya is the clearest case in this study of a settler colony. A few thousand European farmers shaped its laws on land, labour and politics for sixty years, and the conflicts this produced ended in the Mau Mau war of the 1950s. The independence struggle after 1945 is a focused study of its own; here the emphasis is on how settler colonialism was built and maintained, what it did to the economy and society, and how Africans resisted it before and during the Emergency.

Establishing colonial authority

The Imperial British East Africa Company, chartered in 1888, could not pay its way, and in 1895 the British government declared the East Africa Protectorate. Its first purpose was to secure the route to Uganda. The Uganda Railway, built from Mombasa to Kisumu on Lake Victoria between 1896 and 1901, used about 32,000 indentured labourers from British India, of whom about 2,500 died. Many who stayed became the core of Kenya’s Asian community.

Conquest was piecemeal. The Nandi resisted the railway and British posts for about ten years, until their leader Koitalel arap Samoei was killed at a meeting with British officers in October 1905. Punitive expeditions against the Embu, Kisii and others followed. Some African leaders chose alliance: the Maasai leader Lenana and Kikuyu chiefs such as Kinyanjui wa Gathirimu helped the British and gained positions as paramount chief. The Maasai were moved from the central Rift Valley in 1904 and again in 1911, losing their best grazing land to settlers.

The chain diagram of the settler state shows why settlers mattered so much. The railway had cost over £5 million, and officials, led by the commissioner Sir Charles Eliot, argued that European farmers producing exports would make it pay. From 1902 settlers from Britain and South Africa took land in the cool central highlands, which became the White Highlands. Their leader, Lord Delamere, a wealthy aristocrat who arrived in 1903, became the most powerful voice of settler politics.

Maintaining power: administration, law and force

Kenya was governed by a governor responsible to the Colonial Office, advised by a Legislative Council in which settlers gained elected members in 1920, the year the territory became the Kenya Colony and Protectorate. In the African districts, British district commissioners ruled through appointed chiefs and headmen, given power by the Native Authority Ordinance of 1912. From 1925 Local Native Councils gave educated Africans and chiefs a small say over local spending. Unlike the emirs of Nigeria, Kenya’s chiefs were mostly colonial creations, and many became wealthy landowners.

The law served the settler economy. The Crown Lands Ordinance of 1902 let the state grant land to settlers, and that of 1915 made all land in the colony, including African land, Crown land. Africans were confined to native reserves. Hut and poll taxes forced men to earn cash, the Masters and Servants Ordinance made leaving a job a criminal offence, and from 1920 every African man had to carry a kipande, a registration certificate that recorded his employer. Officials and chiefs also pressed men to work for settlers, especially during the labour shortages after the First World War.

Coercion was used whenever protest grew. In March 1922, after the arrest of the political leader Harry Thuku, police fired on a crowd outside the Nairobi police station; the official count was 21 dead, and other estimates run as high as 56. Thuku was deported without trial to the far north until 1930. During the Emergency of 1952–1960 the colonial state used detention without trial, collective punishment, forced villagisation and executions on a scale that has made Kenya the best-known case of colonial violence in British Africa.

Primarily, Kenya is an African territory, and His Majesty's Government think it necessary definitely to record their considered opinion that the interests of the African natives must be paramount, and that if, and when, those interests and the interests of the immigrant races should conflict, the former should prevail.

Duke of Devonshire, Colonial Secretary, Indians in Kenya (the Devonshire Declaration), White Paper, July 1923. The statement was issued to settle a dispute between European and Indian settlers over political rights, and its main effect was to block both settler self-government and Indian equality. As evidence of British policy it shows the official doctrine of trusteeship; set against the land and labour laws, it shows how far doctrine and practice diverged, since no alienated land was returned because of it.

Economic policies and their impact

Settler agriculture received the state’s support: railway freight rates favoured settler crops, the Department of Agriculture served Europeans, and Africans were not allowed to grow arabica coffee, the most valuable export, until the 1930s, and in practice in any numbers only from the 1950s. Settlers grew coffee, maize, wheat, sisal and tea and raised cattle, but many farms were unprofitable, and the Depression of 1929–1933 nearly ruined them. The state rescued them with loans and guaranteed prices.

African farmers adapted as far as the law allowed. Kikuyu farmers near Nairobi sold maize, vegetables and wattle bark, and in western Kenya Luo and Luhya farmers grew maize and cotton. Hundreds of thousands of men worked as migrant labourers on settler farms, on the railway and in Nairobi; tens of thousands of Kikuyu families lived on settler farms as squatters. Asian traders ran most of the shops in the towns and the countryside and were blocked from owning land in the highlands.

The Swynnerton Plan of 1954, written during the Emergency, reversed earlier policy. It consolidated scattered Kikuyu plots into single farms with individual land titles and allowed Africans to grow coffee, tea and pyrethrum for export. It created a class of prosperous African farmers, many of them loyalists, and left many of those detained during the Emergency without land, a division that lasted into independent Kenya.

Social and cultural continuity and change

Christian missions, above all the Church of Scotland Mission, the Church Missionary Society and the Catholic orders, provided most schools, and education became the main route to jobs and influence. In 1929 the Church of Scotland Mission and other Protestant missions demanded that their members give up female circumcision, an initiation rite at the centre of Kikuyu ideas of adulthood. The dispute led thousands to leave mission churches and schools and to found independent schools and churches, organised by the Kikuyu Independent Schools Association and others, which combined Western education with Kikuyu culture.

Nairobi, founded in 1899 as a railway depot, grew into a segregated city with European, Asian and African areas and a strict colour bar. Migration to the city and to settler farms loosened the authority of elders and lineages but did not end it, since migrants kept their land rights and family ties in the reserves. Ethnic identities hardened: colonial administration was organised by "tribe", each reserve belonged to one people, and political associations formed along ethnic lines.

Experiences of different social groups

The table of social groups shows that colonial rule divided Africans as well as separating them from Europeans. Women’s experience is often hidden in official records. On the coast, the Giriama prophetess Mekatilili wa Menza led resistance to British labour recruitment and taxation in 1913–1914 and was twice detained. In 1922 Mary Nyanjiru was among those shot at the Thuku protest after she shamed the men in the crowd for not freeing him. During the Emergency, women carried food and messages for the forest fighters, a few rose to command, and thousands were detained.

Resistance and the road to independence

Political resistance began with Thuku’s East African Association (1921) and the Kikuyu Central Association (1924), whose general secretary from 1928 was Johnstone Kamau, later Jomo Kenyatta. Their methods were petitions, delegations to London and newspapers, focused on land, the kipande and the lack of African representation. After 1944 the Kenya African Union (KAU) tried to unite Africans across ethnic lines.

Constitutional methods brought little, and from 1952 the conflict became an armed rebellion. The British declared a state of emergency on 20 October 1952 and fought the Mau Mau fighters, who called themselves the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, until 1956, keeping the Emergency until January 1960. The war, the detention camps, the Hola massacre of 1959 and the negotiations at the Lancaster House conferences (1960–1963) are covered in the focused study of Kenyan independence (FS2.2). Kenyatta and five other KAU leaders were convicted at Kapenguria in 1953 of managing Mau Mau, on evidence later shown to be unreliable, and he was released only in August 1961. Kenya became independent on 12 December 1963, with Kenyatta as prime minister.

Uganda: a protectorate built on Buganda (1894–1962)

Uganda was a protectorate, not a colony, and the British governed it largely through the kingdom of Buganda, whose chiefs had already allied with them. It had no large settler community, and its export economy was built on African peasant farmers. Its colonial history shows indirect rule at its most successful for one African elite, and the divisions this created for the rest of the country.

Establishing colonial authority: the Buganda Agreement

Buganda, a powerful kingdom on the northern shore of Lake Victoria, was torn in the 1880s and early 1890s by wars between Protestant, Catholic and Muslim factions of its chiefs, which the Protestant party won with the help of Lugard and the Imperial British East Africa Company. Britain declared a protectorate over Buganda in 1894 and extended it to the neighbouring kingdoms and peoples over the next twenty years, with Baganda troops fighting alongside British forces against Bunyoro and its ruler, Kabarega.

The Buganda Agreement of 10 March 1900, negotiated by the British special commissioner Sir Harry Johnston with the regents of the child kabaka (king), Daudi Chwa, and above all with the chief minister (katikiro) Apolo Kagwa, set the terms of British rule. The kabaka and the Lukiko (council of chiefs) kept their government under British supervision, Buganda paid a hut tax, and land was divided between the British Crown and Buganda’s ruling families and chiefs.

So long as the Kabaka, chiefs, and people of Uganda shall conform to the laws and regulations instituted for their governance by Her Majesty's Government, and shall cooperate loyally with Her Majesty's Government in the organisation and administration of the said Kingdom of Uganda, Her Majesty's Government agrees to recognise the Kabaka of Uganda as the native ruler of the province of Uganda under Her Majesty's protection and over-rule.

The Uganda (Buganda) Agreement, article 6, 10 March 1900 ("Uganda" here means the kingdom of Buganda). The agreement was written by the British and signed by the regents and chiefs, who had strong reasons to accept it: it confirmed their own power and gave them land. The conditional wording ("so long as") shows that the kabaka’s authority now depended on loyalty to Britain, a point that became central in the crisis of 1953.

The flow chart of the agreement shows the two sides of indirect rule in Uganda. Inside Buganda, about 1,000 chiefs and landowners received about 8,000 square miles of mailo land, freehold estates (named after the English word "mile"), and peasants on those estates became their tenants. Outside Buganda, the British used Baganda agents such as Semei Kakungulu to conquer and govern the east and north, a pattern historians call sub-imperialism. Similar but less generous agreements were made with Toro (1900), Ankole (1901) and, much later, Bunyoro (1933).

Maintaining power

The British ran Uganda with very few officials. In Buganda the kabaka’s government collected taxes, ran courts and organised labour for roads; elsewhere county and sub-county chiefs on the Ganda model did the same. Chiefs were salaried officials who could be moved and dismissed, so the system was a form of indirect rule in which "traditional" authority was in fact reorganised by the British. Order was kept by the Uganda Police and the King’s African Rifles, which recruited heavily from the north, especially the Acholi.

Resistance to Baganda rule was strongest in Bunyoro, which had lost a large part of its heartland, the "lost counties", to Buganda. In 1907 the Banyoro rose in the nyangire ("refusing") movement and forced the withdrawal of Baganda agents. In Buganda itself, the British later reduced the power of Kagwa’s generation of chiefs, who had become a landed oligarchy: Kagwa was forced to resign in 1926, and in 1927 the Busulu and Envujjo Law limited the rents and labour chiefs could demand from tenants.

Economic policies: peasant cotton and coffee

Uganda’s economy rested on African smallholders. Cotton, promoted from 1903–1904 by the British Cotton Growing Association and the Uganda Company (founded by a missionary-linked group), was grown first in Buganda and then in Busoga, Lango and Teso. The value of cotton exports rose from £200 in 1905 to £369,000 in 1915, and by then Uganda no longer needed a British subsidy to pay for its administration. Coffee became the second export from the 1920s and the first by the 1950s.

The profits did not all go to farmers. The government fixed prices, and Asian traders held the licences to gin cotton, while Africans were kept out of ginning. Northern districts were treated as labour reserves for the south and for the army. Settlers were few, and the government refused requests for large European plantations after the First World War, so land stayed in African hands. Makerere, founded in Kampala in 1922 as a technical school, became the leading college of East Africa.

Social and cultural continuity and change

Missionaries had reached Buganda before the British government, and religion became the basis of political factions. Protestant (Anglican) chiefs dominated the kingdom after 1900, with Catholics in second place and Muslims a smaller group. Mission schools such as King’s College Budo (Anglican, 1906) trained the sons of chiefs, who became the kingdom’s administrators. The divide between Protestants and Catholics shaped politics until independence, when the Catholic-led Democratic Party and the Protestant-dominated parties competed for power.

Colonial rule preserved some institutions and changed others. The kabakaship, the Lukiko and the clans continued, which gave the Baganda a strong sense of identity and continuity. But mailo land turned political chiefs into landowners, cash crops gave many peasants an income of their own, and migrants from Rwanda, Burundi and northern Uganda came to work on Ganda farms. In 1945 and again in 1949 there were riots in Buganda against chiefs, price controls and the Asian monopoly of ginning, led partly by the Bataka (clan heads) movement and the Uganda African Farmers’ Union.

Experiences of different social groups

The Baganda chiefs were among the clearest winners from colonial rule anywhere in Africa: they gained land, offices, education and influence over neighbouring peoples. The Banyoro lost land and status. Northern peoples such as the Acholi and Langi were recruited into the army and police and as labourers, but had fewer schools and less cash-crop income, a north–south divide that later shaped Uganda’s politics. Asians, more than 70,000 by the end of colonial rule, controlled much of trade and ginning and were resented for it.

Women in Buganda farmed the household’s plantain gardens, while cotton and coffee incomes often went to men. Mission schools for girls, such as Gayaza (1905), trained a small number of women as teachers and nurses. Under the mailo system land was registered mainly in men’s names, and women’s customary rights to use land became harder to defend.

Resistance and the road to independence

The great political crisis of colonial Uganda came from Buganda, not from a nationalist party. In 1953 a speech by the Colonial Secretary, Oliver Lyttelton, raised the possibility of an East African federation, which Ganda leaders feared would put them under Kenya’s settlers. Kabaka Mutesa II refused to cooperate with the governor, Sir Andrew Cohen, and demanded that Buganda be separated from the protectorate. Cohen deported him to Britain in November 1953. Protests across Buganda made the kabaka a national hero, and he returned in October 1955 as a constitutional monarch.

Party politics developed late and along religious and regional lines. The Democratic Party (1954) drew Catholic support; the Uganda People’s Congress (UPC, 1960) of Milton Obote, from Lango in the north, drew support outside Buganda; and Kabaka Yekka ("the king alone", 1961) represented Buganda’s monarchists. Obote allied with Kabaka Yekka to win power in 1962. Uganda became independent on 9 October 1962 with Obote as prime minister and Buganda as a semi-autonomous kingdom; in 1963 Mutesa became president.

The alliance did not last. In 1966 Obote suspended the constitution and sent the army, under Idi Amin, to attack the kabaka’s palace, and Mutesa fled into exile. In January 1971 Amin seized power in a coup. In August 1972 he ordered the expulsion of Uganda’s Asians, a community of about 80,000 people, most of whom left within three months, and his regime killed many thousands of Ugandans (estimates range from about 100,000 to 500,000) before a Tanzanian invasion and Ugandan exiles overthrew him in April 1979. Historians link these crises partly to colonial legacies: Buganda’s special status, an army recruited from the north, and the economic position of the Asians.

Mozambique: Portuguese rule, forced labour and war (1890–1975)

Portugal had traded on the Mozambican coast since the sixteenth century, but in 1890 it controlled little more than a few coastal towns and the Zambezi valley. Portugal was the poorest of the colonial powers, and it ruled Mozambique through chartered companies, forced labour and the export of workers to its neighbours. After 1930 the Estado Novo dictatorship in Lisbon made the colonies part of the nation and refused to decolonise, which is why Mozambique’s independence came only after a long war.

Establishing colonial authority

Under pressure to prove "effective occupation" after the Berlin Conference, Portugal conquered the south first. The Gaza kingdom, the strongest state in southern Mozambique, was defeated in 1895, and its king, Ngungunhane, was captured in December 1895 and exiled to the Azores, where he died in 1906. Campaigns in the north continued into the 1910s, and the Barue rising of 1917 in the Zambezi region, a protest against forced labour and recruitment for the First World War, was put down only after months of fighting. Lourenço Marques (today’s Maputo) became the capital in 1898.

Portugal lacked the money to govern the whole territory, so it handed much of it to chartered companies financed largely by British, French and South African capital. The Mozambique Company ruled Manica and Sofala (around Beira) until 1942, and the Niassa Company ruled the far north until 1929. These companies collected taxes, recruited labour and ran their own police. Elsewhere, prazos, large estates leased to Portuguese and Afro-Portuguese holders in the Zambezi valley, were turned into labour and tax concessions.

Maintaining power: the indigenato and the Estado Novo

From the 1890s the Portuguese divided Mozambicans into "natives" and citizens. The indigenato, set out in a Native Statute (1926, revised in 1929 and 1954), placed the great majority of Africans, the indígenas, under customary law administered by Portuguese officials and appointed chiefs (régulos), with obligations to pay tax, carry identity documents and work. An African could become an assimilado, with the rights of a citizen, by proving that he spoke Portuguese, had a Christian and "civilised" way of life and earned a regular income. By 1950 there were only a few thousand assimilados, well under 1 per cent of the African population.

In 1930 António de Oliveira Salazar, the finance minister who became dictator of Portugal in 1932, issued the Colonial Act. Its second article declared that it was part of the "organic essence" of the Portuguese nation to possess colonies and to "civilise" their peoples. The Estado Novo ("New State") ended the companies’ rule, tied the colonial economies to Portugal’s, and from 1951 renamed the colonies "overseas provinces", claiming they were part of a single, multi-racial Portuguese nation.

O Estado somente pode compelir os indígenas ao trabalho em obras públicas de interesse geral da colectividade, em ocupações cujos resultados lhes pertençam, em execução de decisões judiciárias de carácter penal, ou para cumprimento de obrigações fiscais.

Colonial Act, article 20, decree of 8 July 1930, as republished in 1933: "The State may compel natives to work only on public works of general interest to the community, in occupations whose results belong to them, in execution of criminal court sentences, or for the fulfilment of tax obligations" (own translation). The article was written to answer international criticism of forced labour, and the article before it banned the state from supplying workers to private companies. Read closely, it still allowed compulsion for public works, for "occupations whose results belong to them" (which was used to justify forced cotton growing) and for anyone behind with tax.

Security rested on the army, the colonial police and, from the 1950s in Mozambique, the political police, PIDE, which watched, arrested and tortured suspected nationalists. Chiefs who failed to deliver tax, labour or cotton could be beaten or removed, and the palmatória, a wooden paddle used to strike the hands, became a symbol of colonial punishment. On 16 June 1960, at Mueda in the far north, troops fired on a crowd of Makonde villagers who had come to present demands to the district administrator. The number killed is disputed, from official figures of a few to nationalist claims of several hundred; the massacre convinced many Makonde that peaceful protest was useless.

Economic policies: forced labour, migrant labour and forced cotton

Mozambique’s economy was built on three forms of labour, each tied to coercion.

The table of labour systems shows why so many Mozambicans experienced colonialism through work. Men from the south went as migrant labour to the mines of the Rand, where they made up a large share of the workforce, and returned with cash and goods; families in the south came to depend on these wages. In the north and centre, forced cotton growing, a form of compulsory cultivation, spread from 1938, and within four years more than 700,000 peasants had been forced to grow it. Cotton took land and labour from food crops, and in years of bad harvest it contributed to hunger. A saying recorded by the historian Allen Isaacman, "cotton is the mother of poverty", gave its name to his study of the system.

After 1945 Portugal sent settlers to Mozambique to build up a white population. Their numbers rose to about 200,000 by the early 1970s. Settlers took farmland in the Limpopo valley and other irrigation schemes, and filled even unskilled jobs in the towns, which limited African opportunities. Portugal also invested in infrastructure: the ports of Lourenço Marques and Beira served South Africa and the Rhodesias, and the Cahora Bassa dam on the Zambezi, built from 1969, was designed to sell electricity to South Africa.

Social and cultural continuity and change

Education for indígenas was left to the Catholic missions, which under agreements of 1940–1941 with the Vatican provided "rudimentary" schooling aimed at producing Catholic, Portuguese-speaking workers. Very few Africans reached secondary school; at the end of colonial rule over 90 per cent of Mozambicans could not read or write. Protestant missions, such as the Swiss Presbyterian mission in the south, were distrusted by the state but trained a number of future nationalists, including Eduardo Mondlane.

Migrant labour changed southern Mozambican society. Men spent years away in South Africa, women took on more of the farming and household responsibility, and returning miners brought new goods, ideas and churches. Zionist and Ethiopian-type African independent churches spread from South Africa along the migration routes. Islam continued to grow along the northern coast. The cities of Lourenço Marques and Beira had segregated areas of cement houses for Europeans and reed-built caniço suburbs for Africans.

Experiences of different social groups

Social groups in colonial Mozambique were divided in law by race and status. Portuguese settlers ranged from wealthy planters and officials to poor immigrants who competed with Africans for jobs. A small group of mixed-race people, Indians and assimilados held an uncertain middle position; assimilados faced discrimination despite their legal status, and many of the founders of nationalism came from this group. Régulos and chiefs who cooperated with the state gained power and income, but many lost legitimacy because they enforced chibalo and cotton quotas.

Women carried a heavy share of the burden. Because forced cotton targeted households, women often did most of the cotton work while also growing the family’s food, and many were beaten when quotas were missed. In the south, women managed farms and families while men were in the mines. During the war FRELIMO formed a Women’s Detachment (1967), whose members carried supplies, recruited and sometimes fought, and the party made women’s emancipation part of its programme.

Generally speaking, women are the most oppressed, humiliated and exploited beings in society. A woman is even exploited by a man who is himself exploited, beaten by the man who is lacerated by the palmatoria, humiliated by the man who is crushed under the boot of the boss and the settler.

Samora Machel, opening speech to the First Conference of Mozambican Women, 4 March 1973. Machel spoke as FRELIMO’s president to a conference organised by the movement in the middle of the war, and his speech set out the party’s Marxist view that women’s oppression came from systems of exploitation. It is valuable evidence of how FRELIMO linked colonialism, "tradition" and gender, and of its aim to mobilise women; as a political speech it is less reliable as a description of women’s actual experience.

Ethnic and regional differences also shaped experience. Southern peoples such as the Shangaan and Ronga were tied to migrant labour and had better access to mission education, while the Makonde of the north lived under forced cotton and crossed the border to work in Tanganyika, where they met nationalist politics. The Makonde became FRELIMO’s first base, and southern educated men dominated its leadership, a tension that contributed to splits within the movement in the 1960s.

Resistance and the road to independence

Before the 1960s most resistance was day-to-day resistance, everyday and hidden. Peasants boiled cotton seeds before planting them, planted cotton late or on poor land, hid food crops, and fled across the borders to Nyasaland, Tanganyika or Southern Rhodesia. Workers deserted, and songs mocked chiefs and officials. Educated Africans formed cultural associations and newspapers in Lourenço Marques, which the Estado Novo closely controlled.

Open political activity was impossible inside the colony, so nationalism was organised in exile. The FRELIMO (Mozambique Liberation Front) was founded in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on 25 June 1962 by the union of three exile groups, under the presidency of Eduardo Mondlane, a sociologist who had worked for the United Nations. On 25 September 1964 FRELIMO began an armed struggle in the northern provinces of Cabo Delgado and Niassa.

The vertical timeline of 1960–1977 shows how war, repression and events in Portugal combined to end colonial rule. Portugal responded to the outbreak of war in Angola in 1961 with reforms: the indigenato, forced cotton growing and the legal basis of chibalo were abolished in 1961. At the same time it fought FRELIMO with up to tens of thousands of troops, many of them African, resettled villagers in fortified aldeamentos to cut the guerrillas off from support, and launched Operation Gordian Knot in 1970. At Wiriyamu in December 1972, Portuguese commandos killed villagers; a later Portuguese investigation counted 63 dead, while the accounts of Catholic missionaries, published by the priest Adrian Hastings in 1973, gave about 400, and the number is still disputed.

FRELIMO survived the assassination of Mondlane by a parcel bomb in 1969 and, under Samora Machel, extended the war to Tete province, where it threatened the Cahora Bassa project. The wars in Mozambique, Angola and Guinea-Bissau took about 40 per cent of Portugal’s budget by the early 1970s, and on 25 April 1974 army officers tired of the wars overthrew the dictatorship in Lisbon in the Carnation Revolution. The new government signed the Lusaka Accord with FRELIMO on 7 September 1974, and Mozambique became independent on 25 June 1975 with Machel as president.

Most settlers left within a year, taking skills and capital with them. FRELIMO built a one-party Marxist state, and from 1977 Rhodesia, and later South Africa, backed the rebel movement RENAMO, which fought FRELIMO in a civil war that lasted until 1992. The violence of the colonial war and the Portuguese refusal to prepare for independence shaped this troubled start.

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Comparing colonial rule across the six countries

Each country can be studied on its own, but comparison shows which features came from the colonial power, which from the presence of settlers, and which from the African societies themselves. The comparisons follow five themes: authority, economic policy, social and cultural change, social groups and resistance.

Methods of establishing and maintaining authority

The table of methods shows that the labels hide a common pattern. In every country Africans did most of the work of colonial government, as chiefs, clerks, police and soldiers, and in every country colonial authority rested on law that treated Africans differently from Europeans. Force was used most where settlers had a stake (Kenya, Mozambique) and where colonial rule was being imposed (Côte d’Ivoire before 1915, northern Nigeria before 1906).

The impact of colonial economic policies

The six colonies shared the same basic economic role: to export raw materials and import manufactured goods. They differed in who produced the exports. In the peasant economies of Nigeria, Senegal and Uganda, African farmers grew cocoa, palm oil, groundnuts and cotton on their own land and kept some of the income, though marketing boards, fixed prices and foreign trading firms took a large share. In Kenya and Mozambique land and labour were taken for settlers, plantations and mines. Côte d’Ivoire combined both: African planters and European planters competed, and forced labour served the Europeans until 1946.

Global events changed every colonial economy. The Depression of 1929–1933 halved or worse the prices of many African exports, cutting incomes while taxes stayed the same. The Second World War raised demand for crops, rubber, tin and soldiers, brought controlled prices and forced production, and ended with new development spending: Britain’s Colonial Development and Welfare Acts (1940, 1945) and France’s FIDES (1946). The historians D. A. Low and John Lonsdale (1976) called this post-war phase the second colonial occupation, in which experts and officials arrived to make the colonies more productive, often provoking new resistance.

Social and cultural continuity and change

Colonial rule changed African societies through the missions, schools, towns and migration it brought, but Africans chose what to accept and adapted it. Christianity spread fastest in the south of Nigeria, in Buganda and in Kenya, through missions that offered schooling; Islam spread fastest in Senegal and northern Nigeria, where colonial rulers worked through Muslim leaders. Africans also built their own religious institutions, as the table of religious responses shows.

Social structures, towns and identity

Towns such as Lagos, Dakar, Abidjan, Nairobi, Kampala and Lourenço Marques drew migrants and created new social groups: clerks, teachers, traders, workers and the unemployed. Migration, whether to towns, to cash-crop areas or to the mines, weakened the authority of elders and changed family life, but most migrants kept links to their rural homes. At the same time colonial rule strengthened ethnic identity: administration by "tribe", native reserves and native authorities gave people reasons to organise as Igbo, Yoruba, Kikuyu or Baganda.

Two kinds of identity therefore grew together. Ethnic associations, regional parties and kingdoms such as Buganda gave people a sense of belonging inside the colony, while national movements, Pan-Africanism and Négritude built identities across ethnic lines. Which one dominated by independence varied: national identity was strongest where a movement had fought together (FRELIMO in Mozambique) and weakest where politics had been organised by region (Nigeria) or around a kingdom (Uganda).

Attitudes between colonisers and colonised

Colonisers’ attitudes ranged from open racism to paternalism, the belief that Europeans should guide Africans like children towards "civilisation". Lugard’s idea of the dual mandate, French talk of a "civilising mission" and Portuguese claims to a multi-racial nation all expressed paternalism, and all assumed European superiority. Settlers in Kenya and Mozambique were usually the most hostile to African advancement, because it threatened their land and jobs, while some missionaries and officials defended African interests against them.

Africans’ attitudes ranged from cooperation and admiration of European education to resentment and rejection. Many members of the educated elite, such as Diagne or Azikiwe in his early career, wanted equality within the colonial system before they demanded its end. The colour bar, the denial of senior posts to educated Africans and violence such as Thiaroye turned many towards nationalism. Négritude, independent churches and the defence of custom all show attempts to answer European claims of superiority with pride in African culture.

The impact of colonial rule on different social groups

The table of social groups shows that colonialism was not experienced by "Africans" as a single group. For one Baganda chief or Senegalese marabout it brought wealth; for a Kikuyu squatter or a Makonde cotton grower it brought loss and coercion. Women’s experience shows the clearest continuity of disadvantage, because colonial law usually recognised men as household heads and landowners, though some women gained new independence through trade.

The effectiveness of Indigenous resistance

Resistance took four main forms, and every country saw all four.

The diagram of factors shows why the same kinds of resistance had different results. Where Britain and France were willing to transfer power after 1945, political parties and elections won independence without war (Nigeria, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Uganda). Where settlers had political influence (Kenya) or the colonial power was a dictatorship that regarded the colonies as part of the nation (Mozambique), armed rebellion was more likely, and its success depended on events outside the colony, such as British decisions after 1959 and the Lisbon coup of 1974.

Perspectives and debates

Contemporary perspectives

Colonial rulers presented their rule as trusteeship and civilisation. Lugard’s Dual Mandate (1922) argued that Britain ruled for the benefit of both Europe and Africa; French officials spoke of a mission civilisatrice; the Colonial Act of 1930 described colonisation as part of Portugal’s national destiny. Settlers in Kenya and Mozambique claimed to be pioneers bringing productive farming to empty or wasted land.

African perspectives were varied. Chiefs and elites who gained from colonial rule, such as Apolo Kagwa in Buganda, presented cooperation as the best way to protect their people. Educated nationalists such as Awolowo and Senghor accepted parts of European culture while rejecting European rule. Others, from the women of the 1929 protest to FRELIMO’s leaders, described colonialism as exploitation; Machel’s speech of 1973 presents it as a system built to take Africa’s wealth and labour, with violence and ignorance used to hold people down.

Indirect rule and the colonial state

Historians have long debated how different British and French rule really were. Michael Crowder, in "Indirect Rule — French and British Style" (1964) and West Africa under Colonial Rule (1968), argues that the difference was real: British indirect rule left traditional rulers with genuine authority, while French chiefs were officials of the colonial state. He also shows that in practice both systems depended on chiefs, and that British practice outside the emirates was far less "indirect" than its theory. A. E. Afigbo’s The Warrant Chiefs (1972) shows how indirect rule failed in south-eastern Nigeria because it imposed chiefs on societies that had none.

Mahmood Mamdani, in Citizen and Subject (1996), goes further. He argues that colonial rule in Africa, British and French alike, created a "bifurcated state": citizens in the towns governed by civil law, and subjects in the countryside governed by chiefs who combined executive, judicial and legislative power under "customary" law, a form of rule he calls decentralised despotism. For Mamdani, the system outlived colonialism and helps to explain authoritarian rule after independence. Critics reply that he generalises too far from some cases and gives too little weight to African agency.

Invented tradition and ethnicity

Terence Ranger, in "The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa" (in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds, The Invention of Tradition, 1983), argues that through the invention of tradition colonial rulers and African elites together turned fluid customs into fixed "customary law" and "tribes", often to suit the needs of indirect rule. John Iliffe, in A Modern History of Tanganyika (1979), makes a related point: Europeans believed that Africans belonged to tribes, and Africans in turn built tribes to belong to. In a later essay (1993) Ranger described these traditions as "imagined" rather than invented, to give more weight to how Africans themselves used and reshaped them. The warrant chiefs of Nigeria and the Ganda model of chiefship spread across Uganda are strong evidence for this view.

The economic impact of colonialism

The table of economic interpretations shows that the debate is partly about which colonies are studied. Rodney’s argument fits Mozambique and Côte d’Ivoire before 1946 closely; Hopkins’s fits the peasant economies of southern Nigeria and Senegal better. Cooper’s idea of the gatekeeper state links the colonial economy to independent Africa, since governments in Côte d’Ivoire and Nigeria went on living from marketing boards, export taxes and foreign aid.

Settler violence in Kenya and Mozambique

Research since the 2000s has changed views of colonial violence. Caroline Elkins, in Imperial Reckoning (published in Britain as Britain’s Gulag, 2005), argues that the detention camps of the Kenya Emergency used systematic brutality and that many more Kikuyu passed through them than official figures admit; her estimates of numbers detained and killed are disputed. David Anderson, in Histories of the Hanged (2005), uses the trial records to show the scale of executions. Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, in Unhappy Valley (1992), present Mau Mau as a moral argument among Kikuyu about land and status as well as a revolt against Britain. For Mozambique, the Wiriyamu inquiry and the testimony of missionaries showed how counter-insurgency fell on civilians; in 2022 Portugal’s prime minister, António Costa, apologised for the massacre, calling it inexcusable.

Applying the ideas in exam questions

Questions set on this study take the form of a claim about colonial rule, its effects or resistance to it, which the answer must evaluate.

Paper 3: maintaining colonial authority

Paper 3: colonial economic policies

Paper 3: continuity and change

Paper 3: social groups and resistance

A further claim to practise with: "Armed rebellion was the least effective form of Indigenous resistance to colonial rule." Test it in Kenya (Mau Mau defeated but British policy changed), Mozambique (FRELIMO’s war and the Lisbon coup) or Nigeria (risings crushed; political action successful), weighing armed rebellion against political, cultural and everyday resistance.

Self-check

• To do:

  I can explain assimilation, association, direct rule, indirect rule and settler colonialism, and say which applied in each of the six countries.

• To do:

  I can explain how colonial authority was established in at least one country, including conquest and agreements with African rulers.

• To do:

  I can explain the methods used to maintain power: African intermediaries, law, internal security, coercion and violence, with examples.

• To do:

  I can describe changes to land use and agriculture, voluntary and forced labour, infrastructure and trade in at least one country.

• To do:

  I can explain African responses to religious change, including mission churches, African independent churches and Sufi brotherhoods.

• To do:

  I can explain how urbanisation, migration, education and colonial administration changed social structures and identities.

• To do:

  I can describe attitudes between colonisers and colonised, using Lugard’s dual mandate and African responses such as Négritude.

• To do:

  I can compare the experiences of colonists, Indigenous elites, women and different ethnic groups in one country.

• To do:

  I can assess the effectiveness of political and legal action, cultural resistance, day-to-day resistance and armed rebellion.

• To do:

  I can explain how and why each country became independent, and why Mozambique’s independence came later and through war.

• To do:

  I can use the views of Crowder, Mamdani, Ranger, Rodney, Hopkins, Isaacman and Cooper as perspectives in an argument.

• To do:

  I can plan an essay on any theme of this study for one of the six countries, reaching a substantiated judgement.