sierra leone, 1787-1987 || sierra leone and south africa

International African Institute

Sierra Leone and South AfricaAuthor(s): Gustav H. K. DeveneauxSource: Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 57, No. 4, Sierra Leone,1787-1987 (1987), pp. 572-575Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the International African InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1159902 .

Accessed: 16/06/2014 05:32

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Cambridge University Press and International African Institute are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to Africa: Journal of the International African Institute.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.250 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 05:32:28 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=iai

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1159902?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Africa 57 (4), 1987

SIERRA LEONE AND SOUTH AFRICA

Gustav H. K. Deveneaux

While in the history of Sierra Leone connections have been established with such places as Great Britain, America, the West Indies, Nigeria, the Gambia, Ghana and other parts of Africa, relatively little or no attention has been paid to connections with South Africa. And yet it may just be that the South African impact in shaping developments in Sierra Leone in the last century was greater than anyone might suspect. The activities of two individuals, Nathaniel Isaacs and Sir Frederic Cardew, will be briefly examined to illustrate the point.

Christopher Fyfe gives this brief introduction to Isaacs in his History.

Born in Canterbury in 1808 of Jewish parents he went as a boy to St. Helena where his uncle, Saul Solomon, was in business; thence he moved to Natal, explored the interior and sought to settle, but was refused land. Discouraged, he returned to England and in 1834 began trading to West Africa. By the early 1840's he had an establishment in the Gambia, and during 1843 and 1844 spent nearly ?1,700 on houses or mortgages in Freetown where he received cargoes of groundnuts or palm oil from the rivers, and became an army contractor. In 1844, he bought Matacong Island, sold off his Freetown properties, and moved there, out of reach of the customs.'

The rest is a familiar story until 1854, when again, according to Fyfe, Isaacs was suspected of trading in slaves at Matacong Island by Governor Kennedy. But before Kennedy could send troops to arrest him, word reached him through his many contacts. He bolted quickly to England, from where he continued to direct the business interests which he had established in West Africa.2 The slaves were, however, found in his compound.

Isaacs had been a man of considerable stature in the colony, having on occasion served as agent of the government, and had cultivated friendly relations with local rulers. He had also chosen to support generously the Methodist sect in Sierra Leone. Whether he had been converted or not is not certain, however.

But probably the key to appreciating Isaacs's subsequent enterprise in West Africa lay in his South African experiences, particularly in Natal, a fact only casually referred to by Fyfe and others. Isaacs was taken into South Africa from St Helena in 1825 by James Saunders King, a Cape trader and speculator, at the tender age of seventeen. Subsequently he moved to Natal, from where, together with Francis George Farewell and Henry Francis Fynn, he became one of the first Europeans to enter the Zulu kingdom under Shaka. There he witnessed some of the bloodiest scenes under Shaka and experienced the agonies and excitement of the early pioneers in Zululand. Following Shaka's death, under Dingane relations deteriorated with the traders, a party of whom were brutally murdered by Dingane's Impis in Natal. Isaacs had had enough, and his luck in escaping the slaughter finally induced him to leave South Africa for good in 1830.3

But he had planned to return to Natal again, as many of the surviving white traders did, and met with a rebuff from the colonial authorities. So he settled in England, where he launched a campaign for white settlement in




Natal and against the Zulu and succeeded in painting a very lurid picture of Shaka in a book published in two volumes in 1936 entitled Travels and Adventures in Eastern Africa. Significantly, it was from this single source alone that the demonic image of Shaka and the Zulu which became so popular with whites in South Africa and Europe and America was picked up.

But a recent biographer of the Zulu kings, Brian Roberts, has questioned Isaacs's portrayal. I quote his summary extensively.

Isaacs' career in Natal was coloured by his unquestioning devotion to James Saunders King. King had brought him to Africa at the age of seventeen and impressionable youngster that he was Isaacs had followed his smoothtalking friend blindly. To cover up for King's double dealing, he discounted the friendship shown to the traders by Shaka; he was reluctant to admit that the Zulu kings had any redeeming qualities. There is a great deal of truth in what he says, but all too often his writings have been accepted uncritically. His diary is regarded as a primary source for the pioneering days in Natal but it is too biased particularly where Shaka is concerned to be reliable. When he told Fynn to make the Zulu Kings as 'Blood-thirsty as you can', he summed up his own approach. His portrait of Shaka is an obvious distortion but, for want of other evidence, it has resulted in a legend of a Zulu monster. Shaka, for all his ruthlessness, deserves more credit than Isaacs allows him.4

Isaacs, as we have seen, then applied his energies in West Africa until 1854, when he returned to England. He died at Egremont, in Cheshire, in 1872.5

The importance of Isaacs's career in South Africa and its relationship to his subsequent career lies in the possibility that he had developed from that background a callous disregard for Africans and a cynical attitude towards European efforts at reforming them. This is the only reasonable conclusion one can arrive at, judging by his superficial display of respect for the colonial authorities in Freetown and association with recaptive benevolent interests while at the same time accumulating considerable wealth by selling other Africans as slaves to European and presumably American dealers. Perhaps more respectable Europeans at this time were engaged in such double-dealing in the colony, making it more difficult for it to chart a steady course of economic and social progress. That Isaacs could have been living with an African mistress, a practice in which several other European slave dealers indulged while degrading her 'brothers' for money, betrayed a pathetic ambiguity in racial attitudes common in slave-owning countries, for example the Americans and the West Indies in the nineteenth century, and in South Africa, then and now. The extent to which such ambiguity was felt by other European officials and traders in the nineteenth century will never be known, but it is something worth pondering. More information on this theme might throw more light on European attitudes towards African progress in Sierra Leone in the nineteenth century and add another fascinating dimension to the colony's history.

Now, to another figure of towering importance in the eventual imposition of colonial rule on the hinterland of the tiny coastal colony towards the tail end of the last century, Frederic Cardew. Again we take our cue from Fyfe. He writes:

573



SHORT COMMUNICATIONS

Colonel Frederic Cardew, sent to relieve him [Governor Fleming] temporarily then remaining substantively, suffered from no hesitant fears. A professional soldier, he served twenty years in India, five in South Africa, with active service on the North West Frontier and in the Zulu War, before accepting a colonial post in Zululand. At fifty-five (he was a month older than Hay, three years older than Fleming) his robust frame, unimpaired by smoking or drinking, was still equal to exertions in the bush.6

The rest, as in the case of Isaacs, is a familiar story. For Cardew had arrived in the colony at a critical period when the British government had to take a firm decision on the future of relations with the neighbouring polities and peoples. Past policy had been characterised more by vacillation and indecision than anything else. But in the current international climate of imperialism and the need to formalise and regularise relations with her neighbours, the British government felt less constrained by caution about the consequences. If indeed the appointment of Cardew had been meant to be temporary, it was indeed fortunate, for the Colonial Office could not have selected as acting governor a personality better than him.

For Cardew went on to implement British policy with such single-minded dedication that, indeed, when a protectorate was declared over adjoining territories and a tax on houses imposed which the native authorities jointly decided to refuse to pay in 1898, many believe the subsequent rebellion was caused by the inflexible manner in which Cardew and his European commissioners had carried out their policies. Sir David Chalmers, sent out to investigate the insurrection, thought so, anyway, as have many others since.7

Cardew himself had a strong sense of mission and felt the imposition of the Pax Britannica on native peoples was beneficial to them. Resistance was therefore tantamount to regression to barbarism. Apologists for Cardew have concurred with him on the need for an orderly administration to promote economic advance.8 But at the bottom of all this was Cardew's fundamental belief in the superiority of white civilisation.

Cardew equally felt a strong dislike for African elites and found it unnecessary to place any trust in Krio responsibility either in the colony or in the protectorate. Indeed, he considered any interference on their part mere 'meddling'.

Again, it is here suggested that such strong views regarding Euro-African relations towards the tail end of the last century as evinced by Cardew owe a lot to his South African experiences. His long experience as a soldier in India, where he had witnessed government through Indian chiefs, was no doubt important. For we ought to remember that the system of 'indirect rule' which was subsequently applied by the British government in the colonies in Africa as developed by Lord Frederick Lugard owed much to inspiration from the Indian experience.

But it was the South African experience in Zululand which was decisive. Cardew had taken part in the final destruction of Zulu power under Ceteshwayo by a combination of Boer greed and ruthlessness and British connivance. Following the defeat of a British garrison at Islandhlwana in 1879 by the Zulu, Ceteshwayo was banished and his kingdom quickly divided up. All this had been executed by Commissioner Sir Garnet Wolseley, who had seen action earlier in the 1870s in the Gold Coast. Chiefs

574




who proved to be mostly unpopular were appointed. The philosophy he pursued, according to a leading authority on South African history, Leonard Thompson, was 'Divide and refrain from ruling'.9

No doubt it was this experience which conditioned Cardew's thinking and action in Sierra Leone. The eventual subjection of the powerful Zulu kingdom over the years by European settlers and imperialists was one of the most tragic chapters in black/white relations in South Africa. From respect and fear at the beginning of the nineteenth century, by the end of the century it was contempt and disregard that characterised white perception not only of the Zulus but of Africans in general in South Africa. Cardew could certainly not have escaped such an infection.

It is therefore only reasonable to conclude that much of his behaviour in Sierra Leone, generally agreed even by his sympathisers to be superior and paternalistic and contemptuous of African elites was conditioned by the racial climate of fin de siecle South Africa.

Again, at a critical period in Sierra Leone's history South African experiences had directly affected the behaviour of an important individual, in this case the governor himself. Purely out of speculation, one wonders how many other subordinate British officials then and subsequently in the twentieth century shared Cardew's attitudes. Future research on such a theme might just reveal that the inherent contradiction between white paternalism and African demands for equality and freedom, a continuing theme in colonial Sierra Leonean history, owed much to influences from South Africa.

NOTES

C. Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone (London, 1968), pp. 239-40. 2 Ibid., p. 275. 3 B. Roberts, The Zulu Kings (London, 1974), especially ch. 12. 4 Ibid., p. 219. 5Ibid.

6 Fyfe, History, p. 522. 7 Sir David Chalmers, Report of the Insurrection in the Sierra Leone Protectorate, 2 vols (London

1899); A. Abraham, Mende Government and Politics under Colonial Rule (London, 1978); G. Deveneaux, 'The Political and Social Impact of the Colony in Northern Sierra Leone', unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Boston University, 1973, and Fyfe, History.

8 J. D. Hargreaves, 'The establishment of the Sierra Leone protectorate and the insurrection of 1898', Cambridge Historical Journal, XII, 1 (1956). 9 L. Thompson, 'The subjection of the African chiefdom', in M. Wilson and L. Thompson (eds.), The Oxford History of South Africa, II (London, 1971), p. 265.

575



sierra leone, 1787-1987 || sierra leone and south africa

Documents