MC_A Concise History of Africa

Colonialism

railway under one local colonial administration. Because the railway experienced cost overruns in Kenya, the British decided to justify its exceptional expense and pay its operating costs by introducing large- scale European settlement in a vast tract of land that became a center of cash-crop agriculture, known as the “White Highlands.” In much of Uganda, by contrast, agricultural production was placed in the hands of the Africans, if they responded to the opportunity. Cotton was the crop of choice, largely because of pressure from the British Cotton- Growing Association, which

looked to the colonies to provide raw materials for British mills. Even the Church Missionary Society joined the effort, by launching the Uganda Company (managed by a former missionary) to promote cotton- planting and to buy and transport the produce. It was a financial success but eventually caused resentment, in that the Africans remained cotton-growers, Europeans then processed the crop, and the Indians came in as merchants, buying crops and supplying imports to the country-dwellers. The government in East Africa was paternalistic and the people

became conditioned to follow the lead offered by others. Eventually, when independence was imminent, the elite took up government service, rather than commerce, and African paternalism replaced the colonial kind. The Invention of Africa Africa did not offer the same kind of framework for rule as India, where the British inherited an empire, the Moghuls having been overlords in most of the continent, their rule, at times, extending into Afghanistan. As far as the British could fathom, there was an assortment of monarchs in India, and Britain made better use of existing rulers than most. The French, meanwhile, must have had a difficult time trying to incorporate republicanism into areas that once boasted their own imperial power, and Liberté, Égalite, Fraternité must have needed a good deal of explanation. The British emphasized the notion of the “Great White Mother,” concerned for all her imperial subjects. Queen Victoria, although interested in Africa, cared most strongly about India, the jewel in the crown, to the extent of employing a tutor to teach her Urdu, while later British monarchs were in the habit of regaling African rulers with letters and messages, rather like a father to a son. LEFT: Cotton became the most important crop grown in the British colonies. The raw crop was used to supply the British cotton mills. OPPOSITE: Queen Victoria as head of the British Empire was referred to as the “Great White Mother.”

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