The Shortest War in History

Tomorrow I leave to return to NYC after 2 1/2 months in my other home city.  Getting ready is onerous.  And lots of people here are wondering, given the political situation, why I want to go back.  I know why.  But that's another story.

I also am in a place in my WIP where one of my characters is about to go into a dangerous battle in WWI, and I am worried about what will happen to him.

I am hoping that WW III will  not be breaking out soon and also that my character will not be...  I can't even type it.

The best I can today is go back to this post about another war that I first offered 11 years ago. 

It will take longer to write this post than the duration of the war.  Much longer.

The combatants were the British Empire and the Sultanate of Zanzibar.  Want to guess who won?

We will get to that, but let’s start further back.

Though I knew nothing of Zanzibar’s location on the map or its history, the very sound of its name was synonymous with “romantic and exotic” in my mind when I was a child.  Its story has proved my young imagination correct.  Its position and its protected, defensible harbor made it a base for voyaging traders from time immemorial.   Arabs, Indians, and Africans had used it as such for millennia when the Vasco Da Gama arrived and assumed control of it in 1499.   It took the Ottomans two hundred years and at least two shooting wars to unseat the Portuguese for good in 1698.

Sultan Seyyid

Afterwards, under the control of the Sultanate of Oman, the island became a center of agriculture and an important post for trading ivory and slaves.

During the 19^th century Scramble for Africa, the British set their sights on Zanzibar. Its main potential uses: it would give them a leg up in their competition with the Germans for control of East Africa AND they could claim it as key to abolishing slavery.   The Empire’s progress there came in diplomatic fits and starts until 1856, when the Brits recognized Sultan Seyyid Said, who in return gave their East African ambitions his support, favoring them over their German rivals.

But… and since this is about a war, there must be a “but.”   Said’s heir, the pro-British Hamad bin Thuwaini, died on August 25^th 1896, whereupon Hamad’s nephew Khalid bin Barghash took over in a coup d’etat.

The treaty between Her Majesty’s government and the Sultan Seyyid had given Britain the right to approve of who ruled Zanzibar.

The Brits saw that Khalid threatened their favored position and would play the Germans and the British off against each other.   They were most seriously  displeased.  They much preferred another heir, Hamud bin Muhammed, who would be their man.

The game was afoot.

Khalid had 2800 men with him in the fortified palace and an armed yacht anchored in the harbor.  The rest of the regular Zanzibar Army was elsewhere on the island and under the command of General Lloyd Matthews, formerly a Lieutenant in the Royal Navy.  Needless to say, Khalid was not getting any help from that quarter.

On August 26^th, the Brits moved in with five cruisers.  They also landed a few platoons of Royal Marines.  They delivered an ultimatum to Khalid: Stand down and give up the palace by 9 tomorrow morning or you will be toast.  Khalid ignored the order.  Big mistake.

On August 27^th, at 9:02 in the morning, Rear-Admiral Henry Rawson gave the order to open fire.  That volley set the Sultan’s palace afire and destroyed the defenders’ artillery.  The British sank the HHS Glasgow, the Zanzabari royal yacht.  Khalid’s retreating troops fired a few desperate shots at the Brits.  At 9:40 AM, a final shot from the HMS Thrush’s 12-pounder brought down the Sultan’s flag at the palace and the war was over.

Khalid absconded to the German embassy and eventually escaped to German East Africa on the mainland.  The British puppet, Sultan Hamud took the throne.

Five hundred of Khalid’s men—largely composed of civilians and slaves—were killed or injury.  One British sailor was wounded.

And the way was paved for the Brits to gain hegemony over British East Africa (now Kenya).  You can meet some of those Brits—real and fictional—in my Strange Gods, which will launch on June 24.

Annamaria - Monday

The Importance of Time and Place in Strange Gods by Annamaria Alfieri

Annamaria Bragging on Monday

This Sunday morning just as I was leafing through my list of possible blog topics, I learned that the following article had just been published in the Journal of the Historical Novel Society, under the title above.  Its author, Marilyn Pemberton had interviewed me a few weeks ago.  I did not know that this would be the result.  I am, of course, delighted. First let me introduce the author of the article. (It seems to me that, like the founder of the Historical Novel Society, she is British. Can you see the evidence for that below?)

Marilyn Pemberton has a passion for fairy tales that subvert and challenge social mores. Victorian fairy-tale writer Mary De Morgan was the subject first of a biography, then a fictionalised life in The Jewel Garden. Her historical trilogy, Grandmother’s Footsteps, will be complemented by a fourth book, A Bearer of Tales, due to be published later in 2024.

 

 

 

After the publication of her third historical novel set in South America, Annamaria Alfieri’s agent and editor thought it was time for her to write a series. With this challenge set before her, Alfieri knew that she would have to find a place and a time that would allow her to write many stories.

“I had taken a couple of trips to Africa by then and had fallen in love with being there,’ she relates. ‘As with my other books, once I had an interesting place, I looked for the most dramatic time in its history. Once my imagination landed in that place at that time, I knew that there was enough grist for the story mill to last through a series.’

Alfieri has decided to write a ten-book series, based on a theme inspired by her late father. She remembers that, ‘Among his possessions, I found a leather bookmark inscribed with the Ten Commandments,’ she remembers. ‘It was like a message from Dad—to base a book on each of the commandments. So, for each book, one theme is the sin of the commandment. Another is a different evil that has no commandment, and I have the audacity to suggest it should have one.’

Strange Gods (Stonesong, 2023), the first book in the series, is set in the former British East Africa and based on the first commandment, which forbids worship of any but the one true God. ‘This brings up the clash of cultures between what the Europeans believe and what the Africans believe,’ Alfieri says. ‘The sin that has no commandment is the audacity of the colonizers, who move in and take over the territory where the indigenous people have lived for millennia.’

Each of the ten books will be set in sequential years of a decade, starting in 1911, a time frame Alfieri chose after ‘doing TONS! of research.’ She says that ‘All of the good ideas I get for my stories come right out of my research. The best sources for me are always the writings of people who had feet on the ground at the time. Also, there were books written about life in the Protectorate of British East Africa that were meant to attract settlers to the place. I have a copy of one, thanks to reprints by the University of Michigan Library. What a treasure trove! It even has the railway schedule, so that when my characters travel by train, I know what time the train is supposed to come and what time it’s supposed to get to their destination. All my research is aimed at helping me to feel as if I am there. Research is my time machine. Once I am there in my imagination, I can hang out with my characters, hear what they say, and I write down what they do.

Alfieri chose the 1910s in particular because it ‘brings readers to a time fraught with conflict. Colonialism was just really getting going. Missionaries from Britain had been moving into the area for about 20 years. The British government had taken control over the previous 15 years and even built a railroad from the coast to the shores of Lake Victoria and the center of the continent. And the British government had begun a campaign of recruiting settlers who were beginning to move in and establishing farms along that railroad. Also, the tribal people who had lived there for centuries were often in conflict with one another.’

This conflict, she explains, was evident from the outset, when ‘the missionaries and the King’s faithful empire builders of the administration were at odds over how the indigenous people should be treated. The arriving settlers were largely British aristocrats, often second sons, who were no longer guaranteed a cushy life back home and looking to find a place where the cost of living luxuriously was cheaper. Being of the upper class, they looked down upon both the “tin-god” administrators and the “shopkeepers’ sons” among the clergy. With all this conflict, there would be—in that place and time—lots of drama and many reasons for people to want to kill each other.’

There are three main storytellers in Strange Gods, each one representing different groups, and it is their stories that Alfieri tells in this first book. ‘Vera McIntosh is the daughter of Scottish missionaries. She was born and grew up in British East Africa, and her playmates were Kikuyu children. Because of this, she has a foot in two worlds. She knows her parents’ culture and its requirements, but she also knows the world as well as the language of her playmates.

‘Justin Tolliver is the second son of an earl. But his family has no money to bankroll an upper-class lifestyle for him. Like most second sons, he is serving in the British military. His regiment was posted to South Africa in the aftermath of the Boer War. While there, he visited British East Africa and has fallen in love with its beauty. He wants to stay there, but without financial support from his family, he cannot afford to do what people of his class did – take a farm. In order to stay, he takes the drastic step of joining the police force. So, Justin too has a foot in two worlds.

‘Kwai Libazo,’ – arguably the most interesting character in the book – ‘is an askari, a police constable, who is half-Maasai and half-Kikuyu. Growing up, neither tribe accepted him. He is a young man who belongs nowhere. Then, serving in the police force, he meets and begins to work for Justin Tolliver, who holds justice as their goal as policemen. Kwai is now working for the white people, but he is not one of them. Having been rejected by the tribal people, he attaches himself to the idea of justice. Kwai too inhabits the liminal space between two worlds.’

Alfieri would like readers of Strange Gods to ‘feel as if they are there. I want my books to be their time machine that takes them to that fascinating time and place, where they learn what life was like and especially how wondrous, how beautiful is the place that is, after all, the cradle of humanity. Thirty-two of the thirty-three known remains of our hominid ancestors were found in the Rift Valley. To me, when I am in the Kenyan wilderness, on a cellular level, I feel as if I am home. Hopefully, armchair travelers who read my stories will join in and experience vicariously the majesty, the wonder of our ancestral birthplace.’

Who Digs the Ditches Redux

 Annamaria on Monday

The copy-edited pages of A Death on the Lord's Day are coming to me fast and furiously, I am thrilled to say.  A major part of the background history in the story has to do with the way the indigenous people are treated in colonialism.  I don't know how it came about that all my novels have colonialism in the background, either its immediate consequences or its aftermath.

In the upcoming book, the research discussed in this blog from six years ago plays a major role recruiting workers in the fields. See below:

Whenever colonizing Europeans moved into new territory, they needed to figure out what to do with the people who already lived there.

In North America, through battles, geographical displacement, bringing in new diseases, and other forms of oppression—intentional or accidental, they nearly wiped out the indigenous people.  Once they took over the territory, the Europeans—largely the British, but also the French and Spanish—brought in African slaves to do physical labor.  Colonizers, by definition, are not physical laborers.

In South America, the Spanish and Portuguese did some of the same things, but whenever large cadres of workers were wanted, they also enslaved the local people, especially—outside of Brazil—for mining and agricultural work, both huge sources of wealth, which was exported home to the Iberian Peninsula.

I am not sure how this issue was handled in India, but I hope our resident expert, Sujata will weigh in on this subject.

In British East Africa, things were different.  Colonization there began after the Brits had battled slavery worldwide for decades and were bragging about it.  They couldn’t very well secure a labor force by enslaving the local population.  But then who was going to dig the ditches and do the washing up?  They needed the tribal people to work for them.  But not by forced labor. Voluntarily.  For wages, of course.

  

It all depends on your definitions of “forced” and “voluntarily.”

Once European settlers began to move into BEA, the British administrators had to find local people willing to work for wages. Trouble was, the tribal people in that area of Africa had a generally comfortable life style without money. They had always lived simply in a place where food and shelter were quite easy to acquire.  Their attitudes: Money?  What’s that and why would I want it?

Women working

Men, not working

An added difficulty was that the local cultures generally dictated that men did not work at all, except for herding cows and fighting off bands of cattle rustlers from rival tribes.  Everything else—building houses, growing food, carrying water and firewood, these were women’s work and beneath the dignity of men.  Oh, oh. 

The British devised clever ways to get the tribal people to work on farms and public works projects.

First came an interesting rule.  The colonizers took over all the land, which had formerly belonged to nobody but was used by whoever occupied it.  The interlopers divided it up into parcels and sold it cheap to any European who would spend 400 pounds turning it to productive use—farms mostly. Then, the administration ruled that, for the privilege of remaining where they were,  ‘natives’ living on the property had to work for the new owner six months out of the year.

This provided labor for quite a number of farms, but not all that was needed, and not for public works.  Encouragement to take ‘gainful’ employment was still needed.

The next scheme was ingenious.  The government imposed a hut tax on a population that had no money.   If you lived in a hut—no matter where it was and no matter how long you had lived in it—you now had to pay a tax to stay there. To get the money to pay the tax you had to work for it.  The fringe benefit for the government was an inflow of cash to the British.  Anyone who lived in a hut (read “everybody”) now needed a job.  Whatever else we may think of him, the person who invented this was a genius, don’t you think?

The third way was to fall back upon a sure-fire scheme—taxing the production of alcoholic beverages.  It worked beautifully in England.  Why not here?

The Kikuyu were the tribe the settlers had most to do with.  The Europeans said this tribe had “a talent for domestic service.”   Their fathers and their grandfathers going back at least a millennium had been brewing their favorite cocktail—muratina.   They used the drink as part of their celebrations—births, initiations, weddings.  They fermented it from the fruit of the sausage tree, which grows wild and is plentiful. How nice!

But not anymore.

Until now raw materials for the booze had been free, and the hooch was made by the people who consumed it.  Now, every gourd or cow horn full would bring workers to the labor force, because—guess what?  In order to get the money to pay for the license, the muratina makers now have to charge money for the product.   The buyers needed to work for the money to pay for their party libation.  License fees (and fines collected from bootleggers) went—where else?—into the government’s swelling coffers.  Swell ain’t it?

É voilà, ladies and gentlemen.  A people who formerly lived free have now been brought into that peculiar form of slavery known as The Economy!

  

Slavery in East Africa

 Annamaria on Monday

The second in my Africa series relaunched on May 1 in a beautiful new edition.  In celebration of that, herewith, a past post outlining the background history of that story.  It explains why the British were still dealing with the slave trade a few decades after they had, at great cost, abolished it. Stan Trollip, who figures in this little essay, is the Stanley of Michael Stanley - partner of Michael Sears in authoring the marvelous Kubu series. Yes, slavery was still an issue in British East Africa in 1912.  Vis: 

My British East African series is based on the Ten Commandments.  Each story has a plot thread based on the sin of the commandment.  And another based on a sin that has no commandment.  But that I think should.  In The Idol of Mombasa, the second in the series, the sin of the commandment is idolatry.  The other sin is slavery.

When I first started working on the book a couple of years ago, I mentioned the themes to Stanley Trollip.  He immediately said he thought the slave trade had ended well before 1912, when the book is set.  I figured that—as happens with me—I had chosen a topic so obscure that even a person as knowledgeable as Stan would think my story far-fetched.  I had some work to do to make my plot plausible.

I hit the books again.  My further research bore out what I had already learned: In East Africa, slavery did not disappear abruptly the day the British declared it so.  As one of my characters says, “…like every beast, slavery has a tail, and we are dealing with that tail here.”

Let’s take a look at why it took longer for slavery to be stamped out in East Africa.

The black lines represent slave trade routes in the Middle Ages.

In the late Nineteenth Century, the territory that is now Kenya was a protectorate of the British government—a step on the way to becoming a colony.  That is all of it but a ten-mile swath of the coast, which belonged to the Sultan of Zanzibar.

Arabs had been trading slaves from there since the 700s, long before any European put a foot on that shore.  Over the centuries, the Sultanates of the Middle East took African slaves to work for Persia as sailors, to dive for pearls in the Gulf, to fight as troops for Omani.  And mostly to work in houses as domestics and sex slaves.  Some were shipped as far away as China.

They used Mombasa as their shipping point, and the mixture of genes and cultures between the city’s African population and the Arab traders gave rise to the Swahili people and language.  Africans as well as Arabs traded slaves.

When the Brits arrived in East Africa, slavery was an entrenched way of life.  It might have been against British law everywhere else, but it was an important part of the local culture and sanctioned by Shari'a law. 

Also, when the Protectorate of British East Africa was declared, His Majesty’s administrators had a bitter rival for the goodies available to be plundered from Africa—the Germans in German East Africa (now Tanzania) to their south.  The Sultan still had hegemony over the BEA coast.  If the Brits did not make nice with him, he might favor the Gerries and cut them out.  The Brits’ allies in this matter were Arabs who were themselves slave owners and slave traders.

So the British East African Administration never fully committed to enforcing their own anti-slavery laws.

In the end, they prevailed with the Sultan, if paying him 250,000 pounds sterling for the right to govern the coast in his name can be called prevailing.  At least they won out over the Germans.

Little by little, the Brits tried to cut down on the number of people enslaved—by declaring 1474 existing runaways as free men, by declaring that children born after 1 January 1890 were free.  This gradual approach put the government on the outs with the passionate anti-slavery forces on the home front.

In response the government argued that slavery on Zanzibar and along the British East African coast was far more benign than the well-known horrors of the Caribbean.  They could offer as proof that the Qu’ran instructed good Muslims to be kind to their slaves and set them free when they died.

In 1897, the King’s administrators convinced the Sultan to make slavery illegal.  But nobody told the slaves.  If they found out and wanted to bolt, they had to prove that they had the means to support themselves as freemen by showing a contract of employment.  The police ramped up their enforcement of the vagrancy laws to keep the household slaves in their place.

So slavery continued in this area well into the Twentieth Century.

In my story, I wanted to include some low level slave trading, as well as slave possession.  I gave the British a pragmatic fictional reason for turning a blind eye to slave trafficking on the coast in 1912.  It served my story to imagine this.  Just this past Friday, while boning up on my facts to write this blog, I found a new article on the subject.  Here is quote from “The Windmill of Slavery: The British and Foreign Antislavery Society and Bonded Labor in East Africa” by Opolot Okia. 

  

“Moreover, unlike the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the British efforts against slave trading in these areas were more lethargic and gradual and were conditioned more by specific, local circumstances than some amorphous but inexorable anti slavery logic.” (The Middle Ground Journal: Duluth, 2011)

The institution was not finally abolished by law until the 6^th of July 1909.

The Idol of Mombasa set two and half years later in January of 1912.  I hope you will read the book.  Then you can tell me if my story of slavery in East Africa is in keeping with the actual history of the place.