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The Whole of Churchill and Africa, Explored by C. Brad Faught
Brad Faught. Churchill and Africa: Empire, Decolonisation and Race. Barnsley, Yorks. and Philadelphia: Pen and Sword Books, 2023. 188 pages, $39.95, Amazon $23.95, Kindle $29.99.
Professor Brad Faught…
…specializes in Modern Britain at Canada’s Tynedale University. He is the author of multiple books, including Cairo 1921: Ten Days That Made The Middle East. This study is the first to consider in totality Churchill’s more than half century of episodic involvement in African affairs. We begin in the high noon of Victorian Imperialism and end with mid-twentieth century decolonization.
Brad Faught somewhat counters the Churchill now increasingly assaulted with charges of racism. He argues that from the time WSC arrived as a young soldier and journalist, in Sudan in 1898, through his retirement as Prime Minister in 1955, as security forces battled the Kenyan Mau Mau, Churchill’s thinking was more complex and sympathetic than portrayed. Likewise, his stance as an imperialist softened and evolved over time.
Victorian apogee
The first chapter sets the context as Africa waxes in importance. The British Empire was at its zenith. The Suez Canal, a marvel of French engineering that opened in 1869, was a vital strategic waterway. It sped Britain’s passage to and from India, the crown jewel of empire, prompting Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli to obtain controlling interest in 1875.
Within a decade, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck hosted the Berlin Conference to manage African imperial competition. The result was relative peace until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.
Despite earlier military setbacks in South Africa and Sudan, Britain would eventually control fifteen large African territories. This success, along with Christian missionary influence, created the notion, in schoolboys like Churchill, that Britain’s mission was a divine mandate to improve the lives of African and other native peoples.
Chapter two introduces Churchill to the “Dark Continent” as a cavalry officer and war correspondent. After wars in Cuba and India, Churchill sought further notoriety to secure a political future. Joining the 21st Lancers, attached to the General Kitchener’s Anglo-Egyptian Army, he advanced up the Nile. The object was to reconquer Sudan and avenge the 1885 murder of General Charles Gordon by Dervish rebels.
On 2 September 1898 at Omdurman, near Khartoum, Kitchener demolished a Dervish force twice his number. Churchill still found war romantic, bravely participating in a famous cavalry charge. In his book The River War, he nevertheless criticized Kitchener’s neglect of enemy wounded and destruction of Islamic holy sites. Brad Faught calls Churchill’s faith that he would not be killed in battle a “considered Deism” (21). Oddly, he fails to name the future Admiral, David Beatty, who tossed Churchill a bottle of champaign from a Nile gunboat (26).
South Africa’s challenge
Shortly after Sudan, Britain waged war from Natal and Cape Colony against the Boer republics of the Transvaal and Orange Free State. Churchill left the army in March 1899, then lost his first bid for Parliament in Oldham in July. In September he headed for South Africa, with another lucrative contact to report the war for the Morning Post.
His capture by and escape from the Boers are well-trod stories. prison in Pretoria, hero’s welcome in Durban, and service in the South African Light Horse. Two more books resulted from these adventures, and his now-worldwide fame launched Churchill’s long Parliamentary career. Vanity Fair cleverly and accurately observed, “He can write and he can fight” (63).
After a few years in Parliament, with a brief visit to Egypt’s Aswan Dam in 1902, he dramatically switched from Conservative to Liberal. When the Liberals won the next election he became Under-Secretary of State for Colonies. Africa was again the focus. Churchill addressed the plight of 50,000 Chinese indentured workers and constitutional challenges in South Africa, merging the four disparate territories into a union in 1910.
As a “liberal imperialist,” Brad Faught argues, Churchill believed the colonial role was to protect native Africans from rapacious white settlers. This view strengthened after his three-month tour of East Africa in 1907-08. Beginning in Mombasa and proceeding across Kenya and Uganda, he followed the Nile through the Sudan to Egypt, some 3500 miles. Back in England, he published My African Journey. Three months later, he was appointed to his first cabinet position as President of the Board of Trade, akin to Commerce Secretary in the US.
Back to Africa
After over a decade of politics and World War, Churchill returned to African affairs as Colonial Secretary in 1921-22. Previously, at the War and Air Ministries, he used the fledgling Royal Air Force to end a twenty-year reign of terror by Somaliland’s “Mad Mullah.” His imperial wrangling now included the 1921 Cairo Conference, which set the borders of the modern Middle East.
Africa was relatively quiet in this period, though in British East Africa (now Kenya), problems simmered between natives and white settlers, compounded by Indian immigrants. Brad Faught observes that, while Churchill was paternalistic, he was not retrograde on race—as most of his countrymen were in those years.
African affairs faded after Churchill returned to the Conservative Party and became Chancellor of the Exchequer under Stanley Baldwin (1924-29). Then came ten years in the political wilderness, battling against Indian self-government and Appeasement in the face of Hitler. In the Second World War, Africa loomed large in a hard-fought campaign between 1940 and 1943.
As Prime Minister, Churchill ordered the hateful but necessary attack on the French North African fleet and directed the ultimately successful campaign against Rommel in North Africa. His nadir came with the fall of Tobruk in June 1942, causing a vote of censure against his government, which Churchill handily defeated. Ultimately, North Africa was liberated: the “Hinge of Fate,” as Churchill put it in his war memoirs, before final victory in Europe.
Africa postwar
After six years out of office, Churchill returned as Prime Minister, facing Cold War challenges and decolonization from 1951 to 1955. The West African colony of the Gold Coast was one of those on a stable path to independence, but Kenya exploded in 1952. Mau Mau rebels now fought other Kenyans and settlers over land use and tenure.
Churchill opposed South African Apartheid, but counterinsurgency tactics in Kenya prompt latter-day charges of genocide and racism. Ironically, famed African leaders such as Jomo Kenyatta and Nelson Mandela, according to Faught, cited Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s Atlantic Charter as their inspiration. Kenyatta branded the Mau Mau rebellion as a horrifying episode that must not be repeated.
Brad Faught argues that as long as it was accompanied by civil order and democratic institutions, Churchill accepted African independence. Charges of racism are now so perversive as to be a trope, far removed from historical contextualization and based on modern notions of morality. Historical leaders like Churchill, Faught writes, become mired in useless vitriol. Finely written and researched books like this go a long way to righting the balance and revealing the truth.
The author
William John Shepherd, archivist and historian, is a frequent contributor to The Churchill Project, academic journals, and popular history magazines.
Further reading
“The Art of the Possible”: Churchill, South Africa and Apartheid, Part 1 and Part 2, 2020.
“Great Writing: Churchill as Biographer, Novelist, Explorer and Memoirist,” 2024.
“Hearsay Doesn’t Count: The Truth About Churchill’s Racist Epithets,” 2020.