The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (31 page)

The British showed their usual facility for development, civilization, and self-rule. After the Great War—in which there were extensive, if small-scale, combat operations in East Africa—the British took over formerly German Tanganyika. By the end of the Second World War, the Kenyan Legislative Council, to which white voters had been electing members since 1919, had two black African representatives (one of them an Oxonian), a number that would slowly increase.

Of all Britain's possessions in East Africa—Uganda, Tanganyika, Zanzibar, Kenya—only Kenya was seen as “a white man's country.” That
complicated its politics and made it a focal point of international attention during the Mau-Mau rebellion. The state of emergency to deal with the Mau-Mau lasted from 1952 to 1960, though the movement was essentially defeated by 1956. The rebellion was limited almost entirely to the Kikuyu and the areas around Nairobi and the Aberdare mountain range, but the bestial nature of the Mau-Mau oath-taking ceremonies and the bloody nature of its terror and atrocities launched it into international headlines even if the number of European civilians murdered (about 30) was relatively small (the Mau-Mau were estimated to have murdered another 2,000 black Africans). The war pitted the Mau-Mau terrorists not only against British rule, but against Kikuyu Christians, loyalists, and the more conservative-minded tribesmen. Mau-Mau atrocities incited the security forces to abuses themselves; and while there have been some hysterically exaggerated accounts of British-imposed torture, the fact is that the British government curbed these abuses and never authorized a campaign of terror.

The war became, in the end, not an attempt to maintain white rule (it should be noted that most of those fighting the Mau-Mau were black Africans), but a matter of restoring peace so that Kenya could make an orderly transition to independence, which came in 1964. Compared to its neighbors—Uganda gained independence in 1962; Tanganyika in 1961, becoming Tanzania in 1964 after its merger with Zanzibar—Kenya has done reasonably well, maintaining a moderately free market, a relatively free state, and avoiding the clownish barbarism of Idi Amin and the socialist flummeries of Julius Nyerere. Kenya's progress has been far from perfect, of course—but, as many Africans might tell you, the wind of change came much too fast for their continent.

“I have met but two men who realize my ideas of what a true hero should be: my friend [General] Charles Gordon was one, General [Robert E.] Lee was the other.”

 

G
eneral Gordon is the epitome of a British imperial hero, the preeminent Christian soldier-martyr of the British Empire. But he is also important because Lytton Strachey turned his virtues into vices in his famous and influential book
Eminent Victorians
. Strachey, a wilting, effeminate socialist, wanted to discredit the patriotic muscular Christianity that lay at the center of the Victorian ideal of the British Empire, and Gordon was one of his targets.
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Gordon was thus traduced by “liberals” (broadly speaking) after his death (though he was a Liberal himself), just as he was abandoned by the political leader of the Liberals, Prime Minister William Gladstone, during his life.

Gordon was born in London on 28 January 1833. His father, a Royal Artillery major, had a career not a quarter as colorful as his son's, but he retired as a lieutenant-general, a higher rank than “Charlie” Gordon ever reached. Young Charlie was full of rambunctious mischief and had a knack for martial arts—in the sense that he excelled at drawing maps and intimidating his peers. At the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich he polished his
map-drawing skills and proved himself a rebellious and quick-tempered lad (he once head-butted a cadet through a glass door). Nevertheless, he graduated and was commissioned in the Royal Engineers. After some specialized training and humdrum assignments repairing barracks, he was sent to Pembroke to build fortifications, and it was here that he met a couple who inspired him to become a firm Bible-based Christian.
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Gordon first saw action in the Crimean War (1853–56), arriving in Balaclava in January 1855. His first job was building huts for the troops exposed to the harsh Russian winter, but he soon found himself working on trenches, and exploring no-man's land. He befriended a young officer much like himself in high spirits, courage, and eagerness to reform the Army—Garnet Wolseley, who noted, as did many, that Gordon's “full, clear and bright blue eyes seemed to court scrutiny, whilst at the same time they searched into your inner soul.”
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Gordon distinguished himself in the Crimea for his energy, readiness for action, and keen observation of enemy movements. He was awarded the Légion d'honneur by the French and assigned by his superiors to help survey the post-war border between the Ottoman Empire and Russia. It kept him abroad, which was what he wanted, because Charlie Gordon was eager to renew his acquaintance with the crack of musket balls and the roar of cannon.

In 1860 he volunteered for the war in China, where the British and French were enforcing the Treaties of Tientsin (which had ended the Second Opium War, allowing for freer European trade with China and opening up the country to Christian missionaries), and was present for the sack of Peking. Though he bought some spoils for himself, he hated the wanton destruction of the emperor's summer palace (which he blamed on the French) and was appalled at how “everybody was wild for plunder.”
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Gordon built barracks and stables and anything else that needed building, pitching in with his own labor wherever he could, and helped manage a fund of donations for impoverished Chinese.

The Manchu dynasty was under threat not only from Europeans eager to open China to trade but by a massive domestic uprising, the Taiping Rebellion led by Hung-sen-Tsuen, a religious fanatic who propounded a new trinity of God the Father, God the Elder Son Jesus, and God the Younger Son Hung-sen-Tsuen. Hung proclaimed himself Tien Wang, the Heavenly King whose task was to create a Dynasty of Perpetual Peace—though of course the path to perpetual peace required massive slaughter of his opponents and also required that he marry thirty wives and keep a harem. Despite these rather heterodox beliefs and the movement's propensity for violence, some British evangelical Christians, flexible in doctrine themselves, based
on each man's reading of the Bible, maintained a sympathy for what they viewed as a reformist Christian uprising against a cruel Manchu regime. A century later, the Taipings won praise from the Communist Chinese for their war against the Manchu monarchy and feudalism. Yet a better assessment came from the British vice-consul at Ningpo: “The Taipings have a fume of blood and a look of carnage about them. Their chief condition for success is to strike terror, first by numbers, and secondly by the tawdry harlequin garb worn by them.... Their long, shaggy black hair adds to the wildness of their look, and... this fantastic appearance is accompanied by a certain show of fury and madness.”
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