Americans in Africa

Richard West

„..1.° listen to Andrew Young, one might Lila* hirn the first American ever to visit or ta, lk about Africa. As a corrective to this anrPression I went back to that most enjoy1e book by Eric Rosenthal, published in under the title Stars and Stripes in 'Afrka. Being a History of American 7chievements in Africa by Explorers, Misto.rtarks, Pirates, Adventurers, Hunters, ;liners, Merchants, Scientists, Soldiers, k'wmen, Engineers and others, with some Qccount of Africans who have played a part in American affairs. After that title, I hardly need to explain the book. .The author gets off to a puzzling start w,nh a chapter on Columbus who although '1e undoubtedly went to the Gold Coast can ,scareely be called an American, let alone a `aPtain entitled to fly the Stars and Stripes. Our own James Callaghan made rather the same mistake when he (of all people) keosed certain Americans of ignorance about Africa, jeering at those who wanted be like Columbus discovering a new conl'oent. The fact is that Columbus never set 'not on what is now the United States, confining his pillage to the West Indian isles. If anYone, Castro might be accused of wanting t° be Columbus in reverse. nut Mr Rosenthal gets interesting when lite suggests that the Mayflower, that took Calvinist settlers to New England in may have looked in at the Cape, clIrty-seven years later. Even if she did not, nhe says, 'undoubtedly the original May mwer was used, immediately after transporting the Pilgrim Fathers, to take Negro s. laves to the West Indies, which forms at least one link between the famous boat and Africa'. .if not a link that modern Americans care to remember. f Both New York and Capetown were ,°unded and settled by the Dutch, who `Ailed both the main streets Heerengracht, °r Gentlemen's Walk. The English, when IlleY acquired the towns by purchase or 4orce, renamed the two streets respectively, /fkdderly and Broad. Dutch lingers on in a .ew American words like 'cookie' and also In, 'boss' as in 'yes boss', which is the same as

'lie 'bus' by which black Africans still often

address the whites. During the eighteenth entory, several Dutch Americans settled at Cape which was solidly on the side of A-. Medea in the War of Independence. During that war the English sent a number of captured white prisoners to Senegal and the Gambia where it is feared that many died. If any of them had survived, settled and married a black girl, we might have expected a Roots in reverse, by which some Gambian Haley could trace his way back to the place in America from which his white ancestor had been seized.

The Cape Dutch, like the European Dutch were much impressed by the American Declaration of Independence which later became the model for the Voortrekkers, who headed north in their wagons to found the little republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. They proclaimed their intention `to establish our new settlement on the same principles of liberty as those adopted by the United States of America'. . .among which principles, needless to say, was the right to keep blacks if not in slavery, at least in an inferior state.

The Americans never established an African colony, unless one includes Liberia on the West Coast which was started as a refuge for indigent, freed slaves and soon became an independent republic. Oddly enough, the Americans were the first regular settlers at Walvis Bay, the South West African port which is just now a cause of conflict between South Africa and the future rulers of independent Namibia. In the early part of the nineteenth century Walvis Bay was a base for Nantucket whal ers, and the shacks they erected there were the only signs of habitation along this coast when the Germans arrived some fifty years later. If the Americans had stayed, they would now be very rich in diamonds and uranium.

The author could not resist including as Americans the Welsh explorer-journalist Stanley and the agreeable Frenchman Paul du Chaillu, the first white to see a live gorilla. It is true that both men took Ameri can citizenship but they remained Euro pean at heart. However Mr Rosenthal is right to stress that Stanley worked for an American newspaper, to which the rescued Livingstone was grateful, naming some fragments of land in Lake Tanganyika 'the New York Herald Islets'.

The Americans played their biggest part in just those countries, South Africa and Rhodesia, where now their interference is most distrusted by the whites. Americans were in at the start for both the diamond and the gold rushes, hence the ditty that Mr Rosenthal quotes: Australians, Yanks are to the fore The old, experienced digger That slow-going coach, the festive Boer, The Coolie and the Nigger.

An American was the first to use a steam engine to sift for diamonds at Kimberley, where another American introduced the electric tram. A Forty-niner from California, Stafford Parker, was for a few months President of a 'Diggers Republic'.

There were also American Negroes among these miners and, according to Mr Rosenthal 'the simple-minded black from the kraal was immensely impressed by the sophisticated dress of his brother from the far side of the Atlantic'.

Americans were still more prominent in the Witwatersrand gold rush that started two decades after the Kimberley diamond finds. The first hotel in Johannesburg belonged to the United States Consul; clubs were formed for American men and women; forty Americans who went in deputation to President Kruger of the Transvaal were told by that fierce, enigmatic old man: 'I am glad to hear of the coming of good people but I will cut the throat of any bad ones'.

He may have had a suspicion that the Americans were against him in the dispute between the Transvaal Boers and the `Uitlanders' or outsiders, the mining people. And indeed the Americans felt with the other foreigners that they should not pay 'taxation without representation' — the very cry that sparked the American Revolution. Sure enough when the Uitlanders revolted in 1896 with the abortive Jameson Raid, there were eight Americans among the 66 men arrested by Kruger's militia and tried for their lives.

Nevertheless, when the Boer War broke out, American opinion was very much on the Boer side; and 3,000 Irish Americans took up arms to fight the historic enemy, England.

This saddened the Vice-President of the time, Theodore Roosevelt, who knew and had hunted in Africa, and whose own family was of mixed English and Dutch stock. He was much upset by an article on the war in The Spectator, about which he wrote to his friend Frederick Selous, the Rhodesian (whose name lives on in the controversial Selous Scouts):

'Much of the pro-Boer feeling here is really anti-English. I have no sympathy with such manifestations. . .If the two races, Dutch and English, are not kept asunder by too intense antagonism, surely they ought to amalgamate in South Africa as they have done here in North America, where I and all my fellows of Dutch blood are now mixed with English and other ancestry'.

It is interesting to observe that when Roosevelt and his contemporaries wrote about racial problems, they almost invariably meant the hostilities that arose between different nations of whites.