The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (56 page)

control over local communities. Similarly, the Church did not get its

lands back and continued to lose infl uence in secular matters.

It would take another half century for the ruling dynasty in

Piedmont to create the modern Italian state, and historians of Italy

are divided over whether Napoleon advanced or retarded unifi cation.

At the very least, he opened politics to the middle classes, and his

centralizing imperial program left Italian rulers with a greater capacity to impose their authority on the countryside. Broers is therefore

probably correct in referring to the state-sponsored version of Italian

286 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

nationalism that legitimized Italian unifi cation as the “bastard child

of Napoleonic cultural imperialism.”38 Indeed, the Italian experience

of subjecthood under French imperial rule did not produce a unifying

collective or popular sense of national identity. Napoleon’s imperial

project fl oundered in Italy because rural communities mobilized to

resist him on the basis of local particularism rather than a larger

nationalistic sense of Italian patriotism.

At fi rst glance, the comparatively quick defeat and collapse of

Napoleon’s grand European empire seemed to suggest that the era of

empire building was over. This was largely the case in western Europe,

where local communities eventually and grudgingly made their peace

with nationalism while defi antly rejecting the much more oppressive

weight of imperial subjecthood. Rural Italians fought a rearguard

action against Napoleonic centralization and direct state control,

but in time they eventually became Italian “citizens.” National consciousness thus spread, sometimes forcibly so, from intellectuals and

romantic thinkers to the middle and lower classes. Citizenship was

burdensome in many ways, but it also tempered the enhanced power

of the western European nation-state to oppress them. Consequently,

just as it became unacceptable in the early modern era for Europeans

to be slaves, the slow emergence of nationalism in the nineteenth

century meant that it gradually became equally unacceptable for

them to be the subjects of a foreign imperial power. This was a halting process that slowly spread eastward, but it ultimately doomed

the great multiethnic Habsburg and Ottoman empires. The Russian

Empire survived into the twentieth century in the guise of the supposedly anti-imperial Soviet Union, but eventually its subjects also

asserted their right to self-determination.

Thus nationalism corroded empires. Conventional imperial rule

required local partners, and Spanish conquistadors and British nabobs

built viable and long-lived empires in the early modern era by exploiting the divisions among Asians and Americans. As the nineteenth

century progressed, the spread of nationalist sentiment in Europe

made it diffi cult to rally local intermediaries as the strength of larger

collective identities made it treasonous and dangerous to cooperate

with a foreign regime. Similarly, liberal democracy and the collective rights of national citizenship made imperial extraction equally

unfeasible and intolerable. Finally, the grand coalition that overthrew

Napoleon demonstrated that the nations of Europe would not allow

Napoleonic

Italy 287

one of their number to upset the balance of power on the continent

by building an empire by force of arms.

The nineteenth century therefore appeared to mark the end of

empire. The once powerful early modern Spanish, Portuguese, and

Dutch empires dwindled to a handful colonies scattered around the

globe. Britain lost most of its original empire with the American Revolution, and the Indian revolt of 1857 marked the demise of the once

powerful East India Company. At home, British liberals and free traders attacked empire as expensive, exploitive, and ultimately unnecessary at a time when Britain emerged from the Napoleonic wars as the

world’s dominant industrial and ocean-going power. In arguing that

scattered outposts were an unnecessary drain on the metropolitan

budget, they exposed how irrelevant and unproductive empire had

become for nation-states.

Yet the age of formal empire was not yet over. In the fi nal decades

of the nineteenth century a new generation of imperial entrepreneurs

and aspiring conquistadors tried to recapture the glory and wealth of

the early modern empires. With Europe and the Americas wrapped in

a protective carapace of emerging nationalism, they turned to Africa

and Asia to exploit vulnerable communities who still identifi ed themselves in local rather than collective terms. The British government

underwrote the speculative conquest of what was to become Kenya

because well-meaning Britons accepted the promise of the smugly

confi dent “new imperialists” to create a liberal empire that would

rule for the good of its subjects. This was a self-serving lie, but the

new rulers of Africa found that the supposedly primitive population

was not so different from the ordinary Italians who were so effective

in thwarting Napoleon’s ambitions. Like countless earlier generations

of subjects who despised their imperial conquerors, the British army

veteran Daniel Nguta disdained the British. The imperial enthusiasts

who justifi ed his subjugation on the grounds that he and his people

were primitive and inferior soon realized that these supposedly simple “tribesmen” could bring down mighty empires.

ETHIOPIA

Moyale

N

Mt.

Kapenguria

Elgon

Maralal

Kitale

Eldoret

Baringo

Kakamega

Thomson’s

Isiolo

Falls Nanyuki

Kisumu

Meru

Aberdare

Nakuru

Mt. Kenya

Range

Lake

Kericho

Gilgil

Nyanza

Nyeri Embu

Kisi

Fort Hall

Naivasha

Narok

Kjambu

Thika

Tan

Nairobi

aR

Machakos

.

Kabado

Magadi

AthiR.

Lamu

Mt. Kilimanjaro

Malindi

Voi

Kikuyu Reserves

White highlands

Mombasa

0

50

100 mi

0

50

100

150 km

Kenya

6

The Short Life of the New Imperialism

In 1905, some 373 years after Atawallpa met Pizarro on the plaza

of Cajamarca, the Nandi
orkoiyot
Koitalel arap Samloei encountered

another imperial entrepreneur in the highlands of Kenya. This heir of

the conquistadors was a commissioned British military offi cer named

Richard Meinertzhagen. In 1905, he was on secondment to the King’s

African Rifl es (KAR), Britain’s ragtag but grandly named East African

colonial army. Unlike the Inka ruler, Koitalel was fully aware that this

twentieth-century imperial soldier was a serious threat. Indeed, for

the previous decade the Nandi had fought a war of attrition against

the encroaching British Empire.

At fi rst glance, it might seem odd that a supposedly “tribal” people

such as the Nandi held a “modern” western power at bay for over

ten years when the Inkas had succumbed to Pizarro and the conquistadors so quickly. Firmly entrenched in the cool, well-watered East

African highlands, the Nandi had a conventional mixed agricultural

and pastoral economy. Politically, they had no centralized institutions of authority and could be properly described as stateless. In the

late nineteenth century, they divided their lands into six or seven

counties (
emotinwek
) of two thousand to fi ve thousand people under

councils of elders (
kokwotinwek
) at which any married man could

speak. In times of crisis special councils consisting of the most infl uential Nandi elders, military leaders, and ritual experts (
orkoiik
) made

the key decisions.

The Nandi may have been stateless, but they were a signifi cant

military power in the highlands. In the decades before the British

289

290 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

arrival, victories over neighboring communities allowed them to

assimilate conquered populations and acquire new crops and technologies. Known originally as the Chemwal, they earned the name

Mnandi from the coastal ivory traders whose caravans they raided

repeatedly. This was the Swahili word for “cormorant,” a bird with a

reputation for rapaciousness in East Africa.

The rising Nandi fortunes were largely the work of an infl uential

family of
orkoiik
that used their ability to divine the future to usurp

the authority of the
kokwotinwek
councils. These ritual experts were

actually refugees from a nearby Maasai community who took control of important agricultural and initiation rituals after fi nding refuge with a Nandi clan. The
orkoiyot
Kimnyole arap Turukat, who

was Koitalel’s father, organized the Nandi regiments into a powerful

military force that drove off the Maasai and raided their remaining

neighbors for cattle.

Later, the British claimed that these “witch doctors” were tyrannical autocrats, but the Nandi warriors beat Kimnyole to death in

1890 after he led them on a disastrous raid that resulted in the death

of fi ve hundred of their comrades. Nevertheless, Koitalel and his

brother Kipchomber arap Koilegei retained signifi cant infl uence in

Nandi society and waged a fi erce succession struggle to assume their

father’s place. Koitalel enjoyed the backing of an aggressive younger

faction of Nandi warriors who wanted to continue the cattle raids,

which gave him the means to drive his brother into exile. With his

power secure, he directed the Nandi recovery from the epidemics,

cattle blight, drought, locusts, and famine that disastrously weakened

the East African highland communities at the turn of the twentieth

century. The Nandi were therefore much better prepared than their

neighbors to face the British imperial menace.

Richard Meinertzhagen personifi ed that threat. When he met

Koitalel under the equivalent of a fl ag of truce he did so as the military representative of the East Africa Protectorate (EAP), which

became the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya in 1920. The EAP was

actually the successor state to the anemic Imperial British East Africa

Company (IBEAC), a chartered company that the metropolitan British government used to stake its initial claim to the region. The European chartered company was a powerful imperial tool in the early

modern era, but it was an ineffectual anachronism in the late nineteenth century. Although the IBEAC reserved a slice of East Africa

British

Kenya 291

for Britain, its small and ill-equipped private army could not cope

with the Nandi and other powerful local forces. Under both Kimnyole and his son Koitalel the Nandi raided passing caravans and stole

copper telegraph wire and raw materials from construction parties

building a railway from the port of Mombasa to Uganda. The EAP,

which replaced the company in 1895, mounted successive “pacifi cation campaigns” against them, but the Nandi wisely avoided a direct

confrontation with its Maxim guns and other western fi rearms.

Fed up with Nandi intransigence, the British demanded that

Koitalel and his followers pay a fi ne of three hundred cattle or face

the consequences. They knew full well that the Nandi would refuse,

and Meinertzhagen was part of a massive punitive expedition consisting of eighty British offi cers, fi fteen hundred African soldiers

and policemen, thirty-fi ve hundred armed and unarmed porters, one

hundred Somali “levies,” one thousand Maasai “auxiliaries,” ten

machine guns, and two armored trains. This represented the protectorate’s ultimate solution to the Nandi problem.1 The Nandi Field

Force’s mission was to provoke the Nandi into standing and fi ghting

by seizing their cattle. The Nandi elders’ protests that they had little

authority over Koitalel and his reckless younger followers were of

no consequence.

The British framed their East African imperial project in moral

and humanitarian terms. Denying that they were conquerors, they

claimed that military force was the only way to compel the backward peoples of the highlands to respect civilized authority. By their

count, the Nandi transgressions included the murder of Europeans,

straightforward theft, and, most signifi cant, demonstrating to other

African communities that it was possible to defy imperial Britain. It

mattered little that most of the Nandi’s European victims were part

of a marginal, often brutal rabble who sought to enrich themselves

by leveraging their privileged status as “white men.” They were

clearly heirs of the Pizarrists, but the absence of lootable empires in

the highlands forced them to seek their fortunes through cattle theft,

petty fraud, and thinly disguised slave raiding. The Nandi recognized

these men for what they were. Responding in kind, they murdered a