Lesson video

Hello, welcome to this lesson one of four.

An enquiry: How do we uncover the lived experience of those ruled by empire in Africa? Today's session title is what was empire and why is it challenging to uncover the experience of it? For today's lesson you'll need a pen, something to write on, and you also need to make sure that wherever you are, you're free of any distractions.

I'll give you a moment to write down the title and then I'll introduce myself and the module properly.

Hello, my name's Mr Hewitt and I'm going to be your teacher for this enquiry into uncovering the experiences of those who lived under empire.

I'm so impressed and glad that you've chosen to study this topic.

Not only because it's a challenging one, but also because it's very important.

Every historian and indeed every good citizen of the world has a duty to remember, curate, and listen to the stories that are often ignored, overlooked, and forgotten.

For example, those are people living under empire.

If we don't do this, we run the risk the empire and horrible things that relate to it may repeat themselves.

We also run the risk that we won't spot and recognise the legacies of empire, which come from the experiences of living under it.

One such legacy could be racism and an excellent way to combat racism and equip yourself to do this is to study empire and appreciate how empire has left this legacy.

Let's take a look at where we're going with this enquiry.

In 1893, tired, despondent and desperate, the African Matabele, King Lobengula left the battlefield and headed for his capital Bulawayo.

Why? He planned to burn it to the ground.

Better this he thought than let the British take his beloved city.

By early November Cecil Rhodes and the vicious colonists who had killed many of the Matabele warriors with Maxim machine guns and rifles arrived in the capital of Bulawayo and made complete their conquest of Matabeleland.

This was not a unique story, but one which characterised empire, especially the British empire and the experiences of those who faced it.

Rhoad's intention was to lay a railroad all the way from Johannesburg and Southern Africa to Cairo and Alexandria in Egypt, another British colony in the North.

A statue of Rhodes still stands today above Oriel College, Oxford in spite of his vicious colonial activities.

And this is a good example of how the legacies of colonialism continue to dog peoples today.

But what about the experiences of those who faced men such as Rhodes and the horrors of colonialism? I'll get my head out the way so that you can see these two rather disturbing maps.

Both of them show the continent of Africa one before the scramble or partition of Africa, which began in earnest in 1884 and the other at the end of this period right before the first world war in 1913.

What happened between 1884 and the start of the first world war was that Africa went from being almost entirely free to living almost entirely under colonial rule.

The British occupied huge swathes of Africa.

In the south Botswana and South Africa and in the north Egypt and areas such as Chad and Uganda, the French empire was enormous too stretching across Morocco and Algeria and the Belgian ruthless and exploitative in the Congo.

It was mostly if not entirely European empires, which divided control of Africa amongst themselves and it is within Africa that the focus of our enquiry will full on the experiences of those who lived under empire.

We must remember, of course, that empire touched on all of the areas of the globe.

Britain, for example, held colonies in India, Australia, Southeast Asia, even South America, and of course, Canada, and even the United States was originally a British colony, but this enquiry will focus in particular on the experiences of those who lived under colonial rule in Africa and not just under the British empire, but also under other European empires in this region.

What was the nature of European colonial rule in Africa? First of all, we must understand the sheer scale and size of Africa as an enormous continent with a range of different climates and an enormous and diverse range of peoples Africa was culturally, linguistically, religiously diverse and in many ways wealthy.

As I said, between 1884 and 1914, 90% of Africa came under European colonial rule.

Read this extract here from Martin Meredith, a historian, from his book "Fortunes of Africa" in 2014, he writes that, "In Africa in the late 1950s", this is after colonisation, "entire region "was containing a population of around 200 million "yet producing only 8,000 secondary school graduates.

"In 1961, the year of Tanganyika's independence, "every senior civil servant in Dar es Salaam, "every provincial commissioner, "were British expatriates.

"And in former French colonies "there were no universities at all".

I want you to read this extract again and consider from it what we can learn about how Europeans governed colonial Africa.

I want you to consider also having read this extract, what challenges there would be to us uncovering the lived experience of those under empire.

Pause the video, answer those questions and when you're ready, unpause the video and we'll share some of our answers.

Very good job.

You're quite right.

The Europeans deliberately excluded Africans from colonial government.

We can see that the British ex Patriots were running almost every feature of the state.

You're quite right.

Literacy.

The ability to read and write was not fostered and developed among those living under empire.

Instead, the Europeans failed to educate and drew resources out and away from those living under empire.

This is problematic because it made it harder for people living under empire to actually record their experiences in a form which we can keep and verify today.

It's also the case that when people are excluded and ignored and when they live under such systems as empire even if they are recording their thoughts, feelings, and voices, these are deliberately being overlooked.

This is why it's particularly important for us as historians to look closely, carefully and deeply to find these experiences.

And indeed, in the next three lessons, we'll do just this.

Read the words of Kwame Nkrumah, a Ghanaian independence leader.

"For centuries", he writes, "Europeans dominated the African continent, "the white man arrogated to himself "the right to rule and to be obeyed by the non-white.

"His mission, he claimed was to civilise Africa.

"Under this cloak, the Europeans robbed the continent "of vast riches and inflicted unimaginable suffering "on the African people." Nkrumah is referring when he says centuries to the history of slavery, as well as the brief history of colonialism from the late 19th century into the 20th.

When we read this extract, we get a sense increasingly of what experiences may have been like living under empire.

For example, attacks on African civilization and economic exploitation.

Both of these we'll analyse using real historical sources in the next three lessons.

European colonial rulers failed, and even deliberately avoided to educate and invest in those living under colonial role.

Europeans often ignored and silenced the voices of those living under empire.

These two realities make our job as a historian more challenging when uncovering these experiences, but also more important.

Why? Because as I mentioned earlier, we have a duty to tell the stories of people who have been overlooked in the past.

And perhaps even more importantly, we cannot fight the legacies of empire, such as racism without appreciating these experiences.

Let us consider again the challenges that we will face when looking for records as historians.

Pause the video for a minute and answer the two questions on the left.

Where might a historian look for written records? Which organisations, types of people, or institutions produce these? When you're ready unpause the video and we'll share some of our answers.

Excellent.

Legal records such as court cases could be one place to start.

Governments produce records also such as treaties.

What about communications, letters, for example, between kings or chieftains, these could be good sources also.

Personal histories are fantastic.

Diary entries, autobiographies, both of these could be used to uncover the experiences of those people living in the past.

Public documents such as speeches and newspaper articles can also be useful to historians.

Take a look at this source.

It's a map produced by British imperialists and it portrays the British empire in a certain and very deliberate light.

Across the top we see the words freedom for eternity and federation implying that the British empire gives freedom to people, brotherhood, and community, but take a closer look at the bottom left.

We see an Indian man forced to carry a heavy package whilst next to him a white colonialist stands proud and with a musket under his arm.

Is this really freedom or fraternity? The centre of the image also is an interesting one.

We see Lady Britannia, the personification of Britain sitting on top of the world, such arrogance and presence, and who looks up at her? Two nonwhite peoples gazing on in awe.

They are portrayed as subjects, less than Britain or Britannia, hardly people who are considered equal to our nation.

Here's that detail even closer again.

I'm showing you this source because I want you to appreciate that sources can be flawed.

Think about the author of this source.

Is it produced by someone living under empire or someone who wanted to celebrate empire? Does this impact how we can use it to really evaluate what empire was like? What about the audience for the source? Who was supposed to see it and be impressed or inspired by it? And what conditions was it produced under? For example, was a person paid or instructed to produce a certain type of image? Pause the video for a moment, write down your thoughts, and then we'll share our answers.

When you're ready you can unpause.

Absolutely.

The author might have had an agenda.

Clearly they wanted to portray the British empire as a glorious thing.

They were producing this from the perspective of an imperialist, a Britain living in the 19th century, not from the perspective of someone who lived under colonial rule.

People who produce sources may not be typical either.

For example, a person who writes a letter as a king or chieftain may be portraying something rather different to someone who writes as an ordinary individual.

Just like this map, a source could be produced for a specific audience to inspire and to whip up patriotic sentiments among a group of people.

That is in the case of this map.

Or to convince people of something.

For example, the idea that empire was a powerful thing or a good thing, which this map clearly is designed to do.

The audience for which a source is produced is very important when evaluating it critically.

Sources can also re-interpret the words of another person.

This is often a hazard for people studying the colonial era because colonists did keep records of the experiences of the colonised, but often in the words of colonists and therefore these experiences have been modified, changed and reshaped and we need to be very careful when reading these experiences that we make sure to look for the experiences of those who really lived under empire and not how those experiences were represented by the colonists themselves.

Remember when working with sources that uncover the experience of colonialism, we must be careful and we must challenge ourselves to find, uncover and appreciate these sources truly.

It's time now for you to complete the comprehension questions.

Once you've done these, you can come back to the video, un-pause it, and we'll share our answers.

Well done.

That's a fantastic job.

It's tricky to think about both the horrible nature of colonialism and of course the challenging nature of uncovering the lived experiences of those within it.

But it's very important that we do that and that's exactly what we're going to be doing using a range of different historical sources in the next three lessons.

Well done also for completing the questions for these lessons.

Let's take a look of some of the answers that you might've got.

So for this first question, what's meant by the word literate? If you had able to read and write that's fantastic, it's the correct answer.

You could go even further and extend your work by explaining that a literate person could read or write and the colonial government sadly often didn't invest in the education of African nations and therefore one of the challenges in locating primary sources is of course that many people living under empire, couldn't read an write.

For example, in the late 19th century.

This second question.

Can you give an example of a written record a historian might use to uncover past experiences? Well you've done really well there if you have, for example, a court record, but equally you could have said a diary, for example, or even speech and all of those would have worked.

Historians might look for things like newspaper records, government documents, legal records, autobiographies.

The difficulty of course in uncovering the experience of the colonised is that often the coloniser is focused more on themselves when making official records than they did on the people they were ruling.

What about this question? Why's the order of a source important to its utility, that's the degree to which you can use it, when uncovering general experiences? Well, you might've said something like the author may not have had a typical life.

Perhaps they were a chief for a king, someone who's experience is important but not necessarily the standard experience for people living under empire.

You could expand that.

You might say the author was perhaps trying to convey a message or, you know, as I mentioned, they had a radically different experience of life.

We've got to be careful always when reading sources that we think about who wrote them and whether their experience is typical of experiences of other people around them.

Now onto this, can you explain two of the challenges of a historian studying the experiences of those living under empire? What might those challenges be? Well, for example, if you said people living under colonial rule were ignored and oppressed, then you'd be going exactly in the right direction and well done.

You could explain exactly why that's so significant though.

You could point out that colonists considered their culture superior and actually they ignored African voices and African experiences for a whole range of reasons and that means that it's certainly not impossible, but it is more difficult to uncover the experiences of those ruled by empire.

It also means of course that it's even more important to do this.

Wow, you've done a great job.

Now that you understand where you're going with the notion of empire, you're ready to start looking at these sources in detail in the next few lessons.

I'd be really impressed to see you sharing your work both from this lesson and others lessons as we go forward and you can do that using the hashtags here if you've got a parent or guardian who's on Twitter.

I'll see you next lesson.

Goodbye.