Look to the West Volume VIII: The Bear and the Basilisk
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
TTL's historiography in a nutshell. The "birth" of Diversitarianism-in-action gets fawning language, despite several paragraphs of throat-clearing about how it's retroactively labeling realpolitik as something other than realpolitik. Meanwhile, a corporate body artificially-inducing famines in India is off-handedly mentioned (and dismissed) in a parenthetical.
293.1
Thande
Donor
Part #293: Distant Rumbles
“Families of victims of last November’s Pittsburgh rail crash today expressed their ‘anger and disappointment’ after the jury at the Pennsylvania Assizes ruled that the incident, which cost sevem people their lives and injured more than a dozen others, had been unavoidable misadventure. Our legal analyst, Mr Lionel Turner, reports.”
“Thank you, Miss Jackson. Behind the public outrage, cooler heads are critical of the approach taken by the public prosecutor in this case. In particular, it is felt that too many potential causes of liability by PennRail were attacked, with the result that the jury were unconvinced by an incoherent list of alleged errors. Rather than the ‘catalogue of failures’ which the prosecution claimed, this instead was interpreted as desperately scrambling to find anything to pin on the powerful public rail corporation with its deep pockets. If the prosecution had instead focused on any one of these points exclusively – the tired driver forced into overtime by allegedly exploitative practices condemned by his trade union, the delayed maintenance on the tracks west of the Pittsburgh Interchange, and so on – then it seems more likely that PennRail might have had to pay compensation. A spokeswoman for the families of the victims was noncommittal on whether they intend to appeal to the Privy Council...”
*
(Dr David Wostyn)
As our team of highly esteemed colleagues (mutters under breath) collates the appropriate extracts to describe the closing years of the Black Twenties, first I want to pause and look at some underappreciated corners of the world...
*
From: “The Forgotten Continent” by Sir Oswald Young and Philippa Olaifa (2009)—
Africa is a sorely-neglected theatre of the Black Twenties in scholarship. Or rather, we should say, it is the Pact-Cannae conflict, which seems to define much of the Twenties in other parts of the world, that is neglected. One can find many dissertations examining, in graphic detail, the ethno-cultural devastation wrought by the Societists on the continent of Africa; but such ostentatiously pious mourning for that loss is rendered shallow and hypocritical by the lack of interest in the nations of Africa before their contact with the Threefold Eye. We can find many studies of the Matetwa Empire’s struggle against the expanding Combine, yet mysteriously few discussing their wars against the European colonisers of the Cannae beforehand. At best, this is usually relegated to a mere matinée before the main event in such accounts, which is certainly not how it was seen at the time.
As we’ve discussed elsewhere, to attempt to treat ‘Africa’ as a single entity when covering any period of history is a fool’s errand, yet one also runs into headaches if one tries to treat it as a series of separate regions, as history will inevitably spill over from one to another. Still, we shall try, beginning in the north and west.
Morocco arguably represents the most successful resistance to European colonialism of any of the African nations. Whereas Abyssinia (and, arguably, Kongo) ended up making deals which did not necessarily work out to their advantage, and the Matetwa kept their independence by constant exercise of cold steel, the Sultans of Morocco wisely guided their state through the dangerous years without putting a foot wrong. Or, at least, that is what self-congratulatory official histories would have us believe. In reality, Morocco’s success owed as much to luck as skill, but then that is scarcely unique in the annals of world history. Since the revival of Ottoman power in Algiers in 1861, the traditional alignment of France and the Empire had been disrupted, and Sultan Mohammed V (or rather his minister Fouad al-Jirari) had ably played the two off against one another.[1] The Moroccans feared Ottoman revival would continue westwards and pursued an on-again off-again alliance with France; broader French protection from the Ottomans was mirrored by more immediate Moroccan protection and supply of the neighbouring French colony of Arguin.[2] The Moroccans’ interest in propping up this claim, rather than contesting it, is that during the nineteenth century it provided a useful buffer zone against the Fulani Caliphate and its potentially expansionist Royal Africa Company partner. Morocco had also continued its historical alliance with the UPSA; it had been one of the first nations to recognise the young Novamundine republic, in part due to serving its interests in its historic conflicts with Spain.[3]
Though Morocco remained neutral in the Pandoric War, the conflict changed the world in such a way to require changes in its foreign policy. Sultan Ismail III and his ministers had to respond to the defeat of the Ottomans by the Russians (leading to some unrest in Algiers which faced a crackdown), the ascendancy of the ‘French Vulture’ and the destruction of Morocco’s old ally, the UPSA. Ismail elected to formally join the Marseilles Protocol, though feared Morocco would lose its independence as a result, watching the Mauré example with concern. The defeat of the IEF in South America (to which Morocco would make a token contribution) weakened France’s position sufficiently for Ismail to withdraw from full participation in 1906, as a number of other nations did at the time. As this poisoned relations with the Tuilleries, Ismail began looking to shore up his country’s position elsewhere. His capable Foreign Minister, Abraham Berdugo (descended from Portuguese exilic Jews who had been expelled in 1492) negotiated a series of treaties in 1909-1911 with both the Ottoman Empire and the new Grand Palaver of Guinea. These saw the remaining terra incognita of the Sahara carved up between the three powers on neat ruler-straight lines of latitude and longitude, eliminating rival claims and diminishing the need for French Arguin as a buffer state.
Morocco also pursued more trade in general with Guinea, after historically viewing its components with suspicion. Morocco’s mining industry became more developed in the early twentieth century, becoming a leading supplier of phosphate which would feed world chemical industries (including, unofficially, those in the Combine). Moroccan miners also discovered and exploited haematite deposits in the Rif. Iron production from these deposits was initially primarily exported, but the metallurgical industry was further developed in Morocco as business and the state saw an opportunity in supplying Guinea. Historically Guinea had mostly imported items such as tools and firearms from the ENA, but President Faulkner’s abandonment of free trade with American colonies had caused issues with punishing tariffs. Morocco began to fill part of this gap. This expanding trade meant that Morocco suffered less than many countries from the Panic of 1917, its African trade connexions insulated from the decline of global trade just as the udarkismo of the Combine did. This meant that, when the Black Twenties erupted into war, Morocco was uniquely sited to supply weapons to both sides. Foreign political cartoons of the time picture Morocco, personified as a Barbary lion, learning the way of the vulture from her old mentor, France. Morocco would continue to supply arms to anyone who wanted them and became rich off the proceeds, even helping Guinea develop her own factories to do the same. She would come to regret this when one of her best markets became her old enemies, Spain and Portugal, to fuel their civil wars.
Indeed, Guinea pursued similar exploitation-of-neutrality policies to Morocco in the Black Twenties, though focusing more on the production of raw materials to supply overseas. As angry English commanders in Natal would opine, the Matetwa Empire would probably never have been able to fight on through the war without the supply of certain vital goods from Guinea, a region which fifty years earlier would never have gone against England’s claimed national interests. But identity had moved on, and the ideas of C. B. Kane and the Palaver were creating a new Guinea. The main concern of that Guinea was the continuing expansion of Karlus Barkalus’ Societists from Kongo into the heart of Africa with its vital trade routes. The aforementioned Guinean supply of the Matetwa came entirely by sea, via the Russo-Lithuanian colony of Povilskaja, which rendered ships vulnerable to being stopped by Cannae forces. The Societists’ vaguely-defined sphere of influence in the Congo Basin was effectively a block on what internal African trade had previously existed – though, admittedly, given some of that trade had been in human lives, the situation is not as morally simple as Diversitarians would like to opine.
Guinean concern about the Societists increased sharply throughout the Black Twenties; the eyes of the world were elsewhere, and Barkalus and his lieutenants seized that opportunity. The plague reached North Africa in 1924 and began to spread through the trade routes. Historical epidemiologists argue about how far the Second Plague pandemic, the Black Death, had ever penetrated into Africa; but regardless of such debates, the Third Plague broke out into the interior from 1925 onwards. While the plague’s worst ravages in Africa lay in the future compared to the rest of the world, this death and disruption was already exploited by the Societists.
As an aside, the Societist ‘Doctrine of the Last Throw’ is often described in a manner that makes it sound ideologically coherent and unified. This is not the case, with there being two main schools of Societist thought about the Doctrine even within the Combine. The original conception of the Doctrine, as espoused by its creator Raúl Caraíbas, is that Societists should wait for nations to exhaust themselves through war, then make their move to expand when war-weariness has impaired the nations’ ability to resist. However, while this idea would bear abominable fruit for the Combine in the twentieth century, back in the nineteenth and the Long Peace through which Caraíbas lived, many other Societists scoffed at the idea of waiting for such a terrible war. Others, from the more bourgeois ‘secret society’ Societist tradition of the time (possibly including Bartolomé Jaimes, though records are unclear) instead argued for a variant of the Doctrine that merely exploited temporary inability of a nation to resist. For example, if an army had mutinied over low pay, or the nation had sent it to a faraway war that left the homeland territory vulnerable. These Societists were clearly inspired by Hoche’s invasion of England in 1807, when the Jacobins had opportunistically exploited England sending a chunk of her navy away to fight the UPSA in the Third Platinean War.
It was this second exercise of the Doctrine that Barkalus and his men primarily employed during the Black Twenties in Africa, which arguably lasted longer than they did in most other parts of the world. While Africa was not the top priority for the Combine’s propaganda efforts in supplying regions with Tremuriatix and vaccines, what it did receive allowed Barkalus to make master stroke after master stroke in his conflicts with nations like the Kingdom of Lunda and the Luba Empire. These powers, which often had highly effective governing structures that had perpetuated their existence for centuries in the face of many challenges, now crumbled. It was not merely that the Societists came with modern firearms and tactics, but that in their other hand they offered cures and preventives to the deadly plague that was now ravaging the Congo Basin, brought there by Arab and Persian slave traders. As early as 1925, the Guineans were hearing reports that the eastern shore of Lake Chad – which, according to Berdugo’s treaties, was the territory of the Ottoman-allied Sultanate of Darfur – had been taken by Societist-allied militias. At this point it is very difficult to say which forces were truly ‘Societist’ and reckoned themselves part of the Combine, and which naively thought they were merely making temporary alliances. Nonetheless, this expansion was regarded with alarm by the Guineans.
The Grand Palaver and the Board of Directors feared that Barkalus’ successful propaganda campaign would begin to undermine their own fragile rule. It mattered not that the actual quantities of Tremuriatix and plague vaccine reaching Africa from South America was miniscule compared to the demand; Barkalus employed skilful propagandists, and soon every village had someone who knew someone who had been to a village blessed by the Threefold Eye where no-one feared the plague. Ironically, and contrary to the Societists’ own aims, a fair amount of contemporary art survives in Guinean museums which approvingly represents the Threefold Eye and black flag in uniquely north Bantu styles; perhaps the ultimate expression of a culture that would go on to resist all attempts to quell it.
The Guinean response to this was audacious. Since the Americans had begun producing Birline in 1923-24, they had jealously guarded the patent, using its production mostly to protect their own people and occasionally as gifts for acts of diplomacy, though less commonly than the Societists. Guinea had developed its own chemical industry due to the need to produce anti-malarial treatments in periods of Meridian, and later Societist, monopoly. In the early years this had focused on the growing of cinchona plants for quinine harvesting – indeed, that was primarily the reason why the RAC had expanded south into Duala.[4] Later in the nineteenth century, however, discoveries of anti-fever drugs, produced synthetically from natural precursors, led to development of a specialised factory-based chemical industry in coastal Guinea. Like the Meridians and later the Societists, the Guineans had access to a vast array of natural products from their flora which other parts of the world lacked; the difficulty was in finding ones to exploit. In the short term, Guinea mostly imported experts from abroad (many Meridian Refugiados from chemical companies found work in Guinea) but would also go on to build her own technical universities.
Regardless, the point was that Guinea had sufficient chemical industrial development to produce Birline if she had access to the details of the synthesis. As the Americans protected this, the Board authorised a team of elite Freedish mercenaries to travel to New York, break into a Birley Company factory and open the vault to copy the encrypted formula. The remarkable part is that not only was the team (led by the legendary Emance Bell Rackham) successful in their heist, but the company (and American government) did not even learn what had happened for another quarter-century, so capable were they in covering their tracks. As was seen more tragically with the Societists breaking American military codes, it was clear most Americans were complacent about their cryptography at this point, and a German-built ypologetic engine supplied by the University of Al-Qarawiyyin in Morocco deciphered the formula.[5] Guinea and Morocco’s chemical industries then began production of Birline rat poison, both for the simple humanitarian and economic reasons of protecting their own people from the plague, but also to prevent the Societists from getting the propaganda upper hand. In years to come, they would not only protect themselves, but begin supplying Birline to other African regions in an attempt to combat the Societists’ expansion.
Many starry-eyed Diversitarians will cite Guinea and Morocco’s act of intellectual piracy as a heroic act of anti-colonialism. It is certainly a good story, and more and more far-fetched versions of the heist have created an entire genre in modern African (and beyond) cinema. The altruistic argument slightly falls down, however, when one reflects that Guinea and Morocco just as jealously guarded the formula as America had before them; indeed, their stealthy control of their purloined intellectual property played a major role in the Americans being unaware what had happened. (For years, American courts accepted the claim that the Guineans and Moroccans’s Refugiado chemists had developed a similar but different chemical independently, as the alternative seemed so unthinkable given juries’ prejudices about Africans).
As said above, even in the mid-1920s Darfur was beginning to crumble as Societist cadres and militias roamed the Sahel east of Lake Chad, through lands that a century earlier had been part of the Kanem-Bornu Empire. The Sultanate of Sennar, another Ottoman ally, was more successful in resisting Societist expansion, and even fought beyond its own borders as the Societists reached Lake Cyrus and Kitara. That kingdom, strategically located on the borders of both Russian-allied Abyssinia and Persian-allied Zanguebar saw factionalism at its court of Mengo between partisans of each. But it was the Societists who posed the greatest threat to Kitara, whose ruler Kabaka Olimi V was focused mainly on which of the Cannae and Pact could provide his land with the most protection against the black flag. The answer, it became increasingly clear behind the honeyed words, was neither. All powers in the region were being drawn farther and farther away by their conflicts elsewhere, which seemed so existential at the time, yet now are often treated as a mere prelude.
Indeed, both Abyssinia and Zanguebar (a Swahili-speaking confederacy controlled mostly by a Persian-Omani ruling class) were beginning to rethink their own alignments. Abyssinia had never set too comfortably in its alliance with Russia. There were confessional reasons for Abyssinia to prefer Russia to other European colonisers, and there was a certain Abyssinophile faction and tendency at the court in Petrograd (especially among Russian artists who admired Abyssinian iconography) but this only went so far. It was clear that Petrograd would always see Gondar as, at best, a junior partner. Repeated entreaties from the latter about Russian Erythrea’s control of various territories which the Gondarine dynasties had seen as core lands were always met with nothing more positive than ‘not yet’. Ultimately, Abyssinia was stuck between a rock and a hard place; the Russians were scarcely the best of allies, yet the Amharic Gondarine regime was always vulnerable to rebellions from the Oromo majority in its expanded territory, and Russia could always provide shock troops such as Cossacks or Yapontsi nindzhya to put them down. There were external foes as well; the Sennaris, Zanguebar, Kitara and the Scandinavian outpost of Obock, with its ally the neighbouring Emirate of Yemen. The inherent instability of the Gondarine-led state rendered attempts to build a regional coalition by Nagusa Nagast (King of Kings or Emperor) Demetros III, and his successor Susyenos III, unfeasible. Sennar or Yemen would scarcely be interested in an alliance to resist European colonisers when they would both benefit from a collapse of Gondarine power in Abyssinia.
Therefore, the alignment of Abyssinia with Russia made sense as the least bad option, until war came. In the Pandoric War, Abyssinia did not participate (other than joining Russia’s economic blockades, with poor local consequences) until the Ottoman Empire joined the war at the end of 1898. Abyssinian troops joined with those from Russian Erythrea to attack Sennar and the directly Ottoman-administered Red Sea coastline; they played a key role in repulsing an Ottoman-Sennari siege of the key port of Zapodny Benyovsk (a.k.a. Massawa). After the war, the court at Gondar was dissatisfied with its territorial gains in comparison to the blood and effort expended; the borders were adjusted in Abyssinia’s favour and Sennar’s expense in the Gambela region, but coastal expansion north remained firmly in Russian hands. Abyssinian troops had also played a part in taking Puntland from Germany, but at the peace treaty this was unceremoniously handed over to Belgium (along with other German colonies) as a consolation prize for obtaining nothing of worth Maximilian had actually wanted from his participation in the war. Abyssinia was perhaps the only place whose people had actually desired Puntland (known as Wittenberg’s Folly, an economic drain on any who possessed it) and this was regarded as a slap in the face. More Russian troops were required to put down revolts throughout the 1900s and 1910s as a result.
When Russia intervened in Belgium and effectively took control, several Belgian colonies were redistributed; the Belgian Cape, in which the Belgians had fought for expansion in the war for no gain, was merged with Povilskaja and Puntland was belatedly handed over to Abyssinia. Though trumpeted as a triumph by the Gondarine government, this was decidedly too little, too late. It meant that when war came again, Abyssinian public opinion was decidedly unenthusiastic about participation. This time, Scandinavia was a Russian enemy rather than ally, and so Obock and Yemen were threats to Abyssinia along with Persian-Omani Zanguebar and, eventually, the Ottoman Empire and Sennar again. Surrounded and with little public commitment to their alliance, the only thing that prevented a revolution in Abyssinia was fear that the surrounding powers would carve up the nation. The Scandinavians and Yemenites largely ignored Abyssinia in a tacit acknowledgement of the latter’s lack of will in going on the offensive unless provoked first, with Obock attacking Russian Erythrea and the latter making increasingly shrill demands for Abyssinian support.
The Persians and Omanis were less nuanced in their approach; the increasing Russian conquests in northern Persia throughout 1922 and 1923 led to urgent demands for victories under Persian arms that could be trumpeted in the press. Forces from Zanguebar therefore crossed the Chalbi Desert into the Sidamo region with its coffee plantations, while Omani marine forces landed in northern Puntland. Zanguebar armies would besiege and take the port of Mogadishu to join up with the Omanis; by the time of the surrender of Persia in October 1923, the entirety of Abyssinia’s coastline had fallen to the enemy.
That surrender, however, changed matters considerably. As part of a ploy, the Shah-Advocate released Persia’s vassals, allowing Oman to fight on as a separate power. Russian hopes of continuing their expansion to take on places like Oman or Kalat were soon dashed as the fronts of the war multiplied. Indeed, the Russian declaration of war on the Ottoman Empire (and therefore Sennar) meant that Abyssinia was now truly surrounded by enemies. At the same time, with the Persian withdrawal from the war, Oman would now struggle to lead Zanguebar alone. Sultan Faisal bin Sayyid sent diplomatic approaches to France to gauge French support for continuation of the war, and came away dissatisfied; it is likely Changarnier’s infamous independent activities were involved. In March 1924, with the plague beginning to spread and conflict having remained effectively static for months (other than further Scandinavian conquest of Russian Erythrea), Muscat approached both Gondar and Aden to discuss a separate peace.
Susyenos III knew he had little in the way of options. There were virtually no conflict on the western border, as the Sennaris were ignoring orders from Constantinople (and later Alexandria) to attack in favour of focusing on the Societist foe, while Abyssinian armies were close to mutiny. The Scandinavians had almost entirely rolled up the Russians in Erythrea, with only the again-besieged Zapodny Benyovsk still holding out and dependent on Abyssinian supplies. The Omanis had a superficially strong position, but their sole control over Zanguebar was unstable and they, too, were beginning to fear the Societists and the plague as greater threats.
Susyenos therefore repudiated his alliance with Russia and independently signed the Treaty of Zanzibar in May 1924, expelling the remaining Russian troops – of which there were few, having been stripped for Tsar Paul’s ever-multiplying number of fronts. Susyenos and the Abyssinians also joined an ever-multiplying list of ‘traitors’ in the Russian press, along with Prince Yengalychev and the Sikhs. The mob smashed many examples of Abyssinian artwork on display in Petrograd, Moscow and Yekaterinsk. This was an exercise in fanning the flames that many state officials probably thought of as a way for the public to work off their anger from the privations of the war, but it had also awakened a spirit of discontent that would begin to undermine Russia’s increasingly-strained war economy through the plague years.
The treaty was relatively favourable to Abyssinia. Zanguebar would keep Mogadishu and there were a few other border adjustments in the south, with Yemen receiving the Bari region on the uttermost Horn of Africa (despite this having been conquered by Omani troops). Scandinavia, invited only as an observer (also illustrative of increasing Yemenite relative power) annexed the whole of Russian Erythrea, pledging to respect Abyssinian territorial integrity.
With Sennar refusing to attack and informally holding a ceasefire, this left Susyenos with ‘only’ the plague to cope with. That, and the civil war that – finally, and inevitably in the absence of Russian troops – now broke out...
[1] This is using European-style regnal numbers for the Sultans; the system used internally is somewhat different (a similar conundrum to representing Siamese monarchs and many others).
[2] French Arguin has grown to take in a claim of a chunk of hinterland on the continent, not just the titular island.
[3] Similarly, in OTL Morocco was the first country to recognise the USA and pursued a limited alliance in the nineteenth centjury.
[4] See Part #107 in Volume III.
[5] The University of Al-Qarawiyyin is an ancient university founded as a mosque and madrassah in 859 AD; as with some other examples in China and elsewhere, experts argue over when it should be counted from as a ‘modern’ university. In TTL it has modernised and expanded to other disciplines rather earlier than when it did in OTL (1963).
“Families of victims of last November’s Pittsburgh rail crash today expressed their ‘anger and disappointment’ after the jury at the Pennsylvania Assizes ruled that the incident, which cost sevem people their lives and injured more than a dozen others, had been unavoidable misadventure. Our legal analyst, Mr Lionel Turner, reports.”
“Thank you, Miss Jackson. Behind the public outrage, cooler heads are critical of the approach taken by the public prosecutor in this case. In particular, it is felt that too many potential causes of liability by PennRail were attacked, with the result that the jury were unconvinced by an incoherent list of alleged errors. Rather than the ‘catalogue of failures’ which the prosecution claimed, this instead was interpreted as desperately scrambling to find anything to pin on the powerful public rail corporation with its deep pockets. If the prosecution had instead focused on any one of these points exclusively – the tired driver forced into overtime by allegedly exploitative practices condemned by his trade union, the delayed maintenance on the tracks west of the Pittsburgh Interchange, and so on – then it seems more likely that PennRail might have had to pay compensation. A spokeswoman for the families of the victims was noncommittal on whether they intend to appeal to the Privy Council...”
– Transcription of a C-WNB News Motoscope broadcast,
recorded in Waccamaw Strand, Kingdom of Carolina, 09/06/2020
recorded in Waccamaw Strand, Kingdom of Carolina, 09/06/2020
*
(Dr David Wostyn)
As our team of highly esteemed colleagues (mutters under breath) collates the appropriate extracts to describe the closing years of the Black Twenties, first I want to pause and look at some underappreciated corners of the world...
*
From: “The Forgotten Continent” by Sir Oswald Young and Philippa Olaifa (2009)—
Africa is a sorely-neglected theatre of the Black Twenties in scholarship. Or rather, we should say, it is the Pact-Cannae conflict, which seems to define much of the Twenties in other parts of the world, that is neglected. One can find many dissertations examining, in graphic detail, the ethno-cultural devastation wrought by the Societists on the continent of Africa; but such ostentatiously pious mourning for that loss is rendered shallow and hypocritical by the lack of interest in the nations of Africa before their contact with the Threefold Eye. We can find many studies of the Matetwa Empire’s struggle against the expanding Combine, yet mysteriously few discussing their wars against the European colonisers of the Cannae beforehand. At best, this is usually relegated to a mere matinée before the main event in such accounts, which is certainly not how it was seen at the time.
As we’ve discussed elsewhere, to attempt to treat ‘Africa’ as a single entity when covering any period of history is a fool’s errand, yet one also runs into headaches if one tries to treat it as a series of separate regions, as history will inevitably spill over from one to another. Still, we shall try, beginning in the north and west.
Morocco arguably represents the most successful resistance to European colonialism of any of the African nations. Whereas Abyssinia (and, arguably, Kongo) ended up making deals which did not necessarily work out to their advantage, and the Matetwa kept their independence by constant exercise of cold steel, the Sultans of Morocco wisely guided their state through the dangerous years without putting a foot wrong. Or, at least, that is what self-congratulatory official histories would have us believe. In reality, Morocco’s success owed as much to luck as skill, but then that is scarcely unique in the annals of world history. Since the revival of Ottoman power in Algiers in 1861, the traditional alignment of France and the Empire had been disrupted, and Sultan Mohammed V (or rather his minister Fouad al-Jirari) had ably played the two off against one another.[1] The Moroccans feared Ottoman revival would continue westwards and pursued an on-again off-again alliance with France; broader French protection from the Ottomans was mirrored by more immediate Moroccan protection and supply of the neighbouring French colony of Arguin.[2] The Moroccans’ interest in propping up this claim, rather than contesting it, is that during the nineteenth century it provided a useful buffer zone against the Fulani Caliphate and its potentially expansionist Royal Africa Company partner. Morocco had also continued its historical alliance with the UPSA; it had been one of the first nations to recognise the young Novamundine republic, in part due to serving its interests in its historic conflicts with Spain.[3]
Though Morocco remained neutral in the Pandoric War, the conflict changed the world in such a way to require changes in its foreign policy. Sultan Ismail III and his ministers had to respond to the defeat of the Ottomans by the Russians (leading to some unrest in Algiers which faced a crackdown), the ascendancy of the ‘French Vulture’ and the destruction of Morocco’s old ally, the UPSA. Ismail elected to formally join the Marseilles Protocol, though feared Morocco would lose its independence as a result, watching the Mauré example with concern. The defeat of the IEF in South America (to which Morocco would make a token contribution) weakened France’s position sufficiently for Ismail to withdraw from full participation in 1906, as a number of other nations did at the time. As this poisoned relations with the Tuilleries, Ismail began looking to shore up his country’s position elsewhere. His capable Foreign Minister, Abraham Berdugo (descended from Portuguese exilic Jews who had been expelled in 1492) negotiated a series of treaties in 1909-1911 with both the Ottoman Empire and the new Grand Palaver of Guinea. These saw the remaining terra incognita of the Sahara carved up between the three powers on neat ruler-straight lines of latitude and longitude, eliminating rival claims and diminishing the need for French Arguin as a buffer state.
Morocco also pursued more trade in general with Guinea, after historically viewing its components with suspicion. Morocco’s mining industry became more developed in the early twentieth century, becoming a leading supplier of phosphate which would feed world chemical industries (including, unofficially, those in the Combine). Moroccan miners also discovered and exploited haematite deposits in the Rif. Iron production from these deposits was initially primarily exported, but the metallurgical industry was further developed in Morocco as business and the state saw an opportunity in supplying Guinea. Historically Guinea had mostly imported items such as tools and firearms from the ENA, but President Faulkner’s abandonment of free trade with American colonies had caused issues with punishing tariffs. Morocco began to fill part of this gap. This expanding trade meant that Morocco suffered less than many countries from the Panic of 1917, its African trade connexions insulated from the decline of global trade just as the udarkismo of the Combine did. This meant that, when the Black Twenties erupted into war, Morocco was uniquely sited to supply weapons to both sides. Foreign political cartoons of the time picture Morocco, personified as a Barbary lion, learning the way of the vulture from her old mentor, France. Morocco would continue to supply arms to anyone who wanted them and became rich off the proceeds, even helping Guinea develop her own factories to do the same. She would come to regret this when one of her best markets became her old enemies, Spain and Portugal, to fuel their civil wars.
Indeed, Guinea pursued similar exploitation-of-neutrality policies to Morocco in the Black Twenties, though focusing more on the production of raw materials to supply overseas. As angry English commanders in Natal would opine, the Matetwa Empire would probably never have been able to fight on through the war without the supply of certain vital goods from Guinea, a region which fifty years earlier would never have gone against England’s claimed national interests. But identity had moved on, and the ideas of C. B. Kane and the Palaver were creating a new Guinea. The main concern of that Guinea was the continuing expansion of Karlus Barkalus’ Societists from Kongo into the heart of Africa with its vital trade routes. The aforementioned Guinean supply of the Matetwa came entirely by sea, via the Russo-Lithuanian colony of Povilskaja, which rendered ships vulnerable to being stopped by Cannae forces. The Societists’ vaguely-defined sphere of influence in the Congo Basin was effectively a block on what internal African trade had previously existed – though, admittedly, given some of that trade had been in human lives, the situation is not as morally simple as Diversitarians would like to opine.
Guinean concern about the Societists increased sharply throughout the Black Twenties; the eyes of the world were elsewhere, and Barkalus and his lieutenants seized that opportunity. The plague reached North Africa in 1924 and began to spread through the trade routes. Historical epidemiologists argue about how far the Second Plague pandemic, the Black Death, had ever penetrated into Africa; but regardless of such debates, the Third Plague broke out into the interior from 1925 onwards. While the plague’s worst ravages in Africa lay in the future compared to the rest of the world, this death and disruption was already exploited by the Societists.
As an aside, the Societist ‘Doctrine of the Last Throw’ is often described in a manner that makes it sound ideologically coherent and unified. This is not the case, with there being two main schools of Societist thought about the Doctrine even within the Combine. The original conception of the Doctrine, as espoused by its creator Raúl Caraíbas, is that Societists should wait for nations to exhaust themselves through war, then make their move to expand when war-weariness has impaired the nations’ ability to resist. However, while this idea would bear abominable fruit for the Combine in the twentieth century, back in the nineteenth and the Long Peace through which Caraíbas lived, many other Societists scoffed at the idea of waiting for such a terrible war. Others, from the more bourgeois ‘secret society’ Societist tradition of the time (possibly including Bartolomé Jaimes, though records are unclear) instead argued for a variant of the Doctrine that merely exploited temporary inability of a nation to resist. For example, if an army had mutinied over low pay, or the nation had sent it to a faraway war that left the homeland territory vulnerable. These Societists were clearly inspired by Hoche’s invasion of England in 1807, when the Jacobins had opportunistically exploited England sending a chunk of her navy away to fight the UPSA in the Third Platinean War.
It was this second exercise of the Doctrine that Barkalus and his men primarily employed during the Black Twenties in Africa, which arguably lasted longer than they did in most other parts of the world. While Africa was not the top priority for the Combine’s propaganda efforts in supplying regions with Tremuriatix and vaccines, what it did receive allowed Barkalus to make master stroke after master stroke in his conflicts with nations like the Kingdom of Lunda and the Luba Empire. These powers, which often had highly effective governing structures that had perpetuated their existence for centuries in the face of many challenges, now crumbled. It was not merely that the Societists came with modern firearms and tactics, but that in their other hand they offered cures and preventives to the deadly plague that was now ravaging the Congo Basin, brought there by Arab and Persian slave traders. As early as 1925, the Guineans were hearing reports that the eastern shore of Lake Chad – which, according to Berdugo’s treaties, was the territory of the Ottoman-allied Sultanate of Darfur – had been taken by Societist-allied militias. At this point it is very difficult to say which forces were truly ‘Societist’ and reckoned themselves part of the Combine, and which naively thought they were merely making temporary alliances. Nonetheless, this expansion was regarded with alarm by the Guineans.
The Grand Palaver and the Board of Directors feared that Barkalus’ successful propaganda campaign would begin to undermine their own fragile rule. It mattered not that the actual quantities of Tremuriatix and plague vaccine reaching Africa from South America was miniscule compared to the demand; Barkalus employed skilful propagandists, and soon every village had someone who knew someone who had been to a village blessed by the Threefold Eye where no-one feared the plague. Ironically, and contrary to the Societists’ own aims, a fair amount of contemporary art survives in Guinean museums which approvingly represents the Threefold Eye and black flag in uniquely north Bantu styles; perhaps the ultimate expression of a culture that would go on to resist all attempts to quell it.
The Guinean response to this was audacious. Since the Americans had begun producing Birline in 1923-24, they had jealously guarded the patent, using its production mostly to protect their own people and occasionally as gifts for acts of diplomacy, though less commonly than the Societists. Guinea had developed its own chemical industry due to the need to produce anti-malarial treatments in periods of Meridian, and later Societist, monopoly. In the early years this had focused on the growing of cinchona plants for quinine harvesting – indeed, that was primarily the reason why the RAC had expanded south into Duala.[4] Later in the nineteenth century, however, discoveries of anti-fever drugs, produced synthetically from natural precursors, led to development of a specialised factory-based chemical industry in coastal Guinea. Like the Meridians and later the Societists, the Guineans had access to a vast array of natural products from their flora which other parts of the world lacked; the difficulty was in finding ones to exploit. In the short term, Guinea mostly imported experts from abroad (many Meridian Refugiados from chemical companies found work in Guinea) but would also go on to build her own technical universities.
Regardless, the point was that Guinea had sufficient chemical industrial development to produce Birline if she had access to the details of the synthesis. As the Americans protected this, the Board authorised a team of elite Freedish mercenaries to travel to New York, break into a Birley Company factory and open the vault to copy the encrypted formula. The remarkable part is that not only was the team (led by the legendary Emance Bell Rackham) successful in their heist, but the company (and American government) did not even learn what had happened for another quarter-century, so capable were they in covering their tracks. As was seen more tragically with the Societists breaking American military codes, it was clear most Americans were complacent about their cryptography at this point, and a German-built ypologetic engine supplied by the University of Al-Qarawiyyin in Morocco deciphered the formula.[5] Guinea and Morocco’s chemical industries then began production of Birline rat poison, both for the simple humanitarian and economic reasons of protecting their own people from the plague, but also to prevent the Societists from getting the propaganda upper hand. In years to come, they would not only protect themselves, but begin supplying Birline to other African regions in an attempt to combat the Societists’ expansion.
Many starry-eyed Diversitarians will cite Guinea and Morocco’s act of intellectual piracy as a heroic act of anti-colonialism. It is certainly a good story, and more and more far-fetched versions of the heist have created an entire genre in modern African (and beyond) cinema. The altruistic argument slightly falls down, however, when one reflects that Guinea and Morocco just as jealously guarded the formula as America had before them; indeed, their stealthy control of their purloined intellectual property played a major role in the Americans being unaware what had happened. (For years, American courts accepted the claim that the Guineans and Moroccans’s Refugiado chemists had developed a similar but different chemical independently, as the alternative seemed so unthinkable given juries’ prejudices about Africans).
As said above, even in the mid-1920s Darfur was beginning to crumble as Societist cadres and militias roamed the Sahel east of Lake Chad, through lands that a century earlier had been part of the Kanem-Bornu Empire. The Sultanate of Sennar, another Ottoman ally, was more successful in resisting Societist expansion, and even fought beyond its own borders as the Societists reached Lake Cyrus and Kitara. That kingdom, strategically located on the borders of both Russian-allied Abyssinia and Persian-allied Zanguebar saw factionalism at its court of Mengo between partisans of each. But it was the Societists who posed the greatest threat to Kitara, whose ruler Kabaka Olimi V was focused mainly on which of the Cannae and Pact could provide his land with the most protection against the black flag. The answer, it became increasingly clear behind the honeyed words, was neither. All powers in the region were being drawn farther and farther away by their conflicts elsewhere, which seemed so existential at the time, yet now are often treated as a mere prelude.
Indeed, both Abyssinia and Zanguebar (a Swahili-speaking confederacy controlled mostly by a Persian-Omani ruling class) were beginning to rethink their own alignments. Abyssinia had never set too comfortably in its alliance with Russia. There were confessional reasons for Abyssinia to prefer Russia to other European colonisers, and there was a certain Abyssinophile faction and tendency at the court in Petrograd (especially among Russian artists who admired Abyssinian iconography) but this only went so far. It was clear that Petrograd would always see Gondar as, at best, a junior partner. Repeated entreaties from the latter about Russian Erythrea’s control of various territories which the Gondarine dynasties had seen as core lands were always met with nothing more positive than ‘not yet’. Ultimately, Abyssinia was stuck between a rock and a hard place; the Russians were scarcely the best of allies, yet the Amharic Gondarine regime was always vulnerable to rebellions from the Oromo majority in its expanded territory, and Russia could always provide shock troops such as Cossacks or Yapontsi nindzhya to put them down. There were external foes as well; the Sennaris, Zanguebar, Kitara and the Scandinavian outpost of Obock, with its ally the neighbouring Emirate of Yemen. The inherent instability of the Gondarine-led state rendered attempts to build a regional coalition by Nagusa Nagast (King of Kings or Emperor) Demetros III, and his successor Susyenos III, unfeasible. Sennar or Yemen would scarcely be interested in an alliance to resist European colonisers when they would both benefit from a collapse of Gondarine power in Abyssinia.
Therefore, the alignment of Abyssinia with Russia made sense as the least bad option, until war came. In the Pandoric War, Abyssinia did not participate (other than joining Russia’s economic blockades, with poor local consequences) until the Ottoman Empire joined the war at the end of 1898. Abyssinian troops joined with those from Russian Erythrea to attack Sennar and the directly Ottoman-administered Red Sea coastline; they played a key role in repulsing an Ottoman-Sennari siege of the key port of Zapodny Benyovsk (a.k.a. Massawa). After the war, the court at Gondar was dissatisfied with its territorial gains in comparison to the blood and effort expended; the borders were adjusted in Abyssinia’s favour and Sennar’s expense in the Gambela region, but coastal expansion north remained firmly in Russian hands. Abyssinian troops had also played a part in taking Puntland from Germany, but at the peace treaty this was unceremoniously handed over to Belgium (along with other German colonies) as a consolation prize for obtaining nothing of worth Maximilian had actually wanted from his participation in the war. Abyssinia was perhaps the only place whose people had actually desired Puntland (known as Wittenberg’s Folly, an economic drain on any who possessed it) and this was regarded as a slap in the face. More Russian troops were required to put down revolts throughout the 1900s and 1910s as a result.
When Russia intervened in Belgium and effectively took control, several Belgian colonies were redistributed; the Belgian Cape, in which the Belgians had fought for expansion in the war for no gain, was merged with Povilskaja and Puntland was belatedly handed over to Abyssinia. Though trumpeted as a triumph by the Gondarine government, this was decidedly too little, too late. It meant that when war came again, Abyssinian public opinion was decidedly unenthusiastic about participation. This time, Scandinavia was a Russian enemy rather than ally, and so Obock and Yemen were threats to Abyssinia along with Persian-Omani Zanguebar and, eventually, the Ottoman Empire and Sennar again. Surrounded and with little public commitment to their alliance, the only thing that prevented a revolution in Abyssinia was fear that the surrounding powers would carve up the nation. The Scandinavians and Yemenites largely ignored Abyssinia in a tacit acknowledgement of the latter’s lack of will in going on the offensive unless provoked first, with Obock attacking Russian Erythrea and the latter making increasingly shrill demands for Abyssinian support.
The Persians and Omanis were less nuanced in their approach; the increasing Russian conquests in northern Persia throughout 1922 and 1923 led to urgent demands for victories under Persian arms that could be trumpeted in the press. Forces from Zanguebar therefore crossed the Chalbi Desert into the Sidamo region with its coffee plantations, while Omani marine forces landed in northern Puntland. Zanguebar armies would besiege and take the port of Mogadishu to join up with the Omanis; by the time of the surrender of Persia in October 1923, the entirety of Abyssinia’s coastline had fallen to the enemy.
That surrender, however, changed matters considerably. As part of a ploy, the Shah-Advocate released Persia’s vassals, allowing Oman to fight on as a separate power. Russian hopes of continuing their expansion to take on places like Oman or Kalat were soon dashed as the fronts of the war multiplied. Indeed, the Russian declaration of war on the Ottoman Empire (and therefore Sennar) meant that Abyssinia was now truly surrounded by enemies. At the same time, with the Persian withdrawal from the war, Oman would now struggle to lead Zanguebar alone. Sultan Faisal bin Sayyid sent diplomatic approaches to France to gauge French support for continuation of the war, and came away dissatisfied; it is likely Changarnier’s infamous independent activities were involved. In March 1924, with the plague beginning to spread and conflict having remained effectively static for months (other than further Scandinavian conquest of Russian Erythrea), Muscat approached both Gondar and Aden to discuss a separate peace.
Susyenos III knew he had little in the way of options. There were virtually no conflict on the western border, as the Sennaris were ignoring orders from Constantinople (and later Alexandria) to attack in favour of focusing on the Societist foe, while Abyssinian armies were close to mutiny. The Scandinavians had almost entirely rolled up the Russians in Erythrea, with only the again-besieged Zapodny Benyovsk still holding out and dependent on Abyssinian supplies. The Omanis had a superficially strong position, but their sole control over Zanguebar was unstable and they, too, were beginning to fear the Societists and the plague as greater threats.
Susyenos therefore repudiated his alliance with Russia and independently signed the Treaty of Zanzibar in May 1924, expelling the remaining Russian troops – of which there were few, having been stripped for Tsar Paul’s ever-multiplying number of fronts. Susyenos and the Abyssinians also joined an ever-multiplying list of ‘traitors’ in the Russian press, along with Prince Yengalychev and the Sikhs. The mob smashed many examples of Abyssinian artwork on display in Petrograd, Moscow and Yekaterinsk. This was an exercise in fanning the flames that many state officials probably thought of as a way for the public to work off their anger from the privations of the war, but it had also awakened a spirit of discontent that would begin to undermine Russia’s increasingly-strained war economy through the plague years.
The treaty was relatively favourable to Abyssinia. Zanguebar would keep Mogadishu and there were a few other border adjustments in the south, with Yemen receiving the Bari region on the uttermost Horn of Africa (despite this having been conquered by Omani troops). Scandinavia, invited only as an observer (also illustrative of increasing Yemenite relative power) annexed the whole of Russian Erythrea, pledging to respect Abyssinian territorial integrity.
With Sennar refusing to attack and informally holding a ceasefire, this left Susyenos with ‘only’ the plague to cope with. That, and the civil war that – finally, and inevitably in the absence of Russian troops – now broke out...
[1] This is using European-style regnal numbers for the Sultans; the system used internally is somewhat different (a similar conundrum to representing Siamese monarchs and many others).
[2] French Arguin has grown to take in a claim of a chunk of hinterland on the continent, not just the titular island.
[3] Similarly, in OTL Morocco was the first country to recognise the USA and pursued a limited alliance in the nineteenth centjury.
[4] See Part #107 in Volume III.
[5] The University of Al-Qarawiyyin is an ancient university founded as a mosque and madrassah in 859 AD; as with some other examples in China and elsewhere, experts argue over when it should be counted from as a ‘modern’ university. In TTL it has modernised and expanded to other disciplines rather earlier than when it did in OTL (1963).
"As we’ve discussed elsewhere, to attempt to treat ‘Africa’ as a single entity when covering any period of history is a fool’s errand, yet one also runs into headaches if one tries to treat it as a series of separate regions, as history will inevitably spill over from one to another."
Arguably true of OTL as well.
Arguably true of OTL as well.
I'm assuming that the Pennsylvania Assizes is equivalent to a state supreme court IOTL.
An Africa update, right after an India update?!? Thande, you spoil us so!
Great work on this. I'm curious to see how the Guntoor-based Societist nastiness gets going, pincered between Bengal-backed native governments and the unstable, independence leaning Bisnagi.
Similarly, ominous notes about Africa suffering the Black Twenties longer than most; is Africa more connected ITTL than OTL? If so, an Abyssinian civil war will see folks spreading everywhere into the soon-to-be Societist Ottomans/Sennaris/others...starting to see how Black this might become.
Great work on this. I'm curious to see how the Guntoor-based Societist nastiness gets going, pincered between Bengal-backed native governments and the unstable, independence leaning Bisnagi.
Similarly, ominous notes about Africa suffering the Black Twenties longer than most; is Africa more connected ITTL than OTL? If so, an Abyssinian civil war will see folks spreading everywhere into the soon-to-be Societist Ottomans/Sennaris/others...starting to see how Black this might become.
The president has been kidnapped by nindzhya's. Are you a bad enough duke to rescue the president?
I've finally caught up to the story! You weave a complex and fascinating timeline, Thande (Mr. Thande? Thande ji?). All I can say is wah, wah!
(PS: Excuse my punctuation; exclamation marks confuse me
)
(PS: Excuse my punctuation; exclamation marks confuse me
)
293.2
Thande
Donor
[continuation from last extract]
Barkalus’ focus on the second interpretation of the Doctrine of the Last Throw, as well as simple geographic proximity and connectiveness, led to the aforementioned Societist focus on expanding from the Congo Basin outwards into weak or debatable lands; the vaguely-defined frontiers of the Directorate of Guinea or Zanguebar, the Ottoman vassals and minor Moon Lakes kingdoms not yet absorbed by Kitara, and so on. For the first thirty years of the twentieth century, Societist penetration of southern Africa would be, if not nonexistent, decidedly stealthy and low-priority.
The only exception to this was the extremely shaky entity called the Loziland Authority, which had been established following the Pandoric War as a corporate operation with joint seed money from Italian and Scandinavian colonial authorities. This entity, whose existence had always had more in common with dotted lines on maps rather than strict rerality, theoretically stretched from encompassing part of Katanga in the north to a ruler-straight border with Russo-Lithuanian Povilskaka through the Kalahari Desert. It was centred on the Lozi Kingdom, also called Barotseland, which was ruled by a monarch called the Litunga; the Litunga had signed treaties with the corporate authority, supposedly for defence against other powers. Throughout the Black Twenties, how little this had been worth became apparent as both Russians and Societists gained influence within its theoretical borders.
Aside form this typical intrusion into a debatable part of the map, the Societists remained reticent, focusing their resources elsewhere. Southern Africa was otherwise divided into six entities, five of which were colonial. These were Povilskaja, which had annexed the former Belgian Western Cape after the Russian intervention in Belgium in 1918 and now had twin capitals at Baravakhul and Kaapstad [Walvis Bay and Cape Town]; the old Cape Republic, the only exilic Dutch state (and only former Hermandad member) to escape absorption into the Combine, ruled from Oranjestad [Port Elizabeth]; Natal, England’s last colony, ruled from Port Natal [Durban]; Scandinavian Madagascar and Sofala, the latter ruled from Valdemarstad, also known as Chiveve [Beira]; and Italian Mauruca, ruled from the island outpost known as Isola di Mozambico. The sixth entity consisted of Africa’s, perhaps the world’s, most successful example of anti-colonial resistance against Europeans and Novamundines: the Matetwa Empire.[6]
The ethnic Nguni core of the modern Matetwa trace their ancestry back, through history and legend, to peoples who migrated from the Moon Lakes in the first or early second millennium after Christ. Originally a loose confederacy, the Matetwa became a more integrated empire and rose to military supremacy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This shift is often attributed to the acts of a few well-known names among kings and generals, but criticism of the ‘Central Character’ interpretation of history has led to a re-examination of this narrative. Regardless, advanced military reforms and the early adoption of firearms both served to expand Matetwa power further. Conquest of the Swazi and Gaza kingdoms (the latter not to be confused with the later acquisition of ‘Gazaland’) took place in the early 1800s. The Matetwa also built on existing friendly relationships with the Tsonga people to access trade with the Portuguese at arm’s length, profiting from the ivory trade without becoming exposed to potential Portuguese conquest.
This characteristic combination of curiosity, caution and strength in foreign policy was the key to long-term Matetwa success. They did not dismiss European advances as irrelevant, but nor did they become so eager to win European support that they left themselves vulnerable to being weakened from within after arousing the interest of colonial companies. The Matetwa gained European colonial respect for their military capabilities, but – under a fortunate succession of wise kings (or at least kings with wise advisors) they avoided warfare unless it was necessary to prove their resolve against foreign expansion. This would indeed prove necessary a number of times over the chaotic nineteenth century.
The Matetwa were undoubtedly fortunate in some respects. The Dutch, and their rebel Vordermanite Boertrekkers in the early part of the century, had once been the biggest potential threat to the native peoples of the Cape, to the point that many local nations had turned to the Matetwa as the lesser of two evils. Most significant among these would be the Sotho people of the region known to the Dutch as the Highveld, who became a protectorate of the Matetwa and later absorbed into a more inclusive empire. (Somewhat; anti-colonial narratives have largely brushed over state discrimination of non-Nguni peoples among the Matetwa, and it is only towards the end of the twentieth century that this became widely recognised). The Sotho alliance allowed the Matetwa vital expansion into the Cape interior, which left them in a powerful position when the Dutch Republic ceased to exist and the weak, exilic Cape Republic came to rely on Meridian support to survive.
The Portuguese Revolution also lent a particular advantage to the Matetwa; while most of their former empire fell into Meridian corporate hands, the Mozambique colonies disintegrated and were effectively taken over by those best-positioned to do so. The Matetwa Emperor Phunga kaMbuyazi took over Gazaland in the south in 1858-60, while freebooters from Madagascar claimed Sofala for the Scandinavian Asiatic Company, and in 1874 a piratical joke of a continuity Portuguese state in Isola di Mozambico was purchased as a colony by Italy.[7] It is a measure of the shifting balance of power in southern Africa that the declining Rozvi Empire (dominated by ethnic Shona people) turned to Scandinavia for protection from the Matetwa, rather than the other way around.[8]
This Matetwa expansion, and willingness to fight against outside encroachment, stood the empire in good stead when both gold and diamond rushes exploded in the late nineteenth century. Enterprising attempts by freebooters in the Sotho lands (where many of the wealthiest deposits were) were pushed back by the Matetwa military. Aware that being entirely intransigent towards European demands would lead to a united front against him, the Matetwa Emperor Mageba kaPhunga instead tried to split his opponents by offering deals for mining concessions; Europeans would be given a percentage of profits in return for aid with mining equipment, but the operation would be under state control. Attempts by individual enterprising miners to illegally break this monopoly were brutally suppressed; the Matetwa had learned well from New Spain’s experience in being overwhelmed with American (and other) immigrants during the California goldrush. The system worked in particular because it offered opportunities for mining companies from powerful but distant states that otherwise lacked the direct ability to colonise the region, notably France – whose miners were looking for new worlds to conquer as the Pérousien goldrushes wound down. Once again, good fortune played a role in the Matetwa’s success; while Mageba’s policy had been wise, it would still probably have failed if not for two facts: he was steadfast in saying no to the exploitative Meridian corporations that were growing out of the UPSA’s state control, and those corporations were content not to press the issue, as their puppet Cape Dutch Republic also had plenty of diamond deposits of its own. Indeed, much of the intrigue in the Cape was between the English, Belgians and Cape Dutch over the latter’s diamonds, rather than aimed at the Matetwa.[9]
A common narrative suggests that the Matetwa’s successful policies against European colonisation can be traced back to a famous incident in 1872. Ever since La Pérouse first travelled there, many among the Mauré of Autiaraux had suggested that they would never truly be able to deal with the French as equals until they could build a great canoe capable of sailing all the way to France, just as La Pérouse had sailed to their homeland. Ultimately, if the French could always deal with them at arm’s length, the Mauré could never hope to hold the upper hand in a negotiation; their threats could never be anything more than a distant problem to Paris. Men as famous to history as Rangatira Tamahimana had imagined they might be the first explorer to sail all that way on a Mauré-built ship.[10] In the end, this dream would not be realised until the 1870s, when a man named Nangana of Egnaté Apa achieved the feat. His wooden lineship, the Matahourua (named after the first canoe to have discovered Autiaraux in Mauré legend) was fully Mauré-built, though its design was heavily French-influenced, and was at least as capable as La Pérouse’s old flagship d’Estaing. Nangana, who had never visited Europe himself but brought along officers who had travelled there on French ships, set out on his long voyage westward across the Indian Ocean. Fatefully, he chose to stop for supplies in the port city of Yetheku, the largest seaport in the Matetwa Empire, founded by the Portuguese as Lourenço Marques.[11]
The Mauré were regarded with great curiosity by the Matetwa (and, indeed, the Europeans and other foreign visitors in the port) and Emperor Mageba granted Nangana an audience to discuss his mission. Mauré-sympathetic historians contend that it was this insight, stemming from long Mauré interaction with the French and others as a distant nation on the other side of the world, that led Mageba to concoct his most effective foreign policy. This narrative has received more criticism in recent years, some critics noting that many of Mageba’s core ideas were present in policy enacted before 1872. One point of contention is, of course, that ultimately the Mauré were less successful than the Matetwa in resisting colonialism; the Matetwa never had to fight a war for independence, after all.
Ultimately, Nangana would be disappointed when he made it to Europe; though the Mauré had achieved a remarkable feat and one which made he and his crew a nine days’ wonder in capitals across Europe, it was seen as a curiosity rather than the chilling expression of equality they had hoped for. No Europeans worried about people from the other side of the world turning up in a wooden lineship, as they might have done a century before; the world had moved on, and ‘serious’ powers were building fleets of armourclads, soon even lionhearts. Non-European states that wanted to keep up, such as Persia and Siam, were frantically buying them under licence and seeking to expand their native industrial capacity to reduce long-term dependence. That was something which small and resource-poor Autiaraux, no matter its growing Polynesian empire, could not hope to do. Nangana might have flown his corou flag proudly, but inwardly he feared that the Mauré would inevitably fall behind and fall under French influence after all – as, indeed, happened after Weihihimana’s bold but doomed attack on Russian Gavaji during the Pandoric War.[12]
But what was true of Autiaraux was not true of the Matetwa lands. The Matetwa kings had built a sizeable empire, interconnected with modernised roads (later railways) and funded by their profitable diamond and gold concessions, which no European power or corporate monolith could hope to overturn without angering all the others who benefited under the current system. One effect which the encounter Nangana likely did have was in persuading Mageba and his successors that it was important to develop naval forces and build up their ports; nations like the Kingdom of Kandy in Ceylon illustrated that once cut off from the coastline, it was only a matter of time before European control of trade led to even the most defiant native power succumbing. Unlike the Mauré, the Matetwa were able to build up iron and coal mines (using the knowledge acquired from the gold and diamond mining cessions), modernise their military, and even build armourclad warships, albeit focusing more on basic coastal defence and riverine patrol vessels.
The historian Albert Latham compares the Matetwa Empire’s stability to the inflated balloon of a steerable (which the Matetwa also experimented with, albeit without much success), where pressure within pushing outward is balanced with pressure from without pushing inward. Latham argues that the Matetwa survived, despite ruthless, cutthroat court politics and many discontented non-Nguni ethnic groups being discriminated against, out of shared fear that a moment of weakness would lead to the European colonists and Novamundine corporations crashing down on all sides and crushing their independence. They had plenty of examples of this happening across the continent, after all. Similarly, the outsiders were often reluctant to try such moves precisely because of the perceived strength and stability of the empire, which, according to Latham, would likely have evaporated if the Europeans had all packed up and gone home, removing the external threat.
One Matetwa policy commonly misattributed to Nangana’s inspiration was the sending of the sons of princes and generals to attend school or university in Europe (or less commonly the Novamund, where racial prejudice was typically more ingrained and less susceptible to the application of money). This had already begun before 1872, and in fact the Matetwa were far from the only African nation to try it. Abyssinians and some of the Guinean nations, such as the Ashanteans and Dahomeans, had also sent noble sons to obtain European education. The University of Paris was particularly prized, but the French state typically doled out places based on where it was trying to obtain influence in Africa, which naturally led to some tensions. The same was sometimes true of Italy and Scandinavia. The universities of Germany and Britain (later England) were considered more neutral targets, while Belgium and Spain were regarded with suspicion and generally avoided.
The misconception that this was a unique Matetwa policy is probably born of the fact that the Matetwa certainly sent more such students than any other African nation, a function of the great wealth which they were able to apply to the purpose, as well as more of a unified state sponsorship programme. While there were some concerns that such teaching might lead to the nation’s future leaders losing their identity and sympathising more with Europeans, ultimately it was felt that an insight into current thinking (and technology) in Europe was vital for future foreign policy decisions. The Matetwa were also helped by the fact that they had generally embraced Christianity following missionary activity, though most Matetwa (including the ruling classes) practised a slightly syncretic form carefully not dependent on the say-so of European clergy. Islam, possibly born of contact with Bengalis in Natal, became a minor but significant strand of belief among the Matetwa, particularly popular with career soldiers, which ultimately aided relations with the Persians and Omanis.
Careful decision-making had kept the Matetwa neutral during the Pandoric War while the Belgians, Cape Dutch and Natalese now kicked up the undeclared ‘Bloody Diamond Fields’ conflict into a front of a real shooting war. The Matetwa ultimately profited from their neutrality just as the French had, selling to both sides. There was some consideration of joining France’s Marseilles Protocol as an expression of armed neutrality, but Emperor Sojiyisa kaMageba eventually decided against it. This proved a wise decision, as the Pandoric War concluded with almost all of the colonial powers ending up aligned with France – the only exceptions being the Belgian West Cape and Russo-Lithuanian Povilskaja, which went on to merge after 1918. Though the Meridian pseudopuissant corporations had been an ever-present fear to the ‘Matetwa Mine System’, they had also provided a useful counterweight that was now missing, as the Cape Dutch turned to the French for protection and the Americans abandoned any interest in Natal.
Fearful of being subordinated to France just as the Mauré had, Sojiyisa looked for new options. After the French-led IEF failed in South America, he even considered approaching the Societists about an alliance. This fact is commonly brought up by anti-Matetwa campaigners today, who miss the point that he, like many Europeans and Americans, then thought of the Combine as just the Meridians with a new flag and could scarcely have known better. In the end, Sojiyisa reluctantly turned to the Russians. He was in regular diplomatic contact with Emperor Susyenos of Abyssinia (they had been in the same year at the University of Paris) and was aware that the Russians were no less unscrupulous than the other colonisers, but he considered them to have the most geographically distant ambitions from the Matetwa heartland and the lesser of two evils. There is probably also some truth to the idea that Sojiyisa, and other important Matetwa figures, privately enjoyed the fact that Belgium had fallen under Russia’s bootheel. Belgium had become notorious both for mistreating African labourers in the Western Cape colony, and for particularly unscrupulous attempts to undermine the ‘Matetwa Mine System’ with the late and unlamented King Maximilian IV’s fanatical army of spies.[13] Let the Belgians learn was it was like to be on the receiving end of colonial control.
Therefore, when the Black Twenties erupted into war, Sojiyisa decided it would be better in the long run to honour his treaty obligations rather than try to seek continued neutrality. The European colonies around southern Africa were very much not a front-line theatre of the global war and there was little enthusiasm on the part of most of the colonial troops there. The exception to this was the Cape Dutch invasion of the former Belgian West Cape, where the white locals were often all too willing to rise up against the Russians ruling them. By mid-1923 the Cape Dutch had pushed Russian control back considerably, and Petrograd was sending desperate Lectelgrams demanding the Matetwa take the pressure off. Now possessing a diplomatic paper trail lest anyone accuse him of expansionism, Sojiyisa deployed his armies against both English Natal and the Cape Dutch in the north. The principal prize the Matetwa desired was the northern Natalese port city of Port St Lucia and the surrounding area, which General Mathole successfully captured in April 1924. Throughout this period, they also spread anti-colonial propaganda, encouraging the African peoples living under English and Cape Dutch rule to rise up. This was of limited immediate effectiveness (the Sotho people talked with their neighbours across the border, and were aware the situation under Nguni-supremacist rule was only marginally better) but sowed seeds for futrue conflicts.
Building on this success, Mathole continued southwards, and some at court in the Kraal (the mobile capital of the empire) even suggested that the whole of Natal might fall to the Empire. After all, Natal was no longer part of a world-spanning empire with the resources of North America, but protected only by distant England. However, Mathole was repulsed from Port Natal in September 1924 by General Corbett and forced to retreat back to Port St Lucia. At this point, the plague began to spread from the port cities, probably brought there by Zanguebar traders, and – just as it did in Europe and elsewhere – the war ground to a halt. Things were particularly bitter in the west, where the Russians held on in the besieged Kaapstad until the plague-stricken Belgians (whose homeland had long since surrendered) finally managed to overthrow them in December 1924. The Russians pulled back to Povilskaja proper, but any future operations would have to wait, as the old Western Cape fell under the Cape Republic and all eyes turned inwards to dealing with the plague.
Here as elsewhere, the Societists were intriguing, albeit usually only half-heartedly. But even when propaganda was not intended for southern Africa, it sunk home; the fighting was as bitter and seemingly pointless in these fronts as in Europe, North America and Asia, and promises of ways to fight the invisible enemy of the plague, if one merely hoisted the black flag, were just as tempting.
Sojiyisa had been rethinking his position since Abyssinia pulled out of the Vitebsk Pact and sought a separate peace in May 1924. For a while, the Matetwa position had seemed worthy of continuing the war for its own sake, but as the plague ravaged his own people – and men at war meant that losses to cattle farmers in turn threatened famine – he felt he could not continue. Like his old friend Susyenos, he had ignored France and the Pact or Cannae as an entity, and focused only on the two nations he felt he would benefit from fighting. While the Matetwa had theoretically been at war with Scandinavia, in practice there had been only desultory fighting along the Shona border. Sojiyisa offered a peace that returned conquered Sotho territory to the Cape Republic, but annexed Port St Lucia to the Empire. This ploy was well considered by his negotiators; the Cape Dutch desperately wanted to focus on the remaining Russians and found this a great deal, while the English were outraged, but knew that if the Cape Dutch took the offer, the Matetwa would be able to concentrate all their armies on Corbett’s outnumbered forces in Port Natal. Charles Grey agonised over his decision, but in the end accepted Corbett’s blunt Lectelgram saying that if England was not willing to send men to fight to defend Natal (he had been demanding reinforcements for months), she should be lucky to settle for only losing a quarter of it.
In the end the treaty (signed in July 1925) was subtly rewritten to save English face, claiming the outcome was merely ‘Matetwa sovereignty over Natalese land’. This fooled no-one, and the growing opposition to Grey’s Anglian Party in Parliament began to coalesce for the first time into a true opposition party, building on this ‘outrage’ of handing over territory to an African power. In practice, Grey had calculated correctly; as he had already found in debates over whether to send reinforcements, few Englishmen truly cared about Natal. In the long run, however, the oppositionists under Stuart Lightfoot, now calling themselves the Democratic Party, would finally change English politics from the de facto one-party state it had been since the Third Glorious Revolution.
Back in Africa, Sojiyiso could breathe a sigh of relief that he had shepherded the Matetwa through a dangerous period in their history, and even gain territory. Exhausted from his work, he succumbed to the plague in November 1926 and was succeeded by Somopho kaSojiyiso as Emperor. It would be Somopho who would have to deal with new challenges after the eventual defeat of the plague, as Societist influence began to pose a threat to all nations and colonies of the Cape in the 1930s...
[6] There is unintentional chauvinism in this description, which reflects an attitude in TTL that places like Persia, China and Siam (or even India) were never seriously under the threat of the level of settler colonial penetration and control that took place in Africa, Australasia and the Americas (and, in TTL, Japan). A description of OTL events like the Opium Wars and Boxer Rebellion would be interpreted in TTL as one of those unsubtle AH allegories, ‘if China were Africa’, etc.
[7] See part #221 in Volume V.
[8] In OTL the Rozvi Empire, largely equating what is today Zimbabwe, managed to resist Portuguese encroachment in the 1680s and survived until droughts and invasions effectively ended its unity in the 1830s (though on paper it lasted until 1866). In TTL the different migration of peoples (in particular the lack of so much Dutch trekker encroachment) has allowed the empire to survive, though it is sufficiently subordinate to the Scandinavians that European maps just count it as part of Scandinavian colonial territory.
[9] See Part #235 in Volume VI.
[10] See Part #202 in Volume V.
[11] Yetheku just means ‘harbour’ in the Matetwa language; the actual name is longer but this is the only part usually cited in European histories.
[12] Corou is the French-influenced TTL spelling of koru, the curled silver fern symbol common in Maori art and identity in both OTL and TTL.
[13] See Part #235 in Volume VI. Note that the so-called ‘Duchess of Brabant’s Girls’ were most probably never as significant as either that piece of in-universe fictional writing, or this line from a history book, implies. There were one or two high-profile incidents exposing them, and people have tended to overrate and exaggerate their importance both at the time and in the years since.
Barkalus’ focus on the second interpretation of the Doctrine of the Last Throw, as well as simple geographic proximity and connectiveness, led to the aforementioned Societist focus on expanding from the Congo Basin outwards into weak or debatable lands; the vaguely-defined frontiers of the Directorate of Guinea or Zanguebar, the Ottoman vassals and minor Moon Lakes kingdoms not yet absorbed by Kitara, and so on. For the first thirty years of the twentieth century, Societist penetration of southern Africa would be, if not nonexistent, decidedly stealthy and low-priority.
The only exception to this was the extremely shaky entity called the Loziland Authority, which had been established following the Pandoric War as a corporate operation with joint seed money from Italian and Scandinavian colonial authorities. This entity, whose existence had always had more in common with dotted lines on maps rather than strict rerality, theoretically stretched from encompassing part of Katanga in the north to a ruler-straight border with Russo-Lithuanian Povilskaka through the Kalahari Desert. It was centred on the Lozi Kingdom, also called Barotseland, which was ruled by a monarch called the Litunga; the Litunga had signed treaties with the corporate authority, supposedly for defence against other powers. Throughout the Black Twenties, how little this had been worth became apparent as both Russians and Societists gained influence within its theoretical borders.
Aside form this typical intrusion into a debatable part of the map, the Societists remained reticent, focusing their resources elsewhere. Southern Africa was otherwise divided into six entities, five of which were colonial. These were Povilskaja, which had annexed the former Belgian Western Cape after the Russian intervention in Belgium in 1918 and now had twin capitals at Baravakhul and Kaapstad [Walvis Bay and Cape Town]; the old Cape Republic, the only exilic Dutch state (and only former Hermandad member) to escape absorption into the Combine, ruled from Oranjestad [Port Elizabeth]; Natal, England’s last colony, ruled from Port Natal [Durban]; Scandinavian Madagascar and Sofala, the latter ruled from Valdemarstad, also known as Chiveve [Beira]; and Italian Mauruca, ruled from the island outpost known as Isola di Mozambico. The sixth entity consisted of Africa’s, perhaps the world’s, most successful example of anti-colonial resistance against Europeans and Novamundines: the Matetwa Empire.[6]
The ethnic Nguni core of the modern Matetwa trace their ancestry back, through history and legend, to peoples who migrated from the Moon Lakes in the first or early second millennium after Christ. Originally a loose confederacy, the Matetwa became a more integrated empire and rose to military supremacy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This shift is often attributed to the acts of a few well-known names among kings and generals, but criticism of the ‘Central Character’ interpretation of history has led to a re-examination of this narrative. Regardless, advanced military reforms and the early adoption of firearms both served to expand Matetwa power further. Conquest of the Swazi and Gaza kingdoms (the latter not to be confused with the later acquisition of ‘Gazaland’) took place in the early 1800s. The Matetwa also built on existing friendly relationships with the Tsonga people to access trade with the Portuguese at arm’s length, profiting from the ivory trade without becoming exposed to potential Portuguese conquest.
This characteristic combination of curiosity, caution and strength in foreign policy was the key to long-term Matetwa success. They did not dismiss European advances as irrelevant, but nor did they become so eager to win European support that they left themselves vulnerable to being weakened from within after arousing the interest of colonial companies. The Matetwa gained European colonial respect for their military capabilities, but – under a fortunate succession of wise kings (or at least kings with wise advisors) they avoided warfare unless it was necessary to prove their resolve against foreign expansion. This would indeed prove necessary a number of times over the chaotic nineteenth century.
The Matetwa were undoubtedly fortunate in some respects. The Dutch, and their rebel Vordermanite Boertrekkers in the early part of the century, had once been the biggest potential threat to the native peoples of the Cape, to the point that many local nations had turned to the Matetwa as the lesser of two evils. Most significant among these would be the Sotho people of the region known to the Dutch as the Highveld, who became a protectorate of the Matetwa and later absorbed into a more inclusive empire. (Somewhat; anti-colonial narratives have largely brushed over state discrimination of non-Nguni peoples among the Matetwa, and it is only towards the end of the twentieth century that this became widely recognised). The Sotho alliance allowed the Matetwa vital expansion into the Cape interior, which left them in a powerful position when the Dutch Republic ceased to exist and the weak, exilic Cape Republic came to rely on Meridian support to survive.
The Portuguese Revolution also lent a particular advantage to the Matetwa; while most of their former empire fell into Meridian corporate hands, the Mozambique colonies disintegrated and were effectively taken over by those best-positioned to do so. The Matetwa Emperor Phunga kaMbuyazi took over Gazaland in the south in 1858-60, while freebooters from Madagascar claimed Sofala for the Scandinavian Asiatic Company, and in 1874 a piratical joke of a continuity Portuguese state in Isola di Mozambico was purchased as a colony by Italy.[7] It is a measure of the shifting balance of power in southern Africa that the declining Rozvi Empire (dominated by ethnic Shona people) turned to Scandinavia for protection from the Matetwa, rather than the other way around.[8]
This Matetwa expansion, and willingness to fight against outside encroachment, stood the empire in good stead when both gold and diamond rushes exploded in the late nineteenth century. Enterprising attempts by freebooters in the Sotho lands (where many of the wealthiest deposits were) were pushed back by the Matetwa military. Aware that being entirely intransigent towards European demands would lead to a united front against him, the Matetwa Emperor Mageba kaPhunga instead tried to split his opponents by offering deals for mining concessions; Europeans would be given a percentage of profits in return for aid with mining equipment, but the operation would be under state control. Attempts by individual enterprising miners to illegally break this monopoly were brutally suppressed; the Matetwa had learned well from New Spain’s experience in being overwhelmed with American (and other) immigrants during the California goldrush. The system worked in particular because it offered opportunities for mining companies from powerful but distant states that otherwise lacked the direct ability to colonise the region, notably France – whose miners were looking for new worlds to conquer as the Pérousien goldrushes wound down. Once again, good fortune played a role in the Matetwa’s success; while Mageba’s policy had been wise, it would still probably have failed if not for two facts: he was steadfast in saying no to the exploitative Meridian corporations that were growing out of the UPSA’s state control, and those corporations were content not to press the issue, as their puppet Cape Dutch Republic also had plenty of diamond deposits of its own. Indeed, much of the intrigue in the Cape was between the English, Belgians and Cape Dutch over the latter’s diamonds, rather than aimed at the Matetwa.[9]
A common narrative suggests that the Matetwa’s successful policies against European colonisation can be traced back to a famous incident in 1872. Ever since La Pérouse first travelled there, many among the Mauré of Autiaraux had suggested that they would never truly be able to deal with the French as equals until they could build a great canoe capable of sailing all the way to France, just as La Pérouse had sailed to their homeland. Ultimately, if the French could always deal with them at arm’s length, the Mauré could never hope to hold the upper hand in a negotiation; their threats could never be anything more than a distant problem to Paris. Men as famous to history as Rangatira Tamahimana had imagined they might be the first explorer to sail all that way on a Mauré-built ship.[10] In the end, this dream would not be realised until the 1870s, when a man named Nangana of Egnaté Apa achieved the feat. His wooden lineship, the Matahourua (named after the first canoe to have discovered Autiaraux in Mauré legend) was fully Mauré-built, though its design was heavily French-influenced, and was at least as capable as La Pérouse’s old flagship d’Estaing. Nangana, who had never visited Europe himself but brought along officers who had travelled there on French ships, set out on his long voyage westward across the Indian Ocean. Fatefully, he chose to stop for supplies in the port city of Yetheku, the largest seaport in the Matetwa Empire, founded by the Portuguese as Lourenço Marques.[11]
The Mauré were regarded with great curiosity by the Matetwa (and, indeed, the Europeans and other foreign visitors in the port) and Emperor Mageba granted Nangana an audience to discuss his mission. Mauré-sympathetic historians contend that it was this insight, stemming from long Mauré interaction with the French and others as a distant nation on the other side of the world, that led Mageba to concoct his most effective foreign policy. This narrative has received more criticism in recent years, some critics noting that many of Mageba’s core ideas were present in policy enacted before 1872. One point of contention is, of course, that ultimately the Mauré were less successful than the Matetwa in resisting colonialism; the Matetwa never had to fight a war for independence, after all.
Ultimately, Nangana would be disappointed when he made it to Europe; though the Mauré had achieved a remarkable feat and one which made he and his crew a nine days’ wonder in capitals across Europe, it was seen as a curiosity rather than the chilling expression of equality they had hoped for. No Europeans worried about people from the other side of the world turning up in a wooden lineship, as they might have done a century before; the world had moved on, and ‘serious’ powers were building fleets of armourclads, soon even lionhearts. Non-European states that wanted to keep up, such as Persia and Siam, were frantically buying them under licence and seeking to expand their native industrial capacity to reduce long-term dependence. That was something which small and resource-poor Autiaraux, no matter its growing Polynesian empire, could not hope to do. Nangana might have flown his corou flag proudly, but inwardly he feared that the Mauré would inevitably fall behind and fall under French influence after all – as, indeed, happened after Weihihimana’s bold but doomed attack on Russian Gavaji during the Pandoric War.[12]
But what was true of Autiaraux was not true of the Matetwa lands. The Matetwa kings had built a sizeable empire, interconnected with modernised roads (later railways) and funded by their profitable diamond and gold concessions, which no European power or corporate monolith could hope to overturn without angering all the others who benefited under the current system. One effect which the encounter Nangana likely did have was in persuading Mageba and his successors that it was important to develop naval forces and build up their ports; nations like the Kingdom of Kandy in Ceylon illustrated that once cut off from the coastline, it was only a matter of time before European control of trade led to even the most defiant native power succumbing. Unlike the Mauré, the Matetwa were able to build up iron and coal mines (using the knowledge acquired from the gold and diamond mining cessions), modernise their military, and even build armourclad warships, albeit focusing more on basic coastal defence and riverine patrol vessels.
The historian Albert Latham compares the Matetwa Empire’s stability to the inflated balloon of a steerable (which the Matetwa also experimented with, albeit without much success), where pressure within pushing outward is balanced with pressure from without pushing inward. Latham argues that the Matetwa survived, despite ruthless, cutthroat court politics and many discontented non-Nguni ethnic groups being discriminated against, out of shared fear that a moment of weakness would lead to the European colonists and Novamundine corporations crashing down on all sides and crushing their independence. They had plenty of examples of this happening across the continent, after all. Similarly, the outsiders were often reluctant to try such moves precisely because of the perceived strength and stability of the empire, which, according to Latham, would likely have evaporated if the Europeans had all packed up and gone home, removing the external threat.
One Matetwa policy commonly misattributed to Nangana’s inspiration was the sending of the sons of princes and generals to attend school or university in Europe (or less commonly the Novamund, where racial prejudice was typically more ingrained and less susceptible to the application of money). This had already begun before 1872, and in fact the Matetwa were far from the only African nation to try it. Abyssinians and some of the Guinean nations, such as the Ashanteans and Dahomeans, had also sent noble sons to obtain European education. The University of Paris was particularly prized, but the French state typically doled out places based on where it was trying to obtain influence in Africa, which naturally led to some tensions. The same was sometimes true of Italy and Scandinavia. The universities of Germany and Britain (later England) were considered more neutral targets, while Belgium and Spain were regarded with suspicion and generally avoided.
The misconception that this was a unique Matetwa policy is probably born of the fact that the Matetwa certainly sent more such students than any other African nation, a function of the great wealth which they were able to apply to the purpose, as well as more of a unified state sponsorship programme. While there were some concerns that such teaching might lead to the nation’s future leaders losing their identity and sympathising more with Europeans, ultimately it was felt that an insight into current thinking (and technology) in Europe was vital for future foreign policy decisions. The Matetwa were also helped by the fact that they had generally embraced Christianity following missionary activity, though most Matetwa (including the ruling classes) practised a slightly syncretic form carefully not dependent on the say-so of European clergy. Islam, possibly born of contact with Bengalis in Natal, became a minor but significant strand of belief among the Matetwa, particularly popular with career soldiers, which ultimately aided relations with the Persians and Omanis.
Careful decision-making had kept the Matetwa neutral during the Pandoric War while the Belgians, Cape Dutch and Natalese now kicked up the undeclared ‘Bloody Diamond Fields’ conflict into a front of a real shooting war. The Matetwa ultimately profited from their neutrality just as the French had, selling to both sides. There was some consideration of joining France’s Marseilles Protocol as an expression of armed neutrality, but Emperor Sojiyisa kaMageba eventually decided against it. This proved a wise decision, as the Pandoric War concluded with almost all of the colonial powers ending up aligned with France – the only exceptions being the Belgian West Cape and Russo-Lithuanian Povilskaja, which went on to merge after 1918. Though the Meridian pseudopuissant corporations had been an ever-present fear to the ‘Matetwa Mine System’, they had also provided a useful counterweight that was now missing, as the Cape Dutch turned to the French for protection and the Americans abandoned any interest in Natal.
Fearful of being subordinated to France just as the Mauré had, Sojiyisa looked for new options. After the French-led IEF failed in South America, he even considered approaching the Societists about an alliance. This fact is commonly brought up by anti-Matetwa campaigners today, who miss the point that he, like many Europeans and Americans, then thought of the Combine as just the Meridians with a new flag and could scarcely have known better. In the end, Sojiyisa reluctantly turned to the Russians. He was in regular diplomatic contact with Emperor Susyenos of Abyssinia (they had been in the same year at the University of Paris) and was aware that the Russians were no less unscrupulous than the other colonisers, but he considered them to have the most geographically distant ambitions from the Matetwa heartland and the lesser of two evils. There is probably also some truth to the idea that Sojiyisa, and other important Matetwa figures, privately enjoyed the fact that Belgium had fallen under Russia’s bootheel. Belgium had become notorious both for mistreating African labourers in the Western Cape colony, and for particularly unscrupulous attempts to undermine the ‘Matetwa Mine System’ with the late and unlamented King Maximilian IV’s fanatical army of spies.[13] Let the Belgians learn was it was like to be on the receiving end of colonial control.
Therefore, when the Black Twenties erupted into war, Sojiyisa decided it would be better in the long run to honour his treaty obligations rather than try to seek continued neutrality. The European colonies around southern Africa were very much not a front-line theatre of the global war and there was little enthusiasm on the part of most of the colonial troops there. The exception to this was the Cape Dutch invasion of the former Belgian West Cape, where the white locals were often all too willing to rise up against the Russians ruling them. By mid-1923 the Cape Dutch had pushed Russian control back considerably, and Petrograd was sending desperate Lectelgrams demanding the Matetwa take the pressure off. Now possessing a diplomatic paper trail lest anyone accuse him of expansionism, Sojiyisa deployed his armies against both English Natal and the Cape Dutch in the north. The principal prize the Matetwa desired was the northern Natalese port city of Port St Lucia and the surrounding area, which General Mathole successfully captured in April 1924. Throughout this period, they also spread anti-colonial propaganda, encouraging the African peoples living under English and Cape Dutch rule to rise up. This was of limited immediate effectiveness (the Sotho people talked with their neighbours across the border, and were aware the situation under Nguni-supremacist rule was only marginally better) but sowed seeds for futrue conflicts.
Building on this success, Mathole continued southwards, and some at court in the Kraal (the mobile capital of the empire) even suggested that the whole of Natal might fall to the Empire. After all, Natal was no longer part of a world-spanning empire with the resources of North America, but protected only by distant England. However, Mathole was repulsed from Port Natal in September 1924 by General Corbett and forced to retreat back to Port St Lucia. At this point, the plague began to spread from the port cities, probably brought there by Zanguebar traders, and – just as it did in Europe and elsewhere – the war ground to a halt. Things were particularly bitter in the west, where the Russians held on in the besieged Kaapstad until the plague-stricken Belgians (whose homeland had long since surrendered) finally managed to overthrow them in December 1924. The Russians pulled back to Povilskaja proper, but any future operations would have to wait, as the old Western Cape fell under the Cape Republic and all eyes turned inwards to dealing with the plague.
Here as elsewhere, the Societists were intriguing, albeit usually only half-heartedly. But even when propaganda was not intended for southern Africa, it sunk home; the fighting was as bitter and seemingly pointless in these fronts as in Europe, North America and Asia, and promises of ways to fight the invisible enemy of the plague, if one merely hoisted the black flag, were just as tempting.
Sojiyisa had been rethinking his position since Abyssinia pulled out of the Vitebsk Pact and sought a separate peace in May 1924. For a while, the Matetwa position had seemed worthy of continuing the war for its own sake, but as the plague ravaged his own people – and men at war meant that losses to cattle farmers in turn threatened famine – he felt he could not continue. Like his old friend Susyenos, he had ignored France and the Pact or Cannae as an entity, and focused only on the two nations he felt he would benefit from fighting. While the Matetwa had theoretically been at war with Scandinavia, in practice there had been only desultory fighting along the Shona border. Sojiyisa offered a peace that returned conquered Sotho territory to the Cape Republic, but annexed Port St Lucia to the Empire. This ploy was well considered by his negotiators; the Cape Dutch desperately wanted to focus on the remaining Russians and found this a great deal, while the English were outraged, but knew that if the Cape Dutch took the offer, the Matetwa would be able to concentrate all their armies on Corbett’s outnumbered forces in Port Natal. Charles Grey agonised over his decision, but in the end accepted Corbett’s blunt Lectelgram saying that if England was not willing to send men to fight to defend Natal (he had been demanding reinforcements for months), she should be lucky to settle for only losing a quarter of it.
In the end the treaty (signed in July 1925) was subtly rewritten to save English face, claiming the outcome was merely ‘Matetwa sovereignty over Natalese land’. This fooled no-one, and the growing opposition to Grey’s Anglian Party in Parliament began to coalesce for the first time into a true opposition party, building on this ‘outrage’ of handing over territory to an African power. In practice, Grey had calculated correctly; as he had already found in debates over whether to send reinforcements, few Englishmen truly cared about Natal. In the long run, however, the oppositionists under Stuart Lightfoot, now calling themselves the Democratic Party, would finally change English politics from the de facto one-party state it had been since the Third Glorious Revolution.
Back in Africa, Sojiyiso could breathe a sigh of relief that he had shepherded the Matetwa through a dangerous period in their history, and even gain territory. Exhausted from his work, he succumbed to the plague in November 1926 and was succeeded by Somopho kaSojiyiso as Emperor. It would be Somopho who would have to deal with new challenges after the eventual defeat of the plague, as Societist influence began to pose a threat to all nations and colonies of the Cape in the 1930s...
[6] There is unintentional chauvinism in this description, which reflects an attitude in TTL that places like Persia, China and Siam (or even India) were never seriously under the threat of the level of settler colonial penetration and control that took place in Africa, Australasia and the Americas (and, in TTL, Japan). A description of OTL events like the Opium Wars and Boxer Rebellion would be interpreted in TTL as one of those unsubtle AH allegories, ‘if China were Africa’, etc.
[7] See part #221 in Volume V.
[8] In OTL the Rozvi Empire, largely equating what is today Zimbabwe, managed to resist Portuguese encroachment in the 1680s and survived until droughts and invasions effectively ended its unity in the 1830s (though on paper it lasted until 1866). In TTL the different migration of peoples (in particular the lack of so much Dutch trekker encroachment) has allowed the empire to survive, though it is sufficiently subordinate to the Scandinavians that European maps just count it as part of Scandinavian colonial territory.
[9] See Part #235 in Volume VI.
[10] See Part #202 in Volume V.
[11] Yetheku just means ‘harbour’ in the Matetwa language; the actual name is longer but this is the only part usually cited in European histories.
[12] Corou is the French-influenced TTL spelling of koru, the curled silver fern symbol common in Maori art and identity in both OTL and TTL.
[13] See Part #235 in Volume VI. Note that the so-called ‘Duchess of Brabant’s Girls’ were most probably never as significant as either that piece of in-universe fictional writing, or this line from a history book, implies. There were one or two high-profile incidents exposing them, and people have tended to overrate and exaggerate their importance both at the time and in the years since.
Thande
Donor
Thanks for the comments everyone as always.
Long-term, perhaps, but in the short term that's still a rather shaky and debatable entity- which I should probably write more of.
Thank you, and if you insist, it's Dr ThandeI've finally caught up to the story! You weave a complex and fascinating timeline, Thande (Mr. Thande? Thande ji?). All I can say is wah, wah!
(PS: Excuse my punctuation; exclamation marks confuse me
Why is the entirety of the Carnatic Coast and parts of Central India named after Guntur? While it was an important city it surely wasn't more prominent than Hyderabad, Vizagapatnam etc.?
The area's de-facto capital is Guntoor. In practice Guntoor is a coastal bazaar for everyone from Denmark to Korea to purchase lands and enterprises throughout the Zone to be ruled by corporations. Security and ease of access are really the primary concerns.
The Philippines has been resisting so far too.
Oh no, don't you dare have Societists swoop in and take over the islands in the confusion.
Why is Spain being viewed with suspicion?