The Colonial Era
By comparison with its previous history in tropical Africa, discussed elsewhere in this volume (see pp. 470-85), Islam has made rapid progress there during the twentieth century.
In Eastern Africa, from modern-day northern Kenya to northern Mozambique, it was largely confined to the coastal areas and to Arab and Persian traders and settlers until the closing decades of the nineteenth century. But from then on Islam was to penetrate inland and secure an increasingly larger following among the indigenous peoples, especially in what is today Tanzania. In western Africa also, where for many centuries it had been for the most part the religion of court and commerce and of the inhabitants of the towns, leaving many of the rural areas virtually untouched, Islam was to make great strides during the colonial era (c. 1885-c. 1960). Areas classified as non-Muslim or ‘pagan’ at the onset of colonialism, such as the southern region of the Ivory Coast, had a strong and growing Muslim presence by the end of the Second World War. And in Nigeria, towns like Lagos and Ibadan, each of which has several million inhabitants, are now predominantly Muslim, whereas a little over one hundred years ago the Muslim population of both towns when taken together was no more than a few thousand.Although the pace of its development has varied and the depth and the extent of its expansion has been uneven, there is no country in either eastern or western Africa where Islam has not made significant headway during the last one hundred years. This is also the case in the Nilotic Sudan where, while the north has been largely Muslim for some considerable time, vigorous attempts have been made much more recently, especially by Nimeiri’s government before it collapsed in 1985, to promote Islam in the south of the country. There is also evidence of expansion in parts of Central Africa, for example in Malawi and Zimbabwe, and in South Africa.
There are an estimated 360,000 Muslims in South Africa today, the first group having been brought to the Cape from Batavia (Jakarta) in the former Dutch East Indies in the second half of the seventeenth century, some as slaves and others as political exiles who had fought against Dutch imperialism. Then in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there was an influx of Indian Muslims, a majority of them traders, who settled in Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town. In the past decade or so, an increasing number of Africans has been turning to Islam, though they still constitute only a very small proportion of the total Muslim population.There is no one, single explanation for this expansion of Islam during the colonial era. In a number of instances where expansion occurred this was facilitated, at certain stages at least, by colonialism. While colonial policy towards Islam was hardly ever consistent there were cases where it directly assisted Muslims, former Italian Somaliland and Eritrea being examples. This did not mean, however, that Italy especially favoured Islam and as a matter of principle as well as policy sought to advance its cause. It was much more a matter of expediency, involving the use of Islam to achieve political objectives in ‘Christian’ Ethiopia. By way of contrast Italy showed much less inclination to bolster or support Muslims in Cyrenaica and her other North African possessions where Islam was seen as more of a threat to her colonial ambitions.
The policies of the Belgian, British, French, German and Portuguese colonial regimes towards Islam were also shot through in varying degrees with pragmatism. Belgium, however, was perhaps more consistent than the rest for after a rather short-lived, initial alliance with the Arabs in the Congo (Zaire) she went on to display unmitigated hostility towards Muslims. Britain and France, on the other hand, were much more given to twists and turns in their relations with Islam. The former, while supporting the claims of the Muslim establishment in Zanzibar to the East African coast, somewhat paradoxically opposed Islam in Kenya, Uganda and Central Africa.
Short of trained personnel and money in their East African Protectorate as elsewhere, the British, following their positivist as well as pragmatic inclinations, at first considered the possibility of producing a class of administrators from among the Arabs and ‘higher Swahilis’ who alone, it was believed, possessed any notion or sense of justice, politics or government. However, when Nairobi replaced Mombasa as the seat of the colonial administration in East Africa and with the arrival of Sir Harry Johnson as governor of Uganda in 1899, Islam came to be seen as a potential danger to British interests. It then became government policy to encourage the spread of Christianity, using Uganda as a line of defence against the further penetration of Islam. In former German East Africa government reaction to what were considered to be the potential dangers of Islam came later and only after representations and strong protest from Christian missionaries.
In West Africa Britain’s policy varied from one territory to another and even within the same territory. In northern Nigeria, for example, while the British policy of indirect rule, which consisted of administering the Muslim areas through the Muslim chiefs or emirs and the existing Muslim institutions, may in some respects have weakened the authority of these local rulers, it nevertheless did much to protect the Muslim way of life and culture. Christian missionary activity, for instance, was, with one or two exceptions, confined to areas outside the walls of Muslim towns and in general to the so-called ‘pagan’ areas such as the Jos Plateau in present-day Plateau State. Elsewhere in Nigeria, for example in the west among the Yoruba, Muslims received no such ‘protection’.
French official policy towards Islam in the final analysis was equally pragmatic, ranging from outright hostility to accommodation, to support, influenced from the outset by the resistance to French imperialism encountered in, among other places, Algeria and of course in West Africa itself.
Numbered among those Muslims who have gained esteem and fame for their resistance to French imperialism are the Senegalese al-Hajj Umar al-Futi (c. 1794—1864) and Samori Ture (1830-1901) from Guinea (Conakry). These were two West African counterparts of the Sudan’s Muhammad Ahmad, the Mahdi (d. 1885), and Somalia’s Muhammad b. Abd Allah (1864—1920/1). Resistance took many forms and it was not only those who resorted to armed struggle that were regarded as hostile by the French. Muslims expressed their opposition in a number of different ways, some of them religious, and most often simply by tacit forms of non-co-operation. There were, of course, those who collaborated and accepted in return certain privileges and benefits.Moreover, like their British counterparts in northern Nigeria and the Germans in East Africa, French colonial administrators not only believed that Islam as a culture and civilisation was superior in every respect to traditional religion but also, since some Muslims were literate, sought to make use of them at the outset as interpreters, clerks, educators, judges and chiefs, even in non-Muslim areas, and this had the effect of extending Islam’s influence in parts of Senegal just as in British-occupied northern Nigeria and former German East Africa. However, over against this, the administration was also to restrict the activities of the marabouts, Muslim clerics, and not only those who may have been charlatans, but even respected members of the Muslim intelligentsia. This happened in Guinea (Conakry) where, because of a supposed threat from Muslim fanaticism, the administration staged a thoroughgoing assault on Islam between 1911 and 1912 in which some leading marabouts were executed while others were imprisoned or exiled. Muslim schools were also closed down. What the French wanted, and this applies to the other colonial powers, was a malleable, pliable Islam that would serve their purposes.
The reason, then, for the progress made by Islam in sub-Saharan Africa during the colonial era is not to be attributed solely or directly to what some Christian missionaries saw as the pro-Islamic policies of colonial regimes. Indirectly, as we have seen, this expansion initially, and in some instances throughout the period of colonialism, did have something to do with the colonial occupation by, among other things, bringing Muslims in former British and German East Africa and in parts of former British and French West Africa into the interior in greater numbers than ever before and placing them in positions of authority and influence. Moreover the development of the road and rail networks, and of the modem sector of the economy, facilitated the expansion of Islam as they did that of Christianity in this period (see pp. 243-56).