British African Colonies
The British presence in Africa began in the late sixteenth century, with the establishment of trading posts along the West African coast. Over the next three centuries, this modest commercial presence was transformed into the largest African empire in history. At the height of British power in the early twentieth century, the British controlled or influenced a continuous chain of territory from Cairo to the Cape, encompassing perhaps 30 percent of the African continent.
This article examines the British African colonies, from the early trading posts of the West African coast to the post-independence transitions of the 1960s. The articles linked throughout explore specific events, regions, and themes in greater depth.
West Africa: The Early Trading Posts
The first English trading posts in West Africa were established in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The Royal African Company, chartered in 1660 and reorganized in 1672, established a network of forts and castles along the coast of what are now Ghana, Gambia, and Sierra Leone. The most famous of these were Cape Coast Castle and Elmina Castle, which had been seized from the Dutch in 1664 and which served as both trading posts and prisons for enslaved Africans awaiting transport across the Atlantic.
The English West African presence was built primarily on the slave trade. The Royal African Company and its successors supplied the plantations of the Caribbean and the American South with enslaved Africans, and the ports of Bristol and Liverpool grew wealthy on the profits of the trade. The abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and the establishment of the West Africa Squadron to enforce the ban transformed the West African presence, as the British government attempted to redirect the regional economy toward “legitimate commerce” in palm oil, gold, and other commodities.
The British settlements at Freetown (Sierra Leone), founded in 1787 as a home for freed slaves, and at Bathurst (Bathurst, The Gambia), founded in 1816, marked a new approach to the West African presence. The Sierra Leone Colony and the Gambia Colony were governed as crown colonies, with British administrators, and they served as the bases for British influence in the region. The Sierra Leone Colony’s particular importance was the presence of the “Liberated Africans” — tens of thousands of people freed from slave ships by the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron and resettled in Freetown — who formed a creole community that would, over the following generations, produce many of the first African professionals and intellectuals in the British colonial world.
The Cape Colony and Southern Africa
The British presence in southern Africa began with the seizure of the Cape Colony from the Netherlands in 1806, during the Napoleonic Wars. The Cape Colony had been established by the Dutch East India Company in 1652 as a refreshment station on the route to the East Indies, and it had grown into a substantial colony of Dutch-settler (Afrikaner) farmers, known as Boers, and the indigenous Khoikhoi and San peoples.
The British takeover of the Cape produced several decades of tension between the British administration and the Boer settlers. The British abolition of slavery throughout the empire in 1834 was particularly controversial, and the Great Trek of 1836–1840 saw thousands of Boer families leave the Cape Colony to establish their own independent republics in the interior. The discovery of diamonds in 1867 and gold in 1886 transformed the region’s economy and led to a renewed British interest in extending control over the Boer republics.
The history of South Africa under British rule is a particularly complex story. The Boer Wars (1880–1881 and 1899–1902) were the defining conflicts of British involvement in the region. The second Boer War, in particular, was a major military undertaking that required the deployment of hundreds of thousands of British troops and the use of concentration camps and scorched-earth policies that provoked lasting controversy. The 1910 Union of South Africa brought the Cape Colony, Natal, the Transvaal, and the Orange River Colony into a single dominion.
East Africa: Kenya, Uganda, Zanzibar, and Tanganyika
The British presence in East Africa was established in the late nineteenth century. The Imperial British East Africa Company, founded in 1888, administered the territory that would become Kenya and Uganda on behalf of the British government. The Uganda Protectorate was established in 1894, and the East Africa Protectorate (later Kenya) was declared a British protectorate in 1895. The Sultanate of Zanzibar became a British protectorate in 1890, and Tanganyika (mainland Tanzania) was transferred from Germany to Britain as a League of Nations mandate after the First World War.
The British administration in East Africa varied from territory to territory. In Uganda, the British relied on a system of indirect rule through the existing kingdoms of Buganda, Bunyoro, Toro, and Ankole. In Kenya, the British established a settler colony in the highlands, with substantial European immigration and the displacement of the Maasai and Kikuyu populations. Tanganyika was administered under a mandate system that emphasized the development of African agriculture and the gradual preparation for self-government.
The history of Kenya under British rule examines the settler colony, the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s, and the paradox of a counter-insurgency followed almost immediately by independence under the very leader the British had imprisoned.
West Africa: Nigeria, the Gold Coast, and Sierra Leone
The British colonization of West Africa in the late nineteenth century produced a patchwork of territories. The most important of these was Nigeria, which was created in 1914 by the amalgamation of the Northern and Southern Nigeria Protectorates. The history of Nigeria under British rule is examined in detail in a separate article.
The Gold Coast (modern Ghana) was the first British West African colony to achieve significant self-government. The 1925 election, in which the Convention People’s Party won a majority of African seats, marked a turning point, and the party, under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah, won the 1951 general election. The Gold Coast became the independent state of Ghana in March 1957, the first sub-Saharan African colony to achieve independence — a moment that set the pace for the entire continent and signalled to colonial governments across Africa that the decade of decolonization had begun.
Sierra Leone, The Gambia, and other smaller West African territories followed their own paths to independence in the 1960s, each shaped by a different configuration of political parties, ethnic constituencies, and relationships with British commercial interests.
Egypt and the Sudan
The British occupation of Egypt in 1882 was a pivotal event in the history of British Africa. Egypt had been a nominal part of the Ottoman Empire, and the British intervention was originally intended to be temporary. The British were concerned about the Suez Canal, the lifeline of the empire, and about the financial situation of the Egyptian government, which had been driven to the verge of bankruptcy by the construction of the canal and the extravagance of the Khedive Ismail.
The British occupation of Egypt led directly to the conquest of the Sudan, which had been in revolt against Egyptian rule since 1881 under the leadership of the Mahdi. The Anglo-Egyptian conquest of the Sudan in 1898, culminating at the Battle of Omdurman, brought the territory under joint Anglo-Egyptian control in an arrangement that satisfied neither Egyptian nationalism nor Sudanese aspirations and produced the crisis that eventually led to Sudanese independence in 1956. Egypt and British influence examines the full arc of British involvement from 1882 to the Suez Crisis.
The history of the Sudan under British rule is examined in a separate article. The Suez Crisis of 1956, in which Britain and France attempted to seize the canal from the nationalized Egyptian government, marked a decisive turning point in the history of British influence in Egypt and the Middle East.
The Decolonization of Africa
The decolonization of British Africa was rapid and dramatic. The independence of Ghana in 1957 was followed by the independence of Nigeria in 1960, Sierra Leone and Tanganyika in 1961, Uganda in 1962, Kenya in 1963, Malawi and Zambia in 1964, The Gambia in 1965, Botswana and Lesotho in 1966, Mauritius and Swaziland in 1968, and Equatorial Guinea (technically Spanish, not British) shortly thereafter. The African decolonization timeline traces the full sequence from Ghana in 1957 to Zimbabwe in 1980.
The transition to independence was not always peaceful. The Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, the Aden Emergency, and various smaller conflicts preceded or accompanied independence. Yet in most cases, the transfer was negotiated — often at Lancaster House in London — and the new states joined the Commonwealth of Nations. What varied was not the form of the transfer but the conditions on which it was made: the degree to which the British were able to protect the interests of European settlers, British companies, and strategic military installations in the post-independence arrangements.