The United States in Africa: A Transimperial History

By the turn of the twentieth century, the British and U.S. Empires were intricately entangled throughout the world. Nowhere was this more evident than in Britain’s African colonies where Americans co-opted and collaborated with British imperial rule and its agents. Oxford’s archival and historical book collection reveal this history of transimperial careering in vivid detail.

‘Here can be found all the natural conditions that made the U.S. what it is today,’ enthused Frederick Russell Burnham from Bulawayo.[i] Burnham, the son of an American missionary working among the Dakota Sioux, had spent his career in the violent borderlands of the Arizona-Sonora copperbelt where he fought Apache raiders and prospected for minerals. In South Africa, he enlisted in the British South Africa Company’s Pioneer column and in 1893 crossed the Crocodile River to colonize Matabeleland. His imagination fired by the prospect of commercial opportunities and his heartrate quickened by the region’s fabled mineral wealth, Burnham wrote home that he would ‘like to see the Stars and Stripes float over this fair land.’[ii]

What brought an Arizonan cowpoke to Matabeleland? And what does Burnham’s journey reveal about the world of empires in the nineteenth century? Students, past and present, are presented with empires as stand-alone units, bordered by thickly drawn black lines and coloured in bright shades to indicate areas of national territorial sovereignty. Historians and historical geographers have long seen these maps for what they are: imagined projections of power that could not contain the flows of goods, people, and ideas across and between empires. It was entirely commonplace for empires to outsource some industrial tasks, send observers to learn from other empires, and exchange personnel and employ foreign nationals for many industrial, sanitary, and scientific projects. Such transimperial crossings and exchanges were especially vivid in the case of the American and British empires. For some Britons, this was a deeply parasitic phenomenon, for others, an effective means of sub-contracting expertise and technologies for the development of the empire’s mineral wealth.

Figures 1 & 2. ‘Wireless Telegraphy,’ Puck, 29 November 1899; ‘Misery Loves Company,’ Puck, 20 March 1901. Late-nineteenth-century Americans were themselves increasingly alert to the increasing points of Anglo-American imperial convergence. As the United States began to assert itself more forcefully on the international stage in the 1890s, American statesmen, commentators, and cartoonists sought to understand world power through the lens of its closest rival and chief model: the British Empire. In print media, Anglo-American transimperial connections took on overtly militaristic tones, as the two national symbols appeared in their respective army’s uniforms, rather than the traditional uniforms of Union Jack waistcoat, and suit made from the Stars and Stripes. A month after the second Anglo-Boer war broke out on the Rand in October 1899, Louis Dalrymple depicted Uncle Sam on the cover of Puck sending ‘good will’ to John Bull as British troops were being rushed to relieve Boer sieges of Ladysmith, Mafeking, and Kimberley; John Bull reciprocated while US troops took to consolidating rule over newly acquired territories in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam. Just over a year later Dalrymple returned to the same image, this time depicting to the two erstwhile imperialists mired in debt and colonial conflict in ‘Misery Loves Company.’ Source: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2012647386/ & https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2010651389/

Transimperial Careering

Transimperial careering brought Americans and Britons closer together throughout the colonial world.[iii] ‘Out in the broad world at large,’ wrote one American commentator, imperial Britons and Americans ‘understand each other, join hands, and work shoulder to shoulder … in a silent alliance.’[iv] These connection were especially striking in parts of Africa. Exploiting the porousness of British imperial formations in Africa, thousands of American entrepreneurs and researchers flooded the Continent to collaborate on transimperial projects.

American big game hunters and explorers such as Arthur Donaldson Smith and May French Sheldon explored its interior spaces; naturalists including the ornithologist Edgar Means of the Smithsonian Institute and Carl Akeley of the New York Museum of Natural History collected and classified its mammals, birds, and fauna for display to the American public; the U.S. Navy scoured its ports for trading opportunities and supported the research of Smithsonian scientists; and missionaries from a variety of American denominations proselytized among African peoples. After his Presidency, Theodore Roosevelt undertook a year-long hunting and collection expedition in East Africa with Smithsonian scientists, recorded on film by the British photographer Cherry Keaton and released as the silent documentary Roosevelt in Africa in 1910.

Figure 3. ‘Teddy in the African Jungle,’ photochemical print, 1909. In East Africa, Roosevelt encountered a large American footprint. On his journey from Mombassa to the interior, Roosevelt took the recently completed Ugandan Railroad, travelling over the 27 railway viaducts constructed by the American Bridge Company over the Mau Escarpment. Later he encountered the American Missions stations at Machakos, Kijabe and on the Sobat River, and an American ostrich farmer living near Lake Hannington (named for the Bishop James Hannington who visited the lake in 1885, but now Lake Bogoria). Source: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2010645484/.

Individual CVs reveal that some moved between imperial careers with ease. William Harvey Brown, a naturalist from Kansas, for example, first arrived in Africa on board the USS Pensacola. Brown was part of a team sent to observe a solar eclipse in the Congo but dispatched to collect specimens of Africa biota for three Smithsonian’s collections. En route up the west and east coasts of the Continent, “Curio Brown” collected 33 mammals from 16 species, more than 100 molluscs, and 250 species of insect for the museum’s collections. After settling in Southern Africa in 1890, Brown joined the British South Africa Company’s invasion of Mashonaland. In 1893-4, Brown then fought, alongside Burnham, in the First Matabele War. For his service, Brown as awarded 13,000 acres of arable land outside Salisbury. Three years later was wounded by Shona soldiers in the Second Matabele War before returning to the United States to write On The South African Frontier, before once again returning to Salisbury.

Such transimperial careering was a systemic feature of empires in the late nineteenth century. The culture of memoirs, reminiscences, periodical articles, and stereograph images generated by transimperial careering, examples of which are listed below, were the primary way in which Americans consumed information about Africa in the late nineteenth century and exerted an out-sized influence on U.S. perceptions; reifying the continent as both a pristine wilderness and a place of resource fecundity, and a place both fossilized in time and the scene of modern civilisation’s apogee.[v]

The Migration of Expertise

Anglo-American collaborations were perhaps densest in the Cape where diamonds and gold lured close to 10,000 Americans to Southern Africa.[vi] Just as American travellers, researchers, and adventurers were the conduits of knowledge about Africa for domestic audiences, American engineers were prized  by British imperial corporations for the knowledge they could bring to the development of the diamond and gold mines of Southern Africa.

Figure 4. Americans in Southern Africa, c. 1890s. ‘Johannesburg … is like an American city’, marvelled one mining expert in 1887 – just a year after the gold rush began.[vii] American migrants felt they belonged to an ‘American colony’ in Southern Africa.[viii] These migrants established an American Society of South Africa to acclimatise new arrivals to life in the camp-come-city of Johannesburg, and American travellers and prospectors might seek the comforts of home in the American Hotel or the California House, and might also join the local American baseball club.[ix] Though an overwhelmingly male city, the wives of Americans in Johannesburg founded the Martha Washington Club in the early twentieth century.[x] This world of American institutions maintained connections with US national culture, celebrations, and provided a familiar waypoint in an alien land. Or as William Hammond Hall, a San Franciscan civil engineer, put it to overcome the ‘the deuced far-off-ed-ness and danged long-time-ed-ness-of the-I-no-see-you-ed-ness of the situation.’[xi] Source: Created by the author.

Cecil Rhodes was a central node in this transimperial network, appointing Americans in every aspect of his interest: Kimberley diamonds, Rand gold, and Rhodesian land.[xii] Rhodes businesses (De Beers Consolidated Mines Co. and Consolidated Gold Fields of South Africa) were staffed by American experts as the Weston’s collections reveal. While Rhodes was, according to one biographer, ‘careless with the details of management, and left to others … the business of production and finance,’[xiii] ever the shrewd capitalist he made two critical appointments to DeBeers and Gold Fields that shaped the direction of imperial affairs in South Africa. To DeBeers Rhodes appointed Gardner F. Williams, who had experience of quartz and hydraulic mining for silver and gold across the American west. Williams revolutionized the technological management of the diamond industry, introducing safer and more effective means of sinking shafts and shoring up the deep underground tunnels and became a trusted manager of DeBeers’ closed compound system. Williams’ son Alpheus succeeded him as General Manager at De Beers and was also appointed U.S. Consul to Kimberley.

Figure 5.  A bird’s eye view of the DeBeers compound, c.1890s. After the consolidation of disparate diggings into an organised system of mines by 1888, closed compounding of black African workers became compulsory in the diamond industry. As underground mining and refining consumed vast amounts of capital, compounding was introduced as a means of controlling the costs of migrant labour. By 1889, seventeen compounds housed 10,000 African migrant labourers.[xiv] The largest of DeBeers’ compounds, the West End Compound, covered 5 acres and housed as many as 2,900 black African workers (more than half of the DeBeers workforce). Barracks line the outer walls of the compound, housing 25-30 labourers in each room. On the right of the picture can be seen a swimming pool. Just barely visible in this image is the netting which hung over the whole compound to prevent diamonds being thrown outside the compound – a minor part of the extensive searching system, which included invasive body searches, to prevent illicit diamond smuggling.[xv] Williams, in a classic statement of the managerial ideology that underpinned the compounds, remarked with pride that the compound was a ‘monastery of labour’, but they are best understood as an early model of coercive labour control for an industrializing South Africa.[xvi] Source: ‘Bird's-eye view of the compound,’ Sixteen Tons, http://sixteentons.matrix.msu.edu/items/show/74.

In the case of Gold Fields, Rhodes was seduced by the verbose and vainglorious John Hays Hammond, a San Franciscan mining engineer with experience managing mines in California, Idaho, and Sonora. Rhodes surely saw in Hammond a skilled engineer, but principally a fellow imperial visionary and ruthless capitalist. After Rhodes’ early failures on the Rand, Hammond steadied the ship for Gold Fields following his appointment in 1894 and oversaw its development of the deep level mines it had secured – expertise Rhodes certainly lacked. Hammond proceeded to staff Gold Fields with American engineers of his acquaintance who went on to manage some of the largest deep-level mines on the Rand including Victor M. Clement, Pope Yeatman, Earnest A. Wiltsee, George Washington Starr, Harry Webb, and William Hammond Hall.[xvii] A skilled assayer, this nevertheless left Hammond free to pursue his own quixotic imperial misadventures, since, as Charles Van Onselen has recently revealed, he was the “brains” behind the ill-fated Jameson Raid.[xviii]

In this way, Rhodes sub-contracted American expertise to develop the Rand’s deep-level gold mines, allying American technical know-how with the pocketbooks of investors in the City of London and Kimberley. Rhodes was far from exceptional in this practice. At Herman Eckstein’s Rand Mines (which Gold Fields owned sizeable shares in)[xix] the Kentuckian engineer Hennen Jennings oversaw a similar migration of expertise, appointing dozens of Americans to managerial positions. As I have written elsewhere, these engineers styled themselves as much as race experts as geologists, chemists, or assayers, and took an active role in the Transvaal Chamber of Mines labour commissions. American engineers were also joined by experts from across Europe thanks to the proliferation of international mining congresses and publications that contributed to the spread of mine engineering practices worldwide.

Figure 6. Black, Chinese and White laborers in a gold mine in South Africa, c. 1902. US engineers participated in the creation of a complex racially segregated labour system in the South African mineral industries. Unskilled black Africans working underground in the Rand’s gold mines fluctuated between 40,000 and 90,000 as wages and political circumstances dictated, in addition to 5,000 in coal mines at Boksburg, and a further 15,000 in Johannesburg and along the reef – more than six times the number of white workers. In 1897, several of them, including Hennen Jennings, Thomas Leggett, and Louis Irving Seymour, provided detailed testimony to the Witwatersrand Chamber of Mines’ Industrial Commission of Inquiry on how to best manage the “labour question” on the Rand and in so doing made frequent comparison to their experience of managing non-white miners in the western United States, and South and Central America. Jennings and Leggett would then go on to recommend the importation of Chinese miners after the Boer War. Source: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3a40984/

Through these avenues American mining engineers became the ‘backbone of the South African mineral industry’, and controlled, in one estimate, ‘nearly 90 percent of the technical management of the mining industry’.[xx] What Rhodes perhaps did not foresee was that this migration was the entering wedge for an invasion of American goods. By 1899, one observer estimated that ninety percent of the mine machinery in the gold and diamond mines was of American manufacture.[xxi] Between them, the Ingersoll Rock Drill Company, Milwaukee’s Edward P. Allis Company, and Chicago’s Fraser and Chalmers dominated the supply of steam engineering, mining drills, and pneumatic shovels.[xxii] Men and machinery were transported below ground on lifts installed by the Otis Elevator Company, of Yonkers, New York. These lifts were in turn powered by generators made by either the General Electric Company, operating under its subsidiary the South African General Electric Company, or the Westinghouse Electric Company of Pittsburgh.[xxiii] Oregon pine supported the labyrinth of tunnels and shafts below the surface, while above ground McCormick’s reapers, binders, and harvesters tilled South African farmland, which was itself enclosed by American-made barbed wire.[xxiv] By the turn of the century the United States was the largest supplier of heavy equipment to South Africa’s gold mines, and was the second largest of all importers – a position it would retain until 1907.[xxv] Taking a tour of the Cape in 1899, one American diplomat noted with pride that Americans had their ‘hand on the throttle valve of this great engine’.[xxvi] Cape Town was ‘under control of the Americans’, proclaimed the Los Angeles Herald with typical bombast. [xxvii]

Figure 7. Singer advertisement in Zululand, 1892. Like other international businesses, the Singer Sewing Machine corporation incorporated the ideology of empire into its sales rhetoric for domestic audiences. In this advertising card, distributed at the Chicago World’s Fair, the supposed “civilizing” effects of the sewing machine can be seen in the sharp contrast between the figure in red on the left-hand side of the image, confidently arrayed in clothing modelled after European styles, while the figure to the furthest right of the image is wrapped in an ibayi shawl, symbolically kneeling below his more westernized counterparts. Source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. URL: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3g02763

US policymakers viewed these knots of entanglement as opportunities for transimperial collaboration. ‘The maintenance of [the British] empire excites no jealousy in us, and presents no inconvenience,’ wrote one State Department strategist, ‘On the contrary, we should prefer to see the colonial markets of the world controlled by a state ready to throw them open to all comers.’[xxviii] As one American observer surmised, “The United States can co-operate only with Great Britain in its material interests beyond its border. . . . The expansion of England and its opening out of the world’s ports to commerce is ipso facto the expansion of American commerce without the cost of blood and substance to the United States.”[xxix]

British policymakers and political economists were more ambivalent about such prospects. ‘British blood bought these new dominions’, complained Frederick McKenzie at the close of the Boer War, adding that Britain had ‘paid the price to benefit the traders of other lands, and that Americans especially will reap the commercial profits of our triumph’.[xxx] For although Britain’s grip on imperial power was consolidated by the co-optation and contracting of U.S. industrial capacity and technological innovation it was, argued Benjamin Kidd before the Royal Colonial Institute,  ‘undoubtedly a fact, from the nature of our trade and the character of our fiscal system, that we even offer peculiar facilities’ to the expansion of American firms. This left Britain “peculiarly open,” Kidd continued, to ‘being drawn deeply into the organization of trade and production now proceeding outwards from the United States.’[xxxi] But the United States was less an upstart than it was an accomplice. By managing lucrative industrial projects in the British imperial world, expansionist American migrants coproduced British imperial rule.

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Such transimperial exchanges were repeated the world over as the mining industry came to be dominated by multinational corporations. But they were not confined to empire’s extractive industries. As the communications, technological, and transportation infrastructure of the connecting world interleaved empires in ever-more involute ways, transimperial mobility became the hallmark of many professions. It was through these deep-laid transimperial relationships that modern world systems – financial, military, scientific and technological – emerged.

Selected Further Reading

Primary Sources

Archival Material in Oxford

Arthur Donaldson Smith Papers, Micr.Afr.590, Weston Library.

John Hays Hammond Letterbooks, Micr. Afr. 368-70, Weston Library.

Correspondence of Cecil John Rhodes, Mss. Afr. s. 228, Weston Library.

Papers of the British South Africa Company, Mss. Afr. s. 70-84, Weston Library.

William Russell Quinan Papers, Mss. Afr. S. 123-8, Weston Library.

Published Works

Carl Akeley, In Brightest Africa (1923).

Albert Bergman, On Board the Pensacola: The Eclipse Expedition to the West Coast of Africa (1890).

William Harvey Brown, On the South African Frontier (1899).

Frederick Russell Burnham, Scouting on Two Continents (1927).

John Hays Hammond, The Autobiography of John Hays Hammond (1935).

Eben J. Loomis, An Eclipse Party in Africa (1896).

Theodore Roosevelt, African Game Trails (1910).

Arthur Donaldson Smith, Through Unknown African Countries: the First Expedition from Somaliland to Lake Rudolf (1897).

Gardner F. Williams, The Diamond Mines of South Africa: Some Account of Their Rise and Development (1902).

Secondary Sources

Volker Barth and Roland Cvetovski, Imperial Co-Operation and Transfer, 1870-1930: Empires and Encounters (2015).

Tracey Jean Boisseau, White Queen: May French-Sheldon and the Imperial Origins of American Feminist Identity (2004).

James T. Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (1995).

Kelly Enright, The Maximum of Wilderness: The Jungle in the American Mind (2012).

Kristin Hoganson and Jay Sexton, eds, Crossing Empires: Taking U.S. History into Transimperial Terrain (2020)

Jeanette Eileen Jones, In Search of Brightest Africa: Reimagining the Dark Continent in American Culture (2010).

Curtis A. Keim, Mistaking Africa: Curiosities and Invention of the American Mind (4^th edn., 2018).

Stephen Tuffnell, ‘Engineering Inter-imperialism: American Miners and the Transformation of Global Mining, 1871–1910,’ Journal of Global History 10/1 (2015): 53-76.

Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (2010).