1880s–1920s: (Monopolies on Violence — Colonial Armies Composed of African Rank-and-File Under Tiny Numbers of European Officers, the Tirailleurs Sénégalais …

1880s–1920s: (Monopolies on Violence — Colonial Armies Composed of African Rank-and-File Under Tiny Numbers of European Officers, the Tirailleurs Sénégalais Since 1857, the King’s African Rifles Amalgamated in 1902, Martial Races Ideology Imported from India, Ethnic Imbalances in Recruitment That Would Have Consequences for Post-Colonial National Armies, and Military Control Tenuous with Only 11,000 British Soldiers Across All of Sub-Saharan Africa in the Early 1900s): Africa was largely subdued and policed by Africans themselves. Colonial armies comprised large African rank-and-file under tiny numbers of European officers, and recruitment became more systematic from the early 1900s. The French had recruited the Tirailleurs Sénégalais since 1857; in East Africa, territorial units were amalgamated into the King’s African Rifles in 1902. Military control was tenuous — Lugard’s West African Frontier Force numbered only two to three thousand troops under about a hundred European officers, while the British had little more than eleven thousand soldiers across all of sub-Saharan Africa in the early 1900s. Troops were often recruited over long distances, with alien groups used to pacify newly acquired territories. Martial races ideology was imported from India, idealizing recruits from savannah and mountainous areas as masculine and warlike while regarding coastal and lowland peoples with suspicion. In West Africa, British and French recruited among northern savannah peoples; in Uganda, it was the Acholi of the north rather than the Ganda who served; in Kenya, the Kamba and Kalenjin rather than the Maasai. Such ethnic imbalances in colonial armies would have important consequences for the national armies that succeeded them. The Belgian Force Publique in the Congo exemplified governance on the cheap — a motley collection of the displaced and brutalized who engaged in violent extortion that brought Leopold’s commercial project to an ignominious close.