The striking story of the 'African Rifles,' active during the 1860s, presents a different view of Canadian history than that preferred by Ottawa these days
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Among the innumerable true stories that defy the dreary and depressing version of Canada’s history that Ottawa prefers nowadays — the version that requires interminable apologies, “decolonization” and acts of contrition, restitution and reparations — just one striking story involves the Victoria Pioneer Rifle Corps, otherwise known as the African Rifles.
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It’s a story that’s especially worth remembering on the first Monday in August, the public holiday west of the Rockies that has been known as British Columbia Day since 1974.
While most provinces had established an August long weekend holiday by the 1970s, B.C. didn’t have one, which was odd, since the Crown Colony of British Columbia was established on Monday, Aug. 2, 1858. But you have to dig deeper to know the origin of the B.C’s August holiday. By the 1970s, it had lapsed for more than a century.
The story of the African Rifles figures into it from the time before the B.C. colony was united with the Crown Colony of Vancouver Island, in 1866.
At the height of the American Civil War, trigger-happy American gold miners were pouring into Victoria on their way to the Fraser River, and it was very much an open question whether the American doctrine of manifest destiny would swallow up everything that was left of the Hudson Bay Company’s old Columbia territory.
In Victoria, the colonial governor was James Douglas, a senior HBC official who had been forced north with hundreds of mostly mixed-race loyalists after the Oregon Treaty of 1846 fixed the mainland border at the 49th parallel. Douglas was determined that the Americans had taken quite enough.
A devout abolitionist, Douglas saw to it that the first sign of Crown authority the Americans encountered upon disembarking in Victoria Harbour was a militia of Black men, in uniform, with guns.
In 2008, Ontario designated Aug. 1 Emancipation Day, to observe the outlawing of slavery in the British Empire in 1843. While it took the House of Commons until March 24, 2021, to officially designate the federal Aug. 1 civic holiday as Emancipation Day, Gov. Douglas was hosting an Emancipation Day fancy-dress ball for the crews and officers of British naval vessels in nearby Esquimalt as early as 1855.
How the African Rifles figure into the story is that they were formed up from a contingent of several hundred members of San........