Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (59 page)

Economically they posed no threat. Their export industries were
vestigial, their currency more or less private. But as the spectacle of America dimmed the allure of Empire, so in a subtler way the message of Communist Russia nagged away at the Empire’s composure. The intelligent young of the subject peoples, denied real political expression, were inevitably attracted to an ideology which specifically declared itself to be race-less and class-less, at once anti-imperialist and social-revolutionary. Communist books, papers and magazines had circulated tentatively in India and Africa even before the war, and many of the early nationalist leaders had been inspired by Marxist ideas. Now a new generation of African and Asian leaders were waiting to learn their lessons.

Soon most of the infant nationalist movements of the Empire had their Marxist cadres, and their leaders found their way by one means or another to founts of Communist teaching, generally in London, sometimes in Moscow itself. In England a West Indian Communist agent, George Padmore, instructed generations of young Africans, who went to England to study medicine or the principles of Common Law in the Mother Country, and went home politically indoctrinated from Moscow. The young Kenyan Jomo Kenyatta, presently to be the nationalist leader of his country, was one of Padmore’s protégés, and spent some time at a revolutionary school in Moscow in the 1930s: so was the Gold Coast leader Kwame Nkrumah, who aspired to the leadership of a West African Soviet Socialist Republic. Most of the guerilla leaders of Malaya and Burma were Communists, and having fought against the Japanese during the war, emerged to work against the British in the peace.

The British hardly knew what was happening, and seldom suspected that, festering beneath the surface of colonial life, movements of such sophisticated intensity were gathering strength. They still allowed almost no political activity in the subject colonies, and in many parts of the Empire the instinct of white supremacy had survived the war intact. The settlers of Kenya were as racialist as ever; in South Africa
apartheid
, the forcible separation of the races, was about to become the very basis of social life; in Southern Rhodesia black people habitually stepped into the gutter when they saw a white man approaching along the street. The young activists of Afro-Asia (a convenient new geo-political concept) naturally
turned to the force most unlike their rulers, and realized for the first time how false was their subjection. It was bluff! They were not after all, as they had been led to believe, immature races incapable of political action. They need feel no gratitude to the Empire, no sense of duty or even loyalty. They became at once more confident and more inhibited than their fathers had been, frustrated by their own growing knowledge, wounded by slights which earlier generations had hardly noticed.

‘What
is
Communism?’ a visiting inspector from the Colonial Office was asked by a simple farmer in Nyasaland in 1949, and instantly he knew that change was on the way. Communism was the
deus
ex
machina.
Communism was the party of universal brotherhood, sworn to rid the world of racialism and imperialism, and cut the lordly British down to size. The remarkable thing was not the fact of Communist appeal, nor the scale of Communist activity in the decade after the Second World War, but its restraint and even its ineffectiveness: but perhaps that was because the dictator Joseph Stalin, the living embodiment of the creed, was a born imperialist himself.

Anyway, the groundswell of discontent among the subject peoples was essentially patriotic. The British preferred to call it ‘nationalist’, a word which had an obscurely disreputable ring to it, and its leaders were always said to be ‘agitators’, but it was really just love of country, of culture, of one’s own people and one’s own history. Social reform played little part in these early stirrings of rebellion. ‘Give us chaos!’ Gandhi demanded, for he knew very well that British administration, in India as everywhere else in the Empire, was likely to be fairer, stabler and more efficient than its indigenous successors. That was not the point. When a nationalist leader harangued a crowd in Karachi, or started a strike in Lagos, he did so not generally for ideological reasons at all, but simply because he wanted his country to rule itself. Independence was all.

The intensity of national feeling varied greatly. Some peoples, like the Ashanti, had never lost their profound and sometimes savage sense of nationhood. Some, like the Jamaicans, had never had
one, so that their leaders had to summon it into existence. India had been welded into nationhood by the British themselves, while Uganda contained a separate kingdom within itself, and was in a perpetual state of tribal schizophrenia. Yet almost everywhere in the Empire, as the 1940s moved into the 1950s, patriotic movements were awake, from the experienced political associations of India to the first ill-informed nationalist cells of British Guiana or Somaliland. In 1945 a Pan-African Congress was held in the town hall of Chorlton-on-Medlock, a suburb of Manchester dominated by the University. Delegates came from most African territories, and they passed a resolution demanding autonomy and independence for the whole of black Africa. The London newspapers took little notice. The citizens of Chorlton-on-Medlock were not much impressed by the shabby black men assembling in the drizzle. But the delegates at that meeting, the plans they decided upon, the new resolves they took home with them to Africa, were presently to change the world.

Among the emergent patriots were some remarkable men. Some were familiar and comprehensible figures, like the brilliant Nehru, Harrow and Cambridge, who wrote an exquisite English prose, behaved like a gentleman, and spoke a language of politics that needed no interpreters. Others were much stranger. Nobody knew quite what to make, for instance, of Jomo Kenyatta the Kenyan,
né
Kamau wa Ngengi, the grandson of a Kikuyu magician whose education had been part Church of Scotland evangelicism, part tribal ritualism, part London School of Economics. This powerful and clever man baffled the British first to last. He had been a Communist in his time, he had spent many years in England, he had written an anthropological study of his tribe, he had been an active Kenyan nationalist since the 1920s and returned to Nairobi in 1946 as president of the Kenya Africa Union: and as his thick-set calculating figure rose from obscurity to fame, petty agitator to celebrated national leader, they never did master how many of his motives were explicable impulses, urges towards power that westerners could understand, and how many were mysteries of Africa, from another morality and another sensibility.

Another riddle was Alexander Bustamante of Jamaica, founder of the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union, and twice a political
prisoner of the British. He was an exotic of a very different kind, but scarcely less disconcerting to the imperial tradition, for nobody really knew the truth about him. Why had he changed his name from Clarke to Bustamante? Was it or was it not true that he had served with the Spanish Army in Africa? What was the thread that bound his extraordinary career—waiter, salesman, dietician, money-lender, police inspector, New York tramway company official, labour leader and finally royalist, anti-socialist, anti-atheist nationalist politician? Or what about Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian revolutionary leader who was presently to oust both Farouk and the British themselves? The British had never heard of the fellow, until he thrust himself to power, for he was a life-long conspirator, full of charm and good sense, but recognizing no accepted channel of dissent, publishing no manifestos, addressing no meetings, simply working quietly and anonymously until the moment of revolution came.

Such men were baffling to the Empire. Fair play did not allow for them, and the rules did not apply. The Arab leaders who now set about destroying British suzerainty were men of a kind the British hardly knew—middle-class townspeople or country bourgeoisie, who had never played a hand of bezique with the Ambassador up at the palace, nor even been invited (‘well it
would
be kind, dear, useful too’) to take tea with the Manager’s wife on Saturday afternoon. In Singapore the easy-going Malays, whom the British liked and patronized, were being supplanted by the formidable and secretive Chinese, whom the British feared. In Cyprus a learned Archbishop, Makarios III, theological graduate of Boston University, was allying himself with a murderous guerilla, Georgios Grivas, in a campaign to achieve
enosis.
In South Africa the unshakeably alien Afrikaners rid themselves of Smuts for the last time and entrenched themselves it seemed indefinitely in power.

It was not simply a new world, as it had been after the First World War. Now it was
several
new worlds, surrounding the perimeters of the British Empire, and erupting within. This great movement of change and discontent was more organic than deliberate. No universal conspiracy linked the scattered patriots. Some were Communists, some tribalists, some men of religion, some cultural irredentists. Some were pursuing old grudges, or evolving
new ambitions. Many were only doing what their masters had taught them, pursuing those very principles of political freedom which were, they had so long been told, the glory of English history. All, though, were encouraged by one common instinct: the British Empire was dying, and the heirs must prepare themselves.

The blindest observers of the process, except of course those myriad primitives who had not yet learnt what an Empire was, were the British themselves. They continued to believe in the power of their prestige, and sometimes it seemed indeed as though prestige
per
se
was the object of their foreign policies. Prestige had been the basis of their imperial power for so long that they clung to it faithfully now—it had been, as Elspeth Huxley had written of its manifestations in Kenya, ‘like an invisible coat of mail, or a form of magic’, and even after Singapore the British believed in it. Sometimes indeed it still worked, and the safest man in a nationalist riot, Cairo to Calcutta, was often the man who proclaimed his Britishness frankly and proudly. But it was a deception too, and prevented the British from coming to terms with history, and accepting their reduced circumstances in the world.

For even now, at the end of the 1940s, most of them saw that world through Victorian glasses. They believed in their hearts that things British were necessarily things best. They believed that they, above all their Allies, had won the war. They saw themselves still, like their grandfathers, as a senior and superior race. Not only within their Empire, but across half the world, they expected to be treated with deference, to use the best hotels, to get the best table, to be waited upon, the Australian writer Alan Moorehead observed, ‘like the children of rich families’.

The islanders were as chauvinist as ever, for all their experiences on the battlefields, and attitudes at home had not much changed since Victoria’s day. Foreigners were still inferior. Coloured peoples were still of a different class. Abroad was still comic.
1
The popular
Press remained the strident instrument that Northcliffe had made it, in the first excitement of popular literacy, and it spoke even now in the raucous voice of the New Imperialism, braggard and insensitive. ‘Mightier yet!’ sang the audiences at the Promenade Concerts in Queen’s Hall, swinging into ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ to a tumult of balloons and paper caps, and one would hardly guess that Great Britain was monumentally in debt, industrially crippled and strategically strained almost to breaking-point.

But it was not an
imperial
braggadocio. Except in the vague and satisfying abstract, except in matters of ‘prestige’, the British cared little about their Empire, and knew still less. A poll in 1947 revealed that three-quarters of the population did not know the difference between a Dominion and a colony, that half could not name a single British possession, and that 3 per cent thought the United States was still a British colony. Their pride was in themselves, not in their Empire, and in this if nothing else their instinct was right. The days of the European Empires were over, and if Britain was to be prosperous and influential in the future it must be as an island Power off the coast of Europe. Now as always, it had not been the British Empire that the world really respected. It had not even been, as a matter of fact, Great Britain. It had been England, the heart of it all, England of Shakespeare and the Common Law, England of the poets and the liberators, Churchill’s England of the white cliffs and the Cockney courage: