The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (106 page)

By the mid-1950s (as we saw earlier), the British had accepted the need to stage a more or less rapid transfer of power in their main West African colonies, the Gold Coast (now Ghana) and Nigeria. Failure to press on in this direction, the Colonial Secretary told his Cabinet colleagues in September 1953, ‘would bring to an end settled government by consent and forfeit the goodwill towards the United Kingdom and the desire to retain the British connection which are common to all parties in the Gold Coast’.
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Two years later, as the timing of independence was gradually finalised, it was the crudeness and immaturity of the Gold Coast leadership that worried British observers. It was highly likely, concluded one, that Nkrumah would want to assert his new freedom in ‘embarrassing’ ways.
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But the die had been cast. The British forced Nkrumah to decentralise power to the regions (he faced strong opposition in the old Ashanti protectorate) before independence was granted. He also agreed to remain in the sterling area – perhaps in the hope of getting funds for development. British personnel were retained in the army and civil service. But the main British interest was that the Gold Coast should be a more or less respectable ex-colony, with a regime that would hold its disparate parts together – a task for which Nkrumah seemed better suited than any alternative leader. In Nigeria, meanwhile, the main British concern was to keep the southern regions in step with the northern. Here, too, they saw little future in denying the political leaders thrown up by the widening of electoral politics after 1945. As in the Gold Coast, they found that this new form of politics was far harder to manage than they had originally thought. Its practitioners proved to be surprisingly adept at exploiting resentment against the colonial state. Indeed, in its new role as agrarian reformer, productivity raiser and controller of prices, colonial rule was a much bigger target than in the inter-war years. The difficulty lay not in constructing a Gold Coast-type bargain with southern political leaders, but in preventing a huge gulf opening up between the forms of politics conceded to them and those preferred by the Muslim aristocracy who commanded the North. It hardly required the Indian case to show where that led.

These differences had come to a head when the Northern leaders (where more than half of the colony's population lived) opposed the Southern demand for full self-government by 1956. They feared the ‘democratic’ appeal that the Southern politicians might make in their own backyard and Southern domination of a new independent federation. British ingenuity was devoted, not to repressing the demand for self-rule (which was seen as impossible), but to solving the

dilemma with which we are faced: Either to give independence too soon and risk disintegration and a breakdown of administration; or to hang on too long, risk ill-feeling and disturbances, and eventually to leave bitterness behind, with little hope thereafter of our being able to influence Nigerian thinking in world affairs on lines we would wish.
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Among British officials there was sharp disagreement on the wisdom of imposing strict constitutional rules to protect ethnic and religious minorities if the result was to weaken the central government's ability to hold independent Nigeria together. But, when all the main Nigerian parties agreed at the Constitutional Conference in 1958 that they wanted independence by 1960, the British quickly caved in. ‘To continue to govern a discontented and possibly rebellious Nigeria’, remarked the Colonial Secretary, ‘would…present wellnigh insoluble administrative problems…It might even need substantial military forces.’
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The threat was enough. Independence was timetabled for October 1960.

It is clear that the British saw no major interest was threatened by conceding Ghana and Nigeria their full independence. Indeed, the reverse was the case. Their real concern was to avoid a political breakdown and a backlash that damaged their post-colonial influence and trade (around half of Nigeria's trade was with Britain). They saw as yet little reason to fear the growth of rival influence in an old British sphere. They persuaded the Nigerians to sign a defence agreement giving them over-fly and staging rights. ‘Nigeria’, the Cabinet was told authoritatively in February 1960, ‘will be a relatively large and stable community within the Commonwealth, likely to exercise increasing influence in our favour in the rest of Africa.’
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With a ‘loyal’ Nigeria, the remaining West African colonies could be cheerfully shrugged off. Tiny Gambia should be merged with a neighbouring (francophone) state, perhaps Senegal.
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Sierra Leone, where there were bitter divisions between the ‘Creoles’ of the old coastal ‘colony’ and the peoples of the interior ‘protectorate’, was at first considered too fractious to be allowed full independence. It ‘will be a small weak state unless it is tied up with its neighbours’.
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But only independence was politically practical and the promise was given in 1959. By mid-1960, the British seemed to have made (or be in the process of making) a largely successful transition from colonial master to post-colonial ally, from imperial rule to post-imperial influence.

Britain's African crisis

Preserving East Africa for British interests and influence was a quite different story. East Africa had much more strategic significance. It flanked the Indian Ocean where the British expected to remain the regional great power even after the debacle of Suez. It provided a way round the so-called ‘Middle East air barrier’ once military flights over Egypt and other Arab states were no longer an option. It might act as a support base for military operations in the Persian Gulf and beyond. In Kenya, a vocal British settler community, whose survival was threatened by a resurgence of ‘barbarism’ (for this was how Mau Mau was presented to opinion at home), could not be abandoned. Nowhere in the region was there a prospective successor regime to which the colonial state could be safely entrusted. In Uganda, where the British were eager to build a strong central government to press on with the task of economic development, they were frustrated by the resistance of the kingdom of Buganda (the largest and strongest of the ‘Bantu’ kingdoms in Uganda) which had enjoyed considerable autonomy from the earliest days of the British protectorate. The
kabaka
(ruler) was ‘exiled’ to Britain in 1953 and the British set out to make the Uganda Legislative Council the main focus of political life, partly to mobilise non-Bugandan opinion, partly to encourage Bugandan commoners to defy their chiefly elite. In Tanganyika, the aim had been to use constitutional change to keep a careful balance between the minority groups of Europeans and Asians and the African majority, which was fragmented into a large number of tribes. Insofar as the British had a ‘master-plan’ for East Africa, it was to promote an East African federation. This was the way, thought official opinion, to hasten economic development and to manage the conflicts between African, Asian and settler interests, especially in Kenya. It was fear of being merged into a ‘Greater East Africa’ that might give the settlers a voice in Buganda's affairs that pushed the
kabaka
into open defiance and temporarily cost him his freedom.

The British might have been cautious about change in East Africa, but they could not stand still. Against the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya, they deployed a huge machine of repression. They raised a loyalist ‘home guard’ among the Kikuyu and turned a blind eye to the atrocities that followed.
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They hanged scores of suspects, sometimes on evidence that was threadbare at best. They interned hundreds of thousands in ‘rehabilitation camps’ to sift out those deemed irreconcilably Mau Mau in sympathy. To pacify the rural unrest from which Mau Mau had sprung (Mau Mau was at heart a revolt of the Kikuyu landless against their aggrandising chiefly class), they devised the ‘Swynnerton Plan’ to replace communal land rights with individual title, creating a class of peasant proprietors – peaceable, conservative and (it was hoped) loyal. But it was also necessary to reform the political centre, to show ‘loyal’ Africans that loyalty paid and to push the white settlers (still the loudest voice in the colony's politics) towards greater cooperation with African leaders. The Europeans, said Evelyn Baring, the governor, ‘with the low whisky prices and high altitude pressures are both irresponsible and hysterical’.
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It was vital, London thought, to bring Africans into the government and ‘close ranks against Mau Mau’.
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At the end of 1957, a new constitution provided for fourteen African elected members in the Kenya legislature (giving parity with the European elected members) with the balance being held by twelve ‘specially elected members’ (representing Africans, Asians and Europeans) chosen by the elected members. But, under the vigorous leadership of Tom Mboya, the African members demanded nothing less than majority rule, and, when this was rejected, boycotted the legislature. The threat of ‘extremism’ and a new round of civil unrest shook London's nerve. When the leading settler politician, Michael Blundell (the son of a London solicitor), resigned from the government and announced the formation of a new multiracial party, the ‘New Kenya Group’, it seized the opportunity to announce a new constitutional conference to be held in London in January 1960. In Uganda, too, the effort to persuade the
ancien régime
in Buganda to support the gradual move towards an elective government for the whole of Uganda had reached an impasse by 1959. Only in Tanganyika, where both settlers and Asians were ‘of little account’,
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did there seem some chance of achieving London's ideal solution: an elective government, ‘moderate’, ‘progressive’ and ‘realistic’ in outlook, and willing to keep the British connection. Across the whole of East Africa, however, the pace of political change was still meant to be cautious. At the ‘Chequers meeting’, to which the East African governors came in January 1959, it was agreed that even internal self-government for Tanganyika and Uganda was at least a decade away. Kenya was a much more difficult case: here no definite timetable could be laid down at all.
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There was no mistaking the anxious tone of official discussion. ‘The long term future of the African continent’, remarked Harold Macmillan, ‘presented a sombre picture.’
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The British had found the drive to ‘modernise’ their African colonies more and more burdensome. They had wanted to make their colonial states more effective, improve the productivity of African agriculture, bring in new experts and impose new methods. They encountered, not surprisingly, intense local suspicion and the deep-seated fear that the real meaning of change was a larger white presence and more white control. Neither words nor deeds could prevent the growth of an African ‘nationalism’ which promised to block the loss of African rights by expelling white power. More worrying still was the fact that colonial governments, theoretically armed to the teeth with emergency powers, were poorly equipped to deal with large-scale unrest: the prospect of more Mau Maus aroused deep apprehension. A further cause for concern had appeared on the horizon. By the late 1950s, the advance of Soviet influence could no longer be ruled out and London needed to reassure Washington that its policies would not turn African opinion away from the West.
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But, before the British could settle their next step in East Africa, the whole of their African policy was galvanised by a crisis.

It broke over Nyasaland (modern Malawi), one of the three territories of the Central African Federation. The Federation had been the centrepiece of the Conservative government's African plans since its establishment in 1953. It was a new ‘dominion’ in the making, to be set one day beside Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. It carried their hopes of a racial partnership between whites and blacks in a dynamic economy.
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But the Federation was also an unfinished structure, whose constitutional future had been left unresolved. Southern Rhodesia was a self-governing, settler-ruled colony, with a ‘colour-blind’ franchise but hardly any black voters. But Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland were protectorates, administered largely by British officials. Among the white politicians in the Federation, it was taken for granted that white political leadership would continue for the indefinite future. They were particularly anxious that the whites in Northern Rhodesia, mostly clustered on the Copperbelt, should acquire the same political rights as those in Southern Rhodesia and control in effect the protectorate's government. No one felt this more strongly than Roy Welensky, federal prime minister from 1956, and a Northern Rhodesian white.
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Indeed, if both Rhodesias were self-governing colonies, albeit still under white domination, the case for federal independence would become irresistible, and the whites would be able to force its concession. Meanwhile, London was torn between two conflicting demands: to honour their ‘promise’ (by nods and winks) to grant the Federation its independence in 1960; and to achieve enough self-rule in the two northern protectorates to be able to claim that independence enjoyed popular (including African) backing. By the late 1950s, reconciling these aims required something more than the wisdom of Solomon.

Nyasaland was the storm centre because, with only a handful of whites, it was clear that any advance towards electoral politics would give black politicians a much greater say in its government. It had been the scene of greatest resistance to the federal scheme in 1953, and hostility to federation as a veil for white rule remained deeply felt. In Dr Hastings Banda, it had a political leader who enjoyed unchallenged command over its main popular movement, the Nyasaland African Congress (NAC). When London promised to discuss constitutional change in 1959, Banda returned from the Gold Coast (where he had been working as a doctor) to lead the NAC campaign for an African majority in the protectorate's legislature and (by clear implication) against federation. But, in March 1959, the Nyasaland governor, Sir Robert Armitage, who foresaw the collapse of his government's authority unless the NAC were checked, and who knew that his masters in London were still deeply committed to federation, declared an emergency. Crucially, Armitage sought to strengthen his case with intelligence reports of a ‘murder plot’ by the leaders of the NAC against government officials. The NAC was proscribed and its leaders (including Banda) thrown into gaol. With reinforcements from Northern and Southern Rhodesia, the government began to round up the NAC activists. But, to London's dismay, in the operations that followed some fifty-one Africans were killed, nearly half in a single incident at Nkata Bay.
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