The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (65 page)

self-determination, applied only to Nazi-occupied Europe, British

imperial subjects thought otherwise. Others concluded that an Axis

victory was their best hope for emancipation, and some West Indian

movie audiences cheered newsreels reporting Allied defeats. Similar sentiments prevailed in Asia, where more than thirty thousand

British

Kenya 333

Indian prisoners of war and deserters fought for the Japanese in Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army. In 1942 and 1943, India

itself experienced the worst outbreak of violent opposition since the

1857 mutiny when anti-imperial groups attacked post offi ces, train

stations, and other government installations. The Raj responded to

Gandhi’s even more damaging nonviolent Quit India movement by

jailing him and the rest of the Indian National Congress leadership.

There were no comparable outbreaks of violence in Kenya, but the

government took no chances and jailed the leaders of the Kikuyu

Central Association on the trumped-up charge of conspiring with the

Italians in Ethiopia.

These draconian measures bought the empire time, but the British government recognized that it would have to give its subjects a

stronger reason to support the Allied war effort. In 1942, Sir Stafford

Cripps, the leader of the House of Commons, offered the Indians full

dominion status or some alternative form of complete autonomy

within the British Commonwealth, which suggested an empire of

consent rather than coercion. One year later, the secretary of state

for the colonies made a broader pledge to guide all “colonial peoples

along the road to self-government within the framework of the British Empire.”50 Imperial offi cials tried to qualify and retreat from these

statements after the war, but there was no denying that peace would

bring signifi cant change to the empire.

This was apparent even in metropolitan Britain, where the Labour

Party’s victory in the 1945 elections testifi ed to a general weariness

with the war and the expense of empire. The British public wanted

rapid demobilization, jobs, heat, and housing, and most people were

unwilling to expend precious resources on retaining India or any other

imperial territory by force. While retreat from India would have been

unthinkable in the interwar era, these sentiments refl ected the reality

that Britain no longer profi ted from the Raj. Metropolitan manufacturers had already lost their share of Indian markets, and wartime

spending and borrowing meant that Britain actually owed India more

than one billion pounds in 1946. Acknowledging these realities, British offi cials hoped to guide India’s path to independence and shape its

postimperial government. Instead, violent sectarian civil strife resulting from irreconcilable differences between the Hindu and Muslim

communities forced Britain to withdraw its troops rapidly in 1947

and accept the partition of the Raj into India and Pakistan.

334 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

Most people in Britain recognized the necessity of Indian independence by this point, but the demise of the Raj gave imperial partisans an opening to make the case for retaining the rest of the empire.

As Cold War tensions mounted, the Labour foreign secretary Ernest

Bevin spoke of turning the remaining African and Asian territories

into a “third force” as a global counterbalance to the United States

and Soviet Union. More important, the economic problems of the

postwar era gave the Labour government a powerful incentive to try

once again to make the empire pay its promised dividends. Nearly six

years of total war left the nation with a debt approaching three billion pounds just as the United States ended its lend-lease program. In

what angry British offi cials termed a “fi nancial Dunkirk,” the American government forced Britain to ratify the Bretton Woods accord

and eliminate its imperial trade barriers as a condition for further

aid. Clement Attlee came to power on a platform of reconstruction,

economic development, and social reform, but his government lacked

the dollars to retire its debts and pay for imports of food and building

materials. As a result, the British public faced greater shortages and

deprivation in 1946 and 1947 than it had during the war years.

Many Britons therefore hoped that the imperial interests’ promises about the value of the African territories might hold true. Several

members of Attlee’s government had been strong critics of the imperial

excesses of the interwar years, but they believed that they could create

a more humane and mutually benefi cial system of imperial development now that they were in power. They assumed they could transform subject societies through central planning, mechanization, and

the 120 million pounds that an enhanced Colonial Development and

Welfare Act allocated for investment in the empire. Colonial secretary

Arthur Creech Jones, a onetime Fabian socialist, spoke optimistically

about raising living standards in the colonies, but the real purpose of

postwar colonial development was to earn dollars for Britain.

To this end the Labour government initiated an ambitious program of development in Africa that was channeled largely through

the new Colonial Development Corporation and other semioffi cial

enterprises. Blaming stunted African economies on the failure of free

market capitalism, the Labourites believed that rational economic

planning and state-sponsored investment could unlock the economic

potential of the remaining empire. One of their biggest and most

infamous projects was the sprawling Tanganyika groundnut scheme,

British

Kenya 335

which spent thirty-six million pounds planting peanuts on tracts of

land equal in size to the state of Connecticut. Similarly, a massive

irrigation program in the Sudanese al-Jazirah province aimed to produce vast quantities of cotton. The overall goal of these initiatives was

to provide raw materials that would reduce shortages in Britain and

earn dollars in North American markets.

To this end, state marketing boards bought African produce at

below-market prices on the promise that the banked surplus would

guarantee stable returns in good times and bad. Rising global

demand for commodities meant that there were no price downturns

in the immediate postwar era, thereby allowing the territorial governments to keep the African deposits in London, where they were

available for Britain’s postwar recovery. The returns from African

agriculture led the Colonial Offi ce’s development experts to meddle

even more deeply in local communities. Failing to realize that African farmers were already willing and able to produce for the global

market, their modernizing initiatives often alienated the very people

they aimed to help.

The Labour development initiative also did very little to actually

promote economic diversifi cation or industrial development in Africa.

In Kenya, the Colonial Development Corporation invested half a million pounds to turn a mix of improvised wartime industrial projects

into East African Industries Ltd. (EAL), a semipublic conglomerate

producing bricks, ceramics, tiles, chemicals, and cooking fats. These

were money-losing ventures, and Asian investors and entrepreneurs

had far more success in setting up small-scale industries that processed

locally produced raw materials. None of these enterprises, however,

altered Kenya’s neomercantile relationship with Britain, and restrictive investment and licensing regulations ensured that commodity

exports remained the central basis of the colony’s economy.

From 1945 to 1951, Britain put forty million pounds into the

empire, which was a fraction of the fi gure promised under the revised

Colonial Development and Welfare Act. Nevertheless, the Labour

government’s various programs netted 140 million pounds for the

metropolitan economy. This was in spite of debacles such as the Tanganyika groundnut scheme, which yielded only nine thousand tons of

produce—meaning that a pound of its peanuts cost more than seventeen hundred pounds.51 The resulting scandal almost brought down

the Labour government.

336 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

Most Africans, however, gave more than they got, and the Labourites’ promises of mutual development proved ephemeral. As in the

prewar era, British interests always came fi rst. Metropolitan buyers

had fi rst call on building materials for reconstruction, and the African territories had to reduce consumption to keep their dollar earnings within the empire. These policies led to shortages, infl ation, and

greater state interference in the daily lives of African workers and

farmers. The result was a wave of rural unrest and urban strikes that

swept through British Africa in the postwar years. Most were over

low wages and commodity prices, but the imperial authorities gradually recognized that they had the potential to mushroom into organized political resistance to British rule.

The Labour government’s imperial experts naively believed that

they could defuse this discontent by granting Africans a measure of

local autonomy and reforming the most fl agrantly abusive legal and

social institutions. Certain that “the natives” were not ready for full

independence, they promised to put their subjects on a gradual path

to self-government. Creech Jones sought to replace indirect rule

with a democratic system of local administration to bind educated

Africans more closely to the imperial regime. Theoretically, qualifi ed

men would move from elected local bodies to seats on territorial legislative councils, which in time might become national parliaments

as the colonies and protectorates evolved into autonomous entities

within the Commonwealth. In the meantime, the Colonial Offi ce

directed district offi cers to be scrupulously courteous in their dayto-day dealings with African constituents and began to retire old

Africa hands who, in the words of a new Colonial Service handbook,

tended to like “primitive people but could not get on well with the

educated native.”52

Not surprisingly, none of these developments sat well with the

Kenyan government or settlers. The old Africa hands remained

fi rmly entrenched in the colony, and the postwar governor Sir Philip

Mitchell believed that Kenya should develop along Rhodesian lines

into a self-governing dominion. He consequently continued his predecessors’ policies of encouraging additional settlement in the white

highlands. As a result, migration spiked in the postwar era as a new

generation of settlers swelled the European population of the colony

to thirty thousand on the premise that it would continue to be a white

man’s country.

British

Kenya 337

Governor Mitchell shared this assumption. Seeking to lay the

groundwork for a potential East African dominion, in 1946 he implemented a new legislative system that replaced his Executive Council

with an “elected member system.” This gave settler leaders control of

key government departments, which evolved into formal ministries.

Thus, Major Ferdinand Cavendish-Bentinck, the informal head of the

postwar settler community, acquired the important portfolio for agriculture, animal husbandry and natural resources. By comparison, a

former schoolteacher named Eliud Mathu became the sole appointed

African representative in the lower Legislative Council until three

more nominated African councilors joined him later in the decade.

On the surface, these measures appeared to make the Kenyan

imperial regime more secure than ever. Population growth in the

reserves ensured that employers had no diffi culty recruiting African

workers at comfortably low wages. Wartime profi teering gave the

settler farmers the resources to invest in tractors and other forms of

mechanization, which made them far less reliant on squatter labor.

Able to dispense with the old imperial tools of labor extraction, they

now sought to wall themselves off from all Africans but their domestic servants. Under settler pressure, sympathetic government offi cials

resumed the mandatory relocations of the 1930s and forcibly returned

roughly one hundred thousand squatters to the Kikuyu reserves

between 1945 and 1952. These rural slums were no less crowded than

they had been in the interwar era, but agricultural and social welfare

experts hoped to develop them though soil conservation measures

and modern agricultural technologies so that they could hold more

people. This was entirely unrealistic, but it provided political cover

for the Kenyan government’s pro-settler policies.

The Labour government’s mandate to end overt racism in the

empire made this window dressing necessary. In 1948, the Colonial Offi ce ordered the colonial governors to produce confi dential

memorandums justifying legislation in their territories that might

be viewed as discriminatory. Mitchell’s report was telling. While it

boasted that Kenya had increased direct African representation on

the Legislative Council, reformed the
kipande
system, and allowed

lawful marriage between Africans and Europeans, it stoutly defended

legal segregation in the colony on the basis of unequal “civilization.” Arguing that the British government’s earlier declarations in