Darwin J. The Empire Project. The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830-1970
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615 / Reluctant retreat, 1959–1968
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.
3
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 inde-
pendence was granted. He also agreed to remain in the sterling area –
perhaps in the hope of getting funds for development. British person-
nel 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 agrar-
ian 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 aristoc-
racy 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 lead-
ers (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 feder-
ation. 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.
4
616 / ‘The great liner is sinking’
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 govern-
ment’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 insolu-
ble administrative problems . . . It might even need substantial mili-
tary forces.’
5
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 break-
down 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 authorita-
tively 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.’
6
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.
7
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’.
8
But
only independence was politically practical and the promise was given
in 1959.Bymid-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 dif-
ferent story. East Africa had much more strategic significance. It flanked
the Indian Ocean where the British expected to remain the regional
617 / Reluctant retreat, 1959–1968
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 loy-
alist ‘home guard’ among the Kikuyu and turned a blind eye to the
atrocities that followed.
9
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 irreconcil-
ably 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
618 / ‘The great liner is sinking’
hoped) loyal. But it was also necessary to reform the political centre,
to show ‘loyal’ Africans that loyalty paid and to push the white set-
tlers (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’.
10
It was vital, London thought,
to bring Africans into the government and ‘close ranks against Mau
Mau’.
11
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 ‘spe-
cially 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 major-
ity 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 r
´
egime 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’,
12
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 inter-
nal 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.
13
There was no mistaking the anxious tone of official discus-
sion. ‘The long term future of the African continent’, remarked Harold
Macmillan, ‘presented a sombre picture.’
14
The British had found the
drive to ‘modernise’ their African colonies more and more burden-
some. 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
619 / Reluctant retreat, 1959–1968
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, theoreti-
cally 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.
15
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.
16
But the Federation was also an
unfinished structure, whose constitutional future had been left unre-
solved. Southern Rhodesia was a self-governing, settler-ruled colony,
with a ‘colour-blind’ franchise but hardly any black voters. But North-
ern 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 North-
ern Rhodesian white.
17
Indeed, if both Rhodesias were self-governing
colonies, albeit still under white domination, the case for federal inde-
pendence would become irresistible, and the whites would be able to
force its concession. Meanwhile, London was torn between two con-
flicting 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 indepen-
dence enjoyed popular (including African) backing. By the late 1950s,
620 / ‘The great liner is sinking’
reconciling these aims required something more than the wisdom of
Solomon.
Nyasaland was the storm centre because, with only a hand-
ful 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 Nyasa-
land 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 gov-
ernment’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.
18
The scale of the violence made an inquiry inevitable. Both Lon-
don and the federal ministers in Salisbury (modern Harare) seem to
have expected a favourable verdict. The NAC’s ‘murder plot’, with
its sinister echo of Mau Mau, would vindicate the measures that the
government had taken. Anti-federation ‘nationalism’ would be heavily
tainted with extremism and violence. With the NAC broken, African
‘moderates’ would take the political lead. Then they could claim that
the ‘real’ African view was no longer so hostile to a federal future. But
London and Salisbury were utterly wrong. When the Devlin Report was
published in July 1959 (Devlin was a leading British high court judge),
it dismissed the murder plot as an implausible fiction, denounced the
Nyasaland government as a ‘police state’ employing illegal and unneces-
sary force, and (worst of all) endorsed the opinion that the vast major-
ity of Nyasaland Africans were bitterly opposed to federation. After
621 / Reluctant retreat, 1959–1968
desperate efforts to discredit Devlin’s conclusions,
19
Macmillan and his
colleagues won the ensuing parliamentary debate. But their panic was
real. With the almost simultaneous revelations of atrocious maltreat-
ment at the Hola prison camp in Kenya, they feared a wave of revulsion
from ‘middle opinion’ at home. Colonial brutality was a political alba-
tross which the Labour opposition showed every sign of exploiting.
In July 1959, a general election was close. And, though Macmillan
was to score an electoral triumph in October, the scars of the summer
remained. ‘No more Nyasalands’ became the unspoken motto of his
African policy.
The logic of this was that, by hook or by crook, colonial govern-
ments must avoid confrontation and enlist the cooperation of African
leaders. Emergency rule was a hostage to fortune that London had no
wish to redeem. This did not mean that Macmillan was set on a rapid
transfer of power or the swift imposition of African majority rule in
the Federation and East Africa. Quite the reverse. His immediate step
was to appoint Iain Macleod as the new Colonial Secretary in October
1959, perhaps chiefly because Macleod (who had no colonial experi-
ence at all) was free from any sentimental attachment to the colonial
‘cause’. Macleod was liberal-minded, courageous, intellectually tough,
ruthless, brusque and not infrequently disingenuous (whites in Cen-
tral Africa used a different word).
20
There is a pervasive myth (which
Macleod himself fostered) that he grasped from the outset the need
to withdraw quickly and hand over all power to African leaders. The
archival record lends this little support. What is certainly true is that
he saw the urgency from the British point of view of engaging African
politicians in a constitutional process that would head off ‘extremism’ –
the category in which he included Jomo Kenyatta
21
– and avert the
recourse to coercion. What he came to see by the end of his tenure
(Macmillan removed him in October 1961) was that, once the com-
mitment was made to majority rule as a goal, and an instalment of
power was conceded to African leaders, control was soon lost over the
pace and direction of political change. The coercion needed to reim-
pose imperial authority increased geometrically with each increment of
self-rule. And so did the odium of using it.
The first sign of this came in Tanganyika. Here Macleod had
proposed (in November 1959) a schedule for gradual advance from
partial self-government to reach full independence in 1968.
22
‘Having
yielded to [Nyerere’s] demand to have the major share of responsibility
622 / ‘The great liner is sinking’
we should be on much firmer ground in resisting further premature
changes’, he told his colleagues blithely.
23
It might even be necessary
to put off independence beyond 1968. Eight months later, when the
strength of Nyerere’s support was becoming more obvious, he told his
advisers that July 1962 would be a ‘reasonable’ date for Tanganyika’s
independence.
24
When Nyerere came to London in November 1960,
the Colonial Secretary insisted that Tanganyika’s advance would have
to keep step with progress towards an East African federation – still the
grand object of Britain’s regional policy. Tanganyika ‘would only reach
independence when the Federation became independent as a whole’.
25
Three months later, he abandoned this condition completely. Now
the goodwill of Nyerere and the Tanganyika African National Union
(TANU) had become indispensable. ‘His continuance in power is vital
to us in East Africa, and if independence by the end of December 1961
is essential to maintain his position, I am sure we should agree.’
26
It
was, and they did.
Much of Nyerere’s appeal to the British came from the care-
ful ‘moderation’ of his public pronouncements and the unchallenged
authority that he seemed to exert over a unified movement: good omens,
they thought, for holding the territory together and keeping the British
connection. In Uganda, the local material was a great deal less promis-
ing. The British stuck to their aim of making a strong central state and
bringing the kingdoms – especially Buganda – to heel. Direct elections
to a Uganda legislature would signal that this was where power now lay
and encourage ‘national’ politicians to rally a following.
27
The bait was
the promise of internal self-government, the prize that would go to the
leader who did best in the new electoral game. If the kabaka resisted,
Macleod told his colleagues, he might have to be replaced.
28
The old
Buganda elite, said the Colonial Office sternly, would have to like it or
lump it: it was the future.
29
But Buganda did neither. Instead, its lukiko
(or parliament) resolved to secede from the Uganda protectorate by
the end of the year, and there were ominous signs that violence would
follow. Meanwhile, the promised elections produced a clear winner:
Benedict Kiwanuka and the Democratic party which appealed partic-
ularly to Catholic Christians and especially to commoners in Buganda
itself. But Kiwanuka was anathema to the Buganda elite, and the tem-
perature rose. Another Nyasaland was perhaps in the making. So
London reversed course. A breakneck inquiry unveiled a new
scheme. Buganda was now to have ‘federal’ status, and the Buganda
623 / Reluctant retreat, 1959–1968
government, not the voters, would select its representatives in the
national parliament. Despite growing doubts over Uganda’s future
cohesion under such a regime, London accepted this formula.
30
To
sweeten the pill, Kiwanuka was promised internal self-government in
early 1962. But he was now an embarrassment and was duly denounced
by an incoming governor as a threat to stability.
31
His main polit-
ical rival, Milton Obote and his Uganda People’s Congress, seized
the chance that was offered. By allying with the kabaka, he pushed
Kiwanuka aside. The prize of self-rule was now to be his. London was
eager to make its escape. Its last precondition was more ‘federal’ auton-
omy for the smaller kingdoms along Bugandan lines before it conceded
the final transfer of power in October 1962.
The pace had been frantic. Despite much verbal camouflage,
this was not a planned march towards granting Uganda its nation-
hood, but a series of zigzags and u-turns, failures and fixes. From
late 1960 onwards, almost its sole rationale was to avert local vio-
lence and find an African leader with a plausible claim to hold Uganda
together. The rising chaos in the Congo, Uganda’s immediate neigh-
bour, made this all the more urgent. London did not fear confrontation
with Ugandan ‘nationalism’, for it scarcely existed. What it dreaded
was being sucked into a morass of anarchy or, still worse, civil war,
caused by (if anything) its own state-building policies. There was at
least the advantage that Uganda’s affairs attracted little outside atten-
tion. It was quite the opposite with Kenya. Here Macleod and Macmil-
lan could expect the closest possible scrutiny for the dispositions they
made: from those who championed the cause of the settlers; and those
who denounced the appeasement of ‘darkness and death’, the Kikuyu
‘extremism’ of which Jomo Kenyatta was still seen as leader. Macleod’s
own approach mixed opportunism with caution. Some months before
taking office, he had met Michael Blundell and was deeply attracted to
the ‘non-racial’ message of his New Kenya Group (of which Macleod’s
own younger brother, a farmer in Kenya, had become an adherent).
32
At the Lancaster House Conference in January 1960 (promised eight
months earlier by Macleod’s predecessor), his aim was not to propel
Kenya quickly towards independence (on which no promise was given),
but to build a coalition between Blundell’s supporters and ‘moderate’
Africans drawn in the main from outside the dominant Luo-Kikuyu
grouping.
33
Once again, the bait was a larger dose of self-government
(and the scope that would give to attract clients and followers). To
624 / ‘The great liner is sinking’
lend the African ‘moderates’ some much needed credibility, there was
a firm declaration that the goal in Kenya was no longer race parity
but majority rule. There were encouraging signs, reported Macleod in
May 1960, that there would be no ‘monolithic’ African party.
34
When
elections were held in early 1961, two African parties emerged: the
Kenya African National Union (KANU), led by Mboya and Oginga
Odinga with mainly Luo and Kikuyu support; and the Kenya African
Democratic Union (KADU), largely supported by minority tribes. ‘I am
delighted to read your excellent news showing firming up of support for
a KADU based government’, wrote Macleod to the governor in April.
‘If this comes off it will be wholly consistent with all our constitu-
tional hopes at Lancaster House.’
35
‘I want to emphasize’, he went on,
‘how much I welcome . . . a Government based primarily on KADU and
New Kenya Party, and very good chance there seems to be of leaving
Kenyatta behind.’
The ‘great prize’ in Kenya was an African government that was
ready to work with European interests, and soothe the fear of the settlers
that they would be robbed of their farms by land-hungry Africans. What
London hoped also was that a ‘moderate’ governing party would suck
supporters away from the KANU majority (KANU had won more of
the elective seats for Africans than KADU). The KADU ministers, said
Macleod, must be ‘backed to the hilt’ and internal self-government (and
by implication independence) brought forward.
36
This prospect soon
crumbled. The KADU leader Ngala was desperate for more power than
the governor would give him. To win over KANU supporters, he joined
in the call for Kenyatta’s release. But his ministers performed poorly
37
and his tribal coalition seemed more likely than KANU to pull apart
at the seams. There hung over all the threat of more violence (there
were 80,000 ex-detainees in Kenya, reported The Times
38
)ifKANU
were kept out of power. The governor’s efforts to foster a coalition
broke down. The British released Kenyatta in August, and by the end
of October he had become leader of KANU. But both London and the
British officials in Kenya remained deeply suspicious of his methods
and motives and convinced of his guilt as a prime mover in Mau Mau.
To escape from the deadlock (and avoid an emergency), there were
fanciful schemes for a federal Kenya. London clung to the dream of an
East African federation to dilute Kenya’s ethnic and racial divisions. A
new constitutional conference was to be convened in the spring. Before