Darwin J. The Empire Project. The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830-1970

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625 / Reluctant retreat, 1959–1968

it met, a new Colonial Secretary, Reginald Maudling, confronted his

colleagues with some unpalatable truths.

The object of the conference, he told them bluntly, was to pave

the way for independence, strewn as it was with many difﬁculties and

dangers. ‘It is not possible for us, even if we wished, to secure the

continuance of European political power in Kenya . . . Arithmetic and

African nationalism are against this. The best we can hope to achieve

is the orderly transfer of power so a securely-based and

African-dominated Government which is genuinely anxious

to see Kenya develop as a modern state to avoid chaos, civil

war and a relapse into tribalism . . . Nor is it likely that we

shall see in Kenya a Government which is actively

pro-Western in its foreign policy. The most we can expect is

one which is not committed to either side in the East–West

struggle and one which . . . does not offer too many

opportunities for exploitation and penetration by the

Communist powers.

‘Over everything broods the threat of Mau Mau, the inﬂu-

ence of the ex-detainees in [KANU] and the persistence of personal

violence.’

London still schemed to engineer a split within KANU to

isolate Kenyatta and the ‘men of violence and communist contacts’.

But the hope was forlorn. A new constitution promised universal suf-

frage and internal self-government but without producing agreement

between the Kenya politicians or assuaging the fears of minority tribes

and European settlers. But as Maudling had hinted, the initiative now

lay with the leaders of KANU, and in fact with Kenyatta. It was Keny-

atta’s command over his quarrelsome colleagues that procured at long

last in October 1963 a settlement that satisﬁed the minority tribes and

lifted the threat of a communal war. With a huge sigh of relief, London

completed the transfer of power before the end of the year.

Just as they found in Tanganyika and Uganda, the British dis-

covered in Kenya that the offer of internal self-government was a run-

away train that refused to stop at the stations they built or to pick up

the passengers they meant it to carry. What made Kenya so stressful

was the threat of extreme violence and the vulnerable position of the

European settlers whose fate was bound to arouse close attention at

626 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

home. From late 1961 onwards (and perhaps even earlier), the British

were no longer in power in Kenya. They had become brokers. They

lacked the will to repress a fresh insurrection and dreaded an outbreak

before they withdrew. The highest card in their hand was Kenyatta’s

reluctance to risk civil war, and his hope of attaining an agreed inde-

pendence and the constitutional legitimacy that was in London’s gift.

It proved just enough.

It was, however, in Central and Southern Africa that the British

had most to lose. This was where the bulk of their economic interests

lay. Here, in the Rhodesias and South Africa, there were together per-

haps some 1.5 million people of British stock and sympathies, as well as

a long connection with African elites who (in varying degrees) admired

British institutions and values. The British government’s diplomatic

representative in South Africa was also a proconsul who supervised the

so-called ‘High Commission Territories’ (today’s Botswana, Lesotho

and Swaziland) that London refused to hand over to the white-ruled

Union. Of the Central African Federation’s three territorial units, two

remained for most purposes (including law and order) under White-

hall’s control and that of its men on the spot. Despite some reservations

about how the Afrikaner Nationalist government in Pretoria might

behave in a world crisis, it was assumed that both South Africa and

the new Federation would be Britain’s regional allies, and provide the

critical link (both air and sea) between Britain itself and its partners

and interests in Southeast Asia and the South Paciﬁc. Like Australia

and New Zealand, they would go on being part of what had once been

called the ‘Southern British World’. But, between the late 1950sand

the mid-1960s, this quasi-imperial connection vanished almost com-

pletely. The long British ‘moment’ in South-Central Africa ended. Its

post-imperial ‘relic’ – the rebel white colony of (Southern) Rhodesia –

was a galling reminder of how far and how fast Britain’s power in the

region had fallen.

The onset of crisis had been signalled (as Macmillan and his

ministers were already aware) by the Nyasaland Emergency. It drove

home the lesson that rule by coercion had gone up sharply in price –

locally, internationally and in domestic politics as well. But the strife

in Nyasaland had another dimension. It turned the future of the Fed-

eration into an urgent and highly controversial matter. London was

already committed to ‘review’ the question of the Federation’s inde-

pendence (the long-standing demand of its white settler leaders) in

627 / Reluctant retreat, 1959–1968

1960: it was this that provoked the Nyasaland protest. Now it had to

decide how to conduct that review in light of the ﬁndings of the Devlin

Report: that African hostility to the Federation was total, and could

only be stemmed by rule based on force. To make matters worse, any

concession that was made to the Nyasaland Africans, perhaps a louder

voice in the protectorate’s affairs, could not be withheld (or not very

easily) from the African majority in Northern Rhodesia, where anti-

Federation feeling was almost as strong. But, if doubt were cast on the

adherence of Northern Rhodesia – with its mineral wealth and sub-

stantial white population of some 70,000 – the Federation was as good

as dead.

It is sometimes suggested that, by late 1959, Macmillan and

Macleod had decided to ditch federation as a useless encumbrance and

push ahead as fast as they could with majority rule in the two northern

protectorates. Two schools of thought converge on this judgment: those

who believe that the Federation was betrayed by these two Machiavellis;

and those who admire their ‘realistic’ appraisal that African nationalism

was an unstoppable force. But though the archive reveals much double-

talk and evasion, it stops well short of supporting this view. Nor is

this surprising. Between 1959 and 1961, the British had good reasons

not to want its demise: by 1962, perhaps, they had given up hope.

Whatever its defects as a parliamentary democracy, the Federation was

a bulwark of Western interests and inﬂuence with its own air force and

army. ‘We should surely lean towards [Welensky] as far as is possible

without compromising the discharge of our responsibilities towards the

black peoples’, wrote one of the prime minister’s closest aides with this

fact in mind towards the end of 1958.

The African leaders were an

unknown quantity, and, when Macleod met Hastings Banda in April

1960, his account was derisive. ‘He is a very vain and ignorant man’,

he told Macmillan.

Nyasaland was impoverished, but entrusting the

Copperbelt to an untried African government was a different matter

entirely. Thirdly, if the Federation were demolished, the commercial

and political links between its three units might break up completely,

setting back the whole region’s economic development and its hopes

of stability. Fourthly, there was a practical question: it had not been

easy to make the Federation: to pull it apart meant crossing a legal,

constitutional and political mineﬁeld, with the prospect of ambush by

the well-organised lobby of the Federation’s British supporters. Last,

and by no means least, if London threw the Federation over the side,

628 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

what remained of its inﬂuence with the whites in South Africa would

likely go with it. There is much to suggest that Macmillan himself was

deeply mindful of this.

Yet, if the Federation was to continue, a decision on its future

could not be delayed. Amongst white settler opinion (which looked

enviously south at white South African ‘freedom’) there was a furious

impatience to achieve the full independence already given or promised

to the West African colonies. Most whites regarded the colonial admin-

istrations in the two northern protectorates as archaic survivals, under-

mining the inﬂuence of the federal government and encouraging African

hopes of its eventual destruction. Without swift independence from

London, it might be too late to check what they thought of as ‘extreme’

African nationalism sweeping down from the north. In Southern Rhode-

sia, where the whites already enjoyed almost complete independence,

a powerful body disliked federation as a ball and chain holding them

back from gaining full sovereignty. In April 1959, at the same time as

they set up the Devlin enquiry, the Macmillan government extracted

the grudging agreement of Sir Roy Welensky, the federal prime min-

ister, to an ‘advisory commission’ to make recommendations on the

Federation’s future and (implicitly) on its prospects of independence.

It was the only way, Macmillan insisted, to remove the issue from the

party arena at home, and dampen the furore set off by the Central

African emergencies.

‘We are your staunch friends’, he told Welen-

sky, ‘and are with you on convincing the world that your Federation is

a splendid conception with a great and honourable future.’

When he

met the Federal ministers during his African tour in January–February

1960, Macmillan repeated the argument that the commission would

allow the Federation’s virtues to be properly seen; its dissolution, he

said, would be a disaster.

But it was during his visit that Macmillan

revealed that London intended to release Hastings Banda, regarded in

Salisbury as the evil genius behind all African opposition.

Even in hindsight, decoding British intentions is far from

straightforward despite the abundance of documentation that is now

available. This is partly because there were sharp divisions in Whitehall,

inside the Conservative party and within the Cabinet. The Federation’s

future became a political battleground that brieﬂy threatened to divide

the Conservatives as much as the question of India had done in the

1930s. Macmillan was anxious not to enrage the party’s powerful right

wing, where sympathy for a white-ruled federation was still deeply

629 / Reluctant retreat, 1959–1968

entrenched. He was also afraid of the Federation’s becoming a party

political issue, exposing him to Labour and Liberal attack. Despite his

warm words to Welensky, he wanted to keep a distance between them,

to keep up the pressure for political change, and uphold Britain’s claim

to stand for the progressive extension of African political rights. To

keep all these balls in the air, Macmillan deployed a highly ﬂexible

language, at once evasive and cloying. However, Banda’s release was

a critical moment. Macleod as Colonial Secretary insisted that Banda

must be set free in time to give evidence to the Monckton Advisory

Commission. After furious arguments with the Nyasaland government

and the Federal ministers, as well as within Whitehall, Macleod’s will

prevailed (he had threatened resignation). But his motive was not simply

to speed Nyasaland on its way to a separate independence. Macleod was

convinced that he could separate Banda from his extremist lieutenants.

‘The hard core does NOT include Banda’, he told Macmillan.

Banda,

he thought, would accept the need to keep Nyasaland calm. He might

even be willing to give up his opposition to federation.

To help to per-

suade him, Macleod proposed a reform of the Nyasaland constitution

that would give the appearance of an African majority in its legislature –

a cautious reform that even Welensky was prepared to approve.

For

Northern Rhodesia, he favoured a similar tactic, although here he ran

foul of the settler politicians who already enjoyed considerable power

and were ﬁercely opposed to even the shadow of majority rule. Macleod

continued to regard federation as the best solution – the view he had

held in December 1959.

‘If we were left to ourselves’, he wrote to

Macmillan, ‘we could make a success of Federation as I am sure it will

be re-deﬁned by Walter Monckton . . . But I am very much afraid that

[Welensky’s] United Federal Party think of Federation and of their own

Party as one and the same thing, and will in the end be too stubborn

for our efforts.’

So far as London had a coherent aim, it was to try to manoeu-

vre towards a ‘reformed’ federation that would command the assent

of ‘moderate’ whites and blacks. This was what the Monckton Com-

mission was meant to promote. Its report acknowledged the ‘almost

pathological’ dislike of the African majority towards the Federation.

But it also insisted that the multiracial partnership it was meant to

embody was too important to fail. The solution lay in devolving most

powers except external affairs, defence, and general economic policy

to three territorial governments; conceding black majority rule to the

630 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

northern protectorates; and instigating a drastic liberalisation of South-

ern Rhodesia’s discriminatory laws. But it was heavy political going.

The Federal Review Conference in December 1960, attended by most

of the main Central African parties, black and white, quickly broke

down. The following year, London forced through a new constitution

for Northern Rhodesia designed with intricate care to yield the appear-

ance of a black majority but deny it real power except in alliance with

moderate whites, in effect the ‘ofﬁcials’ nominated by the governor.

Meanwhile, in Southern Rhodesia, the mainly white electorate agreed

to a change that would create ﬁfteen African seats in a parliament of

sixty-ﬁve, with the prospect of more as the number of Africans quali-

fying to vote (on an education and property franchise) grew larger.

(In return, London gave up its reserve powers over local legislation

that applied to Africans only.) But these were deceptive successes. The

reality was that, after mid-1961, the British lost almost all power to

reshape Central Africa’s politics.

There were several reasons for this. There was almost no chance

of persuading most whites that a federation based on black majority

rule in two of its three units was anything other than a reckless experi-

ment that was certain to fail. Any doubts on this score were erased most

of all by the violent chaos in the Congo, whose sudden independence

in June 1960 was rapidly followed by an army mutiny, a massacre of

whites and the collapse of central authority. The ﬂood of white refugees

that passed through federal territory was seen as a portent of the Rhode-

sias’ fate if white power were surrendered. But it was equally true that

few blacks were willing to accept a federal system in which whites

retained any real power. The Federation was too deeply identiﬁed with

white control of the land, with the privileges of white labour (in the

heavily unionised Copperbelt), with restricted opportunities for literate

blacks (in public services) and the undermining of traditional author-

ity in the countryside. African leaders who took the federal shilling

were dismissed as stooges. Instead, in Nyasaland and Northern Rhode-

sia, political movements that opposed federation exploited the end of

emergency rule to mobilise mass followings of daunting size. The com-

promise constitution for Northern Rhodesia announced in June 1961

was denounced by UNIP, the United National Independence Party led

by Kenneth Kaunda (the son of the ﬁrst African missionary in Northern

Rhodesia), and greeted by a wave of increasingly violent disturbances.

This was the test of London’s commitment to a revised federation. But

631 / Reluctant retreat, 1959–1968

the prospect of being drawn into a new Central African emergency had

even less charm in August 1961 than two years before. London had its

hands full with the defence of Kuwait (against the threat of an Iraqi

invasion). It had little faith that its colonial authorities could police the

Copperbelt townships and regain control of the countryside from the

African leaders. In December 1961, the June constitution was scrapped;

the following March saw a modiﬁed version with a clear black majority.

By the end of the year, elections in Northern and Southern Rhodesia

had produced black and white governments who demanded secession.

It only remained to divide up the spoils. The Federation had lasted ten

years.

‘One’s ﬁnal impression is that the future of the Federation will

depend . . . on an act of will’, wrote one of Macmillan’s closest aides

during a visit to the Federation in October 1959. ‘We must say –

loudly, clearly, convincingly and repeatedly – that we intend it shall

survive and succeed; and we must do something – something simple and

striking – to show that we mean what we say.’

But, by late 1960,the

price of ‘something simple and striking’ had risen too high. ‘The Prime

Minister and Colonial Secretary then said that they did not want an

Algeria. That was the crux of the matter’, noted Macmillan’s private

secretary in November 1960.

The diplomatic, military and political

cost of an ‘act of will’ was now too great. London lacked the means

to coerce white-ruled Southern Rhodesia or the African movements

in the two protectorates. Military intervention had been discussed in

June 1961 when London had feared that Welensky might take control

of Northern Rhodesia by force. It was ruled out as impracticable.

The independence of Northern Rhodesia (as Zambia) and Nyasaland

(as Malawi) may have been a release. But the Federation’s collapse

was still a disaster for Britain. It left behind the insoluble problem of

Southern Rhodesia. By that time, of course, Macmillan’s fond hopes

of preserving British inﬂuence in the rest of Southern Africa – the aim

of his visit to South Africa in January 1960, and of the appeal con-

tained in his famous ‘Wind of Change’ speech to the South African

Parliament – were also in ruins. In 1961, South Africa became a repub-

lic: in political terms an isolationist move. When it sought ‘readmis-

sion’ to the Commonwealth (as convention required), there was ﬁerce

opposition from its Asian and African members. Macmillan’s desper-

ate efforts to ﬁnd a compromise formula won little support and the

South Africans withdrew in May 1961. What remained of the tense

632 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

and uneasy ‘special relationship’ between London and Pretoria quickly

evaporated.

Designs and defeats

In Africa, as in the Middle East, the British had found that in giving

up their authority they had also surrendered their inﬂuence. As the

continent was drawn into the global Cold War, the limits of British

capacity – ideological and material – became more and more glaring.

The presumption that a self-governing Africa would remain a huge

sphere where British inﬂuence was preponderant had ceased to be cred-

ible by the end of 1963. By that time, London was hustling its remaining

dependencies towards the threshold of sovereignty as fast as it could:

in the Caribbean via the failed experiment of a West Indies Federation.

It had scrambled out of Cyprus in 1960, clutching its ‘sovereign base

areas’ after a long guerrilla struggle from which no exit seemed likely

and which was tying down some 27,000 troops. The settlement that

allowed the British to leave was framed not in Whitehall but between

Greece and Turkey at Zurich, and sprang from their fear of a communal

conﬂict between Greek and Turkish Cypriots.

The biggest commit-

ments to which London was still tied lay on the maritime edge of the

Arab Middle East (in the protectorates and trucial states of the Persian

Gulf and in South Arabia and Aden) and in Southeast Asia. Here the

British hoped to secure the future of successor states where they still

had interests in oil, investment and trade. Strategically, they could be

viewed as a remnant of the Anglo-Australian connection, long seen in

London as a valuable adjunct to Britain’s world status. But, by 1963,

both were becoming much more costly and burdensome.

If by that date they were beginning to look like the redundant

accessories of a now bankrupt enterprise, the change had been sudden.

In the late 1950s it still seemed just possible that British world power

would gain a new lease of life. The architect of this last, neo-imperial

phase was Harold Macmillan. Macmillan had become prime minister

in January 1957 in succession to Eden partly because he seemed more

deeply imbued with the Churchillian ethos of British great power than

his main rival, R. A. Butler, a doubter over Suez. Indeed, throughout his

six-year premiership, he dominated British foreign policy as completely

as Churchill, his model in this as in other respects. Macmillan set out

633 / Reluctant retreat, 1959–1968

to exude a breezy self-conﬁdence and dispel the gloom and division

that followed Eden’s catastrophe. His immediate aim was to repair the

damage Suez had done to Anglo-American relations and rebuild the

personal friendships shattered by Eden’s bitter quarrel with Dulles, the

American Secretary of State, and his ‘breach of faith’ with Eisenhower.

He was also keen to smooth over the angry reaction to Suez in parts

of the Commonwealth, and embarked on a tour of Commonwealth

capitals. As Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time of Suez, Macmil-

lan had had a harsh education in the weakness of sterling. Well before

the crisis broke, he had mused on the perils of a long confrontation.

‘It is absolutely vital to humiliate Nasser . . . We must do it quickly or

our M[iddle] East friends . . . will fall. We must do it quickly, or we

shall ourselves be ruined.’

Macmillan was keen to restore sterling’s

status as an international reserve currency by making the pound freely

convertible. To strengthen the export economy, he pressed on with the

struggle to cut defence spending (‘It is defence expenditure that has bro-

ken our backs’, he had told Eden in March 1956),

and the demands it

imposed on the wider economy, not least through conscription. He was

anxious to reassert Britain’s authority in Europe – the aim behind ‘Plan

G’ whose formulation had coincided with the intense preoccupation

with Suez in late 1956. ‘The inner balance of Europe is essential to the

balance of world power’, he declared as an axiom in March 1953.

Finally, Macmillan turned a critical eye on the vast tail of dependencies

that Britain still dragged in its wake. It is easy to exaggerate both the

degree of Macmillan’s detachment from the old ‘colonial mission’ and

the coherence of his ideas about proﬁt and loss on the colonial account.

But there is little doubt that he saw (or soon began to see) that too little

progress towards colonial self-rule would be a huge hostage to fortune

as the scope of East–West competition grew wider. For that was the

prism through which he now came to view the future of British world

power.

From this list of intentions, we can infer the rudiments of a

larger ‘plan’. Macmillan was anxious to stabilise Britain’s external posi-

tion and thought he could do so. In the phase of geopolitical rivalry that

he saw opening up, the search for inﬂuence in the ‘uncommitted’ world

had become the vital arena. Here Britain enjoyed a major advantage

if its Commonwealth and colonial ‘assets’ could be sensibly managed.

Its role as the co-architect of the West’s world policy would become

more important. Its claim to special status within the Western alliance

634 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

would be enhanced. The imperial ‘legacy’, artfully repackaged as the

great work of nation-building, could be turned to account at home and

abroad. The Conservatives’ appeal as the party of ‘greatness’, badly

damaged by Suez, could be resurrected and its disgruntled ‘imperial-

ists’ reconciled. Meanwhile, economic expansion, low unemployment

and the widening of ‘afﬂuence’ would heal the scars of depression and

reposition Conservatism in domestic politics. As the champion of the

welfare state and of a ‘property-owning democracy’, its electoral posi-

tion would be hard to assail. With its home base secure, a Conservative

government could avoid the disasters to which (so it seemed) the French

had succumbed. It could reject both imperial intransigence (of the kind

that had trapped the French in Algeria) and a headlong retreat into an

inward-looking Europe (the gross defect of the EEC project). It was

a seductive vision and Macmillan (for all his mask of worldly-wise

cynicism) was a man less of vision than of visions.

At ﬁrst, things went well. Macmillan quickly restored good rela-

tions with Eisenhower with whom he maintained a close and frequent

correspondence.

At the conference in Washington in October 1957,

he scored two hugely gratifying successes. The Americans withdrew

the restriction on the sharing of nuclear knowledge in force since the

McMahon Act in 1946. Eisenhower agreed to a ‘Declaration of Com-

mon Purpose’ which proclaimed the principles of inter-dependence and

partnership, the combining of resources and the sharing of tasks, as the

bases of Anglo-American relations – a ‘declaration of inter-dependence’

as Macmillan described it to an admiring Cabinet.

Touring the Com-

monwealth was a deﬁnite signal that Britain’s role as its ‘leader’ was

taken seriously in London, and gave Macmillan the chance to exert his

personal inﬂuence on its most prominent ﬁgures. The formal transfers of

power in Ghana and Malaya in 1957 passed off smoothly, and the joint

Anglo-American intervention in Lebanon and Jordan in 1958 softened

the blow of the Iraq revolution which erased (literally) Britain’s most

powerful friends in the Arab world. The defence white paper of 1957,

marking a shift to missile-based deterrence, promised large savings in

manpower and money, lifting the burden on the civilian economy. The

dash to convertibility at the end of 1958 heralded the transition from the

post-war ‘siege economy’ towards Britain’s (and London’s) old place

as a pivot of the global economy.

But, as Macmillan himself periodically sensed, the material

base for his grand superstructure was dangerously fragile and liable