After Tamerlane (70 page)

Ironically, then, while the old colonial powers were struggling to hang on in Asia, they thought in Africa that they had time to play with. Bureaucratic blueprints for the transfer of power in the indefinite future and after a series of stages (like a dunce's progress from the first form to the sixth) flowed from the pens of colonial planners. The real imperative was the urgent need to make the colonies produce: cocoa, vegetable oil, cotton, sisal, tobacco, copper, gold, uranium, cobalt, asbestos and aluminium. Dollar shortage and Cold War tension turned Africa from the derelict of the inter-war years into Europe's Aladdin's cave. The ‘nightwatchman' state, which let sleeping dogs lie, had to be made into the ‘developmental' state, which interfered everywhere. White settler communities in East and Central Africa, typically regarded by pre-war colonial officials as a redundant nuisance, had nowto be petted and their expansion encouraged. In colonial West Africa, where there were no white settlers, colonial administrators looked for support to the educated elite of the coastal towns. Coldly regarded before the war, they were now to help energize the drive for growth. With curious optimism, more romantic than rational, the makers of policy in London and Paris assumed that the promise of ultimate self-government would soothe the irritation of a much more intrusive colonial presence and lay the foundations of
‘Eurafrican' partnership when colonial rule was eventually relinquished.

What they failed to allowfor was the rickety condition of the colonial state. Across much of Africa, it had always been feeble. In the age of partition and conquest before 1914, it sought little more than a rough colonial pax and relied on settlers and concession-holders to create a taxable revenue. In the inter-war years, the prevailing dogma of indirect rule (based on fear of destabilizing ‘traditional' African society) and depression-hit revenues favoured a shoestring regime that delegated power to so-called ‘native authorities' at the local level. More perceptive governors were all too aware that, without a change of direction, it would get harder and harder to hold their colonies together or to win general assent for any central initiative.
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It was only the war (with its demand for more action and spending) and its aftermath that made reform seem urgent. But what the policymakers intended as a consensual advance towards a louder African voice and a more proactive state held a different meaning for African opinion. Amid post-war austerity, colonial governments had to regulate prices, hold down wages, quash labour unrest, and limit local consumption. They had to force through improvements in agricultural practice – like cattle-dipping, anti-erosion measures and burning diseased cocoa trees – that aroused intense animosity and relied on compulsion. With the swarm of alien experts and (in some places) newsettlers, colonial Africa experienced what some historians have called its ‘second colonial occupation'.
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It was hardly surprising that this sudden spasm of activity by the colonial regime provoked suspicion and resistance. Within a short space of time, colonial governments had to choose between two alternative courses. They could devolve more quickly to African leaders and try to win the state more popular backing (the option pursued by the British in Ghana after the 1948 disturbances). Or they could turn instead to a regime of repression, in the hope that forceful action would discourage ‘extremism' (the term reserved for those who refused to cooperate with colonial governments) and refill the ranks of those (called ‘moderates') who were willing to accept a leisurely timetable of political change and an indefinite period before African majority rule.
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The first preference of governments in London and Paris (and even
in Brussels), once the scale of African resentment was clear, was to avoid confrontation and strike a newbargain with African leaders. But in Kenya and Central Africa this solution was barred by the vocal presence of white settler communities. When settlers became a target for African attack in Kenya (though very fewindeed were actually murdered), the demand for an ‘emergency' became irresistible. The result was to unleash a huge cycle of violence. For in Kenya the ‘Mau Mau' insurgency among the Kikuyu people was fuelled as much by resentment against fellowKikuyu as by hatred of settlers. Economic change had allowed many Kikuyu notables and their followers to increase their wealth at the expense of the poor – the landless or less well connected. Older notions of a ‘moral economy' and social reciprocity had broken down.
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When the settler panic jerked the colonial state into repression, it turned these tensions into a social war, as ‘loyal' chiefs harried those suspected of Mau Mau sympathies, and these reacted in kind or fled to the forests, the base for guerrilla war. The back of Mau Mau resistance was broken by 1956. But even in Kenya, the cost of a prolonged security operation, the need to rally African communities to the government side, and embarrassment over the atrocities and brutalities of the repression apparatus (especially the camps where Mau Mau suspects were ‘rehabilitated')
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had made devolution unavoidable by 1960. By that date, indeed, independence under governments chosen and led by Africans had become the accepted policy of all the colonial powers, with the exception of Portugal. But what they hoped and intended was to control the timetable of change, to install ‘moderate' regimes with whom relations would be cordial, and to maintain close supervision over the foreign relations and internal development of the ex-colonial territories. Since sub-Saharan Africa still seemed an international backwater, remote from the front line of cold war, they thought they had time in hand for a post-colonial transition.

This illusion was shattered by the crisis in the Congo. The Belgian government had granted independence in June 1960 on the premise of minimal change in its role and influence in the Congo's affairs.
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It was a catastrophic misjudgement. Within a matter of days the army had mutinied, spreading panic and terror among the large expatriate community. The charismatic newpremier, Patrice Lumumba, rejected
a close post-colonial partnership. The mineral-rich provinces of South Kasai and Katanga seceded unilaterally from the newCongo republic, in Katanga's case with the connivance of Brussels, perhaps with the aim of destroying Lumumba. By August 1960 Lumumba had appealed for aid to the Soviet Union, and Soviet arms and personnel began to arrive on the scene. A United Nations force of 10,000 men was sent to hold the country together. But, with the rise of new separatist regimes, the escalation of violence as rival armies battled for control, the murder of Lumumba by Katangan (and perhaps Belgian) soldiers,
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and international differences over the purpose of the UN force, the country portrayed only three years before as a model colony had become the ‘Congo disaster'.
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Although a semblance of order had returned by 1964–5, the Congo's tragedy transformed the meaning of decolonization in Africa. It revealed the unexpected hazard of a Cold War competition between East and West for African allegiance. It confirmed the wisdom (as it seemed in London) of an early withdrawal from Britain's remaining colonial burdens in East and Central Africa before they were afflicted by the contagion of disorder. And, most decisively of all, it entrenched the suspicion of whites south of the Zambezi that anarchy and barbarism were the inevitable product of concession to African nationalists. As progress towards complete independence became more and more hectic in the rest of Africa (even Algeria, despite its million ‘
pieds-noirs
' – white settlers – had thrown off French rule in 1962), in the ‘southern third' white control tightened to form a solid bloc that also included the Portuguese colonies in Angola and Mozambique. Here was a new and peculiar ‘partition' of Africa.

As much as in the Middle East or the rest of Asia, decolonization in Africa was not a clean break with the imperial past, or a ticket of entry into a ‘world of nations'. The new African states inherited the weaknesses of their colonial forerunners – into whose shoes they had stepped after the briefest transition. Regional or local ethnicity was much stronger than nationalism. Building national identities without common vernacular languages presented an enormous challenge. The ‘tribal' legacy of colonial rule was deeply embedded: indeed, in many parts of Africa, creating newforms of ‘tribal' ethnicity was the usual means of adjusting to the larger scale of economic and social life.
Meanwhile, the pressure to expand the state's role was acute, whether in social services or economic development. The imperative need for any newregime was to find external sources of financial and often military aid, before it lost its claim on the loyalty of its followers.
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It was a scene ready-made for the growth of external influence in a novel post-colonial form. If the world's greatest powers had a motive to do so, the means to build newempires of influence lay all around.

Decolonization is best understood as the dissolution of the distinctive global order – geopolitical, legal, economic, cultural and demographic

– that had made an appearance by the 1840s, was consolidated in the 1890s, and staggered on into the 1940s and '50s where conditions still favoured its survival. The ability of the surviving colonial powers to preserve this old imperial system faded rapidly after 1945. That, as we have seen, was one key element of the new post-war international landscape. The other, just as critical, was the bloody collapse of the war imperialisms of the Nazis and Japan. It was the near simultaneous fall of both these imperial regimes – the ‘old colonial' and the ‘new imperialist' – that cleared a space for the emergence of new world empires, with newideologies, newmethods, and newaims and objects.

Even so, the breakneck expansion of American power was somewhat surprising. Accepting obligations outside the North American continent or Central America had always been contentious in American opinion. Fear of foreign entanglements ran very deep. American freedom was widely thought to derive from a deliberate rejection of the atavistic mentality and warlike spirit of a decadent Old World, and to be gravely threatened by too much contact with it. The American political system seemed poorly equipped for the formulation and conduct of foreign policy, the continuity of which was easily wrecked on the shoals of domestic controversy. American attitudes tended to be strongly unilateralist, scorning the need for the coalitions and compromises that were part and parcel of an active diplomacy. They were powerfully reinforced by the legalist tradition that viewed external relations as something best regulated by judicial decision and
solemn binding agreements.
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By contrast, diplomacy in the European mode – the opportunistic pursuit of the national interest – appeared cynical, self-destructive and futile. These traits had contributed to the notorious American refusal to join the League of Nations or to cooperate in the containment of Nazi expansion before 1939. Yet after 1945 American governments assumed huge newburdens all around the world, and wove a web of alliances to help in their upkeep. What had changed?

Two factors transformed the American outlook. The first was the extraordinary gap that had opened up between America's material strength and that of any other state. In 1950, five years after the war, the American economy produced twice as much as the economies of Britain, France and Germany combined (compared with a rough equality in 1913).
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This economic advantage was dramatically reinforced by the possession of nuclear technology and the unique capacity to deploy atomic weapons. By themselves, perhaps, these newsources of power might have promoted an even more isolationist mood than in the inter-war years. But they were coupled with awareness that the defensive perimeter of America's safety had been hugely extended by advances in air transport and the need to manage the international economy to avoid a post-war depression. ‘Fortress America' was no longer invulnerable. Instead, American leaders now enjoyed the margin of power to make alliances on terms that secured American primacy. The fear of returning to the strategic nightmare of 1941–2 gave them the motive to do so.

The result was the creation of an American ‘system' imperial in all but name. In 1946 plans were laid for a naval command in the Mediterranean. In 1947 the Truman Doctrine promised military help to Turkey and Greece against Soviet pressure, and Marshall Aid pledged the means to restore the battered West European economies. In early 194 8 Washington signalled its readiness to negotiate an Atlantic pact that would commit it to the defence of Western Europe, and the Vandenberg Resolution gave the Senate's blessing. In April 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty was signed, and two years later American troops were deployed for the landward defence of Western Europe. There were parallel commitments in Canada (over which ran the shortest air route to the Soviet Union) and East Asia, where the mutual
security pact with Japan was signed in 1951. By that year, in fact, the system's main elements had been put in place. It was not symmetrical. It comprised a close alliance with Britain, the key European member of the North Atlantic pact, and a defensive partnership with the other West European states. West Germany (whose army was under effective American command) and Japan (where America enjoyed far-reaching extraterritorial rights) were semi-protectorates. The Philippines (technically independent from 1946) granted America control over some twenty-three bases, and undertook not to grant them to anyone else without American agreement; it was a real (if not nominal) protectorate.
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Micronesia was retained under Washington's direct supervision for the sake of its bases, especially Guam, America's fortress in the western Pacific, guarding its route to Japan and the Philippines.
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We could add to this list America's vast sphere of ‘informal empire' in Latin America, where the war had brought the final extinction of Britain's commercial presence. The Rio treaty of 1947 (the ‘Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance') provided for military aid from the United States against both armed attack and other forms of aggression (code for Communist ‘subversion') towards the Latin American states. In the 1950s only three Latin American governments maintained diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.