The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (101 page)

These men were prominent in a growing class of professional politicians with whom the British administration could collaborate. Old allies from among Africa’s old ruling class were discreetly put on one side, a change which some resented. ‘Right thinking people’, complained a Yoruba chief, ‘are beginning to feel that the arrogance of the British administrator is preferable to the exploitation of our national leaders.’
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His apprehension was understandable, for Africa’s politicians were beginning to see themselves as governments-in-waiting and, as deadlines for independence came closer, were treated as such by colonial bureaucrats and British ministers.

In tone and behaviour, African politics closely resembled those of prein-dependence India, and Egypt during its struggle against Britain. African political movements tended to focus on a single charismatic figure, the leader of a monolithic, well-disciplined party which claimed to speak for the entire nation. The chants and responses of the mission churches were adapted to create a nationalist liturgy, which would be recited at mass political rallies. From Kenya came:

‘Uhuru!’ [Freedom]

‘Uhuru!’

‘Uhuru na umoga!’ [Freedom and unity]

‘Uhuru na KANU!’ [Freedom and the Kenyan African National Union]

‘Uhuru na KANU!’

‘Uhuru na Kenyatta!’ [Freedom and Kenyatta]

‘Uhuru na Kenyatta!’

These forms of mass persuasion were needed to give Africans a sense of power and confidence in themselves. Tom Mboya recalled how in 1952 his father and tribal elders had advised him to steer clear of politics: ‘We can never compete with the European. After all, he has aeroplanes, he flies about while we walk on foot. He has cars and guns.’
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And yet within five years Ghana had gained independence, and for a time became the powerhouse for African nationalism. In 1958 Accra was host to the first All-African Peoples Conference which called for the liberation of the whole continent from imperial rule.

For the British government it was not a question of whether the African empire would be dissolved, but when and how. The process had been relatively easy in Ghana, and afterwards with the other West African colonies for they had wholly black populations. In East and Central Africa the situation was complicated by the presence of white settlers, largely of British stock, who looked upon themselves as the economic backbone of their colonies and had grown accustomed to lording it over the blacks. In Southern Rhodesia the whites had had a measure of self-government since 1923, but in Kenya the Colonial Office had deliberately blocked any attempt by the colonists to acquire political paramountcy.

Any residual belief that the white settlers in Kenya might go it alone was shattered by the Mau Mau uprising which started in 1952. It was a peasant
jacquerie,
confined to the Kikuyu, and randomly directed against all things European. Mau Mau was a cabalistic union whose members were bound together by oaths, sworn to the accompaniment of horrific sexual rituals. Most of Mau Mau’s victims were Kikuyu who were suspected of collaboration with the colonial authorities. These reacted by declaring a state of emergency, and by December 1953 over 150,000 Mau Mau suspects were in detention centres, 12,000 had been convicted of membership and 150 hanged. The war was savage and one-sided; between November 1952 and April 1953, 430 prisoners had been shot dead while attempting to escape, and there were cases of others being tortured.
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Mau Mau had brought about a civil war among the Kikuyu, the majority of whom sided with the British, who held all the trump cards. Their enemies possessed few firearms and were nowhere near strong enough to engage the colonial forces on equal terms. Very few settlers were killed by the Mau Mau, but its psychological effect was enormous, reminding them of their smallness in numbers and isolation. Mau Mau was the ultimate white man’s nightmare whose ingredients were images of a dark, impenetrable Africa of witchcraft and fear of sudden attack by crazed tribesmen armed with pangas and spears. But Kenya’s whites, after some nail-biting moments, were able to sleep in peace thanks to British-trained askaris (who did the brunt of the police work), regular soldiers, national servicemen, and aircraft. By 1956, all but a handful of guerrillas had been tracked down, and the rest were either dead or incarcerated in camps, where they underwent a form of brainwashing designed to release them from the magic of their oaths.

For all its nihilism, Mau Mau briefly caught the imagination of other Africans. ‘We want Mau Mau here; we want to kill Europeans because we are tired of them,’ shouted one African at a political meeting at Lusaka, Northern Rhodesia, in April 1953.
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The police intelligence officer who took down his words also noted that Harry Nkumbula (London School of Economics, 1946–50), the president of the Northern Rhodesia African National Congress, urged his listeners to wage war with words.

The struggle in Northern Rhodesia was against the Central African Federation. This hybrid had been foisted on the Labour government in 1951 by tidy-minded Colonial Office officials, who believed that it would solve the future economic and political problems of Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. It was a shotgun marriage which forced cohabitation between two crown colonies, with tiny white minorities, and white-dominated Southern Rhodesia. At its birth in 1953, the proportion of white to black in the Central African Federation was 1 to 66. Most of the former lived in Southern Rhodesia where there were 220,000 to 3.5 million Africans. Blacks had no faith whatsoever in the new state, which they believed was a device to extinguish their political rights and drag them into the orbit of Southern Rhodesia.

Just what this might entail was spelled out in the 1950 version of Southern Rhodesia’s handbook for British immigrants. Only skilled men were wanted, ‘Because of our African population, and the fact that Africans do the unskilled and bulk of the semi-skilled work.’ A good life was promised, especially for women: ‘On the whole, the lot of the Rhodesian housewife is much more pleasant than that of her sisters in England.’ Black servants were plentiful, but the newcomer had to bear in mind ‘that the average Native servant is of childlike simplicity’ and prone to pilfering, so firmness was vital.
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Segregation was enforced rigorously everywhere. Visiting the country in 1955 to advise on its broadcasting system, Sir Hugh Greene encountered Sir Godfrey Huggins, then the Federation’s prime minister, who told him that white and black MPs were forbidden to dine together in Parliament House. Nothing had changed since the time of Rhodes and Jameson. A factory manager told Greene that:

I had a friend from Northern Rhodesia down here the other day who said what a relief it was to see a really good flogging again. He told me: ‘You know up in Northern Rhodesia, if you raise your hand against one of these chaps, he drags you off to the police station.’
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That year, a white man who had flogged to death one of his servants was given a year in gaol and ordered to pay his victim’s family £100 compensation. An African found guilty of stealing sixteen shirts also got a year’s imprisonment.
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It was, therefore, not really surprising that the Colonial Office found it hard to whip up enthusiasm for the Federation among blacks in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland.

Opposition to federation was most vehement in Nyasaland where, from July 1958, the newly-returned Dr Banda had taken over as president-general of the African National Congress. The governor, Sir Robert Armitage, toed the official line over the Federation, and was scared by Banda’s trenchancy and the support he was gathering. In what turned out to be a ham-fisted attempt to force a show-down, Armitage declared a state of emergency in Nyasaland on 18 February 1959, using the discovery of an alleged Mau Mau-style conspiracy to massacre the colony’s 8,000 whites as an excuse. Plot or no plot, and the evidence is far from certain, Armitage had secured a chance to uncover the real strength of the anti-Federation movement and silence it.
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The suspension of normal legal rights and judicial processes allowed for dawn raids, arrests and internment. Banda was seized and bundled off to Gwelo gaol in Northern Rhodesia and troops were rushed in from Northern Rhodesia and Tanganyika to handle the inevitable protest demonstrations. Within four weeks the death toll had risen to fifty-two.
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Armitage’s action had embarrassed the government at a time when it was facing criticism for the deaths of Mau Mau detainees in Hola Camp in Kenya. As has been seen, the Colonial Secretary, Lennox-Boyd, was anxious to forestall television criticism of the state of emergency, and there were charges in the Commons that the Nyasaland authorities had tried to censor journalists reporting on conditions there.
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Resisting pressure from Southern Rhodesia, where the Nyasaland clamp-down had been welcomed, Macmillan ordered a senior judge and sometime Tory candidate, Lord Devlin, to chair a commission of inquiry into the causes of the emergency.

Devlin’s report appeared at midsummer and made disturbing reading. Armitage had blundered, Banda was exonerated, and Nyasaland was described as ‘a police state’. Macmillan was furious and claimed that the judge had acted out of ancestral and personal spite. He was Irish (‘no doubt with that Fenian blood that makes Irishmen anti-Government on principle’), a lapsed Catholic with a Jesuit brother (in fact a missionary in Northern Rhodesia), and was getting his own back for not having been appointed Lord Chief Justice.
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The cabinet rejected Devlin and hurriedly drew up a counterblast, allegedly penned by Armitage, which was published on the same day as the judge’s report.

Together, the reports on the killings at Hola Camp and the blunders in Nyasaland were an indictment of a colonial policy which had lost direction and moral basis. Enoch Powell, a former government minister, took his colleagues to task on the last score in a speech which repeated the classic argument that imperial authority could never exist in an ethical vacuum, or in defiance of its subjects’ wishes. It was indefensible to say: ‘We will have African standards in Africa, Asian standards in Asia and perhaps British standards here.’ He continued:

All Government, all influence of man upon man, rests on opinion. What we do in Africa, where we still govern and we no longer govern, depends upon the opinion which is entertained of the way in which Englishmen act. We cannot, we dare not, in Africa of all places, fall below our own highest standards in the acceptance of responsibility.
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To this invocation of traditional benevolent imperialism was added a warning from the Opposition front bench, delivered by Aneurin Bevan, to the effect that Britain could not allow its national life to be poisoned in the way that France’s had been by African conflict. Central Africa might yet prove Britain’s Algeria.
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Macmillan was determined that this should not happen. In the wake of the Nyasaland débâcle, he had decided to send a commission under Sir Walter Monckton, a silver-tongued lawyer and skilled arbitrator, to investigate opinion throughout Central Africa. This was wormwood to the Federation’s new prime minister, Sir Roy Welensky, a former railwayman and prize-fighter, who had never pulled his punches. In 1957 he had ominously remarked that he had never believed ‘that the Rhodesians have less guts than the American Colonists had’. His predecessor Huggins (now Lord Malvern) had issued a similar threat. Speaking of Rhodesia’s army, he observed: ‘I hope we shall not have to use them as the North American Colonies had to use theirs, because we are dealing with a stupid Government in the United Kingdom’.
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Macmillan took this bluster very seriously, and imagined that if Labour was returned to office in the imminent general election, Southern Rhodesia might rebel.

In August, Macmillan had counselled Monckton to do all in his power to create a multi-racial state in Central Africa. Failure would turn the region, and Kenya as well, into ‘a maelstrom of trouble into which all of us will be sucked’. He added that white supremacy was foredoomed, but hoped that something might be accomplished to accommodate the white settlers, who were vital for the continent.
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The alternative was another extended and unwinnable conflict of the sort which was then being fought in Algeria. British treasure and British blood would never be expended to defend white supremacy in East and Central Africa.

His standing within the Conservative party enhanced by his sweeping victory in October, Macmillan was free to embark on a radical African policy. His chosen instrument was the forty-six-year-old Iain Macleod, a talented, sharp-witted and sometimes acerbic liberal Conservative who was temperamentally suited to carry out what were at heart paternalist colonial policies. He had what the Prime Minister called ‘the worst job of all’ with the prospect of bloodshed if he failed. After a year in office, Macleod justified his actions to his party conference on the grounds that they were an extension to Africa of the ‘one nation’ principles of Disraeli. Black and white would have to be drawn together in the same way as the rich and the poor of Victorian Britain.

Procuring compromise and cooperation were not easy, but Macleod had a flair for chairing conferences and considerable patience. He was also willing to stick his neck out: one of his first acts was to end the state of emergency in Kenya; in April 1960 he restored normal government to Nyasaland and, two months later, had Banda released in spite of howls of anger from Armitage and Welensky. Macleod was publicly announcing that he was the friend of African nationalism, although common sense demanded an end to the Nyasaland emergency which had become a heavy burden on the colony’s limited resources. In 1939 the total bill for policing had been £22,000; in 1960, it was £1 million, a sixth of the entire colonial budget.
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Macleod’s greatest achievement lay in the revision of the schedules for independence and overseeing the peaceful dismemberment of the Central African Federation. Preparing for the transfer of power was not a glamorous task for it involved drawing up draft constitutions and discussing them at conferences, activities which did not make headlines or win public acclaim. Macleod’s work was acknowledged, at least by Africans, for ‘Iain’ became a popular Christian name in Uganda and Nyasaland, where, after independence a thoroughfare in Blantyre was named ‘Macleod Street’.
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This was some reward for labours which ended with Tanganyikan independence in 1961, Ugandan in 1962, and Kenyan in 1963, and in the same year the dissolution of the Central African Federation. The next year Nyasaland became independent as Malawi, and Northern Rhodesia as Zambia.