Insurgent Empire

by Priyamvada Gopal

  How did this self-proclaimed ‘Gandhian’, pacifist, anti-war campaigner and insistent votary of non-violence come to resign from the Peace Pledge Union in the 1970s over his astonishing pronouncement that ‘support for physical action could not always be withheld?’44 ‘Although no revolt had then begun’, Brockway recalls, ‘I told its annual meeting that I would support an insurgence by the Africans to win their right to self-government in Rhodesia … I would support a revolution in Southern Africa.’45 Through a close reading of his memoir, African Journeys, and then examining some of his subsequent interventions on the question of Africa and imperialism, I want to suggest that, although Brockway first came to Kenya convinced of the need for both moderation and gradualism, what he saw there of the operations of colonial violence and racialized dispossession shaped his transformation in the following decades into a full-time British anticolonalist who, without ever advocating violence, came to understand why it might be deployed under certain circumstances. Followed by his engagement, along with other Labour parliamentarians, with the crisis of the Emergency imposed on Kenya in 1952 and the related colonial atrocities visited upon Africans, Brockway’s African journeys formed the seedbed for a more radical anticolonial politics. He subsequently became a founding member and first president of the Movement for Colonial Freedom in Britain.

  Passages in Africa

  Brockway made his first trip to East Africa on behalf of COPAI, visiting Uganda and Kenya in 1950. His notes from this period, which form the basis of his memoirs, as well as his parliamentary interventions, give us a flavour of his gradualist views on imperial rule and self-governance in Africa in the immediate post-war period. While he was clearly already critical of several aspects of colonial governance and policy, there is little to indicate that he was thinking in terms of bringing imperial rule to an immediate end. His object in travelling there was ‘to get the point of view of the African population’, but Brockway was careful to note repeatedly that he had also consulted extensively with colonial officials.46 ‘I listened rather than spoke,’ he would say of attending political meetings in Uganda. For all that he sought actively to be ‘balanced’, he did observe that ‘positive’ aspects of colonial governance were ‘regarded with suspicion’ by the Africans he met. His suggestions were nonetheless determinedly reformist:

  It is clearly desirable that in the planning of Uganda the full co-operation of the people should be gained. The deepest conviction with which I return is that this co-operation cannot be obtained unless the people are given the democratic right of expressing their voice at every stage when plans for their country are under discussion.47

  Brockway was not unaware that the gulf between rulers and ruled is ‘deep’, but hoped that violence might be averted by providing a ‘constitutional opportunity for the expression of the feeling of the people’. On this first visit, Brockway spent only a week in Kenya, where he advised the colonial administration that the views of the Africans were ‘of paramount importance when planning the future of Kenya because the Africans are, after all, the indigenous and majority population’.48 Urging the introduction of a common electoral roll for Africans, Indians, Europeans and Arabs, Brockway repeatedly denounced racial segregation. Famously walking out of a Nairobi restaurant which would not serve his African companion, Brockway wrote: ‘I could understand the bitterness of the Africans who accompanied me when, pointing to the wooded hills where the Europeans lived, they asked why they should be condemned to the wilderness.’ On the whole, however, he remained hopeful that ‘the progressive elements would win through eventually’.49 While Brockway was aware during this first trip of disturbances on the East Suk reserve, for instance, he had no time to visit it, and insisted that he ‘had no knowledge of the Mau Mau Association’. Having given the last forty years to Asia, he did, however, intend now to ‘devote the next 20 years to Africa’.50 Would this entail going beyond identifying the malpractices and inadequacies of colonial rule and suggesting reforms? We shall see.

  If he was largely oblivious to Mau Mau during his first visit, Brockway certainly returned to Britain appalled by Kenya’s brutal racial hierarchy and the resentment it had caused. He would introduce – for nine years running – a bill to make racial and religious discrimination illegal in public places in Britain. In due course he would also become a leading figure in British anti-apartheid activism. On his eightieth birthday, many years later, at a dinner in the House of Commons, Brockway would express his disappointment at the persistence of racism in Britain, America and elsewhere, making another startling statement: ‘I am not opposed to the fundamentals of Black Power. When a people is oppressed the movement for freedom must come from within.’51 This seed of support for a radical liberationist movement had clearly been sown during Brockway’s Kenya visits, where he witnessed the material underpinnings of the racial oppression which resulted in violent resistance: ‘African land hunger, European land space, African starvation wages, European comfort, African illiteracy, European expensive education’.52 The colonial government compounded its problems by insisting on the repudiation not just of Mau Mau, but also of the grievances which had engendered it: no African was given credence ‘unless he were prepared to put into cold storage his protest against the enforced social disintegration of the life of his people, the economic misery of Africans on the reserves, and the humiliations of the colour bar and racial segregation’.53

  Bitterly resented by the majority of European settlers, Brockway’s second visit to Kenya, along with his fellow MP Leslie Hale, was painted both by the settlers and by the British media as a propaganda exercise on the part of the Kenya African Union (KAU), which was both paying for the trip and hosting the two parliamentarians. The insurgency was now fully underway. Hale and Brockway were given an armed guard to protect them, not from insurgents, but from incensed settlers, ‘fanatical Europeans’.54 Brockway made a point, as he had previously, of staying with Chief Koinange’s family, despite the fact that two of its members, the ex-chief included, were in prison accused of participating in political murders. Watchful this time around for signs of Mau Mau’s influence on a visit to a Kikuyu independent school – among the institutions charged with fomenting insurgency – Brockway noted that all he could see was ‘a passionate national patriotism’, and that, contra settler propaganda, he had ‘not found hatred of whites as whites nor any atmosphere of violence’.55 Having also discussed matters with settlers and the government, including the governor, Brockway – still determinedly anti-Mau Mau – offered them an infuriating inversion of malady and symptom: ‘The Europeans were complaining that the Kenya Government had shown no dynamic energy in crushing Mau Mau when first it lifted its ugly head. I think our criticism would be that it had shown no dynamic energy in removing the African frustration which had led to the emergence of Mau Mau.’56 Many administrators and officials were well-meaning and sincere, Brockway acknowledged, but they ‘did not realise that they were administering a volcano boiling to eruption’.57 To complaints that Africans ought to be more loyal, Brockway responded merely that colonial administrators ‘appeared to overlook the fact that no self-respecting African could be “loyal” to a Government in which at that time Africans, alone among the races, had no representative and which had been directly responsible for the frustrations, social, economic and psychological, from which they suffered so grievously’.58 By refusing to acknowledge that injustices burned in African breasts, the colonial government had in fact allowed Kenyan Africans to ‘come to the conclusion that there was no alternative to Mau Mau’.59 All these were points he would raise in parliament upon his return.

  African Journeys is not a radical text by any means. It prides itself on taking a ‘balanced’ view of colonial matters, and does not directly challenge any of the several demonizing stereotypes of Mau Mau in circulation. Indeed, Brockway himself frequently resorts to them himself, invoking bestiality, ‘cold-blooded’ oath ceremonies, and sanguinary atrocities. What seem to have unnerved him more
, however, were the unabashedly supremacist white settler views he was exposed to. Invited by a group of settlers to ‘hear their case’, Brockway recalls listening to ‘the most frightening words we heard in Kenya. They bruised themselves on my mind’.60 … He was told: “Every African is dishonest, a liar and lazy. Their language has no words for love, gratitude and loyalty.” ’61 (Upon inquiry Brockway found out that the corresponding Gikuyu words were, in fact, wendu, ngatho and wathikai).62 As he struggled to work out whether his friend Jomo Kenyatta was its mastermind or not, Brockway’s reflections on Mau Mau’s ‘barbarism’ also impelled him to turn the lens of criticism back upon ‘the infamies which we, civilised and cultured, commit. The atom bomb on Hiroshima killed 1,000 infants for each one killed at Lari. More immediately relevant, the Government in Kenya has been executing fifty Africans a month.’63 While he was not quite able to relinquish his attachment to the liberal notion (possibly ‘pompous and hypocritical’, he concedes) that the British Empire could take credit for disseminating an ‘education and ethic’ derived from Greece, Rome and Christianity, he leavened that claim with an important counterpoint: ‘We have destroyed the old African society without replacing it by any satisfying substitute. We have spread frustration and given it no outlet.’64 This was not a romantic position but an historical insight. ‘I don’t seek to idealise the old Kikuyu society’, he insisted, noting that he had already criticized its treatment of women and inter-tribal wars.65 Yet the historical reality – and Brockway was undoubtedly also drawing here on Kenyatta’s insider ethnographical account, Facing Mount Kenya – was that the ‘old Kikuyu community was a conscious society’ with ‘intimate loyalties which gave a social significance to living’.66 In its place, colonialism had created fresh antagonisms and division without creating new social bonds or communal institutions. Despite his own deprecation of the practice, Brockway understood that the way in which the female circumcision issue had been handled – as a civilizational weapon rather than an issue of women’s emancipation – had been counterproductive and divisive. Invoking Britain’s own new post-war welfare state, Brockway also wrote eloquently of the Kenya land issue:

  To the African, land is what work is to us. Land is life … Land-hunger in Kenya is equivalent to unemployment in Britain – unemployment without benefits, National Assistance, children’s allowances or other social services. I can think of no parallel more exact to conditions in the Kikuyu and some other reserves than conditions in the valleys of South Wales in the Hungry ’Thirties, when 70 per cent unemployment drove thousands to seek a livelihood elsewhere.67

  Those who had left their overcrowded reserves to work on European-owned farms had been transmogrified into ‘squatters’: ‘When I first heard the name, I thought they must be trespassers. Not so. They were labourers on the European farms. The name should be “serfs” rather than “squatters”.’68 The final degradation came from racial discrimination and separation, ‘fundamentally not different from South Africa’s apartheid’.69 Self-consciously established ‘interracial clubs’ were courageous and good ventures, but in themselves paternalist, ‘a little too precious, too consciously good … a Churchy atmosphere of doing good’.70 It was ‘a section of the whites’ who would now have to be ‘painfully … educated to new human values’, but there was no reason for Africans to wait for this new disposition to manifest itself.71

  Back in Britain, Brockway would drive home these points in parliament:

  The greatest mistake which the Government have made in their Kenya policy has been to refuse to accept the co-operation of Africans who, while critical of the Government, abhor the methods of Mau Mau just as much as the methods of the Government. The attitude of the Government has been that unless any African was a 100 per cent supporter of their policy, he was outside the pale.72

  Largely due to his efforts and those of other MPs like Hale, Arthur Creech-Jones, Barbara Castle and Aneurin Bevan, among others, the ‘Kenya situation’ became a frequent topic of discussion in Commons debates during the 1950s. Brockway was relentless in raising the land question – again, significant in the face of routine denials, that the land acquired by white settlers had been in use by Africans: ‘The European population in Kenya should recognise that the African population has the first right to land in that territory.’73 Modest as they may seem to us now, in the context of debates which included nakedly racist interventions, frequently unabashed in their insistence on white superiority and Christian values against a putative African primitivism, the contextual radicalism of Brockway’s interventions must be recognized.74 Brockway was clear that racism was a significant reason for the grievances of the colonized:

  I say without any doubt that it is the practice of the colour bar in Kenya which is largely responsible for the bitterness which has now turned into the vicious movement of Mau Mau. One may suffer a social or an economic affront, but there is nothing which so pierces the personality as the humiliation of being treated as a lesser human being by another human being.75

  This recognition impelled him to turn the critical lens back on Britain and its own ‘colour bar’ in a resonant biblical metaphor: ‘Why should we behold the mote in the eye of South Africa and not consider the beam in our own? I would certainly say that, if we draw attention to the beam in the eye of South Africa, we should recognise, at least, that there is a mote in our own.’76 Situating the present debate within the larger history of British radicalism, Brockway commented on the familiarity of the kinds of racial arguments now being put forward against a legislative end to racial discrimination:

  I was reading last night the reports of the discussions in this House when the abolition of slavery was proposed. I was very interested to find that exactly the same arguments against legislation for the abolition of slavery were made by the reactionary circles in this country at that time as are now being made by the Conservative Party against the elimination of the colour bar. It was argued that slavery was inherent in human relations. There was one beautiful phrase which ran: ‘The drive to obtain freedom from drudgery by the possession of and absolute control over one or more of one’s fellow beings appears to be inherent in the nature of man.’ That argument is now being urged against legislation for the elimination of the colour bar – that it is instinctive and inherent in man’s mind, and, therefore, one must not move too rapidly or introduce legislation. Had that argument been listened to 120 years ago, we should never have had the Emancipation Act of 1833 which ended slavery.77

  Echoing Brockway, Arthur Creech-Jones, erstwhile Labour colonial secretary, made the startling observation that ‘this century may not be remembered for the two great German wars nor even for the cold war, but it may be remembered rather as the century of the coloured man and the inevitability of changes’.78

  That both Hale and Brockway returned from their joint visit to Kenya prepared to push parliamentary discussion in more radical directions is clear. Six months after that trip, Brockway, now dubbed the ‘Member for Africa’, stood up to present a petition to parliament ‘on behalf of 158,642 citizens of the Protectorate and Colony of Kenya’.79 Many of the signatures took the form of thumb-prints, with some done in blood ‘to indicate, in the phrase of the petitioners, that, in their view, “land is life” ’. Among the petition’s more radical demands: that ‘Africans shall immediately be allowed to occupy and farm the large unused areas which are in the territories reserved to Europeans’, and that further immigration of settlers ‘be stopped in view of the land hunger from which the African community suffers’.80 Hale too was unambiguous in his interventions: ‘I think the time for being moderate in this matter has gone. It is time that people spoke up for what is right and what they sincerely believe.’81 He noted that the atmosphere in the House itself was strikingly different:

  There is a real fear that the time is coming when every African will begin to hate every European. [An HON. MEMBER: ‘That is not true.’] There is nobody who knows that it is not true. None of us who go out there can fa
il to be impressed by the gravity of the situation. We talked to Christian missionaries there, and I have been talking to them in London this morning. Let hon. Members talk to them and they will find a deep and abiding fear that Africa is marching with the majesty and inevitability of a Greek tragedy to what is for us a disastrous end … Go into any large library and look at the books on Kenya from Macgregor Ross to Norman Leys and Negley Farson every one of which is a warning about Kenya. They are all of the type of ‘Crisis Coming in Kenya’, ‘Clouds Over Kenya’, warning all of us – and I have as much responsibility as anybody else – that this problem ought to be tackled.82

  In a pamphlet issued not long after his second visit, and after the Emergency was declared, Why Mau Mau? An Analysis and a Remedy, written for the London Committee of COPAI, Brockway began by expressing the familiar deprecation of Mau Mau’s putative atavism, and his ‘shock’ at finding ‘some Africans reverting to methods of witchcraft and terrorism’. Yet, in bold italics at the centre of the page, he notes: ‘But it is not enough to condemn, punish and protect. We must seek out the causes of Mau Mau and strive to remove them.’83 After discussing the causes of African ‘land hunger’ in Kenya, Brockway observes that the very idea of ‘ownership’ as adumbrated by the settler population was alien to the Kikuyu, for whom ‘the ownership of the land could not have been transferred’.84 What was deemed ‘unoccupied’ land by white settlers – in terra nullius mode – had in fact been used for nomadic grazing or left temporarily fallow. The conflict in Kenya bore witness not to a clash of civilizations, but to a clash of economies, moral and fiscal. Wounds of bitterness ran deep not only from this alienation of land, but also from the canny racial discrimination which debarred Africans from growing profitable crops like coffee on what little land they did have. ‘Unless British policies are drastically changed’, Brockway warned, speaking perhaps of his own change of heart from believing a multiracial cooperative society was possible to a position of greater pessimism, ‘Kenya may descend, with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy, to the disaster of race conflict.’85 This, it turned out, was absolutely correct.