Insurgent Empire

by Priyamvada Gopal

  In fact, the undoing of imperial paternalism in Africa would come earlier than Perham could have imagined. Over ten years after this initial published correspondence, in 1955, both Huxley and Perham would write retrospective reflections on it. In hers, Huxley would make a startling observation:

  Obviously – perhaps even too obviously to mention – one million people do not indulge in open revolt against the existing order unless the times are badly out of joint. The question then becomes: what sickness is it in society of which Mau Mau is the symptom? Many would answer in one word: inequality. The sort of things we have been discussing in these letters: the land hunger of the Kikuyu, the feeling that they have been cheated of their land, the low wages, resentment of the Europeans’ wealth, the colour bar. All these things combined to accentuate in the minds of the Kikuyu a state of resentment which made just the right seedbed for the spores of Mau Mau to germinate in.166

  While her account is replete with the familiar condemnatory tropes of savage rituals and bloody plots, Huxley notes that, even in their otherwise antagonistic correspondence, she and Perham had agreed (‘for once’), with reference to the West Indies, ‘that, in a British territory, you get nowhere unless you kick up a fuss, generally a violent fuss’.167 Judging that her and Huxley’s views had drawn closer, given the latter’s attempts to understand Mau Mau in her novel A Thing to Love,168 Perham pronounces that there is now an ‘African Africa which must in no long time, given the new conditions of our world, emerge through the thin and recent layer of European control’.169 The important departure for Perham here is the admission, contra prior assertions, that gradualism has had its day. ‘Honesty demands’, she acknowledges, ‘the admission that the Mau Mau movement has to its credit that it has brought all races to the edge of the precipice of racial strife – many have indeed fallen over that edge – and forced them to draw back into the unattractive alternative of co-operation.’170 The emergence of African assertion means that the settlers must now accept that there is no chance of consolidating their own supremacy; matters were no longer ‘in the main a bilateral issue between the settlers and the British government’.171 It is a concession from Perham that is laced with an unmistakable petulance, perhaps even animus, as she describes the ‘new and bitter impatience’ which appears to mark this assertive new phase:

  It is the desire for equality that seems to move individuals, classes and nations with an energy never shown before in history. There is also a wholly new impatience to get it quickly which is dictated by the speed of modern scientific discovery … Now men use the powerful political forces they find at hand to get the desired results not in a lifetime, nor ten years hence, but in two years – next year! Not because they can prove they are ready for it but because they so passionately desire it and this principle of equality accords it.172

  Definitions of ‘freedom’ had also been unmoored from their entrepreneurial-meritocratic connotations, for ‘it is not freedom which these aspirants desire, freedom in which to work out their own salvation’, or even just ‘equality of opportunity’, but something rather more threatening to the colonial order: ‘equality in status and in material standards, a mass equality to be given or induced, almost irrespective of any qualifications’.173 Perham was recognizing, albeit with anxiety, that ‘freedom’ had lineages and futures different from those put in place by imperialism as capitalism.

  It is clear that, reflecting on her letters ten years later, Perham found herself having to shift her analysis away from an exclusive emphasis on imperial responsibility to thinking about the implications of black insurgency, the ‘dearly bought opportunity Mau Mau has made possible’.174 And so it was that, in 1954, well into the Kenyan Emergency and its brutal repression of Kenyan resistance, Perham would write an extraordinary opinion piece for The Listener in which, without quite relinquishing the idea of trusteeship, she conceded: ‘we have shown ourselves capable of making great mistakes as rulers of other peoples. We should remember Ireland and Palestine, and the Mau Mau in Kenya, to go no further.’175 She now posed far more fundamental questions to do with the limitations of both colonial knowledge and colonial practice: ‘how far are we towards understanding the colonies in their present restless condition? In other words, are we dealing with the causes as well as the symptoms?’176 The most remarkable aspect of this colonial specialist’s responses to insurgency now was the admission that the demands for rights and freedoms could not be described as emerging from British initiative:

  In our dealings with colonial nationalism we are – let us admit it – finding ourselves obliged to make concessions we never meant to make so soon. We yield to pressures without fully understanding what they are and where they come from. We claim – but it is only a half-truth – that what is happening is merely the fulfilment of our own policy and promises.177

  In a pronouncement that might well have issued from Frederick Douglass himself, Perham, theorist of British trusteeship, observes of the distrust that Britain faces: ‘It lies surely in the truth that independence is something that cannot be given but must be taken. And first it has to be demanded by more than the first half-dozen lawyers and journalists who have learned to direct against us the civil liberties we wrested from the Stuarts.’178

  It is easy to overlook the radical significance of Perham’s concessions here, even when peevishly offered. It is not only that freedom from colonial rule has been wrested rather than conceded, but that the Caliban model of political education is inadequate to explaining anticolonial insurgency. The Mau Mau ‘movement’ too, she notes in another article, had ‘the active or passive acceptance of it by – perhaps? – 90 percent of Kikuyu’, a fact that had ‘come as a profound shock to Kenya and to all connected with the colony’.179 While she believed that radical leaders played upon discontent and thrust aside ‘moderate’ leaders as ‘imperialist stooges’, Perham did not advocate, unlike some, that a few ‘agitators’ be set aside in favour of ‘the loyal masses who would then long remain content under our beneficent rule’ – that moment, she appeared to suggest, has passed not least because of ‘a powerful world force which at once inspires their demands and makes them almost irresistible’.180 Without naming socialism as such, Perham invoked the ‘desire for equality, for self-expression, for freedom from any kind of external mastery and its stigma of inferiority’, a force which she noted was also moving through Britain at that point in the form of a ‘peaceful revolution’.181 To refuse to acknowledge its reach would be to leave a vacuum for that which is to be feared more than decolonization and the loss of empire: ‘the pervasive indoctrination of communism’.182 More worrying than the now inevitable end of colonial rule was the prospect of ‘chronic opposition’.183

  The Tutor Tutored

  That it was, above all, Mau Mau which had finally impelled Perham to confront the question of oppression and resistance more directly is clear from her comments in articles written during the mid 1950s. This ‘terrible assertion of discontent’, she suggested, had changed perceptions for good: ‘The Africans can never again be seen as they were before this event.’184 Black self-assertion also meant, to put it mildly, that ‘paternalism may be actively threatened’.185 Perham’s changing views on the Kenyan situation in the post-war period were also influenced by contact with Kenyan anticolonial campaigners such as the labour organizer Tom Mboya, a Luo who was then secretary of the Kenya Federation of Labour. Though not affiliated to Mau Mau, Mboya had a very clear and uncompromising vision of what freedom for Kenya would look like. His 1956 pamphlet written for the Fabian Colonial Bureau, which was not entirely happy with it, and introduced by Perham with enthusiasm though not without reservations, was pointedly titled The Kenya Question: An African Answer.186 In his mid twenties, Mboya, who thought of himself as ‘a socialist at heart and a believer in democracy’, had spent the academic year (1955–56) leading up to the publication of the pamphlet studying political science and economics, specializing in industrial relations, at Ruskin College, Oxfor
d, where he had interacted in some depth with Perham and other students.187 During his time in Britain, he also met several political leaders, MPs and trade unionists. Introducing him as a ‘mind of young Africa’ who must be listened to, Perham flagged her own shift in position: ‘We have to make terms with things as they are … there comes a moment when Britain can no longer effectively govern a subject people against the will of the educated minority.’188 Aware that her own concessions to this tide would be deemed ‘defeatist’ in some quarters, she pronounced with a deliberate air of statesmanship: ‘History teaches that the greater political courage lies more often in the fearless acceptance of change than in blind defiance of it.’189

  Coming from a man Perham deemed a political ‘moderate’, if a ‘magnificent brain’, The Kenya Question is brutally unsparing in its analysis of the colonial situation in Kenya and the origins of Mau Mau.190 Indeed, it suggests that Mau Mau had shifted Perham’s own understanding of what constituted the ‘moderate’. Opening his short essay with an uncompromising assertion of equality, Mboya notes that present conditions ‘have forced the discussion into racial terms’, which may mean that he will be charged with being ‘anti-European’ or ‘pro-African’.191 Significantly, Mboya does not distance himself or other Kenyans from Mau Mau as such: ‘Most people agree that Mau Mau – apart from being a reflection of the failure of British colonial policy in Kenya – is the child of the political, economic and social frustrations experienced by the African people prior to 1952.’192 The essay laid out a familiar charge-sheet against the British in Kenya: land alienation, discriminatory practices in licensing cash crops, and a thoroughly racial basis for establishing schools, hospitals and residential areas, in addition to the colour bar in public places. In the face of this tyranny, Mboya observes calmly, ‘a violent reaction is understandable even if it is not justifiable’.193 The Kenyan trade unionist also made short shrift of the standard explanations for the insurgency produced in Britain, including those offered by Perham herself as well as by the pathologizing studies she endorsed, such as that by Carothers: ‘Psychologists may offer reasons why the Mau Mau ceremonies were primitive and barbaric, but these explain the form of the revolt and not the causes of it. It is absurd to represent Mau Mau as merely the result of too rapid a transition from primitive life to a modern complex society, or as a reversion from Christianity to barbarism.’194 Those many Kenyans like himself who did not support Mau Mau’s methods did not, however, ‘sympathise with the government against which it is struggling’.195 Nor could Mau Mau be dismissed as a ‘struggle of differing factions among the Kikuyu people’: ‘All Africans, regardless of tribe, are agreed on the need to eliminate European dominance.’196

  Mboya restates with simple clarity what Perham and others were coming grudgingly to concede: the time for reforms was over, and it was no longer possible to ‘justify paternalistic government’.197 Continued advocacy of gradualism and pandering to the wishes of settlers amounted to ignoring the ‘rise of African political opinion’, which ‘leaves no room for the master/servant relations of the past’.198 Africans would not ‘be subject to the generosity of those who govern’ but must be recognized – a word Mboya uses pointedly and repeatedly. Despite his distance from Mau Mau methods, Mboya’s warning emphasis is on the violence of the colonial state and the effect of ‘the methods used in the prosecution of the emergency, on future relationships in Kenya’.199 Collective punishments often took illogical forms, Mboya notes, first evicting families onto the streets, then arresting them for being without shelter, but punishing those who did offer them shelter. Mboya recounted his own arrest and that of other trade unionists during the notorious Operation Anvil – the biggest sweep of the Emergency ostensibly undertaken to ‘screen’, ‘blacklist’ and detain actual and potential insurgents. However high the number of (largely Kenyan) lives taken by Mau Mau, the colonial government had more blood on its hands. Reflecting on the episode some years later, Mboya reiterated these views:

  Of course it is true that Africans, more than anyone else, suffered from Mau Mau, and many more Africans died. But this is true of many revolutions and anti-colonial uprisings. It is normally the indigenous people who suffer most, and the Kenya situation does not appear to be unique historically. The trouble in the Kenya situation was that Mau Mau violence was met by even greater violence from the British Government and its security forces. If we must condemn the violence of the Mau Mau, we must equally condemn British violence against it.200

  It was, he noted shrewdly, a point that had been made a long while ago by none other than the British reformer John Bright: ‘I may say too that Force, to prevent freedom and to deny rights, is not more moral than Force to gain freedom and secure rights.’201 Violence garnered attention in a way that ‘working quietly and slowly’ did not: ‘Again, it is sad but true that until the eruption of violence in Algeria and Angola, the world had been content to remain silent about the suffering of those people under colonial rule.’202

  The ‘cult of anti-colonialism’

  In 1961, Perham’s stature as one of Britain’s most recognized commentators on imperial rule was cemented when she was invited by the BBC to give that year’s Reith Lectures, published subsequently as The Colonial Reckoning.203 In part a spirited defence of the better motives and merits of the imperial project, now in terminal decline, the lectures were to some extent motivated by her belief that it had ‘been misjudged and had misleading tests applied to it’.204 In terms of her intellectual trajectory, these lectures came at the right moment, ‘when I was ready to think over all I had been working upon, and generalize upon it’.205 What is striking, however, is the prominence given in this synthetic overview of how empire was coming to an end not, as might have been expected, to an ‘orderly’ decolonization or ‘the peaceful transfer of power’, but to that novel phrase in circulation: ‘anti-colonialism’. While attempting to explain the multiple ‘overseas news items’ in the daily broadsheets that concerned ‘the relations of white peoples with coloured peoples’, the lectures also became an account of a looming metropolitan existential crisis:206

  People of my generation were taught from their schooldays that our empire was a splendid achievement, conducted as much for the good of its many peoples as for our own, peoples who, indeed, now owe to us the form of their existence as national states. The words ‘trusteeship’ and ‘partnership’ held serious meaning. To the generation before us the ‘white man’s burden’ was not a rather bitter joke. Then how, we ask, has ‘colonialism’ suddenly become, as it seems, such a term of abuse? Have we been utterly blind? Was the idealism we so often professed merely a cloak in which we tried to hide our complete self-interest from the world, and indeed from ourselves?207

  More startling than the actual loss of governing power in its global implications, for Perham, was ‘this outburst of anti-colonialism which has accompanied it’.208 This ‘great movement of assertion among the non-European peoples … suddenly changed the balance of forces in our world’.209

  Perham flirted with the familiar self-consoling notion that the ‘ideal of democratic freedom’ had ‘been learned very largely from Britain herself’.210 And yet she found herself compelled to complicate the picture. Certainly, the ‘Caliban’ theory formed part of her account, in the form of African students who had come to London and, like Indian graduates before them, ‘enjoy a sense – a conflicting sense – of freedom and equality’ as they ‘learn all about the civil liberties and observe a free political life’.211 When they returned to their lands as ‘pioneer nationalists’, they ‘quoted the Bible, Blackstone, Burke and Shakespeare. They were turning against Britain her own political and judicial weapons’, enriching ‘their great natural powers of oratory’ with demands in sonorous English.212 The first generation of nationalists were, however, imbued with the spirit of moderation and pragmatism that Perham herself saw as fundamental to British politics, wanting to ‘grow into self-government rather than to seize independence’.213 What, th
en, spurred the rebellions which hastened decolonization and the concomitant crisis of paternalism? Here Perham identified many factors, not least the outbreak of ‘riots’ in the West Indies, India’s refusal to accept dependent self-government, the First World War’s use of African soldiers, Wilsonian ideas of self-determination and, not least, the ‘black racialism’ articulated by the likes of Marcus Garvey.214 Two international events had also acted as spurs: the invasion of Ethiopia, and Hitler’s demand for the return of ex-German colonies, or what were known as the ‘Mandated territories’. Meanwhile, both America and the Soviet Union positioned themselves differently as hostile to the continuance of the British Empire. Russia, of course, ‘offered not only a condemnation of colonialism but also an alternative’.215 And so it was that Perham found herself posing the question at the beginning of her second lecture: ‘What is the nature of the force that in less than a decade has swept the rule of Europe out of almost the whole of tropical Africa and has bred more than twenty new nations in its place?’216 Manifold circumstantial factors notwithstanding, what cannot be denied, Perham concedes, is the inevitability of human resistance to discrimination, to being treated as a lesser being. This returns her to the example of Kenya: ‘We British, I think’, Perham reflects, ‘hate ever to admit that the blackmail of violence can pay.’217 The fact remained that Mau Mau ‘had disrupted the whole life of the colony’, making clear that ‘Kenya could never again face another tribal movement of this kind, still less a movement that was wider than a single tribe’.218 Without quite relinquishing the stock figuration of Mau Mau, ‘that most ghastly of rebellions’, in terms of ‘bestial oaths’ and a ‘cult of torture and murder’, Perham offers what still, in 1961, ran counter to received ideas by acknowledging how necessary that violence must have been felt to be in order to so countermand the moral economy of an indigenous community: ‘How deep must have been the frustrations of the Kikuyu to drive them to practices which quite deliberately violated the sanctities of their own sexual and tribal life!’219