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PART TWO
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Itineraries: Three Cycles of Hope and Disappointment
3
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Decolonization, the Independence Settlement, and Colonial Legacy
COLONIAL PERMANENCE IN QUESTION
With an ever-increasing velocity, the “winds of change” British prime minister Harold MacMillan announced to a stupefied South African Parliament in 1960 swirled through Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. By 1970, only the Portuguese territories, the final white redoubts of southern Africa, and a few scattered microterritories awaited liberation. Only some twenty-five years earlier the premise was that the colonial era in Africa had many decades if not centuries to run.
The purpose of this chapter is to set the stage for the following three chapters detailing the postindependence evolution. I argue the importance of colonial legacy in shaping the postcolonial state; its transmission was shaped by the power transfer process. The nature of the decolonization dynamic established some significant parameters for what followed: the degree of cooperative and planned transition, the role and place of settler communities, the availability of a credible template for evolution. Liberation through armed struggle created a distinctive point of departure for independence. Most studies of decolonization are specific to a given imperial domain; through a comparative inquiry into the range of decolonization patterns and independence settlements, I hope to illuminate both commonalities and divergences in the birth of postcolonial politics.
TERRITORIAL POSSESSIVENESS
Intrinsic to any state is a disposition to territorial possessiveness. Imperial holdings end up being swept into this premise of perpetual sovereign over-lordship, a durable article of faith articulated in 1776 by Adam Smith: “To propose that Great Britain should voluntarily give up all authority over her colonies... would be to propose such a measure as never was, and never will be adopted, by any nation in the world."1 This instinctive impulse to territorial preservation might be overridden by successful revolt of the subject (Spanish and English America), by military defeat (Germany after World War I, Italy and Japan following World War II), or other national calamity.
Only Britain before World War II had a formula for reluctantly accepting a voluntary dilution of the overseas imperial domain, but it primarily restricted this loss of power to the kith-and-kin white-ruled territories. Devolution within the empire was conceded for these territories, including by 1910 South Africa, although with an initial vision of imperial federation. The boundaries of dominion sovereignty remained ambiguous even after the 1931 Statute of Westminster appeared to assure independence. Imperial bonds were not fully severed before World War II, and the empire as a security and mercantile community continued, while aiming, in the felicitous words of John Darwin, to “enfold the Dominions in a form of ‘imperial nationhood’ ... a kind of ‘Britannic nationalism.'"2 Overall, elsewhere in Africa in the 1930s, the permanence of colonial occupation seemed beyond question. Even in 1945, as Frederick Cooper argues, the colonial powers assumed indefinite prolongation of rule would be possible by coopting the educated elite through the bestowal of enhanced status, winning peasant acquiescence through lower taxes and an end to forced labor, and concocting a new veneer of legitimation with the master concept of development.3
However, World War II brought dramatic changes to the international environment, which no longer accommodated the imperial conceits of perpetual proprietorship. The crystallization and accelerating spread of anticolonial nationalism was the most fundamental transformation. But nationalist mobilization now could draw energy from an increasingly supportive global setting. The two superpowers, for different reasons, called for decolonization, even though the real pressure they put on the colonial powers fell well short of their public rhetoric. The new superstructure for international cooperation, the UN system, inscribed the term “self-determination” as a principle in articles 1 and 55 in its 1945 charter. Worse for imperial preservation, article 73 obligated colonizers “to develop the capacity [of colonial subjects] to administer themselves, to take account of the political aspirations of the populations, and to aid them in the progressive development of their free political institutions.” In 1960, the UN General Assembly far more forcefully enunciated an obligation of all states “to bring a speedy end to colonialism, having due regard for the freely expressed will of the peoples concerned."4 The growing number of once-colonized Asian countries, joined by Latin American states, congealed into an active anticolonial lobby at the UN and other international forums.
An earlier unexamined assumption that maximal imperial domains were automatically beneficial came into question; even staunchly Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher had concluded that the empire “cost more to defend than it contributed to national wealth."5 Raymond Cartier, in a series of articles in Paris-Match at the beginning of the 1960s, popularized in France the thesis that colonial holdings were a net drain. The mythologies of unchallengeable colonial strength and beneficence that once underpinned imperial rule gradually evaporated in the face of the rising costs of resistance to the angry voice of nationalism.
THE CODE OF DECOLONIZATION
One need pursue no further the reasons for the gradual dissolution of the will to preserve colonial occupation on the part of the metropolitan powers. During the postwar years, what might be termed a code of decolonization took form, articulated in part through the UN and in international diplomacy, reinforced by the various pan-African instances whose assemblies multiplied in the 1950s, and echoed by the political Left in the imperial homelands, for whom at this time anticolonialism became everyday rhetorical fare. This charter of decolonization, formalized as international jurisprudence by the 1960 UN General Assembly resolution on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Territories and Peoples, had half a dozen elements.
Territoriality
The first and most enduring was territoriality: the elixir of sovereignty hardened the map lines of the colonial partition into a permanent array of containers. This outcome was by no means obvious in 1945, least of all to emergent African nationalists. The 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester denounced “the artificial divisions and territorial boundaries created by the Imperialist Powers” as “deliberate steps to obstruct the political unity of the West African peoples."6 The 1958 Accra All-African Peoples’ Conference echoed these sentiments, again excoriating “artificial boundaries, drawn by the imperialist Powers to divide the peoples of Africa, particularly those which cut across ethnic groups and divide people of the same stock,” and demanding “the abolition or adjustment of such frontiers at an early date."
However, once normative discourse became defined by states rather than political movements, raison d’état dictated the supremacy of existing territorial divisions. Also in 1958, and also in Accra, Ghana president Kwame Nkrumah, a passionate advocate of pan-Africanism, convened the first assembly of independent states, whose consensus he (perhaps reluctantly) summarized: “Our conference came to the conclusion that in the interests of that Peace which is so essential, we should respect the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of one another."7 When the pan-African dream gained organic content in 1963 with the creation of the OAU, “territorial integrity” became a core value inscribed in its charter, as noted in chapter 2.
Worth noticing is that the affirmation of the colonial partition map even sharpened the territorial lines, now an iron grid of sovereign containers. Even in colonial times, the boundaries between the imperial domains of a given colonizer permitted relatively easy interterritorial movement. Moreover, the precolonial safety valve of exit for a dissident community was foreclosed; they became perforce potential recruits for the opposition.
Reason of state was not the only factor in the emergence of a territorial praxis; the momentum of the nationalist struggle also informed it. Though transterritorial political movements had existed earlier in British West Africa, and especially in the sprawling administrative federations
of Afrique occidentale française (AOF) and Afrique équatoriale française (AEF), in most settings the imperatives of effective challenge to the colonizer mandated utilization of the territorial frame within which the institutions of domination operated. Thus the nationalist became territorialist malgré soi.
On the other hand, the withdrawing colonial powers came naturally to embrace the territoriality principle, which did reflect the operational practices and bureaucratic traditions of the colonial project and especially defined the administrative domain within which the decolonization project could be managed and oriented. To be sure, the British in the interwar period and again following World War II toyed with the idea of creating East and Central African federations. These schemes were fatally flawed by the predominant place accorded to white settler interests. In Central Africa, a Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland actually had a brief existence from 1953 to 1964. But the “racial partnership” between an African horse and a white settler rider was doomed from the outset by increasingly bitter African opposition.
A different territorial ambiguity arose in the cases of the former German territories of Togo and Kamerun, which had been partitioned between Britain and France after World War I, with the British portions attached to Gold Coast and Nigeria respectively. A curious form of ghostly territoriality excavated from German times appeared in the French mandated territories of Togo and Cameroon, asserting a natural claim to the restoration of the pre-1914 geographic frame. The doctrine of self-determination, the overarching normative premise shaping the code of decolonization, came into play, in the form of referendums in British-administered portions of former German Togo and Kamerun. In the Togo case, a majority voted for Ghana in a single referendum; in Cameroon, the smaller northern morsel of the Cameroon mandate administered with Nigeria chose to remain there, while a larger southern segment was lured by a promise of federation to vote for affiliation with the formerly French-ruled Cameroon state.8
The failure of the huge colonial federations of AOF and AEF to generate a sufficiently robust pan-territorial identity to compete with the individual identities of their respective eight and four component units is an interesting puzzle. Although Senegal became independent in federation with Mali, the experiment dissolved almost at once. Admittedly, these sprawling bureaucratic constructs were distant from the subject populace, who were in much more direct contact with the territorial administrations. However, these multiterritorial federations had long existed, created in 1895 and 1905 respectively (or longer than Nigeria, unified administratively only in 1914). Particularly in AOF, the most prestigious political party through much of the 1950s, the Rassemblement démocratique africain, was firmly committed to a vocation of unification, especially for AOF. Naturally, federation sentiment was strongest in the territories housing the seats of AOF and AEF, Senegal and Congo-Brazzaville, respectively. In Senegal, a residual nostalgia for the larger entity could still find expression in an elaborate 1995 official celebration of the centennial of the creation of AOF.9 However, the most prosperous territories in the two colonial federations, Ivory Coast and Gabon, long resentful at sharing their revenues with the more impoverished parts, resisted the supraterritorial frame for decolonization.10 French officialdom, privately acknowledging by the mid-1950s that the permanent exclusion of self-government in the African territories enunciated in the 1944 Brazzaville Declaration was not sustainable, made the fateful choice in the 1956 Gaston Deferre loi-cadre to situate the institutions of self-rule in sub-Saharan Africa at the territorial level. This crucial legislation was prepared in collaboration with key African allies such as future Ivory Coast president Félix Houphouët-Boigny, then a minister in the French government.
The other major exception to the transfer of the territorial frame of the colonial partition to independent Africa was the split of the Belgian trust territory of Ruanda-Urundi into its two constituent elements. These two kingdoms were broken off from German East Africa following the First World War; Belgian administration nurtured the separate monarchies under a single bureaucratic frame until decolonization was at hand, using the Tutsi royal castes as intermediaries to rule a large Hutu minority (roughly 85% in both cases). As independence approached, though some African states tried to apply the principle of “territorial integrity” to Ruanda-Urundi, local sentiment overwhelmingly favored separation. Thus Rwanda and Burundi acquired full sovereignty in 1962 as separate countries.11 A further minor derogation to colonial territorial integrity occurred in 1975, when one of the islands composing the Comoros Republic, Mayotte, voted to accept incorporation into the French Republic (and in 2009 voted by 95% for full departmentalization).12 Conversely, UN insistence that the two components of Spanish Equatorial Guinea (mainland Rio Muni and the island of Fernando Po) become independent as a single unit in 1968 prevailed over strong sentiment in Fernando Po for separate sovereignty; the indigenous Bubi feared marginalization by the far more numerous mostly Fang on the mainland. These apprehensions proved well justified.13
A last apparent exception, which ultimately proved the rule, was the 1960 fusion of the Italian-ruled territory of Somalia, whose independence was prepared under an UN-imposed ten-year deadline when Italy regained administrative control in 1950, and British Somaliland, for which an elected majority legislative council was created only in February 1960. In what D. A. Low characterizes as the “swiftest scuttle from Africa,” the British “tumbled over themselves” to respond to requests by Somaliland nationalists to unite with Somalia. An instant decolonization took place in June, “though next to nothing stood ready,” and Somali unification immediately followed.14 Despite the shared Somali identity, the fusion never worked well. Increasingly restive under Somalia sovereignty, Somaliland at once reasserted its territoriality following the collapse of the central institutions and declared independence in 1991.
Representative Institutions
The other five elements of the code of decolonization may be summarized more briefly. A second premise was the central role of representative institutions. The core of the colonial regime was its executive bureaucracy, with its attendant territorial administration and at the lowest levels African chiefly intermediaries; the African colonial state was a pure model of bureaucratic authoritarianism. Until decolonization was well under way Africans were rare in the senior ranks, though in the French and Portuguese cases there was a sprinkling of West Indians or mulattoes.15 An opening for an African voice could only be acceptable if it came through diverse advisory legislative or territorial councils, not through any dilution of colonial executive authority. Before World War II such bodies had only appointed African members, if any; with limited consultative influence, they were dominated by representatives of colonial interest groups (corporations, missions, settlers). Gradually, African numbers increased after the war, with an initially timid infusion of elected members. At the same time, elected councils were created at the local level, especially by the British. The watershed moment came when the territorial councils acquired elected African majorities and became truly legislative.
The postulate of representative institutions lay at the core of legitimating doctrine for decolonization, except for the pair of colonizers that lacked democratic institutions at home (Portugal and Spain). A tacit pact to this effect joined withdrawing colonizer and emergent African nationalists; for the former, ultimate executive power, though under increasing challenge, was the final redoubt, while for the latter the representative institution provided an indispensable engine for the last assault on alien rule. The supremacy of the representative institution in the hierarchy of legitimating values was fleeting but no less important in its moment.
Universal Suffrage
A third, related element in the decolonization code was majoritarianism based on universal suffrage. Not the least of the ironies of power transfer was the import of a norm that had only recently become applicable in Europe itself; at the time of the colonial partition, working-class suffrage was still incomplete and women'
s suffrage decades away. Achievement of universal franchise was gradual in Europe but virtually instantaneous in Africa. The universality was unrestricted—there was no requirement of literacy, property, or tax payment nor was any other condition imposed. The various devices to circumscribe or delay universal suffrage in the early postwar years were correctly perceived by African nationalists as schemes to deny the majority its birthright. In East Africa, especially in Kenya and Tanzania, and through the ill-starred Central African Federation, the specious theory of “racial partnership” conceptualized the body politic as composed of corporate communities of Europeans, Asians, and Africans in which the value of equality would apply at the communal level. Tortured formulas emerged for distinct electoral rolls for the different racial communities, perhaps with provision whereby a limited number of Africans of high professional status or service to the colonial order would be included in the top category.16 In the French case, though the African subject acquired nominal citizenship in the 1946 constitution, dual electoral colleges were established assuring a vastly disproportionate representation to French settlers; the last vestiges of these were finally swept away only in the 1956 loi-cadre. In the Belgian case as well, the first colonial elections, held in several cities in 1957, were so structured as to produce a virtual racial codominion at the level of the municipal institutions.17 Such schemes colored the persistent suspicions of colonial motives that underlay the dialogue of decolonization and reinforced African insistence on universal suffrage majoritarianism, which would automatically restrict the electoral weight of the once-powerful settler communities. Colonial demands that nationalists validate their legitimacy with large majorities backing the independence claim in conjunction with often justified apprehensions that African divisions might be exploited by colonizers to delay decolonization or to favor “moderate” formations sympathetic to imperial interests stimulated the formation of large anticolonial fronts, often forerunners to single parties.