Intervention took place according to the plan devised at Sèvres. But the Suez intervention very rapidly became the Suez Crisis. The British press was divided. The Daily Express welcomed the action designed ‘to safeguard the life of the British Empire’ while The Daily Herald berated ‘this lunatic aggression’.80 In the House of Commons on 31 October, Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell denounced Eden’s threat to reoccupy the Canal Zone as ‘an act of disastrous folly whose tragic consequences we shall regret for years’.81 On 1 November, Tony Benn told MPs that ‘no country has committed as many crimes against Egypt as this country has’, while Aneurin Bevan attacked ‘the bankruptcy of statesmanship’.82
In the United Nations, at the behest of Dulles, on 31 October the Security Council called for an emergency session of the General Assembly. This was opposed by Britain and France but the General Assembly met overnight on 1–2 November. The Indian delegation led the charge behind a resolution that called for a ceasefire and for the withdrawal of all forces behind armistice lines. This was carried by 64 votes to 5, opposed by Britain, France and Israel, with the paltry support of Australia and New Zealand. On 3 November, as Anglo-French planes bombed Egyptian targets, Gaitskell accused the British government of defying a UN resolution passed by the largest ever majority, while Labour MP Dennis Healey declared that ‘our action has shattered the pillars on which British policy has rested since 1945’, that is, solid and secure relations with the Commonwealth and the United States. Both men called on Eden to resign.83 On Sunday 4 November Dag Hammersskjöld, the secretary-general of the United Nations, wrote to Eden calling on Britain to end hostilities on pain of a sanctions resolution being passed against Britain and France. That afternoon, a huge demonstration for ‘Law not War’ took place in Trafalgar Square, organised by the Labour movement and the Movement for Colonial Freedom. Bevan harangued the crowds, saying that Eden was ‘too stupid’ to be prime minister and the crowds marched on Downing Street, shouting ‘Eden must go!’84 The same day the Soviet Union took advantage of the crisis to send its forces into Hungary and provoked a parallel crisis in the United Nations. Marshal Bulganin wrote to Eden, Mollet, Ben-Gurion and Eisenhower on 6 November threatening military action if they did not end the war in Egypt.85 The British ambassador to the United Nations advised on 5 November that British legitimacy had been shot away: ‘We are inevitably placed in the same low category as the Russians in their bombing of Budapest. I do not see how we can carry much conviction in our protests against the Russian bombing of Budapest if we are ourselves bombing Cairo.’86 Britain duly caved in and called a ceasefire in the early hours of 7 November.
Although they were partners in the same crime, the consequences for Britain and France were very different. Eden survived a vote of no confidence on 8 November but then left the country. The weight of political opinion forced him to resign on 9 January 1957 and he was replaced by Harold Macmillan. In the French National Assembly on 18–20 December Guy Mollet was attacked by the Communists for not learning that ‘imperialists cannot defeat peoples in revolt against colonial oppression’.87 He riposted that the Egyptian crisis had been fomented by the Algerians and that the real issue was the Algerian War. He also declared to loud applause that appeasement was not an option. ‘The weakness and indecision of the democracies’, he said, ‘allowed Hitler to climb, step by step, to the height of his power. France did not have the right to make the same mistake twice.’88 He won his vote of no confidence by 372 to 213.
France and Britain also drew very different conclusions from Suez. Julian Amery of the Suez Group called it an imperial Waterloo and the list of setbacks for Britain was considerable.89 Egypt, the northern gate to Africa, was lost, and with it the Suez route to what remained of the Empire. Nasser’s reputation in the Middle East allowed him to make a brief union with Syria and to benefit from the overthrow of the pro-British regime in Iraq. Britain parted company with much of the Commonwealth, led by India, which disapproved of its action. Even Australia, which had stood by Britain in the United Nations, looked more towards the Pacific and concluded a trade deal with Japan. The General Assembly of the United Nations, in which colonial powers were now outnumbered by former colonised countries in Asia and Africa, voted a Declaration on Granting Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples in November 1960 and now regarded Britain as ‘public enemy number one’.90 The Soviet Union tightened its grip on the East European Communist bloc and saw prospects for its influence in Africa open up. The United States filled the power vacuum left by the evaporation of Anglo-French power in the region. The Eisenhower Doctrine announced to Congress on 5 January 1957 invited any Middle East country to request economic or military assistance from the United States if they were threatened by armed aggression by another state, by which was plainly understood the Soviet Union. Denis Healey later wrote that ‘Suez was a historic signal to the world that European imperialism was finished, and that the United States was the only Western power that really counted.’91
The French reaction was different. It had lost control of Suez in 1882 and its main concern was Algeria. No holds were now to be barred in the war waged by France to hold on to what, after all, was constitutionally part of metropolitan France and had a settler population a million strong. The victory of Nasser, seen as a grey eminence behind Algerian rebels, made the Algerian situation even more desperate. What was in the minds of the politicians and military was no longer Munich but Dien Bien Phu. Another such defeat in Algeria was beyond contemplation. Whereas the British concluded after 1956 that it must sail close to United States foreign policy, France decided the opposite: that it should be wary of a power that might dominate France and did not have its best interests at heart. Instead, France returned to the negotiations for a European Economic Community, which might in time evolve its own foreign and defence policies, and on 25 March 1957 signed the Treaty of Rome.92
Apotheosis or Colonial Crime?
In January 1957 General Salan, who had been commander-in-chief in Indo-China, was given full powers to destroy the FLN. Five parachute regiments under Jacques Massu, who had fought with the Free French under Leclerc and under Salan in Indo-China, were sent into the labyrinth of the kasbah to eliminate terrorism in what became known as ‘the battle of Algiers’. Hundreds of suspects were arrested and subjected to torture to reveal the names of their accomplices. ‘The strength of this division’, said Salan, ‘was in its cohesion. All knew each other as members of the same cohort or brothers in arms in Indochina.’93 Among the colonels was Marcel Bigeard, who had survived an FLN assassination attempt and was described by Massu as ‘an animal of action’ and ‘the ace of his generation’.94 Bigeard recalled that ‘Every evening we sat around under the light of a few paraffin lamps, talking about Dien Bien Phu and our dead comrades, how we felt at the time. We also spoke of the present war and how we needed to win it very quickly.’95 Bodies of suspects dropped from helicopters into the bay of Algiers became known as ‘Bigeard prawns’.96
The brutality of the French Army in Algeria was accepted by most French people, insofar as they knew about it, as legitimate force against benighted and bloodthirsty terrorists. A minority nevertheless thought that the French were behaving like an army of occupation and now using against Algerian resisters the torture that only a decade before the Nazis had used against them. Jacques de Bollardière, who had graduated with Massu from Saint-Cyr and had been parachuted into the Ardennes in 1944 to work with the maquis, told Massu in March 1957, ‘I scorn what you are doing’. Bollardière was promptly sent back to France, court-martialled and sent to a military prison.97 Germaine Tillion, a former ethnographer and resister who had been deported to Ravensbrück, returned to Algeria in the summer of 1957 on behalf of the International Commission against the Concentration Camp Regime. ‘Among the witnesses of the sufferings of this foreign people’, she said, ‘were some French people who had endured the same crushing experiences twenty years ago’ and shared ‘a friendship through torture’.98 Denunciations of to
rture by the French Army grew in volume. Pierre-Henri Simon, who had spent most of the war in a German POW camp, argued that ‘With their methods the Germans were little boys next to us’, while the practice of reprisals was justified by the French ‘in exactly the same way as the Germans justified Oradour’.99 After Maurice Audin, a young communist assistant lecturer at the University of Algiers, was arrested by paratroopers in June 1957 and tortured to death, his prospective thesis examiner, mathematician Laurent Schwartz, and philosopher Pierre Vidal-Naquet, set up an Audin Committee to broadcast the crime and rally intellectuals around the cause.100
The French government carried on regardless with its war in Algeria, until it committed one massacre too many. On 8 February 1958 it ordered an air attack on Sakiet Sidi Youssef in Tunisia, from which FLN rebels were undertaking attacks on French forces in Algeria. This raid killed 75 and wounded twice as many. The government was overthrown by the National Assembly. A final withdrawal from Algeria by the decrepit Fourth Republic looked possible, but the army would have none of it. General Salan wrote to President of the Republic, René Coty, on 9 May, to say that ‘the French army would unanimously feel the abandonment of this national territory as an outrage. Its reaction of despair could not be accounted for.’101 That reaction came on 13 May 1958 when a combination of the military and pieds noirs seized power in Algiers to prevent this imminent ‘abandonment’. Salan and Massu formed a Committee of Public Safety to restore order and called upon de Gaulle to take the reins of power in what became the Fifth Republic.
This is sometimes seen as an apotheosis, when the former Free French came together with the Army of Africa and the Algerian population in a momentary vision of what might have been a new Algeria. The so-called apotheosis, however, involved the ceremonial unveiling of Muslim women, who had long been considered governed by Islamic law and outside the pale of French citizenship, but were now going to become voting citizens for the first time. Raymond Dronne, the first soldier of General Leclerc’s Second Armoured Division into liberated Paris on 24 August 1944, said it was a ‘brilliant sign of reconciliation and an act of faith in France’.102 ‘Ceremonies’ were organised in Algiers and other cities on 16 May 1958 in which Muslim women removed their veils, but the use of force was thinly disguised. Frantz Fanon, who had worked in a psychiatric hospital outside Algiers and witnessed the effects of torture on Algerian suspects, saw the veil as a battleground between coloniser and colonised, linked to rape and colonial domination. He wrote:
This woman who sees without being seen frustrates the coloniser. She does not surrender, give herself, offer herself […] Each veil torn away presents colonists with horizons until then obscured, and exposes Algerian flesh piece by piece […] The occupier sees in each Algerian woman newly unveiled an Algerian society whose defence systems are being dislocated, opened, kicked in.103
It seemed for a moment that violence would save French Algeria for another day. In British Africa, on the other hand, violence ushered in the end of empire. On 3 March 1959 there were two massacres, one in Kenya, the other in Nyasaland. In the Hola internment camp in Kenya eight Mau Mau prisoners were beaten to death by their warders. In this case, news did get out and Colonial Secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd had to explain himself before the House of Commons. He called the Mau Mau ‘forest terrorists’ who indulged in ‘sexual and sadistic aberrations […] murder and cannibalism’. Of the 63,000 Kenyans rounded up under the 1954 Operation Anvil, he said that only 13,000 were still interned because they were ‘classed as “Z”, that is not responding to rehabilitation’.104 Against him was mobilised the Movement for Colonial Freedom and Labour MP Barbara Castle, who called for his resignation. ‘We shall not lay the foundations for the multi-racial society in which we on this side believe, because we believe in the equality of men of every race and colour’, she argued, unless ‘we react as completely to any outrage against Africans as we would to any outrage against white men’.105
Also on 3 March 1959, forces of the King’s African Rifles opened fire on a demonstration at Nkhata Bay, Nyasaland, killing thirty-three demonstrators. Nyasaland was part of the Central African Federation set up by the British in 1953 as a barrage against Pan-Africanism. The prime minister of the Federation was Sir Roy Welensky, the son of a Lithuanian Jewish father and Afrikaner mother. He defended the apartheid that operated because the country was ‘only seventy years removed from barbarism’, which was approximately when his father came to Southern Africa looking for diamonds, but had ‘carried out an imperial mission it need never feel ashamed of’, providing law, order and justice.106 This regime was challenged by the African National Congress which had branches in all parts of the Federation. It was led by former railway worker Joshua Nkomo in Southern Rhodesia, teacher Kenneth Kaunda in Northern Rhodesia and medical doctor Hastings Banda in Nyasaland. After an open-air meeting on 25 January 1959 Banda was accused by the authorities of planning a massacre of whites. A state of emergency was declared, the Congress was banned and Banda was arrested. Riots broke out and the Nkhata Bay massacre followed. Outcry forced the appointment of a commission of inquiry under High Court judge Patrick Devlin. This reported in July 1959 that the so-called ‘murder plot’ was a fabrication that Lennox-Boyd had encouraged and that the government in Nyasland had used unnecessary and illegal force to crush discontent. Confronted by this report and the outcry over the Hola camp massacre Lennox-Boyd tendered his resignation. However, to defend the colonial service and with a general election coming up, Premier Macmillan refused to accept it.107
These massacres proved to be a turning point in Britain’s relationship with its colonies. Pressure was building up in the Commonwealth, led by Nehru and Nkrumah, for progress towards black majority rule. Following the October 1959 elections won by Macmillan’s Conservatives, the new Colonial Secretary, Iain Macleod, brought the parties in Kenya to talks at Lancaster House, London. The first step was to secure agreement for a one-seat African majority on the Legislative Council. The second was to release Jomo Kenyatta from prison, allow him to take over the Kenya African National Union (KANU) and make him a minister. The third, in May 1963, was to hold free elections, which were won by KANU. Kenyatta became prime minister but his cabinet included whites and there was no mass exodus of settlers, as there were from Algeria in 1962.
The twin myths of a peaceful transfer of power by the British to former colonial authorities and of the French Empire defending itself by violence, seems clear from these narratives. All was not so simple. Ian Cobain has chronicled how in May 1961 Colonial Secretary Iain Macleod ordered that all documents that might embarrass the military, police, intelligence services and Her Majesty’s Government in general, or be used ‘unethically’ by a post-independence government, should be kept secret. This order was developed in 1962 as Operation Legacy and in December 1963, just before independence, Kenyan files were flown back to Gatwick, while others were said to have been dumped in the sea. These ‘migrated’ archives were kept in Hayes and then in a purpose-built facility in Hanslope Park, but it was not until 2011, when Mau Mau victims were pursuing compensation claims in British courts, that the government admitted to the existence of 1,500 Kenya files.108
The fifteen years after the Second World War are often seen as founding the process of decolonisation. The liberation of Europe from Nazism became a model for the liberation of the rest of the world from colonialism. Indian and African soldiers who had fought in Allied armies returned home in the knowledge that empires were not invincible. The song of the United Nations was about the equality and self-determination of nations. France in particular, founding a new republic, had the opportunity to rethink relations with its overseas possessions. And yet precious little rethinking happened. France and Britain, having nearly lost their empires, were desperate to rebuild them. The Dominions looked to Britain for emigrants while settler populations in Kenya, South Africa or Algeria became even more desperate to hold on to their privileges when indigenous populations took up the fight against thei
r power and privileges. The onset of the Cold War increased the strategic value of colonies and enabled regimes to ban nationalist movements as communist. Past humiliations haunted present leaders. The urge to avoid another Munich led to Suez. The refusal to contemplate another Dien Bien Phu justified an eight-year war in Algeria. Modern thinking was going on and for many the way forward already lay in a European Community. But while France still managed to reconcile Europe and empire, Britain snubbed Europe in 1957 because it preferred the Empire. It would come to have form with this preference for empire over Europe.
4
Neo-Colonialism, New Global Empire
On 16 September 1959 de Gaulle announced that once peace was established in Algeria the men and women of Algeria would be offered a referendum on their self-determination. Nothing was said about the special position of the settlers, whose control of the political process had been challenged by five years of war. This time, the majority would decide. His vision for France’s Empire, called the French Union under the Fourth Republic, was now the French Community, a new structure in which former colonial countries would acquire autonomy in association with France.1 A few months later, on 3 February 1960, the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, addressed the parliament of the Union of South Africa in Cape Town. He welcomed the fact that South Africa was part of the ‘Free World’ in the global struggle against communism and saluted the first African nationalism created by people from Europe. But he was also critical of apartheid and prophetic about the growth of nationalism among the African peoples. He quoted the words of Selwyn Lloyd to the United Nations the previous September, when he had said that the British ‘reject the idea of any inherent superiority of one race over another. Our policy is non-racial.’ In conclusion he observed that ‘The wind of change is blowing through this continent and, whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.’2
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