Ghosts of Empire

by Kwasi Kwarteng

  Chukwuemeka Ojukwu, the son of a wealthy businessman, was educated at Oxford University. He described his years there as the ‘happiest in his life’. A career soldier, he would lead the briefly independent state of Biafra during the Biafran War. Here, he is pictured introducing Biafra’s new currency in January 1968.

  The referendum held in Southern Sudan in January 2011 marked a turning point in the country’s history. The establishment of Southern Sudan was a repudiation of the attempt to create a united Sudan from two very different elements, the Muslim North and the Christian South. This development shows how contentious many legacies of the British Empire remain.

  Colonial life in Hong Kong in the 1940s. The British were known for transplanting a ‘little corner’ of England to every outpost of the Empire. Here, people are playing bowls, a quintessentially English game.

  Chris Patten (1944–), the 28th and last Governor-General of Hong Kong, receives the Union flag after it was lowered for the final time on 30 June 1997 marking the end of 156 years of British rule. He was fervently pro-democracy, believing, perhaps mistakenly, that this was what the British Empire had been all about.

  Kitchener was made governor general of the newly conquered Sudan in January 1899 and served for the rest of the year. He was not really a civilian administrator and the task of actually building the Sudan was left to others. His greatest legacy in the Sudan was the establishment of the Gordon Memorial College which later formed the basis for the University of Khartoum. He was adept at raising money for the institution, and was generally concerned about the education of the local inhabitants. His reputation scaled even greater heights after the Boer War, though his actual successes in that conflict were muted. When war broke out in Europe in 1914, it was to Kitchener that the British public turned as a national saviour. He remarked that most of his experience had been in the Near East, and that he knew little about conditions in Europe. But, almost uniquely among high-ranking officials, he realized that the war would last at least three years, at time when many believed that it would come to a victorious conclusion in a matter of months. Kitchener died on 5 June 1916 when the ship on which he was travelling struck a German mine off the Orkney Islands. Like that of General Gordon, his body was never found, which gave birth to strange myths that he was hiding in a cave in the Hebrides, or that he was a prisoner of war in Germany. Such was the fascination of the man that many simply refused to believe he was dead.

  His career had been extraordinary. It combined exoticism, glamour and bravery. He enjoyed incredible success, being raised successively to a viscountcy and then to an earldom, being made a Knight of the Garter and a member of the Order of Merit, and being given the grant of an estate, Broome Park, near Canterbury. Unusually, an act of Parliament permitted his elder brother and his heirs to inherit the numerous titles he had acquired, although, at the time of writing, his ninety-two-year-old great-nephew was still unmarried, making the imminent extinction of the title likely. More generally, Kitchener’s career reveals certain truths about the nature of the British Empire.

  Kitchener was a great individualist, and it was this individualism that captured the imagination of his contemporaries. He enjoyed the vast spaces and solitude of the desert. Steevens, the ever fluent journalist, conveyed this appeal of the desert to a certain type of solitary but tough Englishman, perhaps too reserved for more active social life: ‘the very charm of the land lies in its empty barbarism. There is space in the Sudan. There is the fine, purified desert air, and the long stretching gallops over its sand . . . You are a savage again. You are unprejudiced, simple, free. You are a naked man facing naked nature.’55 Cromer understood, perhaps better than any other contemporary administrator, the importance of individualism to the British Empire at its Victorian zenith:It has indeed become a commonplace of English political thought that for centuries past, from the days of Raleigh to those of Rhodes, the position of England in the world has been due more to the exertions, the resources, and occasionally, perhaps, to the absence of scruple found in the individual Anglo-Saxon, than to any encouragement or help derived from British Governments.56

  In Cromer’s view, everything about the British pointed to individualism. ‘Our habits of thought, our past history, and our national character all, therefore, point in the direction of allowing individualism as wide a scope as possible in the work of national expansion.’57 Like so many imperial administrators, he distrusted democracy. ‘Parliamentary institutions’ were an ‘exotic system’ which provided no ‘real insight into native aspirations and opinions’. Democracy would enable ‘a small minority of natives to misgovern their countrymen’. As far as imperialism was concerned, the Frenchman allowed no ‘discretionary power whatever to his subordinate’, and this meant that the junior administrators in the French colonies relied ‘in everything on superior authority’. The British official, however, ‘whether in England or abroad, is an Englishman first and an official afterwards. He possesses his full share of national characteristics.’ The Englishman was ‘by inheritance’ an ‘individualist’. The British system, according to Cromer, bred ‘a race of officials ... sympathetic to individualism’ and gave ‘a far wider latitude than those trained in the continental school of bureaucracy would consider safe or desirable’.58 This may have been an idealized picture, but, if it was a myth, it was something the British imperial classes felt strongly about themselves.

  Colonial administrators tended to share Cromer’s view. Empire was about individualism; it was about character and personality, about the rule of the strongman, who, through a mixture of personality, intellect and leadership, could dominate his peers and the world around him. Kitchener was the model imperialist in this respect. As one biographer has noted, Kitchener was an ‘individualist of great conceptions’ who centralized ‘every species of authority in himself ’. Such a man was ‘useless at teamwork’. 59 During the First World War he was frustrated by politicians and could not relate to them, because he was an imperialist, not a democrat; he was an individualist who believed in his own destiny, and in the power of strong-willed individuals to shape the world. This view would become more prevalent, with fateful consequences, in other European countries as the twentieth century unfolded.

  12

  ‘The Finest Body of Men’

  If the skill and industry of one man had been largely responsible for the reconquest of the Sudan, it was obvious that the vision of many more people would be needed to rebuild the country. Kitchener left Khartoum in December 1899, and a man of a different stamp, Sir Reginald Wingate, was appointed governor general of the Sudan and sirdar of the Egyptian army; the two posts were thus combined in the same person for the first twenty-seven years of British rule in the Sudan. The arrangement under which the Sudan was administered was unique in international relations. It was called a condominium, or shared ownership, the same word Americans use for a joint ownership of a block of apartments. The British and Egyptian governments were the two partners in this unusual system.

  The condominium was known as the ‘two flags’ policy, and was adopted in July 1898, even though the formal agreement was not signed until the following January.1 That the Egyptian government, though nominally independent, was in reality under the influence and control of Britain did not seem to concern the British officials who maintained the fiction of a ‘shared ownership’ of the Sudan. The reason for this was simple. The Egyptian government, or rather taxpayers, could be expected to share the cost of running the Sudan (they had paid £750,000 by 1930). So the condominium arrangement saved the British government money, although people who objected to the unusual arrangement pointed out that the Egyptian share of the cost amounted to no more than an eighth or a seventh of a single battleship in 1930 currency terms.2 Even though the sovereignty of the Sudan was shared between Egypt and Britain, the supreme civil and military command was vested in the British-nominated governor general; Kitchener was the first man appointed to this eminent position, and Sir Reginald Wingate was the
second. Kitchener had begun the rebuilding of Khartoum, which had been razed to the ground by the Khalifa, and for this purpose he adopted the Chicago gridiron system for the street-plan. This system had introduced into urban planning a series of diagonal roads, whose object was to shorten the distance from one part of the town to another. The effect of this was that Khartoum was laid out in a series of Union Jack patterns, which people erroneously believed had been designed by Kitchener for patriotic reasons. Kitchener, of course, although extremely patriotic, was a pragmatist before all else and merely wanted ‘quick and easy communications’ in the newly built city.3

  Wingate, physically a small man, was a much less impressive figure than Kitchener, lacking the Sudan Machine’s striking looks and mysterious personality. Like Kitchener and so many of the leaders of the late Victorian army, Wingate had been educated at Woolwich and joined the Royal Artillery after graduation. To a much greater degree than Kitchener, his social provenance was poor and obscure. He had been born in 1861, the son of a Glasgow textile merchant who died when Wingate was a one-year-old baby. His family, in straitened circumstances, moved to Jersey, whence the young Wingate was lucky enough to enter Woolwich in 1878, after which his career prospered.4 He graduated from the military academy a respectable tenth out of thirty-nine, and, with characteristic opportunism, got himself attached to the Egyptian army, where promotions were known to be more rapid, in 1883. Again like Kitchener, Wingate quickly realized that knowledge of Arabic would open doors, and he spent every spare moment he had learning the language.5 The opportunities for self-improvement for young officers in the late Victorian era were clearly considerable if one had ambition and talent. Wingate and Kitchener spent their leisure hours learning exotic languages, while, in the 1890s, Winston Churchill would use his own ample leisure time as a young officer in India devouring Gibbon and Macaulay in order to sharpen his English prose style.

  G. W. Steevens, the tabloid journalist, gave the best description of Wingate in the late 1890s and described him as the ‘type of the learned soldier’ who, under different circumstances, might have been professor of oriental languages at Oxford because of his ability to ‘learn you any language you like in three months’. This ability was particularly useful when dealing with untrustworthy natives. ‘As for that mysterious child of lies, the Arab, Colonel Wingate can converse with him for hours, and at the end know not only how much truth he has told, but exactly what truth he has suppressed.’ If Kitchener was the practical man, Wingate represented the intellectual side of the team.6 Intellectualism, in Wingate’s case, was combined with assiduous record keeping, meticulous filing and a taste, some said, for the macabre. Wingate’s papers, now kept in the University of Durham Library, occupy 190 boxes; he was a prodigious letter-writer and a keeper of a voluminous diary, and he constantly wrote reports, minutes and records of meetings and conversations, which reveal him to have been the consummate Victorian colonial administrator.7 He conceived a high opinion of his historical importance, which resulted in his keeping all his records with admirable method and exactness. Wingate’s sense of the macabre was demonstrated by his rumoured possession of the Khalifa’s skull as a personal trophy, from which, it was alleged, he would drink champagne on the anniversary of the Battle of Omdurman until his death, aged ninety-one, in 1953.8

  Like many other military rulers, Wingate enjoyed his status. As governor general he was said to be an autocrat, while civil government, in the early years of British rule in the Sudan, followed a military pattern.9 As late as 1919, after Wingate had left the Sudan, the official handbook published by the Foreign Office repeated the old mantra, ‘supreme military and civil command is vested in the Governor-General’, as concise a description of autocracy as any. 10 Humphrey Bowman, an Old Etonian education officer who had gone to the Sudan as part of the Colonial Education Service in 1910 and would later serve in Iraq, mentioned Sir Reginald Wingate’s grand manner in his diary: he ‘has got a wonderful “manner”: never forgets a face or a name . . . Here he is absolute ruler; he travels in kingly state, and is always accompanied by native orderlies and attendants.’11 There was never any doubt about Wingate’s love for the pomp and majesty of absolute power. Of course, no autocrat can govern a country purely by himself, and so a bureaucracy is needed, and this, in the case of the Sudan, was provided by a group of men described by Lord Vansittart, a Foreign Office veteran, as the ‘finest body of men in the world’. In Vansittart’s later recollection, these young men were ‘best fitted by character to bear early and lonely responsibility for thousands of square miles in a climate which might use them up in twenty years’. 12

  To understand the culture of imperialism from the point of view of the people who actually ran the British Empire, the Sudan Political Service is as good a place as any to start. The SPS was instituted in 1901, and a regular system of recruiting young university graduates was in place by 1905. These recruits, unusually for the time, were chosen on the basis not of examinations but of a series of interviews. It was the duty of the Sudan government agent in London to sift through hundreds of application forms and letters of recommendation, and then invite a short list of candidates to the selection board in London. Wingate, as governor general, took a personal interest in recruitment, and was bombarded with letters from friends asking him to take on this or that particular candidate. In most cases, he politely refused the requests, but he was certain of the qualities needed if one was to be admitted to the SPS. One candidate was accepted after Wingate wrote a glowing endorsement: ‘his father is the archdeacon of Exeter and all the boys are athletic, public school boys, and brought up under the best influence with strong religious belief’.13

  This summed up the ethos of the service. Public schoolboys were strongly favoured, as were athletes, and it was this particular feature which gave rise to the saying that the Sudan was a country of ‘Blacks ruled by Blues’. ‘Blacks’ referred to the original Arabic name for Sudan, al bilad as-sudan, the Land of the Blacks, while ‘Blues’ referred to the distinction of getting a Blue by representing either Oxford or Cambridge in a match against the other university. Athleticism was greatly valued because of the supposedly sapping nature of the climate. The Sudan, in the words of one later governor general, was not a land for ‘weaklings to master’.14 The Sudan Political Service was regarded as the elite of the African Service, and enjoyed a prestige comparable with the Indian Civil Service. It conferred even greater distinction, because it was known that getting in was not simply a matter of passing examinations, as was the case for nearly every other branch of the civil service. Service in Sudan was very much about character and not merely brains; Sudan was where the ‘best of the imperial breed’ could exercise an unlimited sway over natives. In the layered, hierarchical mindset of the time, ‘Imperialist England requires, not the mediocre by-products of the race, but the flower of those who are turned out from our schools and colleges.’15 The chosen men in Sudan would have satisfied Lord Cromer’s stern requirements. They were not the mere ‘by-products of the race’, but ‘excellent specimens of our academic and athletic culture’.16 Of the fifty-six recruits taken on between 1902 and 1914, twenty-seven had a Blue from Oxford or Cambridge. Because only between seven and ten people were recruited each year, the service quickly gained a reputation for exclusivity and tightly bound camaraderie. There was a need, it was said, for ‘sound, competent, steady men’, which resulted in a strong esprit de corps, with men of similar intellectual outlook and background almost invariably being chosen.17

  The interview process in London was not particularly rigorous, but involved a series of questions designed to show mental toughness; cranks and people with foreign accents were firmly rejected. When asked ‘What made you want to serve in Sudan?’, one candidate replied, ‘I always wanted to serve in the Sudan, Sir, ever since seeing Tarzan of the Apes [the 1918 film]’; he was not selected. Wingate personally rejected another candidate on the less substantial pretext that there was ‘something Levantine about him an
d as you know that fact alone makes him undesirable’.18 The public school ethos was overwhelming. Colonel Sir Stewart Symes, Governor General of the Sudan from 1934 to 1941, remembered that there was always ‘a strong public-school flavour about the members of the Sudan Political Service’.19

  In addition to the Blue, preferably in a manly sport like rugby or boxing, as opposed to hockey or soccer, a degree in Classics or History from either Oxford or Cambridge was highly valued. In the early days, before 1914, the average man in the service could be said to have a ‘2nd in History from Oxford’ and a rugby Blue. In an analysis of the 500 or so men who made up the service between 1902 and 1956, it was found that over 70 per cent were from Oxford and Cambridge.20 Even in 1952, in the final year of recruitment, every successful candidate was a graduate of Cambridge University. One entrant from the 1907 intake remembered his colleagues fondly: ‘We were athletes . . . [there was] a former Rugby captain of Oxford and Scotland, an ex captain of the Cambridge cricket XI, a member of the Oxford soccer team, a member of the Oxford cricket XI and a Middlesex county rugby player.’21 Interestingly Winchester College, an English school traditionally known for its intellectual, rather than sporting, prowess, proved to be the school with the most members in the service, a total of thirty, or about 6 per cent of the entire intake. Eton and Rugby were second and third with twenty-one and twenty members of the service respectively.22 As one former member revealed, ‘the really important thing about a public school background was that you virtually couldn’t get into the SPS without it. I can’t think of any of my SPS colleagues who didn’t have one.’23