Ghosts of Empire

by Kwasi Kwarteng

  For Lugard, the empire had offered a unique avenue of opportunity. For men of energy and drive, worthy sons of an imperial race, empire offered a vast scene in which they could employ their talents. In many fields of activity, ‘openings [were] afforded for every class of youth of England, whether from the universities, the technical schools, or the workshop’. To a man of Lugard’s energy it was difficult to ‘realise how severe would be the blow to the life of the nation if these thousands of avenues to independent initiative and individual enterprise and ambition were closed’. This is what had happened to Germany ‘by her crime against the world’ in starting the First World War.42

  Lugard was a great theorist of imperialism and his greatest legacy to the British Empire and to Nigeria was the doctrine of indirect rule. In many ways, Goldie had anticipated this, in his eagerness, as early as the 1880s, to keep the chiefs and local rulers happy. As long as trade was unimpeded, he was content for local rulers to enjoy their traditional powers. Lugard translated this into a deliberate doctrine, even though, once again, it was the actual circumstances, the prevailing shortage of money with which to govern Nigeria, that drove the policy in the first instance. Indirect rule was a function of necessity more than it was an attempt to allow people to govern themselves. It was a practical, not a theoretical, commitment to self-determination or to any other grandiose idea. Lugard himself saw indirect rule as a better policy than a ‘regime laid down by regulations from Whitehall’. The old individualistic spirit, the spirit of ‘anarchic individualism’, is always present in his life and work. The ‘all-pervading love of freedom’ which Lugard believed was the ‘most notable characteristic’ of British colonial policy was derived from the ‘individual instincts of each Englishman from the highest to the most junior’. This spirit of individualism meant that each of the fifty dependencies of the Crown, which Lugard distinguished from the ‘self-governing Dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa’, had ‘its own policy adapted to the character and traditions of its people’.43

  Indirect rule worked because it meant that the ‘fifty or a hundred different Native administrations’ in Nigeria were free to develop in their own way, ‘subject only to a general scheme of policy’. As far as Lugard was concerned, democracy had taken several centuries to develop in Britain itself, and was not even an ‘unqualified success in Europe’ in the 1920s; Mussolini’s Italy had ‘discarded’ it. Democracy simply was not ‘adapted to the mentality or traditions of Eastern or of African races’.

  In a lecture at London’s Birkbeck College in 1928, Lugard stated firmly that ‘only those institutions will survive which are in harmony with native mentality and tradition’.44 He praised what he called the ‘African system of Indirect Rule’, in which rulers would continue to be under the guidance of a ‘higher civilization’. He recognized that they would ‘not be fitted for independence within any period of time now visible on the horizon’. His attitudes to race shared some of the patronizing assumptions of his time: he urged that native culture should be protected from the ‘disintegrating effect of the impact of civilization’. Ever the military man, Lugard loved order and wanted to preserve the ‘fabric of native society’ by protecting the power of the chiefs. He wanted to prevent the ‘chaos which follows on the premature destruction of tribal authority’. Although his lecture was given in 1928, Lugard was still beating the drum of 1890s imperialism. He told the students of Birkbeck College, many of whom would have been too young to have fought in the First World War, that England was ‘writing our epic on the world’s surface’, which he believed would be a mark that would ‘endure even if England herself should cease to be’.45

  By the 1920s Lugard was a noted theorist of empire, but earlier in the century he had been a man of action. As high commissioner of Northern Nigeria, he had conquered the emirs in the field of battle. Kano had been captured in 1903. There, Lugard took pictures of the dungeon where the Emir had kept his enemies. He conjured up the scene where there was no ‘standing room’ and ‘victims were crushed to death every night’ and ‘their corpses were hauled out each morning’. He remembered the stench from the dungeon as being ‘intolerable’.46 The emirs who ruled the Hausa people of Northern Nigeria were not particularly liberal or enlightened. They were absolute rulers who were nearly always at war with one another. Yet these were the very people whom indirect rule benefited. Once the British had subjugated Northern Nigeria, they gave back to the emirs and chiefs many of the powers which they had taken away. These feudal lords were allowed to remain in office, but were now responsible to the British High Commissioner. Any emir who refused to obey these rules would be deposed, and another member of his family put in his place.47

  The results of all this were very clear: the same despotic rulers now had even more prestige and authority, as their power was backed by the official sanction of the British Empire. The ‘most significant product of Indirect Rule was the enhancement of the status of the various Emirs’, who became more autocratic in their attitude towards the mass of the people.48 Lugard was quite pragmatic about this. In 1922 he observed that ‘we are dealing with the same generation, and in many cases with the identical rulers, who were responsible for the misrule and tyranny which we found in 1902’. Yet he was wary of subverting these indigenous institutions. Like Goldie, he mistrusted Westernized natives, who were trying in India and, to a lesser degree, in Africa to bring democracy to their countries. The aim of education in Africa was to ‘enable the African to “find himself”–to emerge from the habit of mind which has through centuries marked him out as the slave of other races, to show him the higher rungs of the ladder which lead from mere obedience to cooperation’. A purely intellectual system of education would be, as it had been in India, a great mistake. In India, ‘a purely secular and intellectual training, which rated the ability to pass examinations above integrity and good citizenship’, had produced an educated class that had nothing to do with the ‘vast illiterate masses’. The Westernized Indian was ‘politically minded’, and was ‘a prey to the agitator and the anarchist’, because the ‘Western knowledge’ which he had acquired ‘had no roots or foundations in his own traditions, beliefs or environment’. Education in Africa had continued along these lines, with equally bad results. In Africa too, by the 1920s and 1930s, there had emerged ‘an educated class’ which was ‘out of touch with the people, imbued with theories of self-determination and half understood catch-words of the political hustings’.

  What Lugard called a ‘purely intellectual type of education’ undermined ‘respect for authority, whether of the State or of the parent’. What he advocated was the ‘training of the character’. This, to Lugard and many other administrators, was ‘more important than the training of the intellect’. Only by training character could the native develop the qualities of ‘integrity, self-reliance and a sense of responsibility’ required of the individual citizen. His ultimate model for such an education was the English public school, which nearly always represented the ideal type of education in the minds of the imperial civil servants, most of whom had been educated in establishments of this kind. The qualities Lugard listed could ‘only be created and fostered in the atmosphere of the residential school [boarding school], where the influence of the British staff can be brought to bear continuously’. Rather like the Duke of Wellington, who was reported to have said that ‘The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton’, Lugard believed that it was in ‘recreation hours more especially that the public school spirit can be evolved’.49 The ideals of this system were best expressed, in his view, in the war memorial at Cheam, a famous preparatory school: ‘Trained to play the game, without self-seeking, to face life without fear or boasting . . . they faced Death with courage and simplicity.’

  Lugard believed that the Boy Scout and Girl Guide movements could assist in this role. To him the English public schoolboy had ‘from infancy been habituated to the standards which 2000 years of Christian ethics have created
in the society in which he lives’.50 Among primitive people, he considered, this ethical code had to be created by force of example, which was why ‘a strong British staff of the right type’ was needed, who ‘in the daily social intercourse and in the play-fields will impress on the boys what the school expects of its members’. He drew up a list of the public-school virtues which the young native children would learn: ‘self-respect devoid of vanity, truthfulness, courage, good manners, self-control and honesty–because these qualities are the necessary essentials which make a gentleman’.51

  The ideal of the gentleman was a cardinal concept of empire. Behind indirect rule was the notion that the natural rulers of society, if they could be educated as gentlemen, formed the best type of ruling class. Westernized natives, the examination passers, didn’t have the character to rule. The keynote of reform in education was to ‘get away from the examination paper’. Even Muslim emirs, if schooled in character, could rule better than a native who had had the misfortune, like Nehru, of being educated at Cambridge or qualifying as a barrister in London. Lugard disliked the phenomenon, already common in the 1920s, of students from Africa and Asia coming to Europe to complete their education. He hoped that a ‘university college in each group of dependencies [colonies]–east and west –may be inaugurated in the near future, where youths may attain a proficiency which will reduce the period to be spent in Europe to the minimum’.52

  Lugard’s ideas were essentially aristocratic and were shared by many members of the imperial class who were mistrustful of democracy, even in Britain. A later Foreign Office memorandum on Nigeria summed up his ideas well: ‘self-government for the African masses’ should be achieved ‘by the education of their own rulers and the gradual extension of their power’ rather than by the ‘introduction of an alien rule by British-educated and politically-minded progressives’.53 Relying on hereditary princes in Northern Nigeria was a regressive policy. It meant that the ‘educated native’ would be excluded from government. Lugard confessed that the ‘educated native very naturally dislikes it [the system of indirect rule] for it places the native chief, who has no schoolroom education, and is probably ignorant even of the English language, in a position of authority over his people’. The system also made the ruler independent of the ‘educated native lawyer or adviser’.54 The chiefs and the emirs of Northern Nigeria enjoyed the system. In the north, the emirs, as feudal lords, commanded absolute authority. Even when conversing with his own son, the Sultan of Sokoto, the most powerful of the Muslim emirs in the north, had the ‘advantage of being able to watch his son’s reactions as the young man did not once look his father in the face when answering his father’s questions’. This was a ‘custom among the Sultan and the Emirs when talking to their sons’.55 Pandering to the emirs in this way retarded the progress of education in Northern Nigeria.

  More fatefully, Lugard decided to amalgamate Northern and Southern Nigeria in one administration in 1914. This act defined modern Nigeria. The two distinct regions had totally different traditions and peoples. This fact was admitted by Lugard himself. The north was dominated by Islam; the south, in his words, was ‘for the most part held in thrall by Fetish worship and the hideous ordeals of witchcraft, human sacrifice and twin murder’. In his biased view, the ‘great Igbo race to the East of the Niger . . . had not developed beyond the stage of primitive savagery’. In this hierarchical vision, the Yorubas to the west had ‘evolved a fairly advanced system of Government under recognized rulers’. In Lugard’s own account, on ‘1st January 1914 the former governments of Southern and Northern Nigeria were formally amalgamated with some fitting ceremonial’. A ‘durbar was held on the great plain at Kano’, in which ‘not fewer than 30,000 horsemen took part’. Each horseman marched past, then ‘gave the salute of the Desert, charging at full gallop with brandished weapons’.56 The aristocratic and hierarchical traditions of the north were easy for a military man like Lugard to understand. The amalgamation of Northern and Southern Nigeria was officially sanctioned by Whitehall. Lugard admitted that he was ‘intimately acquainted with the method of Administration’ in Northern Nigeria, but had no real understanding of the Igbo, Chinua Achebe’s people. As he wrote in the report he prepared on the amalgamation of the two parts of Nigeria, the ‘Southern provinces were populated by tribes in the lowest stage of primitive savagery, without any central organisation except in the west where the Yorubas . . . had developed a social organisation’. In contrast, the north had ‘under the influence of Islam’ developed an ‘elaborate administrative machinery’.57

  The Yoruba chiefs in the west quickly accommodated themselves to the empire and enjoyed its trappings; the northern emirs were flattered and fawned upon. In 1934, the Emir of Kano and his son were received by King George V in London, where the Emir seems to have been impressed by the sanitary conditions and by English food. 58 Not to be outdone, in 1935, the Yoruba chief, the Alake of Abeokuta, was anxiously lobbying the Colonial Office to plan a trip to London, where he was anxious to see King George V, as his father had been personally received by Edward VII as long ago as 1904.59 The beleaguered civil servant at Government House in Lagos had to inform the Colonial Secretary that the Alake would be ‘accompanied by his two daughters and by three members of his Council’. The elaborate preparations made for his visit show the pageantry and pomp of empire. The Alake wanted to see Paris during his trip to Europe and was keen to travel there by air. A. E. F. Murray, the Resident of Abeokuta Province, was writing to the Under-Secretary of State at the Colonial Office about the arrangements in early 1935. ‘I have approached Imperial Airways,’ he wrote, ‘and have ascertained that they will be prepared to give every assistance.’ Meanwhile Murray was making the requisite arrangements for the Alake’s stay at Claridge’s, the Mayfair hotel. In March the Alake himself was writing directly, in an informal style, to Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister, the Secretary of State: ‘My good friend, It is my intention to arrive in England about the end of June and I am eagerly looking forward to the opportunity of discussing matters affecting the interests of my people and country.’ The Alake, it seems, wanted to do some sightseeing, but was wise enough to dress the visit up as an urgent matter of state.60 Murray was soon complaining that the Alake ‘seemed to be asking a lot’; the Yoruba chief now wanted to stay a week in the country for a ‘rest’ and required suitable accommodation. Murray was wondering whether it would be possible for the Alake to attend a court levee ‘as a spectator’ because ‘bright dresses, uniforms and so on appealed to the negro mind, perhaps even more than an audience with His Majesty, the sobriety of which they found puzzling’.61

  The Alake of Abeokuta postponed his planned visit to the summer of 1936; the Silver Jubilee celebrations of 1935 were used as an excuse for him not to be granted an audience with King George V. As one Colonial Office official wrote, the ‘King has in the past . . . received Emirs and Sultans from the North, but the special fatigues of the Silver Jubilee make these precedents of no great importance’. He added the rider that the ‘Alake of Abeokuta is, I believe, generally admitted to be a very important person in the Yoruba States’.62 The visit of 1936 failed to take place too; the King died in January that year and the Alake decided not to visit at that time. The civil servant acidly remarked, ‘I expect the Alake will want to come next year–unless the coronation is made an excuse for putting him off–though more probably he [emphasis in original] will regard it as the chief motive for his visiting this country.’63

  This brief story shows how much the chiefs in the Yoruba west bought into the notion of empire. They were ‘very important’ people who enjoyed a power and authority directly granted to them by the British Empire. In the Igbo-dominated east of Nigeria, however, the system of indirect rule was less successful, since the Igbo, as Chinua Achebe has related, did not have chiefs, and the attempt to foist such leaders on them failed. The problem was that the system of Muslim emirates, which was adopted for the north of the country, became the ‘model for the whole of united Nig
eria’.64 In 1937, Margery Perham, the Oxford academic and Nigeria expert who had befriended Lord Lugard in his old age, could speak of the ‘democracy’ of Igbo culture. She observed that the ‘headship of any group’ in the Igbo villages was ‘never autocratic’. It was ‘representative to an exceptionally full sense’. There was in the east of Nigeria a ‘distribution of authority’. She was aware of reports which stated that ‘younger men who have acquired high titles . . . or simply by virtue of their abilities, [were] able to raise their voice in council’. Perham could see in 1937 that ‘the artificial system of the last thirty years or so’–the system of indirect rule and the promotion of the local chiefs and petty princes–had, in the south-east of Nigeria, ‘been revealed as defective’.65 It was this deficiency which would set Nigeria up for the crisis of civil war and which, in the form of tribalism and corruption, continues to exercise a malign influence on modern Nigeria.

  15

  Yellow Sun

  The Second World War was a period of great upheaval for the British Empire. British officials could see that, by fighting Nazi Germany, they were actually undermining their own position among the colonial peoples they governed. Lord Moyne, the Colonial Secretary, warned the Governor of Nigeria about the high expectations raised by one of Clement Attlee’s speeches: ‘There is no doubt that in the minds of many coloured people we are fighting this war primarily to vindicate the doctrine of the equality of all races in contrast to the Nazi idea of the Herrenvolk.’ He added, ‘I feel that we must be very careful to live up to what is expected of us.’1

  Nigeria itself was a backwater in the worldwide conflict, and the British officials there grew increasingly frustrated and found themselves sidelined. The Governor, Sir Bernard Bourdillon, was hankering after Khartoum and ‘a closer contact with war’.2 A career Colonial Office man who had spent time in Iraq in the 1920s, Bourdillon was now approaching sixty and was keen to get out of Nigeria. ‘I am very fit, but there is no doubt that, after 34 years in the tropics, I am not as energetic, physically or mentally, as I was when I first came here.’ It would be better, even if the end of the war is ‘not clearly in sight’, for there to be a change of governor. In June 1943, Sir Arthur Richards was appointed in his place. Richards was now fifty-eight. He had a mischievous sense of humour and a dry, cynical wit. A product of Clifton College and Christ Church, Oxford, he was just the kind of liberal administrator who so often presided over the last days of empire.