Those who scrutinised the establishment were also its critics. The general argument ran that those who had discreetly but firmly pulled the strings for so long were to a great extent responsible for national decline and stagnation. They were also capable of colossal blunders. ‘After Suez we can no longer have … confidence in this government’s sanity,’ observed one establishment analyst, himself a former Tory MP.15 The same could have been said, and was, somewhat less harshly, after the fall of Singapore. The difference was that in the mid 1950s everything seemed to be going wrong for Britain abroad. All that the establishment seemed able to do was either reach for old remedies, like Eden, or stand back in bewilderment. From the military wing of the establishment, Glubb Pasha complained: ‘While British citizens discuss … noble plans for the betterment of the human race a great part of the world is convinced that Britain is greedy reactionary and intent only on exploiting other nations.’16
Misunderstood abroad, Britain’s establishment was coming under fire at home, and seemed unable to find the confidence to defend itself. The television programme ‘That Was the Week that Was’ and the satirical magazine Private Eye, both of which appeared in 1961, lampooned public figures with a contemptuous abandon that had not been seen since the eighteenth century. In 1963, the Profumo scandal inflicted a further blow on the establishment by revealing that some of its members enjoyed eighteenth-century-style sexual lives. Ridicule of the establishment, hints of its moral bankruptcy, together with a pervasive feeling that it had somehow failed the country, contributed to Harold Wilson’s general election victory in October 1964. On the hustings, Labour alternately berated the stuffy old guard and promised a dazzling era of social and economic regeneration.
Assaults on the establishment and its values gathered pace. Aristocratic blockheads in high command were assailed in the musical Oh What a Lovely War (1964) and the film The Charge of the Light Brigade (1967). This last is particularly instructive, for a film of the same name, starring Errol Flynn, had appeared thirty years earlier; a wildly unhistorical yarn, full of dashing heroism, which linked a British cavalry regiment’s exploits in India with the famous charge. The new version, better on historical verisimilitude, turns into a bitter indictment of the bloodthirsty, dimwitted, bigoted and immoral officer class who hold command solely because of their blue blood.
The same class and its atavistic values were savaged in Lindsay Anderson’s If … of 1969, which also delivered a few well-aimed sideswipes at the lingering ideals of empire. Set in a contemporary public school, the film takes the title of Kipling’s best-known poem, that lodestar which had guided past generations of public-school men as they went forth to take charge of the destinies of others. Despite the headmaster’s faith in leadership ‘in the modern world’, his school is a tyranny, run by sadistic prefects known as ‘whips’ who occasionally speak about ‘duty’ and service to country in the manner of G.A. Henty heroes. Their antagonists, three school ‘rebels’, are a modern Stalky and Co., but unlike their past equivalents they do not employ their energy and ingenuity in empire-building. They identify with the destroyers of empire, one of whom, a black guerrilla, appears on a poster in their study.17
The film’s climax involves the threesome, augmented by the girl lover of one and the boy lover of another, staging an uprising on commemoration day. The main speech is delivered by a moustachioed, well-medalled general who could have stepped from a 1930s imperial movie. He mouths the clichés of that time:
It’s a very sad thing. But today it is fashionable in Britain to belittle tradition. The old order that made our nation a living force are for the most part scorned by modern psychiatrists, priests, pundits of all sorts … Never mind the sneers of the cynics. Let us be true to honour … duty … national pride.
The rebels, armed with machine-guns and grenades, attack, and a cleric and the general organise resistance. Prominent among those fighting back is a middle-aged woman who speaks with the South African or Rhodesian twang.
In If … the empire and the values of its architects are part of a broader target, an inwardly cankered establishment. By the time the film first appeared on the screens, the physical empire had dissolved, for Harold Wilson had continued his predecessor’s policy of disengagement. So in a sense the film is tilting at windmills; boys from this school will not end up as district officers in Somaliland or in command of frontier posts, even though the school’s emphasis on team games and cadet training suggests otherwise. And yet these young men, the establishment they are destined to join and the country which it dominates, are, according to If … still in the grip of outmoded patterns of thought which can only be swept away by violence.
The phenomenon of social, political and intellectual dissent of which If was an extreme example formed a backdrop to the last days of empire. The same period saw the arrival in power of a generation of parvenus who had climbed the lifelines offered by the 1944 Education Act and had no immediate interest in the preservation of the old order. They did not all reject its view of Britain and the world; grammar school boy Harold Wilson spoke about Britain as a ‘world power’ in much the same way as Etonian Curzon had, and he was right in so far as the country possessed a formidable nuclear arsenal.
Hydrogen bombs, Polaris rockets, nuclear-power submarines (the first appropriately named Dreadnought) kept Britain among the first rank of powers, and were some compensation for an empire that was slipping away piecemeal. As it passed away, late nineteenth-century anti-imperialism, padded out with currently fashionable Marxism, became campus and classroom orthodoxy. All overseas empires were extensions of capitalism, which oppressed and exploited their subjects pitilessly. The children and grandchildren of those who had been taught to feel pride in the empire, now learned to be ashamed of it. Britain had been demeaned and corrupted by its empire, and whether true or not, this knowledge may have made its loss more bearable.
6
Uhuru: Tying up Loose Ends, 1959–80
‘Britain’s not bloody well going to make us live under a bunch of fucking black monkeys. Look at South Africa, that’s how to fix them.’ This outburst was overheard in a bar in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia during the spring of 1963, and the speaker was a first-generation Scottish immigrant.1 Africa was changing, but the Rhodesian mind remained fixed in that uncomplicated past when Rhodes’s columns criss-crossed the country and the answer to the native problem had been the Maxim gun. Another relic from that age, the Marquess of Salisbury, had told the House of Lords in March 1961: ‘I may speak as a moaner and a croaker, I shall not speak as a cynic; for no one believes in the British mission in Africa more passionately than I do.’ He went on to explain that giving self-government to black people and ignoring the wishes of white was not part of that mission. His wallet may have lain close to his heart since he was a director of the British South Africa Company, but he was very touchy whenever this matter was raised, insisting it had no influence whatsoever on his judgement.2
For the man in the bar and the Marquess, Africa was taking a turn for the worse, and its present mutability threatened the descendants of those white men and women who had settled there over the past seventy years. At the same time, there was a strong body of opinion in Britain, embracing the Labour party and the liberal wing of the Conservative, which saw this period as a new dawn for Africa. It is hard nowadays to comprehend the optimism which attended the gradual granting of independence to Britain’s African colonies during the early 1960s. Independence day ceremonies were conducted with a remarkable degree of goodwill in a carnival atmosphere. Royalty stood by as flags went down and up, and speeches were made in which Britain wished the infant nation every good fortune. The paraphernalia of the post-colonial order was reassuring: there were secret ballots, and elected assemblies with maces, and wigged and gowned speakers. African judges, who had learned their law at London’s inns of court and wore robes of scarlet and ermine, presided over replicas of English assize courts. Democracy and the rule of law seemed firmly in plac
e. Britain could feel satisfied that it had guided its subjects wisely and that they were setting off along the right road.
This euphoria was premature and probably naïve. For the Sudan, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and Uganda the post-independence path variously led to the overthrow of democracy, a sequence of praetorian coups, military dictatorships, corruption and chronic economic instability. This was all grist to the mill of those, like Salisbury, who had doubted the African’s ability to manage his own affairs unaided, and naturally were quick to say ‘we told you so’. Others, disappointed by what seemed the failure of a noble experiment, argued that Africa’s woes were a direct result of the imperial era. State boundaries drawn for the convenience of bureaucrats or at the whim of representatives of the great powers created tribal mixtures that were bound to fail. Moreover, the colonial era had witnessed the dislocation of old local social and economic orders, and it was foolish to imagine that colonial government, which had seldom lasted for more than a man’s lifetime, could have created a powerful sense of national coherence and identity. In any case, this had never been its primary purpose.
It was certainly true that at least until 1948 the British government imagined that the time would not be ripe for independence until the last quarter of the century. In any event, the timetable would have to be staggered according to the political sophistication of the natives and the experience of those who would take over the reins of government. But expediency had intervened when events in the Gold Coast made it clear that if the brake was applied violence might follow. Even so, this colony had had longer experience than others in democracy. Since 1894, ratepayers had been able to vote for half the membership of village and town councils, but it was a right which few chose to exercise. In 1922 only 46 of the 1,117 registered electors in Accra turned out on polling day and none of the 717 in Sekondi bothered to appear at all.
Political activity increased throughout West Africa between the wars, and was most intense among the Western-educated élite. Aspirants to leadership tended to learn about politics among émigré student organisations during periods of prolonged exile in Britain or the United States. Nkrumah spent ten years at American universities, and a further two studying law in London before returning home in 1947. Kenyatta was out of Kenya between 1931 and 1946, studying and taking various jobs in England, including one as an extra in Sanders of the River. Banda read medicine in various American colleges between 1927 and 1937, and from 1939 until 1953 was a general practitioner in England. He spent the next four years in Ghana, where he learned the mechanics of party organisation and how to mobilise public opinion. What was most striking about these political apprenticeships was that administrative experience was confined to running the party machine. Alongside professional politicans there were men who had worked in harness with British officials in the various provincial councils that had been designed as kindergartens for future rulers. Nigeria’s Benjamin Azikwe (ten years lecturing in American universities) had a record of serving in local administration from 1944 onwards, and Tom Mboya (Ruskin College, Oxford) served in Kenyan trade unions and local government in the decade before independence.
These men were prominent in a growing class of professional politicians with whom the British administration could collaborate. Old allies from among Africa’s old ruling class were discreetly put on one side, a change which some resented. ‘Right thinking people’, complained a Yoruba chief, ‘are beginning to feel that the arrogance of the British administrator is preferable to the exploitation of our national leaders.’3 His apprehension was understandable, for Africa’s politicians were beginning to see themselves as governments-in-waiting and, as deadlines for independence came closer, were treated as such by colonial bureaucrats and British ministers.
In tone and behaviour, African politics closely resembled those of prein-dependence India, and Egypt during its struggle against Britain. African political movements tended to focus on a single charismatic figure, the leader of a monolithic, well-disciplined party which claimed to speak for the entire nation. The chants and responses of the mission churches were adapted to create a nationalist liturgy, which would be recited at mass political rallies. From Kenya came:
‘Uhuru!’ [Freedom]
‘Uhuru!’
‘Uhuru na umoga!’ [Freedom and unity]
‘Uhuru na KANU!’ [Freedom and the Kenyan African National Union]
‘Uhuru na KANU!’
‘Uhuru na Kenyatta!’ [Freedom and Kenyatta]
‘Uhuru na Kenyatta!’
These forms of mass persuasion were needed to give Africans a sense of power and confidence in themselves. Tom Mboya recalled how in 1952 his father and tribal elders had advised him to steer clear of politics: ‘We can never compete with the European. After all, he has aeroplanes, he flies about while we walk on foot. He has cars and guns.’4 And yet within five years Ghana had gained independence, and for a time became the powerhouse for African nationalism. In 1958 Accra was host to the first All-African Peoples Conference which called for the liberation of the whole continent from imperial rule.
For the British government it was not a question of whether the African empire would be dissolved, but when and how. The process had been relatively easy in Ghana, and afterwards with the other West African colonies for they had wholly black populations. In East and Central Africa the situation was complicated by the presence of white settlers, largely of British stock, who looked upon themselves as the economic backbone of their colonies and had grown accustomed to lording it over the blacks. In Southern Rhodesia the whites had had a measure of self-government since 1923, but in Kenya the Colonial Office had deliberately blocked any attempt by the colonists to acquire political paramountcy.
Any residual belief that the white settlers in Kenya might go it alone was shattered by the Mau Mau uprising which started in 1952. It was a peasant jacquerie, confined to the Kikuyu, and randomly directed against all things European. Mau Mau was a cabalistic union whose members were bound together by oaths, sworn to the accompaniment of horrific sexual rituals. Most of Mau Mau’s victims were Kikuyu who were suspected of collaboration with the colonial authorities. These reacted by declaring a state of emergency, and by December 1953 over 150,000 Mau Mau suspects were in detention centres, 12,000 had been convicted of membership and 150 hanged. The war was savage and one-sided; between November 1952 and April 1953, 430 prisoners had been shot dead while attempting to escape, and there were cases of others being tortured.5
Mau Mau had brought about a civil war among the Kikuyu, the majority of whom sided with the British, who held all the trump cards. Their enemies possessed few firearms and were nowhere near strong enough to engage the colonial forces on equal terms. Very few settlers were killed by the Mau Mau, but its psychological effect was enormous, reminding them of their smallness in numbers and isolation. Mau Mau was the ultimate white man’s nightmare whose ingredients were images of a dark, impenetrable Africa of witchcraft and fear of sudden attack by crazed tribesmen armed with pangas and spears. But Kenya’s whites, after some nail-biting moments, were able to sleep in peace thanks to British-trained askaris (who did the brunt of the police work), regular soldiers, national servicemen, and aircraft. By 1956, all but a handful of guerrillas had been tracked down, and the rest were either dead or incarcerated in camps, where they underwent a form of brainwashing designed to release them from the magic of their oaths.
For all its nihilism, Mau Mau briefly caught the imagination of other Africans. ‘We want Mau Mau here; we want to kill Europeans because we are tired of them,’ shouted one African at a political meeting at Lusaka, Northern Rhodesia, in April 1953.6 The police intelligence officer who took down his words also noted that Harry Nkumbula (London School of Economics, 1946–50), the president of the Northern Rhodesia African National Congress, urged his listeners to wage war with words.
The struggle in Northern Rhodesia was against the Central African Federation. This hybrid had been foisted on the Labour gov
ernment in 1951 by tidy-minded Colonial Office officials, who believed that it would solve the future economic and political problems of Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. It was a shotgun marriage which forced cohabitation between two crown colonies, with tiny white minorities, and white-dominated Southern Rhodesia. At its birth in 1953, the proportion of white to black in the Central African Federation was 1 to 66. Most of the former lived in Southern Rhodesia where there were 220,000 to 3.5 million Africans. Blacks had no faith whatsoever in the new state, which they believed was a device to extinguish their political rights and drag them into the orbit of Southern Rhodesia.
Just what this might entail was spelled out in the 1950 version of Southern Rhodesia’s handbook for British immigrants. Only skilled men were wanted, ‘Because of our African population, and the fact that Africans do the unskilled and bulk of the semi-skilled work.’ A good life was promised, especially for women: ‘On the whole, the lot of the Rhodesian housewife is much more pleasant than that of her sisters in England.’ Black servants were plentiful, but the newcomer had to bear in mind ‘that the average Native servant is of childlike simplicity’ and prone to pilfering, so firmness was vital.7
Segregation was enforced rigorously everywhere. Visiting the country in 1955 to advise on its broadcasting system, Sir Hugh Greene encountered Sir Godfrey Huggins, then the Federation’s prime minister, who told him that white and black MPs were forbidden to dine together in Parliament House. Nothing had changed since the time of Rhodes and Jameson. A factory manager told Greene that:
I had a friend from Northern Rhodesia down here the other day who said what a relief it was to see a really good flogging again. He told me: ‘You know up in Northern Rhodesia, if you raise your hand against one of these chaps, he drags you off to the police station.’8
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire Page 75