The Rise and Fall of the British Empire

by Lawrence, James

  That year, a white man who had flogged to death one of his servants was given a year in gaol and ordered to pay his victim’s family £100 compensation. An African found guilty of stealing sixteen shirts also got a year’s imprisonment.9 It was, therefore, not really surprising that the Colonial Office found it hard to whip up enthusiasm for the Federation among blacks in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland.

  Opposition to federation was most vehement in Nyasaland where, from July 1958, the newly-returned Dr Banda had taken over as president-general of the African National Congress. The governor, Sir Robert Armitage, toed the official line over the Federation, and was scared by Banda’s trenchancy and the support he was gathering. In what turned out to be a ham-fisted attempt to force a show-down, Armitage declared a state of emergency in Nyasaland on 18 February 1959, using the discovery of an alleged Mau Mau-style conspiracy to massacre the colony’s 8,000 whites as an excuse. Plot or no plot, and the evidence is far from certain, Armitage had secured a chance to uncover the real strength of the anti-Federation movement and silence it.10 The suspension of normal legal rights and judicial processes allowed for dawn raids, arrests and internment. Banda was seized and bundled off to Gwelo gaol in Northern Rhodesia and troops were rushed in from Northern Rhodesia and Tanganyika to handle the inevitable protest demonstrations. Within four weeks the death toll had risen to fifty-two.11

  Armitage’s action had embarrassed the government at a time when it was facing criticism for the deaths of Mau Mau detainees in Hola Camp in Kenya. As has been seen, the Colonial Secretary, Lennox-Boyd, was anxious to forestall television criticism of the state of emergency, and there were charges in the Commons that the Nyasaland authorities had tried to censor journalists reporting on conditions there.12 Resisting pressure from Southern Rhodesia, where the Nyasaland clamp-down had been welcomed, Macmillan ordered a senior judge and sometime Tory candidate, Lord Devlin, to chair a commission of inquiry into the causes of the emergency.

  Devlin’s report appeared at midsummer and made disturbing reading. Armitage had blundered, Banda was exonerated, and Nyasaland was described as ‘a police state’. Macmillan was furious and claimed that the judge had acted out of ancestral and personal spite. He was Irish (‘no doubt with that Fenian blood that makes Irishmen anti-Government on principle’), a lapsed Catholic with a Jesuit brother (in fact a missionary in Northern Rhodesia), and was getting his own back for not having been appointed Lord Chief Justice.13 The cabinet rejected Devlin and hurriedly drew up a counterblast, allegedly penned by Armitage, which was published on the same day as the judge’s report.

  Together, the reports on the killings at Hola Camp and the blunders in Nyasaland were an indictment of a colonial policy which had lost direction and moral basis. Enoch Powell, a former government minister, took his colleagues to task on the last score in a speech which repeated the classic argument that imperial authority could never exist in an ethical vacuum, or in defiance of its subjects’ wishes. It was indefensible to say: ‘We will have African standards in Africa, Asian standards in Asia and perhaps British standards here.’ He continued:

  All Government, all influence of man upon man, rests on opinion. What we do in Africa, where we still govern and we no longer govern, depends upon the opinion which is entertained of the way in which Englishmen act. We cannot, we dare not, in Africa of all places, fall below our own highest standards in the acceptance of responsibility.14

  To this invocation of traditional benevolent imperialism was added a warning from the Opposition front bench, delivered by Aneurin Bevan, to the effect that Britain could not allow its national life to be poisoned in the way that France’s had been by African conflict. Central Africa might yet prove Britain’s Algeria.15

  Macmillan was determined that this should not happen. In the wake of the Nyasaland débâcle, he had decided to send a commission under Sir Walter Monckton, a silver-tongued lawyer and skilled arbitrator, to investigate opinion throughout Central Africa. This was wormwood to the Federation’s new prime minister, Sir Roy Welensky, a former railwayman and prize-fighter, who had never pulled his punches. In 1957 he had ominously remarked that he had never believed ‘that the Rhodesians have less guts than the American Colonists had’. His predecessor Huggins (now Lord Malvern) had issued a similar threat. Speaking of Rhodesia’s army, he observed: ‘I hope we shall not have to use them as the North American Colonies had to use theirs, because we are dealing with a stupid Government in the United Kingdom’.16 Macmillan took this bluster very seriously, and imagined that if Labour was returned to office in the imminent general election, Southern Rhodesia might rebel.

  In August, Macmillan had counselled Monckton to do all in his power to create a multi-racial state in Central Africa. Failure would turn the region, and Kenya as well, into ‘a maelstrom of trouble into which all of us will be sucked’. He added that white supremacy was foredoomed, but hoped that something might be accomplished to accommodate the white settlers, who were vital for the continent.17 The alternative was another extended and unwinnable conflict of the sort which was then being fought in Algeria. British treasure and British blood would never be expended to defend white supremacy in East and Central Africa.

  His standing within the Conservative party enhanced by his sweeping victory in October, Macmillan was free to embark on a radical African policy. His chosen instrument was the forty-six-year-old Iain Macleod, a talented, sharp-witted and sometimes acerbic liberal Conservative who was temperamentally suited to carry out what were at heart paternalist colonial policies. He had what the Prime Minister called ‘the worst job of all’ with the prospect of bloodshed if he failed. After a year in office, Macleod justified his actions to his party conference on the grounds that they were an extension to Africa of the ‘one nation’ principles of Disraeli. Black and white would have to be drawn together in the same way as the rich and the poor of Victorian Britain.

  Procuring compromise and cooperation were not easy, but Macleod had a flair for chairing conferences and considerable patience. He was also willing to stick his neck out: one of his first acts was to end the state of emergency in Kenya; in April 1960 he restored normal government to Nyasaland and, two months later, had Banda released in spite of howls of anger from Armitage and Welensky. Macleod was publicly announcing that he was the friend of African nationalism, although common sense demanded an end to the Nyasaland emergency which had become a heavy burden on the colony’s limited resources. In 1939 the total bill for policing had been £22,000; in 1960, it was £1 million, a sixth of the entire colonial budget.18

  Macleod’s greatest achievement lay in the revision of the schedules for independence and overseeing the peaceful dismemberment of the Central African Federation. Preparing for the transfer of power was not a glamorous task for it involved drawing up draft constitutions and discussing them at conferences, activities which did not make headlines or win public acclaim. Macleod’s work was acknowledged, at least by Africans, for ‘Iain’ became a popular Christian name in Uganda and Nyasaland, where, after independence a thoroughfare in Blantyre was named ‘Macleod Street’.19 This was some reward for labours which ended with Tanganyikan independence in 1961, Ugandan in 1962, and Kenyan in 1963, and in the same year the dissolution of the Central African Federation. The next year Nyasaland became independent as Malawi, and Northern Rhodesia as Zambia.

  Macmillan had been the guiding force behind these changes. He had always judged the empire in empirical rather than emotional terms, asking what economic or strategic value colonies possessed for Britain.20 It was as a pragmatist that he made his celebrated tour of sub-Saharan Africa at the beginning of 1960. He was rowed ashore at Accra like Sanders of the River, and in Nigeria he found a successor to that fictional district officer in the sagacious figure of Sir James Robertson, the colony’s governor-general. Robertson told Macmillan that, while Nigerians might need twenty-five years in which to prepare themselves for self-government, it was wiser to let them have it immediately. Delay would tur
n those intelligent men who were now being trained for leadership into rebels and ‘violence, bitterness and hatred’ would follow. The choice was between instant Uhuru and twenty years of repression.21

  In South Africa, it was Macmillan’s turn to deliver a homily, designed to be heeded by whites throughout the continent. It was delivered to the South African parliament in Cape Town and opened with a history lesson: ‘Ever since the break-up of the Roman Empire one of the constant facts of political life in Europe has been the emergence of independent nations.’ This process was now underway throughout Africa, and, during his passage through the continent, Macmillan had been struck by its inexorability:

  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. We must all accept it is a fact, and our national policies must take account of it.

  The South African MPs politely applauded, but it took thirty years for the import of Macmillan’s words to sink in.

  For white settlers in Britain’s African colonies Macmillan and Macleod were a pair of Judases whose words and actions added up to a form of treason. ‘We’ve been thoroughly betrayed by a lousy British government,’ complained one Kenyan farmer in 1962. ‘We’ll throw in our allegiance with somebody who’s not always prepared to pull the bloody flag down.’ He had first come to the country in 1938, secured a 999-year lease on his crown land farm, and had been officially encouraged to see himself as part-squire part-schoolmaster when dealing with the blacks: ‘I’m not a missionary, I hate the sight of the bastards. But I came here to farm, and look after these fellows. They look up to you as their mother and father; they come to you with their trials and tribulations.’22 Now, Kenya’s future prime minister and president, Kenyatta, was saying that any white Kenyan who still wanted ‘to be called “Bwana” should pack up and go’. This form of address, and the deference it implied, mattered greatly to some; Kenya’s white population fell from 60,000 in 1959 to 41,000 in 1965.

  Sir Michael Blundell, the leader of Kenya’s moderate whites, explained this exodus in terms of psychology. Post-1945 immigrants were, he thought: ‘the kind that couldn’t adapt to a Labour government. And if they couldn’t adapt to a Labour government, how the hell could they hope to adapt to Africa?’23 If egalitarian Britain became unbearable, the middle and upper-middle classes could take refuge in Africa where the old values still obtained and servants were freely available. The Duke of Montrose found Southern Rhodesia a welcome change from a Britain which he believed to be afflicted with a terminal moral cancer, whose symptoms he outlined in a memorable speech to the House of Lords in March 1961. There was, he asserted: ‘A great sickness in England … Immorality is made to appear innocent: literature which our fathers banned [Lady Chatterley’s Lover] we set free for people to read … the trouble is not only in Africa; the trouble is here too…’ To escape infection, the Duke was prepared to rough it in the bush: ‘I never thought, as a boy, that I should see my father helping to wash up dishes, but I did before he died. He did not complain, and neither shall I complain if I have to do the same in Africa.’

  These ramblings formed part of a concerted attack on Macmillan’s new African policy which was led by another feudal dinosaur at war with evolution, the Marquess of Salisbury. He blamed Macleod: ‘He has been too clever by half. He has adapted, especially in his relationship to the white communities of Africa, a most unhappy and wrong approach.’ The result was that the whites, by implication a none-too-clever group, believed they had been replaced by black politicians as Britain’s partners in Africa.24 Ninety Conservative MPs shared the Marquess’s misgivings and signed a motion of protest against what Macleod was doing. The dissidents included most of the right wing of the party, including Captain Waterhouse (who was chairman of Tanganyika concessions) and, interestingly, a scattering of Ulster Unionists. The latter, presumably, found it easy to identify with white settlers south of the Zambesi.

  The revolt over African policy was a damp squib which spluttered harmlessly. The cause of the white minorities did not stir up the same passion in Britain as it did in France, and to have split the Tory party over a minor imperial issue would have been suicidal folly. Nonetheless, Macleod’s liberalism may have helped lose him the chance of gaining the party leadership after Macmillan’s resignation in October 1963. An indirect but grateful beneficiary was Harold Wilson, who had rated Macleod the man most to be feared in the upper ranks of the Conservatives.

  The evidence heard by the Monckton Commission sealed the fate of the Central African Federation. It was universally detested by blacks throughout Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia and was, therefore, unenforceable. Its obsequies were conducted by Macleod’s successor, R.A. Butler, at a conference at the Victoria Falls in the summer of 1963. Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland proceeded on separate paths to independence, while Southern Rhodesia sulkily prepared to go it alone. A new party, the Rhodesia Front, made the running on a white supremacy ticket.

  Between 1963 and 1980 successive British governments were tormented by the Rhodesian ulcer. It was a source of international embarrassment, the cause of interminable rows inside the Commonwealth, and a distraction from more pressing domestic and European matters. It was the last and least welcome legacy of empire and, as the Commonwealth and United Nations made repeatedly clear, it could only be cured by Britain.

  With the disintegration of the Central African Federation, the Rhodesian whites were overwhelmed by a feeling that Britain had deserted them, and that henceforward they would have to shape their own destiny. This was independence under the 1961 Constitution which perpetuated white paramountcy. As Ian Smith, the Rhodesian Front leader, was fond of saying, there would be no black majority rule in his or his childrens’ lifetimes. He was forty-five when he became prime minister in 1964. Smith was an unlikely man to take on the empire, for he saw himself and his countrymen as embodiments of all those old, manly imperial virtues which would have been applauded by G.A. Henty. No scholar (in later life he seemed unable to distinguish between ‘actual’ and ‘factual’), Smith was, like most Rhodesian men, sports mad, excelling in rugger, cricket and tennis. A Hurricane pilot during the war, his political hero was Churchill, a man, he always believed, who would never have abandoned Rhodesia to the blacks. As a negotiator, Smith was stubborn and cunning by starts. As a politician he was plain-spoken and, according to his lights, intensely patriotic. His following among the white community was enormous; in the May 1965 elections his Rhodesia Front won all the fifty seats reserved for whites.

  This election provided the popular imprimatur for UDI (Unilateral Declaration of Independence) which was announced on 11 November. It had been preceded by desperate last-minute negotiations between Smith and Harold Wilson, who had flown to Salisbury. The British Prime Minister insisted, as did his successors, that the British parliament alone had the legal right to grant Rhodesia its independence, and then only when blacks as well as whites had the vote. The talks broke down and Wilson returned after what had been a highly disagreeable mission. During a dinner he had to endure the oafish clowning of the Duke of Montrose who told blue jokes and performed a belly dance.25 Sadly, this aristocrat appears to have succumbed to the creeping degeneracy he had denounced in the Lords four years ago.

  On his homecoming, Wilson publicly announced that in the event of UDI Britain would not employ force to bring Rhodesia back to its obedience. It was an immensely controversial statement which gave heart to Smith who, with good reason, was worried that his own army and air force would shrink from fighting the British. Wilson was unaware of his anxieties; what he did know was that the Rhodesian forces were well-equipped and trained, and that Britain’s service chiefs were nervous about engaging them with extended lines of communication. Moreover, it would take time to establish a secure base in Zambia. Even if logistical problems were overcome, there was no popular enthusiasm for the war, although the Archbishop of Canterbury and Jo Grimond, the Liberal leader, were making lo
ud belligerent noises. Opinion polls suggested that they were out of touch with public opinion, which was against a Rhodesian war. This was comforting for Wilson, who was not a warrior by nature and feared that precipitate action might lead to a second Suez, or worse, a British Viet Nam. Rhodesia, he announced, would be overcome by economic sanctions.

  Britain lost the war of attrition against Rhodesia. The rebel state flourished and confidence soared. Between 1967 and 1973, 39,000 immigrants arrived to share its prosperity. According to the BBC’s local correspondent, ‘most of them … are in Rhodesia for the good life, and there’s no doubt that they are getting it.’26 Negotiations continued fitfully. Wilson and Smith met twice, first in December 1966 on board the cruiser Tiger, and again in October 1968 on board its sister ship Fearless. Both meetings ended in deadlock over majority rule. During the first encounter, the naval officers’ feelings had been ‘Good Old Smithy, bloody old Wilson’. They changed their tune after intimate contact with the Rhodesians who revealed themselves ‘rude, racist and even nigger-bashing in their conversations in the mess’.27

  Those Rhodesian qualities which some found repellent, attracted others, especially on the outer right wing of the Conservative party. One such, Harold Soref MP, claimed that: ‘Rhodesia represents Britain in its halcyon days: patriotic, self-reliant, self-supporting, with law and order and a healthy society. Rhodesia is as Britain was at its best.’28 This other Eden was sometimes known as ‘Basingstoke-in-the-Bush’, a parody of a pre-war middle-class suburb transported across the Equator, complete with its tennis and golf clubs, and populated by aggressively hearty men in shorts, blazers and cravats, who talked of nothing but sport, and women who knew their place. So too did the black man. Soon after UDI, a former recruit to the Rhodesian police told a journalist that he had been taught that the African ‘is muck to be kicked down and kept there’.29