W. E. B. Du Bois
The British are notoriously incapable of recognising democracy in any country unless it wears an English garb or expresses itself in terms intelligible to the English mind.
From a cable sent to delegates from the Gold Coast by the president of the Aboriginals Rights Protection Society of the Gold Coast
We were here with one understanding, that the Colonial Office will have to realise the time has come when we no longer beg for what we deserve, but that we are demanding that which is ours.
S. O. J. Andrews, labour organizer from Grenada
The Manchester Pan-African Congress, which was finally held in Chorlton Town Hall on 15 and 16 October 1945, was largely organized by Padmore under the auspices of the Pan-African Federation (PAF), which brought together a number of black British organizations.197 The congress had about 200 delegates and several observers, and Padmore, who by now regarded himself as an elder statesman of sorts, wrote privately of his personal ‘satisfaction of seeing concrete results for my years of labour’.198 Although, as Immanuel Geiss notes, the mainstream British press largely ignored the event – only the New Leader was present – the congress remains of historical significance for the cast of characters it brought together, for the analyses and resolutions which emerged from it, and, not least, for apotheosizing the currents of black self-assertion and radical anticolonialism that had emerged so powerfully in the previous decade.199 The event was ‘a landmark both in the history of Pan-Africanism and in that of decolonization … [It] served as the pace-maker of decolonization in Africa and in the British West Indies’, with strategies resolved on in the course of the conference often implemented ‘with surprising ease’.200 Christian Høgsbjerg has listed some of the posters and quotations visible at the conference, ‘which give some sense of the politics and demands of the organisers’:
‘Labour with a white skin cannot emancipate itself while labour with a black skin is branded’ (a quote from Karl Marx’s Capital), ‘Arabs and Jews unite against British Imperialism’, ‘Down with Trusteeship’, ‘Oppressed peoples of the earth unite!’, ‘Freedom for all subject peoples’, ‘Africa for the Africans’ (a slogan popularised by the late Marcus Garvey), ‘Down with Colour Bar’, ‘Ethiopia wants exit to the sea’, ‘Africa Arise’, ‘Freedom of the press in the colonies!’, ‘Down with lynching and Jim-Crowism’, ‘Down with anti-semitism’, ‘African peoples want the four freedoms’.201
The list of attendees itself reads like a Who’s Who of anticolonialism and black nationalism: it includes, in addition to Padmore, Kenyatta and Nkrumah, who were part of the organizational team, Peter Abrahams and I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson. Delegates from an astonishing array of organizations were also present or sent felicitations, from the Kikuyu Central Association, the Nyasaland African Congress and the South African National Congress to numerous trade unions from the West Indies, the Federation of Indian Organisations in Britain, the Women’s International League and the Ceylon Lanka Sama Samaj Party. For Padmore, the event marked the definitive end of paternalism: ‘The days of dependence upon the thinking and direction of their so-called left-wing European friends who had so often betrayed them, were over. From henceforth Africans and peoples of African descent would take their destiny into their own hands and march forward under their own banner of Pan-Africanism in co-operation with their own selected allies.’202
This was a point repeatedly underscored by other prominent speakers. Amy Ashwood Garvey opened the proceedings, observing that the goals of ‘freedom and peace’ had been central to the war just concluded, and therefore ought to be applied to the British colonies. One delegate recalled that taking freedom by force, if necessary, was a recurrent theme: ‘The notion was expressed that the British government would not, out of its free will, “donate” self-rule to a colony, and the application of some element of force might be necessary.’203 Another delegate, Joe Appiah, was quoted in the Manchester Guardian: ‘It is only force which will bring us out of this disgraceful condition in which we find ourselves.’204 Nkrumah would insist unambiguously that mere ‘internal self-government within the Empire’ was unacceptable, and ‘full and unconditional independence’ would be the goal, even if that required ‘revolutionary methods’.205 Another delegate spoke of the need to ‘help civilise the English people’ through the black presence in England.206 Self-assertion was a keynote in the congress’s manifesto:
The delegates to the Fifth Pan-African Congress believe in peace. How could it be otherwise when for centuries the African people have been victims of violence and slavery. Yet if the Western world is still determined to rule mankind by force, then Africans, as a last resort, may have to appeal to force in the effort to achieve Freedom, even if force destroys them and the world.207
In a further ‘Declaration to the Colonial Workers, Farmers and Intellectuals’, other demands were elaborated with greater specificity, but again drawing from insurgencies on colonial ground: strikes and boycotts, ‘the right to form cooperatives, freedom of the press, assembly, demonstration and strike, freedom to print and read the literature which is necessary for the education of the masses’, as well as ‘the right to elect their own governments, without restrictions from foreign powers’.208 During the first session of the congress, which Du Bois chaired after being felicitated, speaker after speaker also situated this self-assertion within a longer history of black resistance. The world and British people needed to be told by the congress ‘that we want our freedom. We do not want freedom that is partially controlled – we want nothing but freedom.’209 In his account of the East African picture, Kenyatta noted that the previous year a massive strike had gripped the Ugandan cotton industry, ‘which the Government called a disturbance, but it was really a protest by the people against the political, as well as economic, oppression under which they suffer’.210 The reports from the Caribbean unsurprisingly referenced the ‘spontaneous outbreaks of strikes and riots’ and the ‘the perpetual agitation from the people’ in the face of intolerable conditions: ‘Since the wave of revolt which swept through the West Indies in 1937, the people have demonstrated in and out of season their resentment over Crown Colony rule.’211 Ken Hill, the highly regarded Jamaican trade unionist, noted that the time had come for a reverse pedagogy: ‘The first thing which people of the industrial powers want to be educated to recognise is that paternalism and benevolence are not adequate or just substitutes for national home rule or independence in Colonial territories.’212 It was left to the Sierra Leonean trade unionist Wallace-Johnson to spell it out again, referencing an 1885 uprising against imperialism in his country: ‘We are at this conference not to demand certain concessions for Africa and the West Indies, but to demand complete independence for the African peoples and peoples of African descent all over the world.’213
Once again, the wider background of actually occurring resistance and agitation is important. A few months before the Congress, on 15 July 1945, the PAF, along with the West African Students Union (WASU) and other organizations, hosted what was reportedly ‘one of the largest rallies of coloured peoples ever witnessed in the British capital’ in support of the Nigerian General Strike, which had begun a month previously and would last a total of fifty-two days.214 Hakim Adi writes that the strike became a cause célèbre in Britain, galvanizing anticolonial militancy.215 Driven by worker demands and famously joined by the market women of Nigeria, the strike is widely regarded as the first major anticolonial event in that country to garner international attention – ‘the struggle that initiated the struggle for Nigeria by Nigerians’.216 As in the West Indies, the scale and vigour of the strike took both trade union leaders and the government by surprise, an unprecedented mood of militancy having spread throughout the ranks of both labour and the wider populace. Meanwhile, in Britain, the election of a Labour government under Clement Attlee had ‘temporarily increased optimism amongst Black people in Britain concerning the future of the colonies’.217 In conjunction with the news coming in o
f widespread unrest in the colonies, this created an opportunity to demand that Clause Three of the Atlantic Charter, specifying the right of peoples to choose their own government – the subject of Padmore and Cunard’s dialogue – be genuinely universalized. Testifying, once again, to the influence of Padmore’s analysis, Harold Moody of the reformist organization the League of Coloured Peoples (LCP) recalled that English people were now beginning to see ‘how incongruous it is to be fighting ostensibly against the Herrenvolk idea and then to be supporting it within their own communities’.218 There had also been several other conferences during the 1930s, including a series organized by the reasonably militant WASU, which featured speeches by sympathetic Labour MPs and set up a parliamentary pressure group ‘campaigning for the desired changes in West Africa’.219 In 1944, the LCP held a conference in which a ‘Charter for Coloured Peoples’ had been drawn up and presented to an ever-truculent Churchill. Among other things, the charter had demanded ‘that the colonial powers should assume the obligation to render account to an international body about their administration in Africa and about the steps they were taking to transfer sovereignty’.220
In 1945, the PAF had also sent an open letter to the Attlee government on behalf of various affiliated organizations. The letter spoke of the implications of both the Allied and the Labour victories, which it welcomed, though it noted again the kinship between the evil that had just been defeated and that under which colonial subjects laboured:
The dark-skinned workers, no less than the pale-skinned, want freedom from war, want and fear. The victory of the common man here is the victory of the common man in Africa, Asia and other colonial lands.
To consolidate this great victory, however, courage is needed. The courage to face squarely the fact that imperialism is one of the major causes of war. The courage to admit that any high-sounding blue-prints that beg the question of man’s territorial and political domination by other men, whether their skins are white, yellow or black, is only staving off the day when the evils of war with their ghastly new scientific twists will again be unleashed on humanity. It is the challenge of our time that you, Comrade Attlee, and your Government, should give the Socialist answer to the Tory imperialism of Mr Churchill’s ‘What we have we hold.’ What will your answer be?
To condemn the imperialism of Germany, Japan and Italy while condoning that of Britain would be more than dishonest, it would be a betrayal of the sacrifice and sufferings and the toil and sweat of the common people of this country. All imperialism is evil.221
There was no response from Attlee’s government.
Writing of Padmore and the milieu of the IASB and the PAF, one scholar asks: ‘Would the African liberation movement have succeeded in gaining political independence so rapidly in British colonies after the war if this little circle of writer-agitators had not laid the groundwork in London? Quite possibly not.’222 It has also been suggested that the growth of African nationalism helped transform Labour left-wingers’ colonial attitudes. The colonies, Nancy Cunard wrote in her prefatory comments to The White Man’s Duty, were ‘a national heartache to those who know them and who know also that the coloured peoples are as human as ourselves and deserve the kind of life we ourselves desire’.223 Only such a recognition, and actions based upon it, could yield anything like a real commonwealth of peoples. Instead, Padmore observed, it was being made clear that ‘the regime of exploitation and colonial fascism … is to continue after the war; that the system of imperialism is to run on indefinitely’.224 Padmore was also, one scholar argues, ‘anticipating the Fanonian idea that once the colonized participates in his own liberation, a new culture emerges to sustain and energize the new collective identity which ultimately emerges’.225 In Chapter 10, I will explore the unfolding of post-war resistance and rebellion in British Africa – Kenya in particular – and the impact it had on Britons, both individuals and groups, who would throw their weight decisively behind the process of decolonization that the Second World War had now set inexorably in motion, regardless of whether British leaders wished to ‘preside over the liquidation of the British Empire’.226 Fought for tenaciously, that liquidation was finally effected. The next chapter looks at a famous uprising that was a significant contributor to this ending.
10
A Terrible Assertion of Discontent:
‘Mau Mau’ and the End of
Imperial Benevolence
[The Mau Mau crisis was] if not the bloodiest, then certainly among the most traumatic, of the conflicts attendant on British decolonisation – [it] loomed menacingly behind the later phases of constitutional talks and progress to self-government.
Stephen Howe
Mau Mau challenged not only the British sense of control – which was often challenged in these years – but officials’ new-found sense of mission, the belief that they had a positive role in the future of their subjects.
Frederick Cooper
In 1953, George Padmore wrote of an impending revolution in Africa. The headache it posed for ruling British politicians was, he averred, a familiar one:
The distinguished Victorian Prime Minister, the Marquis of Salisbury, once asserted that ‘Africa has been created to plague Ministers of Foreign Affairs’. This was never more true than today. For throughout the length and breadth of the once Dark Continent – from Egypt to South Africa, from Kenya to the Gold Coast, not to mention the vast Central African territories of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland – the indigenous races are struggling to throw off the yoke of colonialism and achieve their rightful place as free nations in a free world.1
Padmore was referring to increasingly fractious resistance across Africa, but his specific focus was on what became the most high-profile uprising of the post-war period: ‘The agitation for self-government is nowhere more dramatically manifested than in Kenya, where the violence of the struggle of the African people against alien domination has captured the attention of the entire world.’ For Padmore, Kenya, more than anywhere else other than perhaps South Africa, exemplified the workings of colonialism as a species of fascism. As we have seen, Kenyatta too had made that case in the pages of the New Leader. Detailing the expropriation of hundreds of thousands of acres of fertile Kikuyu land in that country, Padmore emphasized the ways in which punitive taxation, forced labour and widespread impoverishment were constitutive features of colonial rule in Kenya. Here ‘democracy is interpreted as the right of a small white minority to rule an overwhelming black majority who have been denied all right of free political expression’.2 Governance was based ‘upon the Herrenvolk philosophy of “white supremacy” ’, such that the colour bar and discrimination operated in every aspect of public and social life.3 Direct responsibility for the state of unrest in Kenya lay with the European settlers, ‘aided and abetted’ by the colonial administration. What the world was witnessing in Kenya was ‘a spontaneous revolt of a déclassed section of the African rural population’, which had been given the mysterious name of ‘Mau Mau’ by white settlers.4 The name itself had been invented ‘to discredit the Africans and justify the white man’s legalized terror against a once peaceful and long-suffering people’.5
The uprising which unfolded in Kenya in the early 1950s had indeed begotten a mythology all its own. In the British cultural and political imagination, ‘Mau Mau’ had become a code word for demonic violence in excess of all justification. Novelists Robert Ruark and Elspeth Huxley, for instance, both wrote lurid popular fiction evoking what the latter famously called ‘the yell from the swamp’.6 Ruark’s evocation of ‘a symptomatic ulcer of the evil and unrest which currently afflicts the world’, meaning anticolonial unrest, is not untypical of either colonial fiction or media representations of Mau Mau.7 As Frederick Cooper observes,
Confronted with an opposition that was fundamental and violent, the dualism of British thinking about African society – imagining the modern while fearing the primitive – virtually became a schizophrenia, and like true madness, it had its own meticulous log
ic and its insistence that it was the Other who was mad. The savagery of British counterterrorism in Kenya was built against a belief that the terrorist was a savage.8
The representation of Mau Mau as a phenomenon that evaded all understanding and explanation, David Maughan-Brown suggests, had an expedient material basis to it: ‘the settlers’ justificatory ideology could not allow any admission of legitimate social and economic grievances, so a set of myths had to be elaborated to account for the revolt. If the causes of the revolt could not be social or economic they must be psychological’ – a belief that resulted in the officially commissioned government report by J. C. Carothers, The Psychology of Mau Mau.9 In another work, Maughan-Brown argues that even liberal discourse in Britain was fully in thrall to the language of poison, insanity and disease that prevailed in relation to Mau Mau. He is not wrong, and his examples are persuasive: the Manchester Guardian referred to ‘the liberation of the Kikuyu people … from the virus of Mau Mau’, while Kingsley Martin, often thought of as an imperial dissident, wrote of the oath of unity as ‘nasty mumbo-jumbo’.10 With the exception of writings in the Daily Worker, the only consistently critical engagement with white settler discourse, many on the left ‘also showed themselves convinced of the accuracy of the settlers’ views of the movement, even while repudiating the justice of the settlers’ cause’.11
And yet there was more to it. Despite the seeming hegemony of anti-insurgent discourse, Mau Mau and its attendant crises paradoxically also served to highlight wider resistance to colonial injustices in Kenya, and therefore the fragility of the paternalism that underlay increasingly desperate-sounding discourses of trusteeship. In a curious way, the violence and undoubted brutality of much Mau Mau activity, even if often exaggerated, enabled the emergence of an understanding that there was also wider resistance to settler colonialism in Kenya. This book has tracked the ways in which British dissent and criticism on imperial questions over a century were shaped by crises of conscience following bloodshed and repression in the colonies, by travels to areas of ‘unrest’ that unsettled and reshaped received ideas about ‘reform’, and by the pedagogical work of anticolonial campaigners and intellectuals in the metropole. This last chapter examines how all three of these strands are relevant to metropolitan criticism in relation to the Kenyan struggle against British colonialism, which is most prominently symbolized by ‘Mau Mau’, though not contained by it. The Mau Mau insurgency and concomitant metropolitan crisis of conscience helped British dissenters to make the case for Kenyan self-government and eventual independence – one that could not be delayed for much longer. Here I will explore three symptomatic responses to the situation: the first is that of the MP and campaigner Fenner Brockway, a founding member of the Movement for Colonial Freedom (MCF), whom we have already met as the editor of the New Leader and through his brief association with the League against Imperialism. Although Brockway was already a known critic of the Empire, his travels in Kenya and subsequent engagement with events there put pressure on his own tendencies to paternalism, and pushed him to qualify somewhat his hitherto unshakable faith in non-violence. He would never go so far as to endorse Mau Mau, but he came to an understanding of what had caused the insurgency in ways that deepened his own commitment to ending imperialism. Second, and closely related, are the crises of parliamentary and press conscience triggered by the ferocious repression of the insurgency that took place in the Emergency years, as manifested in the scandal caused by Eileen Fletcher’s damning pamphlet Truth about Kenya, and British MP Barbara Castle’s investigative findings revealing British atrocities in that colony. Lastly, in a perhaps eccentric choice, the chapter examines the impact of insurgency and anticolonialism on the work of the reformist advisor to the Colonial Office, the Oxford academic and commentator Margery Perham. For Brockway, Perham, and several others who were not distant from the corridors of British governance, the violence and persistence of the insurgency drove home the fact that imperial resistance to anticolonial resistance might well have been futile.
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