Calling for overseas British bases to be shut down, the MCF tried repeatedly to show the connections between colonialism and Cold War militarism, pointing out the implications for British people including loss of social services to pay for a military budget and the constant threat of a world war. The organization also sought to explain ‘neo-colonialism’ in many of its pamphlets: ‘This is not just a matter of winning political independence; Britain, America and other colonial powers are clever enough to concede this … It is the struggle of half the world’s population in the underdeveloped countries to rid themselves of poverty imposed on them by foreign or local rulers’.126 This was, not, however, distant from the concerns of the British people who would also benefit from the fight against neo-colonial forms of domination: ‘By helping the former colonial peoples to inherit their own resources we are weakening the very big monopolies and “take-over” tycoons who are the barriers to social advance in Britain’.127 The MCF, in its capacity as ‘Britain’s anti-imperialist movement’, combined its repudiation of the colonial project with an equally stringent attack on ‘racialism’ and anti-immigrant discourse, committing itself to fighting the Commonwealth Immigrants Act (1962) and campaigning for amendments to the Race Relations Act.128 It made clear, however, that its own role was secondary to that of colonial insurgents: ‘We do not wish to claim over-much for the MCF. The growth of interest has been mainly due to the strength and vigour of the movements for freedom in Africa and Asia and to the liberation which they have brought about. We have been proud to be their voice in Britain.’129
Brockway himself would come to describe the MCF, with a touch of hyperbole, as a ‘mass movement against imperialism … in this country’, which could be situated within a longer tradition of British radicalism going all the way back to Leveller solidarity with Irish peasants crushed by English landlords.130 He had certainly come a long way himself. At his eightieth birthday dinner at the House of Commons in 1968, his speech had an element of irascible radicalism to it as he addressed himself partly to his fellow warrior, Barbara Castle:
You said on TV, Barbara, that idealism must be wedded to reality. True; but idealism often creates reality. I think of racial equality and colonial freedom. I think of the fifties. When the Movement for Colonial Freedom was established I had to draft nearly every Question from the Labour Benches; the Fabian Colonial Bureau drafted a few. I had to brief Members of Parliament – I even briefed you, Barbara! But the whole climate of events (illustrated by Harold MacMillan’s ‘wind of change’ speech) changed. Within two years I didn’t have to draft any Question or brief any MP. I certainly didn’t have to brief you. You were more effective on Hola than I could hope to be. What I want to say is this: the great change which took place regarding the colonies was due in part, at least, to the pioneer idealists – Hobson, Hilferding, Lenin, George Padmore, Jean Rous of Paris, Leon Szur and, later, to the MCF.131
Once again Brockway acknowledged the role played by African insurgencies in the gains of anticolonialism: ‘The most liberal of Colonial Secretaries, Iain Macleod, told the truth. He said that if independence had not been granted to the African nations, the violence would have been far worse. Mau Mau and Algeria pointed to that.’132 A decade later, he would flesh out a further genealogy for British anticolonial dissent, paying tribute to ‘The Communist International [which] when it was formed in 1917, gave organised form to Lenin’s theory and was active in colonialist spheres in opposing the opposition of colonialist powers. Less decisively the opposition to imperialism as a system arose within the Socialist International.’133 Brockway noted that the League against Imperialism, which reflected a ‘third period in the struggle against colonialism and imperialism’, had itself been a response to ‘the strong emergence of national movements within the Colonies and their active cooperation with the opponents of imperialism in the exploiting capitalist countries’.134 Looking ahead to the coming decades through this lens, Brockway then took this acknowledgement of anticolonial agency and the struggle’s centre of gravity to its logical conclusions:
There is another possibility. It may be that the next stage in the advance to a new social order in the world may come, not from industrial countries, but from developing countries. It may be that from Vietnam a social revolution will expand across South East Asia, a new area of economic liberation, challenging America and the capitalist world. We live in exciting times and, if our horizons are broad, we see that the tempo is for radical change. Underneath, everywhere, is a great creative force for a new world, and we must recognise that our struggle against colonialism and imperialism is a part of it.135
Even more importantly, Brockway observed, ‘efforts to end colonialism and imperialism’ also led to one clear conclusion that had implications within Britain itself: ‘we must identify with the movements for fundamental change in the basis of our society’.136 The global and domestic orders were inextricably linked in this way.
Britain’s Conscience on Africa and the Crisis of Paternalism
Over the course of this book, I have largely discussed figures who would have considered themselves to be, if not quite oppositional outliers, certainly dissidents. They were not, however, the only ones who found themselves responding to anticolonial insurgencies and contact with anticolonial figures. This book has not looked at twentieth-century reformist critics of imperial policies such as Leonard Woolf and his associates in the Labour Party Advisory Committee on Imperial Questions, or (except in passing, as with Arthur Creech-Jones) the liberal humanitarian members of the very moderate Fabian Colonial Bureau. More work also needs to be done on the impact of anticolonial thought and liberation movements on officials, politicians and administrators. In moving to a close, I want to touch on the question of how anticolonial struggles influenced those of a liberal imperialist but also reformist bent who would regard themselves as, if not quite the ‘official mind’ of British colonial thinking, certainly in some sympathy with it. One such figure is the Oxford don Margery Perham. Certainly no anticolonialist, over the course of a long and distinguished career as an Africa specialist and government advisor on colonial policy, Perham might have been regarded as much the opposite – a responsive liberal or ‘constructive’ imperialist with a penchant for urging reforms precisely in order to keep colonial rule stable and viable. That rare figure for her time, a female Oxford academic who came to be taken seriously as a specialist advisor on colonial African matters, Perham also wrote for newspapers and gave radio talks to inform a wider public about colonial questions. An early advocate of the rights of native people and of curbing the ‘excesses’ of white settler populations in Africa, Perham did not, however, start out as a dissenter from received colonial ideas; she ‘shared a clear consciousness of race’, for instance, with others who defended colonial rule.137 What makes Perham worthy of closer attention is not only the extent to which her defences and critiques of the imperial project alike influenced both British public opinion and the vaunted ‘official mind’ in the Colonial Office. Her own trajectory – less susceptible to the vagaries of party lines – from an enthusiast of British rule in Africa to what one of her BBC colleagues described as ‘a cautious, respectable radical’ on colonial matters, who came to relinquish a dearly held gradualism on the matter of decolonization, had more than a little to do with witnessing – and learning from – the anticolonial insurgencies of the post-war period, the Mau Mau episode among them.138 This is an aspect of Perham’s intellectual and political biography that appears to have escaped scholarly attention: a professional teacher on matters to do with the Empire, she also came to be taught something by the colonized and their resistance. If she did indeed become ‘the informed conscience of the English governing classes’, African anticolonialists could take more than a little credit for it.139
One scholar and friend of Perham’s who has written on her intellectual biography has described ‘the two Miss Perhams’ who emerged in the course of her career – one a liberally inclined imperialis
t wedded to good colonial government and not especially engaged with Christianity, and the second, who ‘came into existence very suddenly, following the fall of Singapore to the Japanese in February 1942’, returning to ‘full Christian belief’.140 While it is debatable whether this particular shift took place precisely in this manner and quite so suddenly, Roland Oliver is right to suggest that there was something of a split (albeit a messy one) in Perham’s imperial world-view which became increasingly prominent from the war-torn 1940s into the decolonizing 1950s. Whether or not it began with Singapore – certainly Perham admitted that the ‘disaster’ had ‘shocked us into sudden attention to the structure of our colonial empire’ – by the 1950s, she had become far more explicitly engaged with the question of insurgency and its implications for the longevity of British rule.141 Mau Mau and the attendant crisis of paternalism faced by the colonial state constituted a kind of watershed in Perham’s thinking, compelling her to come to terms with the limitations of the gradualism she had championed for most of her career, which had underlain her own reformist critiques of imperial policy.142 She came to see the demise of gradualism as inevitable, due partly to the Second World War and American opposition to Britain’s empire, but also very substantially to ‘the internal logic and irresistible dynamic of African nationalism itself … propelling the move to independence at a rapidly increasing rate’.143 Of course there were other movements, in West Africa for instance, which were pushing her towards this conclusion, but Mau Mau – and the wider context of Kenyan militancy – had a particular role in shaping her thinking about not just colonialism, but also anticolonialism.
Reading history at Oxford, Perham excelled in both academics and sport. Upon graduation she became a lecturer at Sheffield, and then returned to Oxford as one of a very small handful of women tutors. In between those appointments, she would make her first visit to Africa via British Somaliland, where her sister and brother-in-law were stationed, publishing Major Dane’s Garden in 1925, a novel based on her experiences. Shortly after her appointment at Oxford, she would strike up a lifelong friendship with Lord Frederick Lugard, the famous architect of ‘indirect rule’ in West Africa, later becoming his biographer, and, until its viability became seriously questionable, an advocate of indirect rule. The establishment of Imperial and Commonwealth Studies at Oxford benefited her, as did that in 1904 of the Rhodes Trust, which would fund her first long stretch of travels to colonial outposts. These culminated in Africa, where she would spend nine months, in 1929–30, in ‘the problem colony of Kenya’, a place for which she would hold a special lifelong regard.144 Writing frequently for outlets such as The Times and the Manchester Guardian, she also became what one scholar describes as ‘a publicist in explaining African nationalism to the British people better than anyone else and therefore helping to ready them for the end of empire in Africa in the 1960s’.145 One newspaper hyperbolically dubbed her ‘Britain’s African Queen’.146 In all three positions, including her Oxford tutorship, Perham had clearly cracked hitherto male bastions, but in her relationship to imperial questions she exhibited – and sometimes held in tension – both an understanding of marginality in relation to power and an ability to voice a ferociously paternalist (and patriarchal) defence of British colonial aims and achievements. It is true, of course, as Joanna Lewis has argued, that something of Perham’s ability to fashion ‘a critique that gently coaxed colonial administrations into rethinking their ruling strategies’ might have emerged from her own sense of critical distance as a single woman in a male world.147 While the increase in ‘the metropolitan focus on its own poor’ may also have ‘opened up her analysis of the African context’, it is important to recognize that Perham also became a student of Africa and Africans, her own critique over time shaped by African criticism of and resistance to imperial policies.148 The trajectory of her work is instructive in this regard.
Perham’s first Kenya travelogues offer little that is out of the ordinary, comprising a series of vignettes combined with political observations, and those mainly about the behaviour and politics of the white settlers. At the time, Perham recalled in an introduction to a later memoir, a few African politicians ‘had begun to organize and assert their grievances … and there was now an increase of agitation and political expression by some Kikuyu over land and labour grievances’.149 When told by a woman settler that the natives were like ungrateful animals, Perham retorted ‘that if you choose to take land from a primitive, overcrowded people, you could not rely on getting civil and civilized labour’.150 Although feisty and combative in tone, Perham did not articulate here a significant critique of colonial life, and African voices do not really figure in her account. She spoke of falling in love with the ‘charm’ of the Masai, and feeling that it was dangerous to use the female-circumcision issue to irritate the Kikuyu, ‘already very politically self-conscious and tending to be anti-European’.151 To the extent that she commented on the land issue at all, her views were carefully ‘balanced’, despite the pejorative language with which she evoked Kenyan farm labour: ‘The squatter is a very significant figure in Africa. He clings to the white settler like a parasite and one which could eventually ruin its host. He would not be there if the native had enough land and the white man had not too much.’152 Much of Perham’s early commentary on colonial rule in Africa, written for outlets such as The Times, demonstrated a commitment to a kindly but stern paternalism. Of her ‘uncritical, unforeseeing commendation’ of indirect rule at that point, Perham would later assert, somewhat defensively: ‘my first knowledge and experience of Africa was of the continent at its wildest and most dangerous, the Africa which dictated the character of much of Britain’s earlier administration’.153 It is not precisely that Perham’s early writings ignored the voices of what she called ‘native witnesses’ – on the contrary, she reported their dissatisfaction and distrust as evidenced before government commissions – but that these voices and concerns were grist for a larger story in which the main actor was Britain. Even at the very moment Perham urged her British readers to remember that theirs was ‘an alien government which has imposed itself upon subject peoples’, Perham’s initial aim was the intelligent consolidation of that government through local knowledge, ‘stooping to discover the positive impulses that animate the smallest cells of their corporate life, and enlisting these in our work of civilization’.154 The African is a ‘partner’ in this project, but without any doubt in statu pupillari, and a beneficiary. ‘Trusteeship’ had a necessarily temporary mandate, ‘that of developing backward peoples until they can “stand by themselves” ’.155
Even in those romantic early days, however, Perham was not unaware of brewing resentment, reminding her readers that the British could not ‘shut our eyes to the beginning of native discontent in Kenya and of distrust between black and white’.156 In an introduction to Ten Africans, a volume which sought specifically to voice African life experiences, Perham would note that African ‘backwardness,’ while an ‘obvious and fundamental fact’, was ‘one upon which we are apt to lean a little too hard in order to make ourselves comfortable in a difficult situation’.157 Moreover, she observes, there’s a tendency to talk about Africans as an undifferentiated mass, whether as ‘natives’, ‘hut and poll tax-payers’, ‘native labour’ or even as the ‘native problem’, which serves to obscure, if not their humanity, their individuality.158 This recognition does not prevent her, however, from prefacing Ten Africans with the unpromising assertion: ‘The barriers between the civilized and the less civilized are there, and they are solid.’159 Such distancing generalities surface frequently in Perham’s own early critique of the colonial situation in Kenya – the only part of Africa she saw as not ‘largely quiescent’ during the interwar years. In a famous published exchange of bristling, often uncomfortable, letters with the British Kenyan settler-writer Elspeth Huxley, written in 1942–43, while referring sympathetically to the settler’s fear of ‘a great dark flood over the little island of privilege’,160 Pe
rham does envision black resentment reaching the point of an active overthrow of white rule. While to some extent deserving of representation on matters that concerned them, Africans figured in Perham’s letters not as acting subjects but as ‘voiceless labourers’,161 passive recipients of injustice, negligence or benevolence.
Without a doubt, Perham’s views at this point were shaped by a sense of ‘British conscience’ and the need to preserve the Empire by the exercise of that conscience: ‘The partnership of conscience and criticism is the salt that saves the Empire from going bad and always has done since the days of Burke and the anti-slavery movement.’162 At the point that she made the case for reformed leadership, figured as a negotiation mainly between settlers and imperial centre, Perham certainly did not conceptualize power shifting into African hands. Indeed, as Huxley was quick to note, Perham had herself suggested in the course of correspondence that ‘Africans aren’t ready for considerable political advances’,163 urging that any major changes be put off for a few decades while Africans were ‘educated’ into governance: ‘I have not been pressing for the early transfer of power to those unready to make good use of it, but for the maintenance of imperial authority on their behalf, during the period of unreadiness.’164 Yet, even as Perham avers that Africans cannot ‘hold their own’ right now, there is a glancing, uneasy reference to the now manifest fragility of colonial rule:
We have been beaten out of some of our richest Eastern possessions by a ‘coloured’ people, and other coloured people, Chinese and Indians, have fought with and for us. The spell of our invincibility … has been broken … It is certainly the moment to modify our persistent delusion that other peoples like being ruled by us, or are going to accept our former political and social superiority any longer without question.165
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