Insurgent Empire

by Priyamvada Gopal

  If, on the one hand, Perham’s figuring of African ‘hatred’ in familiar terms of emotion over reason pointed to her continuing participation in received colonial discourse, it is also the case that she took that ‘intensity of feeling’ seriously, suggesting that it be understood on its own terms.220 Not only Africans, she notes, but even the ‘so moderate’ Indian writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri, had spoken of ‘a ferocity of hate’ he felt once when looking down upon a well-dressed English audience in a Calcutta theatre.221 In what must surely count as an astonishing gesture from a supporter of the imperial project, Perham recited – on British public radio in the 1960s! – verses by the anticolonial poet of Négritude David Diop and Léopold Senghor’s magnificent epic poem Chaka:

  Je n’ai haï que l’oppression …

  Ce n’est pas haïr d’aimer son peuple.

  Je dis qu’il n’est pas de paix armée, de paix sous l’oppression

  De fraternité sans égalité. J’ai voulu tous les hommes frères.222

  Like Brockway, Perham identified colonial racism as the chief culprit: ‘I remember the tone of voice and flash of eye with which a young leader from French Africa exclaimed to me, “You have never known what it is to live under colonialism. It’s humiliating.” ’223 Where Perham found it difficult to criticize colonialism directly, she was willing to condemn more fully the racism it legitimized. The resistance of the colonized, she finally admitted, was part of a very different historical trajectory from the Whig interpretation held by the metropole: ‘We may try to equate Ghana with the Tudors or the Congo with the War of the Roses. But our immensely gradualist history cannot be exactly fitted to theirs.’224 For Perham, the accelerated end of trusteeship was effected not by metropolitan will but by African leaders who, ‘making full use of that changed balance of forces which I discussed in my second lecture, forced the pace’.225 Congratulating them on this a few pages later, Perham finally admits the inadmissible. Decolonization was not the consequence of metropolitan initiative: ‘Britain was answering a demand from her subjects which she was finding it difficult to refuse and nationalist leaders can congratulate themselves for forcing the pace.’226

  If, in the final instance, Perham’s Reith Lectures were not precisely a defence of anticolonialism, they were certainly a stringently honest account of how it had shaped the present, with Britain forced to accede to its claims. Why, Perham asked, had the official world of Britain been so myopic, made such serious miscalculations on the basis that anything resembling African independence was a long way off? ‘Perhaps the reason for this degree of blindness is that British people do not understand nationalism, do not recognise it, or at least its strength, in others.’227 This was not because Britain was immune to nationalism; on the contrary, ‘the confidence arising from our former power, may have bred in us an unconscious kind of nationalism, one that seldom needed to assert or even to know itself’.228 The fact also had to be acknowledged that the British Empire ‘through most of its duration, like all other empires, had been created and conducted mainly in the interests of the ruling power’.229 Perham never quite admits that it was wrong to deem colonial subjects unready to take on parliamentary democracy, but does concede with some admiration that ‘Africans, following Asians, pressed on, as we saw, ignoring the doubts and negations of their rulers’.230

  Ultimately, what is perhaps most remarkable is Perham’s turn to something like dialectics, steering away from her own sense of ‘pessimism’ about Africa to the possibility that the newly independent nations of Africa would neither simply imitate the West nor turn to nativism, but rather attempt a ‘synthesis’ of the two sets of resources, a ‘task of the greatest difficulty and value’.231

  When … I saw the Union Jack flutter down the post I felt a wholly unexpected, almost physical shock. It may be that, having made some study of Nigeria’s history, I realised just what it was that was being brought to an end, all the hopes and fears, the achievements and mistakes, all the work of hundreds of British lives, many of which ended up in this country. But immediately the Nigerian flag ran up, and the assembled Nigerians of all regions and tribes saluted it with unmeasured pride and hope. I realised then that, whatever our regrets or forebodings, the incalculable force of human energy and pride would be harnessed behind the new nation.232

  Empire’s Ends

  Brockway too, if rather differently from Perham, arrived at the conclusion that what would emerge in Africa in the wake of decolonization would be dialectical, distinctive, and forged from its own historical struggles even as the ‘trend is towards an Africanism independent of European influence’.233 He also took seriously the claims made for African community structures as receptive to non-capitalist forms: ‘Africans have no more need to be “converted” to socialism than they have to be “taught” democracy.’234 Written shortly after Perham’s Reith Lectures were delivered, and published as final negotiations for Kenya’s transition to independence were underway, Fenner Brockway’s African Socialism was also an attempt to think about the future of a decolonized Africa as breaking definitively from the regnant global economic order: ‘What is not so fully realised is that African leaders and African national movements are to an extraordinary degree dedicated also to the task of repudiating the capitalism whose urges led to the occupation of their continent in the nineteenth century and of consciously directing their new independent states towards the creation of socialist societies.’235 Both Brockway and Perham, for all their differences, believed that socialism would be a significant force in the era of decolonization. If empire was to be left behind, then the buccaneering capitalism that it had propagated would also need to be replaced with a more radically egalitarian system. The erosion of that possibility and the betrayals of the post-colonial moment belong to another book and another story.

  Epilogue

  That Wondrous Horse of Freedom

  On 3 February 1960, British prime minister Harold Macmillan visited Cape Town and delivered a speech that did not go down too well with his hosts.1 Macmillan began, benignly enough, by praising the Union of South Africa, its strong economy and the ports and skyscrapers of its great cities, Durban and Johannesburg. The economic union between Great Britain and South Africa had, he said, been one of beneficial interdependence, a marriage of capital and entrepreneurial skill. Then he uttered the now famous words:

  In the twentieth century, and especially since the end of the war, the processes which gave birth to the nation states of Europe have been repeated all over the world. We have seen the awakening of national consciousness in peoples who have for centuries lived in dependence upon some other power. Fifteen years ago this movement spread through Asia. Many countries there, of different races and civilisations, pressed their claim to an independent national life. Today the same thing is happening in Africa, and the most striking of all the impressions I have formed since I left London a month ago is of the strength of this African national consciousness. In different places it takes different forms, but it is happening everywhere. 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 as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it.2

  It is worth pausing on Macmillan’s rhetorical moves here. He places African nationalism – as many would do – within a familiar teleology whereby the continent was deemed to be finally ‘catching up’ with a prior European historical stage, and a more recent one for Asia. Cannily, he exhorted his recalcitrant white South African audience to understand that what was blowing through black Africa was a version of their own legitimate national sentiments, they ‘here in Africa’ had ‘created a new nation’.3 Indeed, he was suggesting white South Africans – and the rest of the Western world – could take credit for African nationalism, totting it up as one of the many ‘achievements of Western civilization’ on this continent. Of course, to many in his audience the equivalence Macmillan was according to white and black natio
nalisms was in itself outrageous. Breaking through the fraternal pleading and civilizational credit-taking, however, was an unmistakable note of warning – the word ‘fact’ repeated twice with the ‘frankness’ of a friend. If the growth of African nationalism could not be accepted as a happy achievement, then grim reality would have to prevail: ‘the growth of national consciousness in Africa is a political fact, and we must accept it as such. That means, I would judge, that we’ve got to come to terms with it.’4 Not to do so would be to imperil ‘the precarious balance’ between East and West underlying the post-war settlement. The imperial era, Macmillan was saying more explicitly than any Western leader, and certainly more so than any British prime minister, was coming to an end. Only a few years before, Winston Churchill had sullenly pronounced that he had not become Britain’s leader in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. Macmillan was indicating not only that that liquidation was imminent, but that it had to be framed as the logical outcome of the project of empire.

  Macmillan’s speech in itself was only a sombrely realistic appraisal of the decade or so just gone. While nationalisms in Asia, and to a lesser extent in Africa, had clearly registered on the so-called ‘official mind’ of Britain, it would seem that ‘virtually no one foresaw the scope of the decolonization process – much less its speed – in the immediate aftermath of the war’.5 Neither France nor Britain, the two largest European colonial powers, had anticipated that the colonial world would become ‘the major theatre of conflict’ in the post-war era.6 Macmillan hoped to exercise statesmanlike oversight of a process that was clearly going to be taken out of metropolitan hands; at the very least Britain needed a narrative of controlled and planned transfer of power to prevail. The long-cherished myth of the ‘gifting’ of freedom to those deemed ready for it would require some careful spin in the face of the manifest seizure of power from reluctant colonial hands. The uprising in Kenya was paralleled by one in Malaya (1948–60) where too a brutal counterinsurgency and Emergency were enacted by the British, who had been forced, in 1948, to give up their Mandate in Palestine. Counterinsurgency tactics developed in Palestine would be deployed in Malaya, which the British hoped to hold on to along with Singapore after the loss of India and Palestine; some of the same serving soldiers and high-ranking officials were redeployed from Palestine to Malaya. Though first targeting rubber planters and mine-owning interests, the Malayan Communist Party eventually broadened the resistance to encompass the ‘Fascist colonial state’ in its entirety; in colonial terms, they were, of course, ‘terrorists’ not nationalists. As Christopher Hale has noted, though Malaya has long been used as an example of a thoughtful and ‘benign’ counterinsurgency on Britain’s record, unlike those in Cyprus (1955–59) and Kenya, ‘The Emergency War in Malaya was a nasty and brutal business’, involving, as it had in Kenya, subterfuge, illegality, collective punishment, forced resettlement and unjustifiable civilian bloodshed which, along with the lethal consequences of colonial divide-and-rule, manifests malign consequences even today; the paper trail itself may well only be partial.7

  While it is traditional to pin the end of empire on the no doubt important moment of the Suez crisis in 1956, this was ‘neither the first nor the last instance of imperial aggression to cause a public outcry’8 – not even in relation to that country, as we have seen. A British ambassador to Egypt also made comparisons: ‘In 1882, the bombardment of Alexandria and the British occupation of Egypt had divided British opinion on the same lines.’9 As we have seen, the crises of empire did not begin at that fateful moment when President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the canal. There were several other crises of insurgency and counterinsurgency in the period immediately following the Second World War: in Cyprus, Oman, the Gold Coast, British Guiana, Borneo, Aden and Nyasaland. The other great European empire of the time, the French one, had encountered an infamous defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and was facing its own crises of decolonization. France’s infamous massacre at Setif in Algeria, just as the Nazis surrendered in 1945, had already cast severe doubts on the continuance of that empire in the face of anticolonial resistance. By the time that Kenya achieved independence at long last in 1963, profound changes had also taken place in Britain. In the 1950s, the British Labour Party finally ‘evolved a coherent, powerful critique of colonial affairs, one that helped to create a new cross-party consensus and effect the rapid demise of an empire that had lasted for 300 years’.10 ‘With Britain’s Union Jack replaced by the black, red and green flag of the new states, political power in Britain’s last East African colonial holding slipped from the grasp of its 55,759 whites and was taken up by its 8,365,942 Africans’, wrote the New York Times in the wake of the handover ceremony in Nairobi.11

  Half a century after Macmillan’s speech, US president Barack Obama made a well-received speech of his own to both houses of parliament. On a high-profile state visit to Britain in 2011, he aimed to allay anxieties about the state of the so-called ‘special relationship’ and the possible decline of global Anglo-American influence. Reassuring his audience that the two countries were bonded through shared values, he began by invoking not Britain, but England, the nation at the heart of the Empire: ‘Centuries ago, when kings, emperors, and warlords reigned over much of the world, it was the English who first spelled out the rights and liberties of man in the Magna Carta. It was here, in this very hall, where the rule of law first developed, courts were established, disputes were settled, and citizens came to petition their leaders.’12 Having putatively identified the fons et origo of the very ideas of rights and liberties, America’s first black president went on to graciously concede that mistakes had of course been made. For both his country and the one whose representatives he was addressing, there had been inevitable occasional failures to live up to ideals. So far, so predictable. But, then, a bolder move: ‘But through the struggles of slaves and immigrants, women and ethnic minorities, former colonies and persecuted religions, we have learned better than most that the longing for freedom and human dignity is not English or American or Western – it is universal, and it beats in every heart’. This was encouraging. However, the acknowledgement of liberationist and human aspirations that just might exist beyond ‘Western values’ barely surfaced before it was quickly annexed to a familiar triumphalism:

  Perhaps that’s why there are few nations that stand firmer, speak louder, and fight harder to defend democratic values around the world than the United States and the United Kingdom.

  We are the allies who landed at Omaha and Gold; who sacrificed side by side to free a continent from the march of tyranny, and help prosperity flourish from the ruins of war. And with the founding of Nato – a British idea – we joined a transatlantic alliance that has ensured our security for over half a century. Together with our allies, we forged a lasting peace from a Cold War.

  Having skated surprisingly close to the suggestion that the struggles of the oppressed helped define Anglo-American understandings of freedom, tolerance, equality and democracy, Obama’s speech now glossed freedom in rather more partisan and familiar terms, as an economic system ‘we built’ that takes hold and spreads across the world: ‘There is no greater generator of wealth and innovation than a system of free enterprise that unleashes the full potential of individual men and women … That’s why countries like China, India and Brazil are growing so rapidly – because in fits and starts, they are moving toward market-based principles that the United States and the United Kingdom have always embraced.’ As James noted at a different moment in relation to Africa, this was a familiar claim: ‘Western civilisation was the norm and the African people spent their years in imitating, trying to reach or, worse still, if necessary going through the primitive early stages of the Western world.’13

  The timing was important. Obama was giving this speech in the wake of the ‘Arab Spring’, a series of popular rebellions that had toppled authoritarian rulers, undermined existing political hierarchies in the Middle East and North Africa,
and thus threatened to alter an international order geared to the strategic interests of his own nation. It was something of a geopolitical priority, then, to annex the diverse liberationist impulses and forces that had come together to constitute that widespread insurgency into an American project, to give it the imprimatur of the capitalist West. In an audacious reworking of the famous Douglass pronouncement with which this book began, Obama, himself of part-Kenyan descent, then declares: ‘Power rarely gives up without a fight – particularly in places where there are divisions of tribe and divisions of sect … What we are seeing in Tehran, in Tunis, in Tahrir Square, is a longing for the same freedoms that we take for granted here at home.’ Young Arabs were rebelling in the streets, then, in order to become more like Americans, which indicated – and it is now that the real burden of the argument becomes clear – that Britain and the United States would need to start ‘investing in the future of those nations that transition to democracy, starting with Tunisia and Egypt – by deepening ties of trade and commerce; by helping them demonstrate that freedom brings prosperity’. Aspirations to freedom made manifest in rebellion had now to be carefully channelled from above through the checkout lane.

  It has been the argument of this book that British public life and political discourse have been mired in a tenacious colonial mythology in which Britain – followed by the remainder of the geopolitical West – is the wellspring of ideas of freedom, either ‘bestowing’ it on slaves and colonial subjects or ‘teaching’ them how to go about obtaining it. This assumption does not restrict itself to the undoubtedly copious body of writing on the idea of ‘liberty’ which is certainly a notable feature of British and American intellectual history; it extends, as we have just seen, to the very impulses that drive human beings to make their own history in circumstances not of their own choosing. It is this mythology which has enabled two successive twenty-first-century Labour prime ministers to make historically dubious pronouncements – in one case with lethal consequences: