Africa

by Guy Arnold

  In 1943 Colonial Minister Vieira Machado wrote: ‘It is necessary to inspire in the black the idea of work and of abandoning his laziness and depravity if we want to exercise a colonizing action and protect him… If we want to civilize the native we must make him adopt as an elementary moral precept the notion that he has no right to live without working.’ Such thinking was to show little advance over the succeeding 20 years, despite events elsewhere on the African continent. The Galvao Report of 1947 revealed the true state of affairs in Portuguese Africa. Henrique Galvao was a Colonial Inspector and Deputy for Angola in the National Assembly in Lisbon. His revelations of corruption, forced labour and bad administration were at first ignored. He then delivered them in the National Assembly in 1948, which led to his downfall, and in 1952 he was arrested for subversive activities. Galvao had attacked the retarded development of Angola and Mozambique, the absence of health services, forced labour and under-nourishment, the migration of 2,000,000 African workers to the Congo, the Rhodesias and the Union of South Africa. His report put the infant mortality rate at 60 per cent, the workers’ death rate at 40 per cent. The natives, he said, were simply regarded as beasts of burden, and special condemnation was reserved for the practice of herding workers off to government projects huge distances from their villages.24

  Basil Davidson, who was to become identified with the liberation movements in the Portuguese African colonies, argued that the vast majority of Africans could in no way benefit from Portuguese racial tolerance. On the contrary, they were subject to the closest possible regulation as ‘natives’ (though distinguished from the one per cent – plus or minus – assimilados). They were available for impressments to forced labour or migrant labour under contractual conditions over which they had no control of any kind and when Portuguese voices were raised in protest at such treatment they were either ignored or repressed as mischievous or subversive. In 1951, expecting admission to the United Nations, the government of Dr Salazar introduced constitutional changes, which abandoned the use of the word ‘colonies’, and transformed these territories, at least in juridical terms, into ‘overseas provinces.’ That portion of their populations accepted as being of civilized status – less than one per cent of blacks – was at the same time empowered to send elected deputies to Lisbon’s single-party parliament.25

  HOLDING ON

  In 1945 Britain, of the colonial powers, emerged from the war best able to set the pace in decolonization and undoubtedly gained great kudos by its withdrawal from India in 1947. Despite this, however, many colonial attitudes were rooted in the past and much of the prevailing wisdom assumed that India was a special case (there had been no sensible option) and that the rest of the Empire would continue under British rule into an indefinite future. In 1941 the indefatigable Africanist, Lord Hailey, had advised the government that African politics were quiescent with little sign of discontent apart from pockets in the Gold Coast and southern Nigeria. And in May 1943 a British War Cabinet committee minute stated: ‘many parts of the Colonial Empire are still so little removed from their primitive state that it must be a matter of many generations before they are ready for anything like full self-government.’ When the war ended plans existed to build an imposing new Colonial Office; the view was long term. Over 1945–46, as a result of the war with Japan, British forces were to be found in French Indo-China and the Dutch East Indies, sometimes with surrendered Japanese troops under their command, and these forces held the fort for these other European imperial powers until the former rulers could return in sufficient strength to resist local demands for independence. In Indo-China the British were able to hand over to French troops (hurrying to the East) in October 1945 but in the Dutch East Indies they had to wait until November 1946 before Dutch forces came to relieve them.

  As a Colonial Office official put it as the Indian Empire slid away: ‘Africa is now the core of our colonial position; the only continental space from which we can still hope to draw reserves of economic and military strength.’26 Professor John Gallagher, delivering a lecture at Oxford in 1974, said:

  Britain’s decision to quit India was not intended to mark the end of empire. Quitting India has to be seen in the light of the simultaneous decision to push British penetration deeper into tropical Africa and the Middle East… so the same Labour government, which had liquidated most of British Asia went on to animate part of British Africa. Africa would be a surrogate for India, more docile, more malleable, more pious… No one really knew what geological jackpots Africa contained, because general neglect had skimped the necessary surveys. Here might be God’s Plenty which would rescue the Pilgrim British economy from the Slough of Despond.27

  Despite growing African demands for self-government the British Labour government was far more imperialist in its outlook and intentions than popular myth ever suggested. In December 1950 in Washington for a meeting concerning the Korean War and rearmament, Britain’s Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, asked the Chief of the General Staff, General Sir William Slim, who was accompanying him, how long it would take him to create from the African colonies an army comparable in size and quality with the Indian Army, an army which Britain could use to support its foreign policy just as the Indian Army had done. Slim, who had spent his life in the Indian Army, said he could do something in eight or 10 years, but to do anything really worthwhile would take at least 20 or probably more. Thus, though Labour had given India independence, it had no intention of abandoning the rest of the Empire and saw Britain controlling its African colonies for many years to come.28

  INTRODUCTION

  Independence

  NIGERIA SETS THE PACE

  The Federation of Nigeria became a fully independent state and a sovereign member of the British Commonwealth on 1 October 1960. The country then had a population of 32 million. The transfer of power from Britain to Nigeria, which took place on the Lagos Race Course, was a grand affair. Ministers arrived by motorcade in ascending order of importance with the Federal Prime Minister, Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, coming at the end. Princess Alexandra, representing the Queen, came last of all, escorted by mounted police. In the ceremony that followed the Princess handed the bound Nigeria Independence Act of the British Parliament to the Prime Minister. In his speech of acceptance, Abubakar said:

  At last our great day has arrived, and Nigeria is now indeed an independent sovereign nation… This great country, which has now emerged without bitterness or bloodshed, finds that she must at once be ready to deal with grave international issues. This fact has of recent months been unhappily emphasized by the startling events, which have occurred in this continent. (He was referring to the Congo.)

  Paying a compliment to the departing British, Abubakar said:

  Today we have with us representatives of those who have made Nigeria – representatives of the regional governments, of the missionary societies, and the banking and commercial enterprises… Today we are reaping the harvest which you have sowed… May God bless you all. This is an occasion when our hearts are filled with conflicting emotions…

  But do not mistake our pride for arrogance… we are grateful to the British officers whom we have known, first as masters, and then as leaders, and finally as partners, but always as friends.

  That night the Union Jack was lowered for the last time to be replaced by the green and white flag of Nigeria, and Britain’s largest and grandest African colony had become independent.

  Two years earlier, broadcasting to Nigerians on the occasion of New Year 1958, the new Federal Prime Minister Abubakar had said: ‘It is no good blaming the British any more when things go wrong: these days are gone… we must blame ourselves, because we shall have made the wrong decision. And remember too that… the world is watching us, waiting to see whether we can rise to the occasion.’ At the beginning of 1960, independence year, Shell-BP announced that oil had been found in commercial quantities in Nigeria and that the company hoped therefore to remain in the country for many years. The (combined) c
ompany then had a 50–50 profit-sharing agreement with the Nigerian government. In July 1960 the British Parliament passed the Nigeria Independence Bill. During the second reading the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Iain Macleod, said:

  The Nigerian Government have made great progress in the training of their own Civil Servants and are following the practice of this country of insulating the Civil Service from politics by establishing executive public service commissions. The need is going to exist for substantial numbers of overseas officers to continue giving the devoted service they have rendered to Nigeria over the years.

  The basis of this new member of the Commonwealth was all the better, he said, because ‘what he was putting before the House was primarily the work of Nigerians’. Mr Macleod went on to wish Nigeria well and said he was sure they could speed it on its way to independence with utter confidence.

  I have great admiration for that magnificent country and for her noble people. I am convinced that the world will be a better place for the emergence of Nigeria in its own sovereign right as a country, and I rejoice to think that this great country, in complete friendship with ourselves, is going now to take its place on the stage of world affairs.1

  The handover of power by Britain to Nigeria went very smoothly yet even as Nigeria was preparing for independence in mid-1960 those preparations were overshadowed by events in the Belgian Congo which erupted into civil chaos in July, just three months before Nigeria became free, to affect all perceptions of African independence both inside and outside the continent for years to come. Moreover, Western attitudes to Africa, then and later, would be dominated by Cold War considerations that persuaded the West to regard the new states as its protégés and to treat them after independence much as they had treated them when they were still colonies.

  THE CONGO CATASTROPHE

  Independence for Nigeria and 15 other African colonies during 1960 may have been achieved with considerable aplomb and many ceremonies – it was, after all, the annus mirabilis of African independence (some Africa enthusiasts spent the year travelling from one independence ceremony to another) – but it was a very different story in the Belgian Congo. The territory had had a benighted history: created as a personal fief by King Leopold II who employed the explorer Henry Morton Stanley as his agent, its recognition as the Congo Free State by the main powers had enabled Leopold to exploit it with such ruthless brutality that, following the revelations of the British Consul, Roger Casement, of endless mutilations and other atrocities, the Belgian parliament finally, in 1908, deprived the king of control and turned his territory into a colony. The Belgians were not good colonialists and when the Belgian Congo achieved independence in 1960, the Belgians acted as though little had changed in reality and assumed that they would remain to control it, or at least to control its vast mineral wealth.

  In the immediate period prior to independence Patrice Lumumba emerged as the only nationalist with an appeal beyond his own ethnic group, unlike the other contenders for power. Lumumba had become an évolué in 1954 at a time when he believed in Western values and had not yet become critical of Belgian colonialism. In 1955, when King Baudouin and the Belgian Minister for the Colonies visited the Congo, Lumumba’s prestige rose when he had talks with them. But his new status made him bitter enemies among both the Belgian administrators and his political rivals and from 1956 onwards the administration kept him under constant surveillance. He was invited by the government to visit Belgium in 1956 but on his return to the Congo was arrested on charges of embezzlement when he had worked in the Post Office. He claimed that he had only taken the responsibility for thefts by his staff, but the authorities were determined to get him out of the way and he was sentenced to two years in prison; the Minister for the Colonies, however, reduced his sentence to one year. His term in prison served only to enhance Lumumba’s reputation in the eyes of the nationalists.

  On 5 October 1958 Lumumba founded the Mouvement National Congolais (MNC), an anti-tribal pan-African political party that drew its support from across the country. Earlier that year, when in August President de Gaulle of France had offered the French Congo across the river membership of the French Community or full independence, Lumumba had at once drafted a demand for full independence for the Belgian Congo. Over the next two years Lumumba attempted to organize a mass party but was thwarted by the tribalism of his opponents. Belgium tried to bring an end to the growing nationalist pressures and unrest by finally moving towards independence. A round table conference was called in Brussels for January 1960. By then Lumumba was again in prison, blamed by the authorities for an outbreak of violence in Stanleyville the previous October. It was soon obvious to the Belgians that the conference could not succeed without Lumumba’s presence and so he was released from prison and arrived in Brussels on 26 January. At the conference only Lumumba insisted upon a single Congo while Moïse Tshombe, whose power base was the mineral rich Katanga Province, proposed an independent Congo made up of a loose confederation of semi-autonomous provinces. The Belgians reconciled themselves to Lumumba’s stand and set 30 June as the date for independence. By this time Lumumba had become a thoroughgoing nationalist. At the end of December 1959 he had said: ‘Independence was not a gift to be given by Belgium, but a fundamental right of the Congolese People.’ In the general elections of May 1960 Lumumba’s MNC won 37 of 137 seats and, with its allies, formed the strongest block. The other parties were regional and tribally based. On 23 June Lumumba was asked to form a government. He made Joseph Kasavabu president. Lumumba had no experience of government. Once it was clear that the Belgium Congo was about to become independent the big powers moved to fill the vacuum that was about to be left by the departure of the Belgians. What concerned them were the Congo’s immense mineral wealth and its strategic position straddling the centre of the African continent.

  King Baudouin came to preside over the Congo’s independence on 30 June and gave a speech that even an ardent Belgian royalist must have recognized as biased and undiplomatic. He said: ‘The independence of the Congo is the crowning of the work conceived by the genius of King Leopold II.’ He lauded Belgian achievements and then concluded with a lecture: ‘The dangers before you are the inexperience of people to govern themselves, tribal fights which have done so much harm, and must at all costs be stopped, and the attraction which some of your regions can have for foreign powers which are ready to profit from the least sign of weakness…’ After listening to Baudouin’s speech Lumumba, who had not been scheduled to speak, nonetheless took the podium and replied to the King. After a brief introduction, he said:

  For, while the independence of the Congo has today been proclaimed in agreement with Belgium, a friendly country with whom we deal on an equal footing, no Congolese worthy of the name will ever be able to forget that independence has only been won by struggle, a struggle that went on day after day, a struggle of fire and idealism, a struggle in which we have spared neither effort, deprivation, suffering or even our blood.

  The struggle, involving tears, fire and blood, is something of which we are proud in our deepest hearts, for it was a noble and just struggle, which was needed to bring to an end the humiliating slavery imposed on us by force.

  Such was our lot for 80 years under the colonialist regime; our wounds are still too fresh and painful for us to be able to forget them at will, for we have experienced painful labour demanded of us in return for wages that were not enough to enable us to eat properly, not to be decently dressed or sheltered, nor to bring up our children as we longed to.

  Lumumba went on to speak of the contempt with which blacks had been treated, the despoliation of their land, the use of different laws for black and white, the treatment of black politicians, the difference in housing conditions, the exercise of a colour bar, shootings and imprisonment. He finished by saying all this was now at an end.2

  King Baudouin was not amused.

  Five days later the Force Publique (the Army) mutinied and locked up its Belgian office
rs. Belgium sent troops to restore order as though the Congo were still a colony and Lumumba, who was shocked by this Belgian reaction, appealed to the United Nations to help him restore order. On 11 July, encouraged by the Belgians and the mining conglomerate Union Minière du Haut Katanga, Moïse Tshombe declared the secession of Katanga Province from the Congo. On 14 July Lumumba broke off relations with Belgium and demanded the immediate withdrawal of all Belgian troops. The United Nations Security Council voted to intervene and on 16 July began sending troops to the Congo. Lumumba toured African states seeking help but only Ghana responded with a token force. On 5 September President Kasavubu dismissed Prime Minister Lumumba who responded by dismissing the President. On 14 September Colonel Joseph-Desiré Mobutu, whom Lumumba had made chief of staff of the army, seized power in the first African coup of the independence era.