by Guy Arnold
THE IMPACT OF NKRUMAH’S GHANA
Kwame Nkrumah had returned to the Gold Coast in November 1947 and just short of 10 years later, on 6 March 1957, he led his country to independence as Ghana. It was the first black African colony to achieve independence from its colonial master. During the preceding 10 years Nkrumah had conducted a classic independence struggle, breaking with the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) to form his own Convention People’s Party (CPP), serving a term in prison, and finally developing an excellent relationship with the colony’s last Governor, Sir Charles Arden-Clarke, before the Gold Coast became independent. Ghana created a pattern that was to be repeated, more or less, over the next few years as more than 30 colonies, British and French, also achieved their independence.
Suitable independence celebrations were arranged for more than 100 official guests: there was an independence race meeting, church services, a Miss Ghana contest, a Governor’s State Dinner, Convocation at the University, the opening of the National Museum, laying a wreath on the War Memorial, a sailing regatta. On 5 March the Duchess of Kent arrived to represent the Queen and unveiled the new National Monument. Then the Legislative Assembly met towards midnight and Nkrumah made a final statement, concluding: ‘By twelve o’clock midnight, Ghana will have redeemed her lost freedom.’ The hour struck, the Union Jack was lowered in silence, ‘graciously and peacefully’, and the flag of Ghana – red, green and gold with the black star of African freedom – was hoisted to a roar of ‘Freedom’. Then, having been carried shoulder high on a platform to the old polo ground, Nkrumah made his historic announcement: ‘Ghana will be free forever.’17 The next day was filled with ceremonial, after which the guests departed and Ghana had to face the realities of freedom. In the years that followed Nkrumah’s greatest contribution to Africa – though not to Ghana – was to become the focus of the push for African unity. In a prescient comment on Ghana’s independence, the director of the London Africa Bureau, Michael Scott, wrote:
It is likely to have far-reaching effects on French colonial policy which has always been directed hitherto towards the integration of her African territories into the French Union. This aim of policy is being increasingly repudiated by Africans. Already the creation of Ghana and the fulfilment of Britain’s mandate in Togoland, by its participation in Ghana’s self-government and independence, have brought about a reversal of French policy towards French Togoland and its Constitution as a republic. The demand for self-government independently of the French parliament has been given impetus first by the events in North Africa and now by the creation of the State of Ghana.18
Ghana was to be the first stop for Britain’s Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, on his Africa tour of January/February 1960. He spent five days in Ghana. In a forthright editorial, the Ghana Times said that Africa has now been ‘catapulted to a position where it compels attention, even by those who formerly merely turned up their noses at it’. Mr Macmillan would have to listen to and respect African opinion. It continued: ‘British prestige in Africa is at a dangerously low ebb; the treatment being meted out to Dr Hastings Banda and his colleagues of the National Congress in Nyasaland is a disgrace to Christian Britain. The continued imprisonment of Jomo Kenyatta can only be likened to an act reminiscent of Victorian imperialism. This visit offers a wonderful opportunity to retrieve Britain’s honour which the Devlin report has discredited in a rather devastating manner.’19
THE CENTRAL AFRICAN FEDERATION
After the Conservative Party had won the elections of October 1959 with an increased majority, Macmillan appointed the young, radical Iain Macleod as Colonial Secretary with a brief to ‘get a move on in Africa’. As Macleod was to write in the Spectator of 17 January 1964: ‘It has been said that after I became Colonial Secretary, there was a deliberate speeding-up of the movement towards independence. I agree, there was. And in my view any other policy would have led to terrible bloodshed in Africa. This is the heart of the argument.’ Under Macleod’s predecessor, Alan Lennox-Boyd, the assumption had been that the colonies of East and Central Africa would take 10 to 20 years to evolve to full independence. Macleod changed that and pushed the pace as he recognized the inevitability of quick independence for East and Central Africa and for his pains was to be denounced as ‘too clever by half’ by Lord Salisbury, the patriarchal Tory leader in the House of Lords who believed Macleod had betrayed the whites in the Central African Federation as a whole.
The demise of the Central African Federation may be dated from March 1959 when riots in Nyasaland precipitated a crisis. As Macmillan noted in his diary: ‘It looks as if the federation plan, although economically correct (since Nyasaland is not “viable”) is regarded with such great suspicion by “advanced” native opinion as to be politically unacceptable.’20 Subsequently, the report on the causes of the riots by Mr Justice Devlin exerted serious pressure on the Macmillan Government since it argued that there was no evidence to support the contention of the Nyasa colonial government that the Nyasaland Congress Party had been plotting massacre and assassination (a bloodbath of the whites) and that Nyasaland, no doubt temporarily, was a police state ‘where it is not safe for anyone to express approval of the policies of the Congress Party’. The Devlin Report set off a series of events that culminated in the dismemberment of the Central African Federation at the end of 1963. Although Macmillan initially reacted angrily to the report, which the Government rejected, it may well have sown the first doubts in Macmillan’s mind about the future of the Federation. In his brief to Lord Monckton, who was to lead the Commission bearing his name that was sent to work out a new modus vivendi for the Central African Federation, Macmillan wrote: ‘I am sure that this is one of the most important jobs in our long history for, if we fail in Central Africa to devise something like a workable multi-racial state, then Kenya will go too, and Africa may become no longer a source of pride or profit to the Europeans who have developed it, but a maelstrom of trouble into which all of us will be sucked.’21 This reflection reveals just how much the sense of ‘white’ Africa then dominated the British approach to independence even on the part of so subtle a mind as that of Macmillan. Later in his letter, Macmillan continued: ‘The cruder concepts, whether of the left or of the right, are clearly wrong. The Africans cannot be dominated permanently (as they are trying to do in South Africa) without any proper opportunity for their development and ultimate self-government. Nor can the Europeans be abandoned. It would be wrong for us to do so, and fatal for African interests.’
The publication of the Monckton Report on the future of the Central African Federation (majority report) stated that the Federation could not be continued in its existing (1960) form, although to break it up would be an admission that there was no hope of survival for any multiracial society on the African continent. The main arguments for the Federation were economic. However, Mr H. Habanyama and Mr W. M. Chirwa (African members of the Monckton Commission), did not sign the majority report because they were unable to accept the continuation of the Federation not based on consent and they considered the majority dealt inadequately with the all-important question of territorial constitutional advance. They recommended a referendum in each territory to discover whether or not the inhabitants wished their territory to remain in the Federation. Their conclusion was that the Federation should be dissolved forthwith.
MACMILLAN’S AFRICA TOUR 1960
Macmillan was obliged to give a great deal of attention to African problems and his African tour of January/February 1960, ending with his ‘Wind of Change’ speech in Cape Town, marked a turning point in British African policies. On 5 January 1960 Macmillan embarked on the six-week tour of British territories in Africa. His principal concern was the question of independence in West, East and Southern Africa. Despite his stance as an ‘Edwardian’ grandee, Macmillan’s sympathies were with black Africans rather than the white settlers with whom he always felt ill at ease while he had difficulty understanding their viewpoint. As early as 1942, when briefly h
e held the job of Colonial Secretary, Macmillan had suggested that the big, rich European farms in Kenya should be bought by the Crown and run as state companies for the ultimate benefit of whites and blacks. He said this would be less expensive than civil war and ten years later in 1952 the Mau Mau rebellion erupted. At the end of 1959, prophetically, Macmillan had written to Norman Brook, the cabinet secretary, ‘Africans are not the problem in Africa, it is the Europeans’.
Macmillan’s first two stops were in Ghana, which by then had been independent for three years, and Nigeria, which was to become independent on 1 October. At a banquet in Accra Macmillan first used the phrase ‘wind of change’ but it attracted no attention, perhaps because Ghana had already experienced its own wind of change, although Nkrumah was certainly in the vanguard, advocating independence for the rest of Africa. In Nigeria Macmillan reflected that the territory had suffered from arbitrary, imposed frontiers, which he thought were ‘criminal’ in the way they cut through tribal territories; wherever he went in Nigeria he sensed a looming regional/federal crisis and this, after he had passed from power, was to erupt in the Nigerian civil war. From Nigeria he went on to Salisbury, the capital of the Central African Federation, where the atmosphere was very different. In Lagos, in an unguarded reply to a journalist’s question about the future of Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia, Macmillan had replied: ‘The people of the two territories will be given an opportunity to decide on whether the Federation is beneficial to them. This will be an expression of opinion that is genuinely that of the people …’ This ‘gaffe’ had not been well received in Salisbury. In the Federation Macmillan faced white hostility and was generally depressed, especially by what he saw in a two-day visit to Nyasaland, and he left the Federation feeling that the future was ominous and reflecting that had he foreseen how the three territories would come to regard each other and the Federation he would have opposed it in 1953. At the time he did not believe that anything could be achieved until Hastings Banda, the leader of the Malawi Congress Party, was released from detention.
Macmillan arrived in South Africa just after the Pied Noir ultras in Algeria had reacted against liberal policies emanating from de Gaulle in Paris: they killed 14 gendarmes and wounded 123 in a number of confrontations, the first French killings of other Frenchmen. Macmillan believed that South Africa was potentially similar. After visiting Durban, Macmillan and his wife Dorothy arrived in Cape Town on 2 February where they were guests of Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd at Groote Schuur. Macmillan liked little that he saw in South Africa and in his conversations with Verwoerd found that nothing he said had any effect upon his host.
Macmillan had agonized over the speech he intended to deliver in Cape Town and had polished and re-polished it all the way from London with the help of Norman Brook, while his Private Secretary, Tim Bligh, had dropped hints that something special was to come. In the first part of his speech to the South African parliament, Macmillan drew elaborate historical parallels, going back to the breakup of the Roman Empire. Then, after paying fulsome compliments to South Africa for its development and courage in the two world wars, he approached his main theme, that African nationalism was unstoppable. Then, having spoken of the constant emergence of independent nations in Europe, he said:
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 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.
Later in the speech Macmillan clearly dissociated Britain from the apartheid policies of South Africa. ‘It is a basic principle of our modern Commonwealth that we respect each other’s sovereignty in matters of internal policy. At the same time we must recognize that in this shrinking world in which we live today the internal policies of one nation may have effects outside it.’ At the time, Macmillan’s audience was more impressed by his praise for South Africa than bothered by the wind of change. That, however, came later. The Daily Service (newspaper of the Action Group in Nigeria) commented: ‘The hypocrisy of advocating a non-racial policy in British colonies while conniving at the apartheid policy of South Africa is ripe for abandonment, and it was a good thing that Mr Macmillan chose South African soil to do a volte-face. Secondly Mr Macmillan has strengthened the confidence of African states and of all right-thinking people in the future of the Commonwealth. And thirdly, it is reasonable to hope that his address will lead to serious heart-searching and active re-thinking of policies in South Africa. For the knowledge that he is alone should have a sobering effect on Dr Verwoerd. Mr Macmillan has only one step more to take to instruct the British delegate at the United Nations to vote at all times against the policies from which the British Prime Minister has dissociated himself and his country.’22
Speaking in the South African budget debate of early March, Verwoerd said the process then taking place in Africa was well known in English as appeasement. The countries of the West were prepared to leave the white man in Africa in the lurch and tell him he should accept black majority rule. This would mean absorption of the whites by the black masses of Africa. He went on to say that Britain, the US and others should realize they were sacrificing the only real and stable friend of the West for something they could not achieve.
On 21 March 1960, as African crowds demonstrated against the pass system in many parts of South Africa, the police fired on the crowds at Sharpeville, Transvaal, and at Langa, Cape Province. At Sharpeville 69 Africans were killed and 182 wounded. According to the South African Department of External Affairs, the crowd at Sharpeville numbered 20,000, but press reports put it much lower at 3,000. Six Sabre jets and eight Harvard planes, as well as Saracen armoured cars, were used to intimidate the demonstrators. The local police commander, Colonel Pienaar, said: ‘It all started when hordes of natives surrounded the police station. My car was struck by a stone. If they do these things they must learn their lesson the hard way.’ A Johannesburg news photographer said, ‘I took pictures of more bloodshed than I have ever before seen in South Africa.’ Dr Verwoerd commended the police for the courageous, efficient way they handled the situation.23
ELSEWHERE ON THE CONTINENT
The United Nations General Assembly agreed unanimously to the holding of a second plebiscite for the British Cameroons between September 1960 and March 1961 in which the people would have a choice of either union with Nigeria or union with an independent (French) Cameroon. On 12 January 1960 the Mau Mau emergency in Kenya was brought to an end by the Governor’s proclamation. On 15 May Kenya’s African leaders decided to call on all African elected members to resign unless the Governor allowed them to visit Jomo Kenyatta, who had been chosen as president in exile of the new Kenya African National Union (KANU). The Republic of Somalia was formed on 1 July 1960 by the merger of the former British Somaliland Protectorate with the UN Trust Territory (the ex-Italian colony of Somalia). Britain had assumed control of the northern regions of Somalia in 1886 with the object of safeguarding the trade links with Aden, especially to ensure the supply of mutton, and to keep out other interested powers, especially France. Following the defeat of Italy in World War II, Italian Somaliland and Eritrea were placed under British control. In 1950 Italy had returned to Somalia as the Trusteeship authority to prepare the territory for self-rule by 1960. Similarly, Britain prepared what had been known as its ‘Cinderella of Empire’ for independence at the same time. The transition was effected smoothly.
