British authority in the Middle East lay shredded and challenges to its colonial position were being mounted in West and East Africa. One of the legacies of the Second World War was the return home of conscripted African soldiers who had witnessed the fragility and brutality of the British imperial machine. They decided to press their demands on the colonial authorities. How far these held on or let go depended partly on the strategic significance of the region and partly on the presence or otherwise of white settler populations.
On 28 February 1948 Gold Coast colonial veterans who had fought in India and Burma marched to the governor-general’s castle in Accra to present their grievances. They were shot at by police and three were killed. Riots broke out, in which twenty-nine more people were killed. Leaders of the newly-formed United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) were arrested. Its general secretary was Kwame Nkumah, who had a master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a flair for inspiring the Africa masses – youth, veterans, farmers, workers and women stallholders. In 1949 he broke with the UGCC to found the Convention People’s Party (CPP) with the demand of immediate self-government. The British authorities hoped to deal with tribal leaders who were opposed to the CPP, and offered limited constitutional concessions, while stifling the CPP. Nkrumah organised the elections of February 1951 from his prison cell, writing instructions to his liaison agents on toilet paper.24 African-American author Richard Wright, who visited the Gold Coast in 1953, was impressed by the crowds motivated by politics plus. ‘It bordered on a religion’. They greeted Nkrumah with shouts of ‘Free-dom! Free-dom!’25 The British had to accept him as prime minister and concede a fully elected assembly, in which the CPP gained majorities in successive elections. Nkrumah formally demanded independence on 3 August 1956, and this came into force on 6 March 1957.
Very different was the situation in Kenya. Strategically it was key to the Indian Ocean, and had provided thousands of troops for the King’s African Rifles to fight during the Second World War. It had a powerful settler community 35,000 strong, farming tea and coffee. Their numbers had been augmented after the war by emigrants from Britain and retirees from the Raj in India. The development of plantation in the White Highlands required expropriating the African population, transforming them into little more than serfs with tiny plots of their own land. They did forced labour service on the plantations or were driven into the cities to face unemployment and homelessness. ‘Europeans only’ racial segregation operated in schools, restaurants and leisure facilities. The political system was undemocratic and stacked against the Africans. In the legislative assembly the 35,000 Europeans had forty representatives, while 5, 250,000 Africans had six – all nominated – as did 100,000 Asians, while 20,000 Arabs had only two representatives.26 In any case, real power was in the hands of the colonial governor in Nairobi and the colonial secretary in London.
An opposition movement developed through the Kenya African Union (KAU) led by Jomo Kenyatta, which petitioned the Westminster Parliament in July 1953 to address the land question. But resistance was also direct, orchestrated by a rural secret society, the Mau Mau, which launched attacks on white farms. The colonial governor declared a state of emergency on 20 October 1952. The British Army did its job as best it knew how. Don McCullin, a north Londoner sent to Kenya on National Service, reflected that ‘to us the Mau Mau were monster baddie Indians. As to Great Britain’s right to throw its weight around on another continent, that went without question […] My country could do no wrong.’27 Kenyatta and the KAU were accused of masterminding the Mau Mau; he and his close allies were arrested, put on trial and convicted. Suspects were detained without trial, curfews were imposed, public meetings and the opposition press were banned and the armed forces burned villages thought to harbour terrorists. Operation Anvil in February 1954 herded 250,000 Kenyans into camps for screening in what was later called Britain’s colonial gulag.28 According to one British officer who wrote anonymously to the British press in 1955 they were giving an ‘exhibition of Nazi methods’ (Figure 3.1).29
Figure 3.1 Colonial repression: Mau Mau suspects under police guard in Nairobi, 24 April 1954.
Getty Images / Popperfoto / 79036598
Although in Britain the Mau Mau were generally portrayed as bloodthirsty terrorists, a small anti-colonial opposition nevertheless developed. Fenner Brockway, the Calcutta-born son of missionaries who had been imprisoned as a conscientious objector in the First World War, had been invited to meet Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah in India in 1929, and was elected Labour MP for Eton and Slough in 1950. He visited Kenya that year at the invitation of Kenyatta.30 Returning there in 1954 under the emergency he argued with the settlers and colonial administration on behalf of the Kenyans who had no voice. He was one of the founders of the Movement for Colonial Freedom, set up in April 1954, drawing on constituency Labour parties and trade unions. Tony Benn, treasurer of the movement, likened their mission to that of Chartism.31 One of the members, Blackburn Labour MP Barbara Castle, went on her own fact-finding tour of Kenya in November 1955, financed by Hugh Cudlipp of The Daily Mirror. She unearthed stories of suspects being flogged to death in colonial jails and was attacked in the Commons by the Colonial Secretary Lennox Boyd. She nevertheless later commented, ‘The Mirror had done me proud and splashed my articles under headings such as “What Price Justice? Kenya land of Fear”.’32
However bad Kenya was, it was only a pale reflection of what was going on in South Africa. After 1948 the Purified Nationalist Party dealt with what it saw as the ‘swamping’ of its cities by Africans by imposing apartheid, the ‘separate development’ of the white, Coloured (mixed race), Indian and African races. Every child was assigned a race by birth under the 1950 Population Registration Act, and these races were kept rigidly separate by the 1949 Prohibition of Mixed Marriages and the 1950 Immorality Act. Africans were cleared out of the cities in rural reserves under separate tribal administrations. They were obliged to migrate daily to the towns to work, and allowed to travel only with passes. The Bantu Education Act of 1953 ended the policy of assimilation of Africans through mission schools and instituted what was dubbed ‘education for barbarism’. Black Africans had lost the vote in 1936; Indians, who had kept their voting rights in 1946, were now disfranchised along with Coloureds.33
Opposition was led by the African National Congress (ANC), alongside the South African Indian Congress and (Coloured) African People’s Organisation (APO). Leaders of the Communist Party, banned as the Cold War became colder in 1950, joined the ANC. A Defiance Movement violating the pass laws was launched in 1952, resulting in 8,000 arrests and riots in the Eastern Cape, where 250 Africans were shot dead on 9 November 1952.34 That same year, 3,000 delegates of the ANC, Indian Congress, APO and underground Communist Party met in a Congress of the People outside Johannesburg to adopt a Freedom Charter that declared, ‘South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black or white.’ Over 150 activists, including Nelson Mandela, were arrested and put on trial for treason, on the grounds that opposing apartheid was betraying the state.35
Opposition to apartheid in Britain was spearheaded by priests such as Canon John Collins and Trevor Huddleston, who as a missionary had witnessed the expulsion of Africans from Sophiatown in 1955. But the British government was constrained by three factors: the dominant position of the white settler population, the value of investments in and trade with South Africa, including the sale of military aircraft and ships, and the strategic importance of the naval route round the Cape. In 1951 the Conservative Commonwealth Minister told an audience in Cape Town, ‘We are both great African powers.’36 In June 1955 the British agreed to hand over its Simonstown naval base to South Africa, on condition that the Royal Navy might still use it in time of war. The sea-lanes round South Africa were deemed crucial to the defence of both Africa and the Middle East in the face of the Soviet threat.37 For the moment, power-political considerations trumped the evils of apartheid.
Defending the French Union
F
rance was the country of the rights of man that had liberated itself from Nazi domination and restored the Republic. It was under great pressure from the peoples of its empire to pass on to them the liberty and equality for which they had fought in French armies. It was inevitable that its relationship with its empire would alter. And yet many factors mitigated against significant change. Metropolitan France had been liberated from its empire. This demonstrated that the existence of empire was indispensable to France’s survival. The Empire enabled France to recover its rank as a great power that had been lost with such humiliation in 1940 and to negotiate with Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union. Charles de Gaulle, speaking in the Algerian city of Constantine in August 1946, affirmed that ‘United with its overseas territories, which she opened up to civilisation, France is a great power. Without those territories, she would risk being one no longer.’38 Algeria, the cornerstone of its African empire, was in fact considered a part of metropolitan France, ruled directly from Paris. Moreover it was home to a million European settlers, French citizens who lorded it over nine million Muslim Arabs who were not. To cede freedom and equality to that subject population would imperil their very existence, let alone their domination.
After the liberation things initially augured well for a rethink of France’s relationship with its overseas possessions. The first Constituent Assembly elected in October 1945 was dominated by communists and socialists. Of the 586 deputies, 64 were elected from the colonies, although half of them by Europeans represented in separate colleges. Aimé Césaire, elected a deputy for Martinique, announced in April 1946, ‘The colonial empires are going through an infinitely serious crisis. The various peoples associated with the destiny of France have also become aware of their strength, their opportunities, and of aspirations that until now have been confused.’39 Léopold Sédar Senghor, elected deputy in Senegal, declared that ‘the most important thing about the constitution of 1946 will be its recognition of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, not only of French women but also – I was going to say above all – of the men and women from overseas’.40 A law sponsored by Lamine Guèye, mayor of Dakar and SFIO (Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière) deputy for Senegal, was passed on 25 April 1946, giving citizenship to all adults from France’s overseas territories, including Algeria.
The draft constitution offered opportunities of greater democracy in the colonies and the possibility of their secession. However, it was rejected by the French electorate on 5 May 1946 as too radical, and on 2 June a second Constituent Assembly was elected, in which the majority shifted to the right. This was decisive. In July 1946 the colonial lobby met in an Estates General of French Colonisation and elected veteran Mayor of Lyon and radical politician Édouard Herriot as its chair. When the French Union was again debated in the Assembly, Herriot warned that if colonies like Senegal, Madagascar and Vietnam were allowed to secede, other powers would simply take them over. Neither could equal citizenship be accorded to inhabitants of the colonies. The Muslim population of Algeria had tripled or quadrupled over a century and the upshot would be catastrophic: ‘France would become the colony of its former colonies.’41 Senghor could well shout out, ‘that is racism!’, but the new model of the French Union was established in October 1946, with the sovereignty of the Republic and primacy of national defence trumping autonomy and the racial hierarchy of separate electoral colleges of the European settlers and indigenous populations perverting democracy. That was the extent of the rethink.
As these debates continued, on the ground, from West to East, French soldiers and administrators were busy ensuring that colonial territories that had temporarily been lost to Vichy and the Japanese were recovered for the French Republic. The surrender of Japan offered France an opportunity to reclaim its colonies and protectorates in the Far East, but it had also made possible the creation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. General Leclerc, arriving late in Saigon and with limited forces, was obliged to make a deal with Ho Chi Minh on 6 March 1946. The French would recognise the Vietnamese Democratic Republic as a ‘free state’ within an Indochinese Federation and within the French Union on the familiar US model. A union of the protectorates of Tonkin and Annam and the colony of Cochin-China would be put to a referendum. Ho Chi Minh duly went to France to have this endorsed at a conference in Fontainebleau but the French press ranted against the ‘politics of abandonment’ and a new Munich and the talks broke down. In Indo-China the French double-crossed the Vietnamese: they proclaimed an independent republic of Cochin-China, stalled on the referendum and went back to war. On 20 November 1946 they bombarded the port of Haiphong, through which the Vietminh were bringing military supplies, killing 6,000 people. Ho Chi Minh sent a telegram of protest to French Communist veteran Marcel Cachin, but the French Communist Party supported the ideals of the French Union and Cachin did not mention Haiphong when, as Father of the House, he made the opening speech to the new National Assembly.42 It was left to Claude Bourdet, a resister with Combat during the war, to express his horror privately and after the event. ‘For me, and for a good part of the left-wing Resistance, the Indochinese war is what opened our eyes in 1946–47. We understood that roles had reversed. It was the same Resistance, but on the other side.’43
In Indo-China, as the Vietminh sustained their struggle to win independence for their republic, the French appealed to the Ex-Emperor Bao Dai for an independent Vietnam within the French Union. Everything, however, was thrown into the air by Mao Tse-tung’s Communists coming to power in China in 1949. Communist China recognised Ho Chi Minh’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and supported North Korean forces which attacked South Korea. In Vietnam the French suffered a major defeat in October 1950 at Cao Bang. General de Lattre de Tassigny, who had led the First French Army into Germany in 1945, was sent out to take control of the situation. A new phase of the Cold War now completely altered the way in which anti-colonial insurgency might be seen. De Lattre was aware that for French public opinion, the war in Indo-China was ‘an exhausting and painful burden’, but he was also aware that it was a test of French greatness. In addition he realised that the Cold War gave France the opportunity of reimagining the war in Vietnam not as a redundant colonial war but part of a new anti-communist mission which would attract support from the Americans. ‘If we fail, we will be the “sick man” of the second half of the twentieth century’, he declared in March 1951. ‘Besides, because we are fighting the Communist enemy in Indo-China, the campaign in East Asia has become one of the episodes in the war between the two blocs. Tonkin is one of the frontiers of liberty.’44
To hold on to Vietnam was always going to be a challenge for the French. Madagascar, which had finally been repossessed by the Free French, was a strategic stepping stone on the route to Vietnam. In the elections to the first Constituent Assembly three nationalist Malgaches were elected and formed the Democratic Movement for Malgache Renewal (MDRM). Three times in the Assembly they requested that Madagascar be established as a free state within the Union, and each time they were ignored.45 Meanwhile the MDRM was spread in Madagascar by secret societies and had 300,000 members after a year. French settlers intensified a programme to drive Malgache peasants off the land and reduce them to serfdom. Over 15,000 Malgaches had served in the French armies during the war and expected some return on their fight for liberation, but they were held in French camps while awaiting repatriation. When 8,000 of them returned in August 1946 and found that colonial exploitation was even worse, they rioted.46 On 29 March 1947 a full-scale insurrection broke out on the island. The French High Commissioner, Pierre de Chevigné, a former Free French soldier and comrade of General Leclerc, did not hesitate to defeat the insurgents by overwhelming force and torture, using French North African forces on their way to Vietnam.47 The three Malgache deputies were deprived of their parliamentary immunity and sent for trial with twenty-nine others in Tananarive. They were sentenced to death in July 1948, although their sentences were commuted by the president of
the Republic to hard labour for life and they were imprisoned in distant parts of the French Empire.48 Estimates of the numbers of Madagascans killed vary from official figures of 11,000 to 100–200,000, the most reliable figure being 30–40,000.49
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