Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965

by Burleigh, Michael

  The Soviet embassy opened in Conakry in April 1959 and military hardware followed, with three light tanks making a big impression at a Soviet-style parade. The East Germans installed an urban public address system, but Africans tired of blaring propaganda. Trade deals also ensued, but an anti-capitalist Soviet economy produced little to trade and Guinea had nothing with which to pay for it. As a Radio Moscow correspondent explained to a US acquaintance: ‘We gave them what they wanted, and they didn’t know what to do with it.’ The Soviets kept altering the terms of barter so that iron ore and bauxite had to be added to consignments of bananas and oranges. This was part cheap buy-in, part an attempt to extend Soviet influence to West Africa.

  A hodgepodge of badly made Eastern Bloc equipment and spoiled Chinese rice turned up to rust or rot on Conakry’s docks, for despite mass famine at home Mao could export 15,000 tons of rice to Guinea in 1960.49 Soviet largesse included lavatory bowls for homes with no bathrooms or plumbing (even in the presidential palace, Touré had to go to the ground floor to wash his hands since the water pressure was unable to reach his second-floor offices). Six tons of quill pens were accompanied by enough tinned crabmeat for half a century, although the snowploughs famously left to rust were in fact supposed to be brush cutters. Machines and vehicles lacked French-language maintenance manuals and so ended up rusting in ditches. Bigger capital projects disappointed: a print works operated at below 5 per cent capacity; a radio station was erected over an iron-ore vein, which interfered with its signals; and a tomato cannery was built in an area that had neither water nor tomatoes.50

  Faced with this reality Touré turned westwards, especially to finance his favourite project, the Koukoure hydroelectric dam needed to power a huge aluminium smelter at Boku. In December 1961 he expelled the Soviet Ambassador Daniel Solod on a trumped-up charge of fomenting a teachers’ strike and halved the number of Soviet advisers and technicians in Guinea. The following October he visited Washington, where he was well received. Returning home, Touré denied the Soviets landing and refuelling rights at a runway they had earlier built, and which they needed to circumvent the US naval quarantine around Cuba. Khrushchev responded by cutting all aid to Guinea, remarking that ‘the President behaves like a boor; don’t give him any assistance’. Soviet–Guinean relations took a further turn for the worse after the KGB tried to abduct and fly out an attractive Russian teacher who had fallen in love with a Haitian diplomat. A sharp Guinean customs officer prevented her removal and the word spread that the Russians had objected to the relationship because the Haitian was black. In the end Touré did not get much more than warm words from the US and eventually turned to the Gulf Arabs for funding.51

  The Soviets also initially enjoyed good relations with the pan-Africanist Kwame Nkrumah, leader of Ghana, previously the British colony of the Gold Coast, and the first black African nation to achieve independence. The country started independent life from a higher base than Guinea since it had $200 million in the bank and a good civil service. A low-level Soviet delegation attended independence celebrations in Accra in March 1957; the US sent Nixon. Nkrumah wanted to dash for industrialization and modernization, his key project being the River Volta Dam, and to that end tacked back and forth between the US and USSR in opportunistic fashion. A Soviet embassy opened and a trade deal was concluded, involving the Russians taking 20,000–30,000 tons of cocoa beans. Attempts to widen commerce failed since the Soviets were unfamiliar with credit, payment on instalment or the need to display and explain their wares at local trade fairs. As Soviet farm managers could not turn a profit from giant agricultural collectives at home, what hope was there to do the same in Ghana?

  The Americans regarded Nkrumah’s close relations with the Soviets, central planning and various crackbrained socialist experiments with suspicion. But they nonetheless loaned him $37 million, with a further $97 million for the private consortium that was studying the feasibility of the dam. Like Guinea, Ghana refused the Soviets landing and refuelling rights during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Strategic defeat in the Congo and disappointing results in Guinea and Ghana inclined the Russians to look elsewhere for a foothold in sub-Saharan Africa, in the troubled Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique to which the aged dictator António de Oliveira Salazar clung like grim death.52

  Weary Men with Glazed Eyes and the White Redoubts

  Among those who believed that Salazar was right to hang on were British supporters of white settlers in Rhodesia.53 The British government was coming to another conclusion. The abrupt end of the French and Belgian empires in Africa put pressure on the British not to be the last to leave the party, especially since by loitering they attracted the focused hostility of Asian and African states at the UN. Did Britain really wish to end up in the same boat as Salazar’s Portugal? France’s futile war in Algeria was a fate the British government wished to avoid. ‘It was idle dreaming to think that Britain, by force, could hold her position,’ said Iain Macleod, Colonial Secretary in the crucial period from October 1959 to October 1961. ‘If General de Gaulle with a million men couldn’t hold Algeria, then we couldn’t hold about a third of the continent.’54

  What Britain did in Africa also affected relations with the US, where Kennedy was a great champion of independence movements – except in his own Latin backyard – and with India because of the many sub-continentals the British Empire had imported to East and Southern Africa. The chaos engulfing the Congo was a terrible warning of what might happen if majority rule were conceded without adequate preparation – but black nationalists also threatened chaos if the white minority clung to power for too long. These were loaded questions for the Conservative Party. While de Gaulle was never sentimental about the pieds noirs, British Conservative governments could not ignore their voters’ favourable opinion of their ‘kith and kin’, supported by Conservative newspapers. In the 1950s and 1960s empire was as divisive and poisonous for the Conservatives as Europe would be from the 1980s onwards.

  Harold Macmillan took it upon himself to lance the boil. The droopy-eyed Premier with the languid manner and the bons mots was personally innocent of what became outright decadence as symbolized by the 1963 sex scandal known as the Profumo Affair which finished off his administration. After an unhappy boyhood at Eton Macmillan enjoyed two years at Balliol College, Oxford, before the First World War intervened to end the Edwardian ‘Indian summer’. His war record was distinguished by many acts of bravery, in the course of which he was wounded three times. Like most of his generation, it was hard to shake loose the feeling that their most talented contemporaries had been immortalized in bronze or stone at the threshold of their potential.55

  After the war Macmillan entered the family publishing business, where he was a success, and then became a Conservative MP in 1923.56 Six years later his wife Dorothy embarked on the lengthy affair with the bisexual Bob Boothby and Macmillan had a nervous breakdown. Under the influence of his friend John Maynard Keynes he became an advocate of economic planning, which joined his patrician concern for the disadvanted as a sort of political philosophy, though condescending guilt might better describe it. He had another ‘good war’ as minister resident at Allied Headquarters in Algiers. He handled the fractious French with aplomb (he spoke the language fluently) and forged enduring friendships with Eisenhower and his US counterpart Robert Murphy. However, during the January 1943 Casablanca conference, Macmillan shared with the future Labour Party intellectual Richard Crossman an hauteur that remained for the rest of his life: ‘We, my dear Crossman, are Greeks in this American empire. You will find the Americans much as the Greeks found the Romans – great big vulgar, bustling people, more vigorous than we are and also more idle, with more unspoiled virtues, but also more corrupt. We must run Allied Forces Headquarters as the Greeks ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius.’57

  On his return to Britain, Macmillan switched parliamentary seats from northern Stockton to suburban southern Bromley. Ideas he had promot
ed before the war became commonplace, as the Tories endeavoured to shape themselves around the nationalizations and statist planning of the newly elected Labour government.

  When the Conservatives returned to office in October 1951, Macmillan became minister of housing. Older than either Eden at the Foreign Office or Butler at the Exchequer, Macmillan thought himself better than either. After Churchill’s belated departure, Macmillan became Eden’s first foreign secretary. Given Eden’s claims to unique expertise, it was not a happy relationship. In December 1955 Eden made Macmillan chancellor of the exchequer. A year later the top job became vacant because of Suez, and in January 1957 Macmillan became prime minister.

  At the start of his premiership, Macmillan commissioned several policy studies, including ‘a profit and loss account’ for each colony. Economic objections to granting independence were discarded. Rather, the colonies were defended on the grounds of moral responsibility, whether to the Asian minorities Britain had transplanted to African settings as a penny capitalist class, or to the white settlers who, with the aid of African labour, had made the colonies what they were. An abrupt abdication of responsibility towards the minorities was regarded as immoral.

  There was a further consideration. The pervasive American fear that Communism would flourish in places denied their independence was less evident than British concern that the post-1948 apartheid regime in South Africa might exert a gravitational pull on the white settlers of Kenya, plus North and South Rhodesia, which with Nyasaland had become a Central African Federation in 1953.58 A parallel defence review, undertaken by Duncan Sandys, recommended reducing expenditure from 10 to 7 per cent of Britain’s GNP by 1962. To achieve this, the armed forces were to be slimmed down drastically and made all-volunteer services. A reduction in numbers from 690,000 to 375,000 men by the end of 1962 had obvious bearings on Britain’s ability to fight major counter-insurgency wars. A third review concerning how Britain might best match ends and means during the decade ending in 1970 concluded that the Atlantic alliance with the US was the chief means of containing the Soviet threat, with Europe and the Commonwealth in supporting roles.59

  Another consideration, this time a domestic one, influenced Macmillan as he prepared for a grand tour of Africa in early 1960. His party was divided into three shades of opinion about decolonization: imperial diehards, pragmatists and those who did not think very much about anything.60 The Suez shambles had alienated many of the brightest young people and Macmillan hoped to recapture their moral imaginations by projecting a ‘big picture’ for post-imperial Britain. This became an urgent consideration once the horrors of Hola became general knowledge, and a judicial inquiry described Nyasaland (where Dr Hastings Banda and other nationalists had been imprisoned in the course of Operation Sunrise) as ‘a police state’.61

  With his Commons majority increased to over a hundred following the election in October 1959, Macmillan’s six-week tour of Africa began in January 1960 in independent Ghana where Nkrumah welcomed the sixty-five-year-old British Prime Minister. The next stop was Nigeria, which was about to become a Dominion and which was scheduled for independence in 1963. There Macmillan casually observed that the Central African Federation was not necessarily permanent. This was news to Sir Roy Welensky, the Federation’s Prime Minister.62 Welensky was a tough operator, the son of a Lithuanian Jew and an Afrikaner mother who nonetheless thought of himself as ‘100 per cent’ British. He had come up the hard way, as a railway union activist who in his youth had also been Rhodesia’s heavyweight boxing champion. Macmillan’s patrician charm was water off a duck’s back when they conferred at Salisbury’s Government House. ‘The sight of big powers scuttling out of colonial responsibilities makes me sick,’ said Welensky.

  But this was as nothing to the storm Macmillan ran into on 3 February, when he ventured forth from Bechuanaland – one of the three high-commission enclaves within the Union of South Africa – to address parliament assembled in Cape Town. British commercial, sporting and wartime ties with South Africa were multiple. These bonds were shredded by the ascendancy of Boers with a grudge born out of the suppression of their independent republics at the turn of the century, men who sounded like a Dutch version of German Nazis.63 Undeterred by the grim faces in his audience, Macmillan said:

  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 accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it.

  This was met with icy silence and restrained applause at the end. Thunderous clapping greeted the South African Premier Hendrik Verwoerd, when he reminded Macmillan that the white man had rights in South Africa too, their presence long predating that of Bantu migrants.

  The winds of change became a gale once Iain Macleod became colonial secretary. When Macmillan said, ‘Iain, I’ve got the worst job of all for you,’ Macleod knew he was going to the Colonial Office, despite never having visited a British colony, although his youngest brother was a farmer in Kenya. His sibling reported that an African who had fought the Japanese on behalf of the British ‘didn’t take kindly to removing his hat in his own country in the District Commissioner’s Office to ask for a pass to visit a cousin in the next village’.64

  The son of a medical doctor from the island of Lewis, Macleod grew up in Yorkshire, where his father practised, but he remained a middle-class Scot in a party of upper-class Englishmen. He was a successful professional card player whom the war sobered up, an ideas man who adorned the new Research Department of a party in which the term clever was a veiled insult. He became an extremely effective speaker on health questions, and an advocate of One Nation Toryism, while penning a regular bridge column for the Sunday Times.

  After coming to Churchill’s attention in May 1952, the thirty-eight-year-old bright spark became minister of health in the new Conservative government. Three years later Eden appointed Macleod to his cabinet as minister of labour, which kept him clear of responsibility for the Suez debacle, and suited him to be the new broom Macmillan was looking for to liquidate the empire.

  Knowing next to nothing of the colonies enabled Macleod to pursue a few key ideas. He recognized the illogic of Britain granting independence to West African nations while denying it in East Africa because of the white settler minorities. For, regardless of anything decided in Whitehall, a rapid chain reaction was occurring in Africa. The quality of British colonial administration, which in some parts of Africa was undeniably good, could not be an excuse for denying Africans the right to govern themselves. Macleod rejected the idea that white settlers knew what was best for the African majorities and declared his aim to proceed ‘not as fast as the Congo and not as slow as Algeria’.65

  Macleod lifted the state of emergency in Kenya, which meant the release of the remaining detainees, with the former ‘terrorist’ Kenyatta becoming an interlocutor. As a lifelong gambler, Macleod was eminently suited to the ensuing conferences in which black and white men sat around a table, arranging the constitutional frameworks for new East African nations. During conference sessions he first let each delegate deliver the setpiece speech he had burning in his pocket, to clear the air for detailed bargaining. He was ruthless in encouraging fissures between moderate whites and the diehards, while of course there were exploitable fissures among the blacks too, for beneath the fancy political party acronyms lured deep anxieties about one tribe dominating others, as well as an all too human desire to get their hands on the levers and rewards of independent statehood.66 In this cumulatively exhausting manner the tracks were cleared for Tanganyika, Uganda and Kenya to become independent nations.

  The fate of the Central African Federation caused the most acrimony. Established in 1953, this was the g
reat black and white hope – so to speak – of British sponsorship of a multiracial polity, distinctive in feel from the grim Calvinist redoubt of Pretoria. Actually, for a black person – referred to as ‘It’ and debarred from using urban pavements – the tangible differences between Southern Rhodesia and South Africa were marginal.67

  Opinion in the Conservative Party was as divided about the white settlers as it was united in doubting the ability of the black Africans to govern themselves. Macmillan regarded Kenyan and Rhodesian whites as the deracinated scum of the earth and belittled Welensky’s patriotism as the outpourings of ‘an emotional Lithuanian Jew’. Macmillan and Macleod were not above misleading Welensky to the effect that Britain would never tolerate black secession from the Central African Federation, not least because the cattle and tobacco farmers of Southern Rhodesia would find themselves in trouble without the copper of Northern Rhodesia (it shared the Copper Belt with Katanga) or Nyasaland’s labour pool.

  In fact, the Federation was a British delusion of an essentially idealistic kind. Whites were very unevenly distributed across the three constituent territories, which also had five governments if one includes the British. As far as the northern Africans were concerned, the Federation was simply a constitutional confidence trick enabling white domination of Southern Rhodesia. This was why the Monckton Commission into the Federation’s future in October 1960 recommended swift moves to majority African rule in Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia, and parity between whites and blacks in the federal assembly. In so far as it touched on Southern Rhodesia – apart from recommending the relocation of the federal capital – it was to suggest that it should divest itself of racially discriminatory practices that associated it too closely with South Africa.68