The Rise and Fall of the British Empire
Page 66
As Britain entered the second half of the twentieth century it began to fall victim to the politics of illusion. In 1950 the Labour and Conservative parties had convinced themselves that the Commonwealth was something that should be cherished and was beyond criticism. It was simultaneously advertised to the world as a shining example of international cooperation and evidence of Britain’s continuing status as a world power. This was make-believe on the part of politicians who had failed to come to terms with Britain’s relative decline, and still hoped that the country might somehow manage to stand apart from its overmighty patron, the United States, and a Europe which, by the early 1950s, was taking its first steps towards economic unity. The illusion of power was better than none at all, and Commonwealth leaders were willing accessories in the charade. It offered them the chance to attend high-level conferences and be treated with a reverence their standing and calibre might otherwise not have commanded.
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The increasing use of the word ‘Commonwealth’ to encompass the colonies as well as the dominions coincided with a sustained Communist propaganda campaign in which ‘colonialism’ was equated with the ‘slavery’ and ‘exploitation’ of coloured races by the capitalist powers. Whatever their political complexion, colonial protest movements were grouped together as part of a world-wide struggle against rapacious imperialism. At the end of 1948, Pravda reported how in French and British West Africa, the ‘names of Lenin and Stalin were very well known even in forests and [the] smallest villages,’ where people clubbed together to buy wireless sets so they could listen to Radio Moscow.27 Strikers in the Gold Coast in 1948 were inspired by the example of Communist partisans in Indo-China and Indonesia [the former Dutch East Indies], where the Dutch were the pawns of ‘the monopolists of Wall Street’ who were ready to engorge themselves on the country’s wealth. According to Trud of 19 August 1948, these bloodsuckers in harness with the City of London, were encouraging the destruction of the Malayan nationalist movement (i.e. Communist party) so as to get their hands on the country’s raw materials.28
The tentacles of the global capitalist conspiracy reached into Africa. According to the veteran West Indian journalist George Padmore, editor of the London-based Negro Worker, Britain and America were about to swallow up its resources. Padmore regularly contributed Marxist articles to the Gold Coast Observer. During 1948–9, he accused the ‘Trade Union Boss’ Bevin of carrying out Tory policies in Palestine, and speculated as to whether African troops would be used alongside ‘headhunters and bloodhounds’ in the anti-Communist war in Malaya.29
Colonial campaigns were a godsend for Communist copywriters. In November 1952, Zyi Warzawy published a photograph of Mau Mau suspects with the caption: ‘Here are two members of the “Mau Mau” organisation, manacled like slaves … They fought to liberate Kenya from the imperialist yoke, and for this they were regarded as bandits.’ Under the headline ‘The Colonisers are on the Rampage’, Komosol Pravda of 30 June 1953 gave details of operations against the Mau Mau. ‘The soldiers and police are cruelly persecuting the Negro population of this country. News of the mass murders of Negroes arrives each week from Kenya.’ Among the reports cited was one from the British Communist newspaper, the Daily Worker, which proclaimed that, ‘Terror reigns in Kenya which can be compared in brutality with only the occupation régime introduced by Nazi SS units.’30
Two things emerge from this welter of crude polemic. The first is the remarkable degree of press freedom which existed in Britain’s colonies. It was in part the result of the application of domestic liberal principles, and in part an acknowledgement of the fact that outspoken journalism was unlikely to upset the colonial apple cart. The ability of a partisan press to make mischief was limited by the absence of mass political parties, or trade unions. In West Africa, where there were more newspapers and readers than elsewhere in the tropical empire, these conditions changed, slowly before the war and rapidly after. Nonetheless, the Colonial Office and its local officials felt strong enough to let matters stand. Had they wished to do otherwise, there would have been repercussions in Britain where, traditionally, state censorship of newspapers was considered intolerable in peacetime.
External Communist propaganda produced by Russia, its satellites, and later China, presented colonial unrest everywhere as part of a single, global struggle between the haves and have-nots, and pledged Communist support to the latter. The fear of Russian and Chinese-sponsored mass revolution in what today is called the Third World scared Washington and London. Whether or not the alarm was in proportion to the actual threat is irrelevant. What mattered was that from 1948 onwards both the British and American governments were extremely jumpy about subversion, not least because they were aware that in many colonies the social and economic conditions were perfect for Communist agitation. Whatever their actual root cause, strikes and political demonstrations were regularly diagnosed as symptoms of underground Communist activity.
At the end of 1947, the Colonial Office asked all colonial governments to report evidence of Soviet propaganda in their local press.31 None was uncovered in Northern Rhodesia, the Gambia, the Seychelles, Bermuda or the Bahamas. From Nigeria came evidence of some academic interest in Marxism and the presence of Communist literature, but no organised party. Cypriot newspapers had contained Communist articles, including one which predicted a surge in American imperial expansion, and there was an abundance of Communist material in the Gold Coast newspapers. This was disturbing, given the high level of political and trade union activity in the colony, and an unexpected outbreak of rioting in Accra in February 1948. Investigations into this outbreak, and others in Singapore and Kenya, added to official jumpiness for they revealed a chilling lack of popular support for the colonial authorities.32
There was, inevitably, an intelligence trawl for evidence of Soviet intrigue in disaffected areas and among African nationalists. Particular attention was given to African students in Britain and politicians who visited the country. For over fifty years, both groups had gravitated towards left-wing circles, including the British Communist party. MI5 reported in 1953 that two prominent Kenyan dissidents had made contact with British Communists, who were ‘apparently afraid to take them much into their confidence’.33 African visitors were more warmly received and fêted by those left-wing Labour MPs, such as Fenner Brockway, who, in Barbara Castle’s words, had a ‘consuming interest’ in all colonial freedom movements.34 Liaisons of this kind worried the Colonial Office which, in a 1951 memorandum on the welfare of colonial students, suggested that the provision of ‘healthy social interests and good living conditions’ might prove an antidote to Communist influences. It was noted that the Conservatives had begun to court African students, who were by now being regarded as the future leaders of their countries.35
In Africa, evidence of organised Soviet subversion was fragmentary. The 1952 Kenyan emergency produced a shoal of intelligence red herrings, and one suspected Soviet agent, Mrs M.A. Rahman, the wife of an Indian diplomat who had just joined the Indian high commission in Nairobi.36 Both she and her husband were carefully watched, but nothing concrete emerged to link either them or Russian intelligence to unrest in Kenya and central Africa.37
The intelligence offensive against what proved to be some somewhat exaggerated Communist infiltration of anti-colonialist movements was matched by official counter-propaganda. Here the United States was keen to lend a hand, and in 1950 the State Department proposed a joint programme of publicity suitable for colonies, using wireless broadcasts in native languages. The Colonial Office was cool. It foresaw ‘political problems’ if Africans were employed by the ‘Voice of America’ in New York, and was unhappy about scarce dollars being spent on imports of American wireless sets into the colonies. Most significantly, there were fears about American control over the content of the broadcasts.38 The Colonial Office placed its faith in existing colonial broadcasting stations, and the sale of ‘saucepan specials’, receivers made by Pye and destined for African lis
teners. These sets cost £5 each and were, therefore, affordable. In Northern Rhodesia, where the average weekly wage was about one pound, the ‘saucepan specials’ were an immediate success, with a thousand being sold monthly during 1951.39 It was estimated that each receiver attracted an audience of ten, and there were plenty of appreciative letters to the radio station at Lusaka. One read, ‘These wireless sets are ours. Please try to make use of them if we are to be a civilised nation.’40
The prospect of the colonies becoming a Cold War ideological battlefield had a profound effect on policy towards self-government. During 1947, senior Colonial Office officials had been compiling detailed plans for the slow, systematic and piecemeal transfer of power within the colonies. It would be an evolutionary process, beginning with elected local councils, and proceeding as it were upwards, towards a national parliamentary government with powers over the colony’s internal affairs. With a fully-fledged parliamentary democracy, the colony would be ready for independence. Nothing was to be rushed; it was calculated that it would take at least twenty, probably thirty years for native populations to learn the ways of democracy and, most importantly, to create a body of responsible and trustworthy native politicians.
This tidy, pragmatic and above all realistic programme was suddenly jettisoned in 1948. The immediate cause was the panic which beset the Colonial Office after the Accra riots in February, whose roots were economic distress rather than impatience with the pace of political change. Nonetheless, an official investigation recommended a swift constitutional change, promoting Africans to the Gold Coast’s Executive Council. The further opening of government at all levels was proposed by a second report, compiled in 1949 by a commission of Africans under an African judge.41 The British government accepted both reports, and the process of evolution was effectively compressed into a few years, for elections were held in 1950. In February 1952, Kwame Nkrumah, leader of the majority Convention People’s party, became Leader of Government Business and, a year later, Prime Minister.
Why did the government take fright in 1948? The Gold Coast administration had been taken unawares by the disturbances, and its reaction was ham-fisted. There was no guidance from above as to how to handle riots, and it was only in 1955 that the Colonial Office attempted to devise a common policy on riot control. The preliminary enquiry yielded a fascinating variety of techniques; under the 1948 regulations for the St Vincent police, the issue of blank cartridges was forbidden, as was firing over the heads of rioters since ‘this may give confidence to the daring and guilty’.42 Whatever the circumstances, shooting rioters, as occurred in Accra, looked bad in the press, and from 1945 the government had found it impossible to keep details of colonial unrest from the newspapers.43
The British government was always sensitive about the use of force, especially firearms, to quell colonial tumults because it was a denial of what the empire stood for. In theory and popular imagination, British rule had always rested on the goodwill and collaboration of the governed, not coercion. The latter had to be applied in certain situations, but as a final resort and sparingly. Officials and soldiers whose job it was to keep order were also aware of an ill-defined but strong public hostility to the application of the iron fist. It was described by an NCO in Simon Raven’s Sound the Retreat (1974) which was set in India in 1946:
‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Cruxtable with sombre relish; ‘as things are nowadays, these bloody wogs only have to open their mouths and dribble, and everyone in the world’s on their side against us. No one wants to know the truth of it. They’re just for the wogs and against us – and so are half our own people, come to that.’
Variously expressed, the same complaint was heard many times during the final years of the empire.
Rather than ruthlessly crush dissent, the British government chose to embrace and, so to speak, smother it. By accelerating the Gold Coast’s passage to self-government, Britain imagined it had rescued the colony from possible Communist subversion and won the goodwill and gratitude of local political leaders. The conditions of the Cold War had wiped out the chances of a leisurely, measured progress from colonial tutelage to responsible government. Henceforward, British policy would concentrate on the cultivation of the most influential native politicians, who could be trusted to take over the reins of government in the empire’s successor states. It was an answer to the problems of decolonisation which dismayed many, who foretold that it would create as many problems as it solved.
Echoing the doubts of those proconsuls who had been uneasy about India’s advance towards home rule, the veteran Colonial Office mandarin, Sir Ralph Furse, wondered whether the government had been listening to the right voices:
It is, and always has been, extremely difficult for a European to discover what Africans are really thinking. On the whole the primitives cannot now help us very much, though an old and very poor man in the bush district of Barotseland may have come as near the mark as most when he told Lord Monckton’s Commission that ‘he wished to remain under the gracious protection of the blanket of King George V.’ The African political intelligentsia are not a very safe guide. Like other politicians they mostly have axes to grind, and several, from having been educated abroad, are to some extent déraciné … Because African crowds shout slogans at the behest of such leaders it does not follow that they understand what the slogans mean.44
There were still in the late-1940s large areas of the empire without any political consciousness and largely untouched by the outside world. Old patterns of life continued as did old hierarchies. A sportsman visiting Darfur in the southern Sudan in 1949 encountered a local chief who was ‘a tremendous old fellow with jutting beard, red robes, gold trappings and a 5-foot whip hanging from his wrists, eleven sons and daughters uncounted. Behind him rode an escort of 60 men in, of all things, chain mail.’ Old men could recall the days before British rule when Ali Dinar was sultan, although none could remember what he looked like for ‘we were never allowed to look above the knees’.45 The British had governed Darfur for just over thirty years. Further south, in northern Uganda, colonial government was roughly the same age and still not firmly in place, for in the Karanoja district cattle-rustling continued intermittently throughout the 1940s.46
As late as November 1957, patrols of the King’s African Rifles tramped through remote districts of Kenya to remind Suk and Turkana tribesmen of the retribution in store for lawbreakers. Demonstrations of rifle and Bren gun fire were mounted for parties of tribesmen and after one, which included the explosion of phosphorus grenades, a district commissioner remarked, ‘I believe the lesson has sunk in.’47 Nothing much seemed to have changed in fifty years. Aerial policing continued in the hinterland of Aden where sixty-six tons of bombs and 247 rockets were needed to punish caravan raiders and stop an inter-tribal war in 1947.48 That same year a revival of tribal feuding left several hundred dead and wounded in Somaliland, a protectorate where British rule had only been fully installed in 1920.49
Colonial authority was also fragile in another volatile outpost, the Solomon Islands. After the end of the Japanese occupation, a substantial body of natives had virtually declared independence, and bound themselves together under what was called the ‘Marching Rule’. This was in part a cargo cult, whose devotees expected the arrival of huge ships bringing lavish gifts from a world power. Under the Marching Rule, men and women lived in disciplined communities and shared everyday tasks. The movement’s Communist undertones worried local officials who, after attempts at conciliation, were driven to use force in August 1947. A visit from a submarine in June did not impress the dissidents, and so the aircraft carrier Glory and the destroyer Contest were sent for. Their cruise through the islands, and the appearance of fifty native constables with rifles and fixed bayonets (borrowed from the New Guinea force) brought about the downfall of the Marching Rule. Its dénouement resembled an Ealing comedy film. The policemen, some of whom were members of the Rule, played a game of soccer with the natives, winning 4–3, and afterwa
rds there was a Fijian feast and a cocktail party for naval officers and officials.50 It took a further two years for the government to feel secure enough to reimpose the island poll tax, the islands’ main source of revenue.
It is worth remembering that at the moment when Britain was making arrangements which would lead to the liquidation of the empire, there were still areas which had been under effective colonial rule for less than a man’s lifetime, and there were others where imperial authority was precarious and shallow-rooted. Even under Labour, old hierarchies stayed the same; there were, in 1949, ten lavatories on the railway station at el Qantara in the Suez Canal Zone, labelled as follows:
Officers European
Officers Asiatic
Officers Coloured
Warrant Officers and Sergeants European
Warrant Officers and Sergeants Asiatic
Warrant Officers and Sergeants Coloured