The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (107 page)

The scale of the violence made an inquiry inevitable. Both London and the federal ministers in Salisbury (modern Harare) seem to have expected a favourable verdict. The NAC's ‘murder plot’, with its sinister echo of Mau Mau, would vindicate the measures that the government had taken. Anti-federation ‘nationalism’ would be heavily tainted with extremism and violence. With the NAC broken, African ‘moderates’ would take the political lead. Then they could claim that the ‘real’ African view was no longer so hostile to a federal future. But London and Salisbury were utterly wrong. When the Devlin Report was published in July 1959 (Devlin was a leading British high court judge), it dismissed the murder plot as an implausible fiction, denounced the Nyasaland government as a ‘police state’ employing illegal and unnecessary force, and (worst of all) endorsed the opinion that the vast majority of Nyasaland Africans were bitterly opposed to federation. After desperate efforts to discredit Devlin's conclusions,
¹⁹
Macmillan and his colleagues won the ensuing parliamentary debate. But their panic was real. With the almost simultaneous revelations of atrocious maltreatment at the Hola prison camp in Kenya, they feared a wave of revulsion from ‘middle opinion’ at home. Colonial brutality was a political albatross which the Labour opposition showed every sign of exploiting. In July 1959, a general election was close. And, though Macmillan was to score an electoral triumph in October, the scars of the summer remained. ‘No more Nyasalands’ became the unspoken motto of his African policy.

The logic of this was that, by hook or by crook, colonial governments must avoid confrontation and enlist the cooperation of African leaders. Emergency rule was a hostage to fortune that London had no wish to redeem. This did not mean that Macmillan was set on a rapid transfer of power or the swift imposition of African majority rule in the Federation and East Africa. Quite the reverse. His immediate step was to appoint Iain Macleod as the new Colonial Secretary in October 1959, perhaps chiefly because Macleod (who had no colonial experience at all) was free from any sentimental attachment to the colonial ‘cause’. Macleod was liberal-minded, courageous, intellectually tough, ruthless, brusque and not infrequently disingenuous (whites in Central Africa used a different word).
²⁰
There is a pervasive myth (which Macleod himself fostered) that he grasped from the outset the need to withdraw quickly and hand over all power to African leaders. The archival record lends this little support. What is certainly true is that he saw the urgency from the British point of view of engaging African politicians in a constitutional process that would head off ‘extremism’ – the category in which he included Jomo Kenyatta
²¹
– and avert the recourse to coercion. What he came to see by the end of his tenure (Macmillan removed him in October 1961) was that, once the commitment was made to majority rule as a goal, and an instalment of power was conceded to African leaders, control was soon lost over the pace and direction of political change. The coercion needed to reimpose imperial authority increased geometrically with each increment of self-rule. And so did the odium of using it.

The first sign of this came in Tanganyika. Here Macleod had proposed (in November 1959) a schedule for gradual advance from partial self-government to reach full independence in 1968.
²²
‘Having yielded to [Nyerere's] demand to have the major share of responsibility we should be on much firmer ground in resisting further premature changes’, he told his colleagues blithely.
²³
It might even be necessary to put off independence beyond 1968. Eight months later, when the strength of Nyerere's support was becoming more obvious, he told his advisers that July 1962 would be a ‘reasonable’ date for Tanganyika's independence.
²⁴
When Nyerere came to London in November 1960, the Colonial Secretary insisted that Tanganyika's advance would have to keep step with progress towards an East African federation – still the grand object of Britain's regional policy. Tanganyika ‘would only reach independence when the Federation became independent as a whole’.
²⁵
Three months later, he abandoned this condition completely. Now the goodwill of Nyerere and the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) had become indispensable. ‘His continuance in power is vital to us in East Africa, and if independence by the end of December 1961 is essential to maintain his position, I am sure we should agree.’
²⁶
It was, and they did.

Much of Nyerere's appeal to the British came from the careful ‘moderation’ of his public pronouncements and the unchallenged authority that he seemed to exert over a unified movement: good omens, they thought, for holding the territory together and keeping the British connection. In Uganda, the local material was a great deal less promising. The British stuck to their aim of making a strong central state and bringing the kingdoms – especially Buganda – to heel. Direct elections to a Uganda legislature would signal that this was where power now lay and encourage ‘national’ politicians to rally a following.
²⁷
The bait was the promise of internal self-government, the prize that would go to the leader who did best in the new electoral game. If the
kabaka
resisted, Macleod told his colleagues, he might have to be replaced.
²⁸
The old Buganda elite, said the Colonial Office sternly, would have to like it or lump it: it was the future.
²⁹
But Buganda did neither. Instead, its
lukiko
(or parliament) resolved to secede from the Uganda protectorate by the end of the year, and there were ominous signs that violence would follow. Meanwhile, the promised elections produced a clear winner: Benedict Kiwanuka and the Democratic party which appealed particularly to Catholic Christians and especially to commoners in Buganda itself. But Kiwanuka was anathema to the Buganda elite, and the temperature rose. Another Nyasaland was perhaps in the making. So London reversed course. A breakneck inquiry unveiled a new scheme. Buganda was now to have ‘federal’ status, and the Buganda government, not the voters, would select its representatives in the national parliament. Despite growing doubts over Uganda's future cohesion under such a regime, London accepted this formula.
³⁰
To sweeten the pill, Kiwanuka was promised internal self-government in early 1962. But he was now an embarrassment and was duly denounced by an incoming governor as a threat to stability.
³¹
His main political rival, Milton Obote and his Uganda People's Congress, seized the chance that was offered. By allying with the
kabaka
, he pushed Kiwanuka aside. The prize of self-rule was now to be his. London was eager to make its escape. Its last precondition was more ‘federal’ autonomy for the smaller kingdoms along Bugandan lines before it conceded the final transfer of power in October 1962.

The pace had been frantic. Despite much verbal camouflage, this was not a planned march towards granting Uganda its nationhood, but a series of zigzags and u-turns, failures and fixes. From late 1960 onwards, almost its sole rationale was to avert local violence and find an African leader with a plausible claim to hold Uganda together. The rising chaos in the Congo, Uganda's immediate neighbour, made this all the more urgent. London did not fear confrontation with Ugandan ‘nationalism’, for it scarcely existed. What it dreaded was being sucked into a morass of anarchy or, still worse, civil war, caused by (if anything) its own state-building policies. There was at least the advantage that Uganda's affairs attracted little outside attention. It was quite the opposite with Kenya. Here Macleod and Macmillan could expect the closest possible scrutiny for the dispositions they made: from those who championed the cause of the settlers; and those who denounced the appeasement of ‘darkness and death’, the Kikuyu ‘extremism’ of which Jomo Kenyatta was still seen as leader. Macleod's own approach mixed opportunism with caution. Some months before taking office, he had met Michael Blundell and was deeply attracted to the ‘non-racial’ message of his New Kenya Group (of which Macleod's own younger brother, a farmer in Kenya, had become an adherent).
³²
At the Lancaster House Conference in January 1960 (promised eight months earlier by Macleod's predecessor), his aim was not to propel Kenya quickly towards independence (on which no promise was given), but to build a coalition between Blundell's supporters and ‘moderate’ Africans drawn in the main from outside the dominant Luo-Kikuyu grouping.
³³
Once again, the bait was a larger dose of self-government (and the scope that would give to attract clients and followers). To lend the African ‘moderates’ some much needed credibility, there was a firm declaration that the goal in Kenya was no longer race parity but majority rule. There were encouraging signs, reported Macleod in May 1960, that there would be no ‘monolithic’ African party.
³⁴
When elections were held in early 1961, two African parties emerged: the Kenya African National Union (KANU), led by Mboya and Oginga Odinga with mainly Luo and Kikuyu support; and the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU), largely supported by minority tribes. ‘I am delighted to read your excellent news showing firming up of support for a KADU based government’, wrote Macleod to the governor in April. ‘If this comes off it will be wholly consistent with all our constitutional hopes at Lancaster House.’
³⁵
‘I want to emphasize’, he went on, ‘how much I welcome…a Government based primarily on KADU and New Kenya Party, and very good chance there seems to be of leaving Kenyatta behind.’

The ‘great prize’ in Kenya was an African government that was ready to work with European interests, and soothe the fear of the settlers that they would be robbed of their farms by land-hungry Africans. What London hoped also was that a ‘moderate’ governing party would suck supporters away from the KANU majority (KANU had won more of the elective seats for Africans than KADU). The KADU ministers, said Macleod, must be ‘backed to the hilt’ and internal self-government (and by implication independence) brought forward.
³⁶
This prospect soon crumbled. The KADU leader Ngala was desperate for more power than the governor would give him. To win over KANU supporters, he joined in the call for Kenyatta's release. But his ministers performed poorly
³⁷
and his tribal coalition seemed more likely than KANU to pull apart at the seams. There hung over all the threat of more violence (there were 80,000 ex-detainees in Kenya, reported
The Times
³⁸
) if KANU were kept out of power. The governor's efforts to foster a coalition broke down. The British released Kenyatta in August, and by the end of October he had become leader of KANU. But both London and the British officials in Kenya remained deeply suspicious of his methods and motives and convinced of his guilt as a prime mover in Mau Mau. To escape from the deadlock (and avoid an emergency), there were fanciful schemes for a federal Kenya. London clung to the dream of an East African federation to dilute Kenya's ethnic and racial divisions. A new constitutional conference was to be convened in the spring. Before it met, a new Colonial Secretary, Reginald Maudling, confronted his colleagues with some unpalatable truths.

The object of the conference, he told them bluntly, was to pave the way for independence, strewn as it was with many difficulties and dangers. ‘It is not possible for us, even if we wished, to secure the continuance of European political power in Kenya…Arithmetic and African nationalism are against this. The best we can hope to achieve

is the orderly transfer of power so a securely-based and African-dominated Government which is genuinely anxious to see Kenya develop as a modern state to avoid chaos, civil war and a relapse into tribalism…Nor is it likely that we shall see in Kenya a Government which is actively pro-Western in its foreign policy. The most we can expect is one which is not committed to either side in the East–West struggle and one which…does not offer too many opportunities for exploitation and penetration by the Communist powers.
³⁹

‘Over everything broods the threat of Mau Mau, the influence of the ex-detainees in [KANU] and the persistence of personal violence.’
⁴⁰
London still schemed to engineer a split within KANU to isolate Kenyatta and the ‘men of violence and communist contacts’.
⁴¹
But the hope was forlorn. A new constitution promised universal suffrage and internal self-government but without producing agreement between the Kenya politicians or assuaging the fears of minority tribes and European settlers. But as Maudling had hinted, the initiative now lay with the leaders of KANU, and in fact with Kenyatta. It was Kenyatta's command over his quarrelsome colleagues that procured at long last in October 1963 a settlement that satisfied the minority tribes and lifted the threat of a communal war. With a huge sigh of relief, London completed the transfer of power before the end of the year.

Just as they found in Tanganyika and Uganda, the British discovered in Kenya that the offer of internal self-government was a runaway train that refused to stop at the stations they built or to pick up the passengers they meant it to carry. What made Kenya so stressful was the threat of extreme violence and the vulnerable position of the European settlers whose fate was bound to arouse close attention at home. From late 1961 onwards (and perhaps even earlier), the British were no longer in power in Kenya. They had become brokers. They lacked the will to repress a fresh insurrection and dreaded an outbreak before they withdrew. The highest card in their hand was Kenyatta's reluctance to risk civil war, and his hope of attaining an agreed independence and the constitutional legitimacy that was in London's gift. It proved just enough.