The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (100 page)

There was nothing new in the equation of imperialism with the exploitation of the weak by the strong. What was novel was the suggestion that not only were helpless people plundered, but their societies and cultures were torn apart in the process. As the British empire disappeared, one of its most cherished assumptions came under attack. The so-called superior civilisation which it had offered its subjects was nothing of the sort, and certainly not a justification for the wholesale destruction of other systems. Britain should feel guilt rather than pride for its imperial past. In November 1967, Dennis Potter, the left-wing, iconoclastic television playwright summed up the new orthodoxy: ‘Perhaps the noblest task of the popular historian should be to make us ashamed of our forefathers … now that the hilarious residue of the White Man’s Burden has been chased out of the reading books of schoolboys.’
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It was relatively easy for the post-imperial guilt complex to penetrate the public consciousness during the late 1960s. The image of empire, as daily projected in the television news, was one of iron-fisted coercion in Viet Nam, Moçambique, Angola, South Africa and, from 1972 onwards, Southern Rhodesia. The news from those countries where the Union Jack had been recently hauled down was also bleak and bloody. In 1966, the year of a Commonwealth conference in Lagos, there was a military coup in Nigeria and another in Ghana. 1967 saw the beginning of a three-year civil war in Nigeria and a new wave of military take-overs in Ghana and Sierra Leone. There were military coups in the Sudan in 1969, and two years later the preposterous General Idi Amin seized power in Uganda and began a reign of terror. For its former subjects, the inheritance of empire appeared to be political corruption, a succession of praetorian governments and internecine warfare. Not surprisingly, touring companies of British actors found African audiences very responsive to
Macbeth, Julius Caesar
and
Richard III,
all of which mirrored political life in their countries. It was natural in the successor states, and in some quarters in Britain, to blame these woes on the empire.

Faced with what appeared to be the failure of its imperial mission, Britain was also undergoing a re-evaluation of the principles which had formerly guided its rulers and empire. From the mid-1950s, social anthropologists had been busy analysing what was called ‘the establishment’. They uncovered and closely examined the world and values of an exclusive network which extended through London’s clubland, politics, the higher civil service, the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, the boardrooms of banks and large companies, the bench of bishops, the judiciary and the commanders of the armed services. Public school and Oxbridge education formed a common bond and had helped to mould a common humane, cautious, conservative outlook. Britain’s rulers were also the empire’s rulers. The establishment saw the exercise of power as a right, and its members had relished governing India and the empire since they had been able to do so without being unduly trammelled by expressions of the popular will.
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Those who scrutinised the establishment were also its critics. The general argument ran that those who had discreetly but firmly pulled the strings for so long were to a great extent responsible for national decline and stagnation. They were also capable of colossal blunders. ‘After Suez we can no longer have … confidence in this government’s sanity,’ observed one establishment analyst, himself a former Tory MP.
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The same could have been said, and was, somewhat less harshly, after the fall of Singapore. The difference was that in the mid 1950s everything seemed to be going wrong for Britain abroad. All that the establishment seemed able to do was either reach for old remedies, like Eden, or stand back in bewilderment. From the military wing of the establishment, Glubb Pasha complained: ‘While British citizens discuss … noble plans for the betterment of the human race a great part of the world is convinced that Britain is greedy reactionary and intent only on exploiting other nations.’
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Misunderstood abroad, Britain’s establishment was coming under fire at home, and seemed unable to find the confidence to defend itself. The television programme ‘That Was the Week that Was’ and the satirical magazine
Private Eye,
both of which appeared in 1961, lampooned public figures with a contemptuous abandon that had not been seen since the eighteenth century. In 1963, the Profumo scandal inflicted a further blow on the establishment by revealing that some of its members enjoyed eighteenth-century-style sexual lives. Ridicule of the establishment, hints of its moral bankruptcy, together with a pervasive feeling that it had somehow failed the country, contributed to Harold Wilson’s general election victory in October 1964. On the hustings, Labour alternately berated the stuffy old guard and promised a dazzling era of social and economic regeneration.

Assaults on the establishment and its values gathered pace. Aristocratic blockheads in high command were assailed in the musical
Oh What a Lovely War
(1964) and the film
The Charge of the Light Brigade
(1967). This last is particularly instructive, for a film of the same name, starring Errol Flynn, had appeared thirty years earlier; a wildly unhistorical yarn, full of dashing heroism, which linked a British cavalry regiment’s exploits in India with the famous charge. The new version, better on historical verisimilitude, turns into a bitter indictment of the bloodthirsty, dimwitted, bigoted and immoral officer class who hold command solely because of their blue blood.

The same class and its atavistic values were savaged in Lindsay Anderson’s
If
 … of 1969, which also delivered a few well-aimed sideswipes at the lingering ideals of empire. Set in a contemporary public school, the film takes the title of Kipling’s best-known poem, that lodestar which had guided past generations of public-school men as they went forth to take charge of the destinies of others. Despite the headmaster’s faith in leadership ‘in the modern world’, his school is a tyranny, run by sadistic prefects known as ‘whips’ who occasionally speak about ‘duty’ and service to country in the manner of G.A. Henty heroes. Their antagonists, three school ‘rebels’, are a modern Stalky and Co., but unlike their past equivalents they do not employ their energy and ingenuity in empire-building. They identify with the destroyers of empire, one of whom, a black guerrilla, appears on a poster in their study.
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The film’s climax involves the threesome, augmented by the girl lover of one and the boy lover of another, staging an uprising on commemoration day. The main speech is delivered by a moustachioed, well-medalled general who could have stepped from a 1930s imperial movie. He mouths the clichés of that time:

It’s a very sad thing. But today it is fashionable in Britain to belittle tradition. The old order that made our nation a living force are for the most part scorned by modern psychiatrists, priests, pundits of all sorts … Never mind the sneers of the cynics. Let us be true to honour … duty … national pride.

The rebels, armed with machine-guns and grenades, attack, and a cleric and the general organise resistance. Prominent among those fighting back is a middle-aged woman who speaks with the South African or Rhodesian twang.

In
If
 … the empire and the values of its architects are part of a broader target, an inwardly cankered establishment. By the time the film first appeared on the screens, the physical empire had dissolved, for Harold Wilson had continued his predecessor’s policy of disengagement. So in a sense the film is tilting at windmills; boys from this school will not end up as district officers in Somaliland or in command of frontier posts, even though the school’s emphasis on team games and cadet training suggests otherwise. And yet these young men, the establishment they are destined to join and the country which it dominates, are, according to
If
 … still in the grip of outmoded patterns of thought which can only be swept away by violence.

The phenomenon of social, political and intellectual dissent of which
If
was an extreme example formed a backdrop to the last days of empire. The same period saw the arrival in power of a generation of parvenus who had climbed the lifelines offered by the 1944 Education Act and had no immediate interest in the preservation of the old order. They did not all reject its view of Britain and the world; grammar school boy Harold Wilson spoke about Britain as a ‘world power’ in much the same way as Etonian Curzon had, and he was right in so far as the country possessed a formidable nuclear arsenal.

Hydrogen bombs, Polaris rockets, nuclear-power submarines (the first appropriately named
Dreadnought
) kept Britain among the first rank of powers, and were some compensation for an empire that was slipping away piecemeal. As it passed away, late nineteenth-century anti-imperialism, padded out with currently fashionable Marxism, became campus and classroom orthodoxy. All overseas empires were extensions of capitalism, which oppressed and exploited their subjects pitilessly. The children and grandchildren of those who had been taught to feel pride in the empire, now learned to be ashamed of it. Britain had been demeaned and corrupted by its empire, and whether true or not, this knowledge may have made its loss more bearable.

6

Uhuru: Tying up Loose Ends, 1959–80

‘Britain’s not bloody well going to make us live under a bunch of fucking black monkeys. Look at South Africa, that’s how to fix them.’ This outburst was overheard in a bar in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia during the spring of 1963, and the speaker was a first-generation Scottish immigrant.
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Africa was changing, but the Rhodesian mind remained fixed in that uncomplicated past when Rhodes’s columns criss-crossed the country and the answer to the native problem had been the Maxim gun. Another relic from that age, the Marquess of Salisbury, had told the House of Lords in March 1961: ‘I may speak as a moaner and a croaker, I shall not speak as a cynic; for no one believes in the British mission in Africa more passionately than I do.’ He went on to explain that giving self-government to black people and ignoring the wishes of white was not part of that mission. His wallet may have lain close to his heart since he was a director of the British South Africa Company, but he was very touchy whenever this matter was raised, insisting it had no influence whatsoever on his judgement.
2

For the man in the bar and the Marquess, Africa was taking a turn for the worse, and its present mutability threatened the descendants of those white men and women who had settled there over the past seventy years. At the same time, there was a strong body of opinion in Britain, embracing the Labour party and the liberal wing of the Conservative, which saw this period as a new dawn for Africa. It is hard nowadays to comprehend the optimism which attended the gradual granting of independence to Britain’s African colonies during the early 1960s. Independence day ceremonies were conducted with a remarkable degree of goodwill in a carnival atmosphere. Royalty stood by as flags went down and up, and speeches were made in which Britain wished the infant nation every good fortune. The paraphernalia of the post-colonial order was reassuring: there were secret ballots, and elected assemblies with maces, and wigged and gowned speakers. African judges, who had learned their law at London’s inns of court and wore robes of scarlet and ermine, presided over replicas of English assize courts. Democracy and the rule of law seemed firmly in place. Britain could feel satisfied that it had guided its subjects wisely and that they were setting off along the right road.

This euphoria was premature and probably naïve. For the Sudan, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and Uganda the post-independence path variously led to the overthrow of democracy, a sequence of praetorian coups, military dictatorships, corruption and chronic economic instability. This was all grist to the mill of those, like Salisbury, who had doubted the African’s ability to manage his own affairs unaided, and naturally were quick to say ‘we told you so’. Others, disappointed by what seemed the failure of a noble experiment, argued that Africa’s woes were a direct result of the imperial era. State boundaries drawn for the convenience of bureaucrats or at the whim of representatives of the great powers created tribal mixtures that were bound to fail. Moreover, the colonial era had witnessed the dislocation of old local social and economic orders, and it was foolish to imagine that colonial government, which had seldom lasted for more than a man’s lifetime, could have created a powerful sense of national coherence and identity. In any case, this had never been its primary purpose.

It was certainly true that at least until 1948 the British government imagined that the time would not be ripe for independence until the last quarter of the century. In any event, the timetable would have to be staggered according to the political sophistication of the natives and the experience of those who would take over the reins of government. But expediency had intervened when events in the Gold Coast made it clear that if the brake was applied violence might follow. Even so, this colony had had longer experience than others in democracy. Since 1894, ratepayers had been able to vote for half the membership of village and town councils, but it was a right which few chose to exercise. In 1922 only 46 of the 1,117 registered electors in Accra turned out on polling day and none of the 717 in Sekondi bothered to appear at all.

Political activity increased throughout West Africa between the wars, and was most intense among the Western-educated élite. Aspirants to leadership tended to learn about politics among émigré student organisations during periods of prolonged exile in Britain or the United States. Nkrumah spent ten years at American universities, and a further two studying law in London before returning home in 1947. Kenyatta was out of Kenya between 1931 and 1946, studying and taking various jobs in England, including one as an extra in
Sanders of the River.
Banda read medicine in various American colleges between 1927 and 1937, and from 1939 until 1953 was a general practitioner in England. He spent the next four years in Ghana, where he learned the mechanics of party organisation and how to mobilise public opinion. What was most striking about these political apprenticeships was that administrative experience was confined to running the party machine. Alongside professional politicans there were men who had worked in harness with British officials in the various provincial councils that had been designed as kindergartens for future rulers. Nigeria’s Benjamin Azikwe (ten years lecturing in American universities) had a record of serving in local administration from 1944 onwards, and Tom Mboya (Ruskin College, Oxford) served in Kenyan trade unions and local government in the decade before independence.