The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (89 page)

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.
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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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.
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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 afterwards there was a Fijian feast and a cocktail party for naval officers and officials.
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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

Other Ranks European

Other Ranks Asiatic

Other Ranks Coloured

ATS [Auxiliary Territorial Service – i.e. women]
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2

Friendly Relations: India and the Liquidation of Empire, 1945–7

In 1945, the gravediggers of empire commenced work. No government before or after 1945 ever took a conscious decision to dissolve the empire, but equally none was prepared to embark on an alternative course, its preservation come what may. The ministers, diplomats, soldiers and civil servants who found themselves responsible for devising and carrying out the policies of imperial disengagement did not imagine that they were parties to a funeral. Rather, they saw themselves as midwives, facilitating the births of new nations which were emerging from the imperial womb. The conventional, bipartisan wisdom which held sway for the next twenty-five years insisted the infant states would grow up within the extended family of the new, multi-racial Commonwealth, whose members shared a maternal affection for Britain, its democratic system and traditional respect for individual freedom. Never was an empire dismantled with such a sense of hope for the future.

There were circumstances in which Britain was willing to forgo an orderly retreat from empire and dig its heels in, but they were exceptional. Britain was engaged in the Cold War, and so no colony could be allowed to pass under Communist control after independence. So, while committed to future Malayan self-determination, Britain was prepared in 1948 to fight an extended campaign (euphemistically called an ‘emergency’ to avoid charges of colonial oppression) against local Communist guerrillas. Nor could the government allow a colony to dissolve into chaos, and for this reason operations were undertaken against the Mau Mau in Kenya between 1952 and 1954; another ‘emergency’.

None of Britain’s rearguard colonial wars matched the ferocity and length of those waged by the French in Indo-China and Algeria, and the Portuguese in Angola and Moçambique. British politicians needed to look no further than events in North America in the 1770s or, more pertinently, in southern Ireland after 1918 to identify the pitfalls that lay in wait for those who wanted to cling to empire at any cost. The Irish campaign also illustrated the fact there was a point beyond which the public was unwilling to tolerate armed coercion. This was understandable since a constant theme of modern imperial propaganda had been the goodwill which existed between the empire’s rulers and its subjects.

Furthermore, for the first time in its history, the entire British people was directly involved in the defence of the empire. Between 1947 and 1960, its outposts and trouble spots were manned and policed by peacetime conscripts, national servicemen. Professional fighting men played their part, but the casualty rolls of imperial conflicts now included sons and sweethearts who were not under arms by choice.

The public was also made more intimately aware of imperial campaigns and the issues behind them through the novelty of the television set, which was rapidly entering homes from 1950 onwards. The government quickly appreciated that, carefully handled, the medium could be manipulated to show colonial conflicts in a favourable light. At the end of 1957, the ITV Christmas Day show ‘Christmas in Cyprus’ concentrated on the festivities of soldiers, including national servicemen, who were there dealing with another ‘emergency’. The script was vetted by the army and Colonial Office, and both warmly endorsed ‘natural unrehearsed shots of soldiers assisting Cypriot civilians etc.; particularly women and children in the streets’. The programme opened on a positive note with the announcement, ‘Cyprus is part of the British Commonwealth,’ and continued with the assertion that British troops were only there to help its people.
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Those viewers whose wits had not been dulled by seasonal indulgence may have wondered, if this was so, why were Cypriots shooting at soldiers? Others no doubt settled down and watched troops giving a party for Cypriot children.

‘Emergencies’ of the sort experienced in Cyprus were relatively rare. The British empire did not dissolve like the French, Portuguese, and for that matter the Russian, in tears and blood. In India and the colonies an alternative way was devised, which involved an orderly and cordial withdrawal, and the assumption of power by a government which had been elected. At its best, from Britain’s standpoint, this arrangement was accomplished with a minimum of fuss, and wherever possible the retention of strategic bases, behind-the-scenes political influence and commercial advantages. What had to be avoided at all costs was a helter-skelter retreat which left behind a political vacuum, or worse, chaos.

Mastering the arcane diplomatic art of colonial disengagement took time, and to begin with its practitioners were moving in the dark and learning as they went. With little else to guide them, they turned, in British fashion, to the past and adopted the old empire-builders’ rule, which was to find someone with legal authority, such as a chief or rajah, and do business with him. Now, the empire’s demolition men had to cultivate and work in harness with the new power-brokers, local politicians. The leaders of various parties and national movements were assumed to speak for the majority of the people. Whether or not they did, these tribunes found themselves treated as spokesmen for nations and the eventual successors to the imperial administration. There were certain rituals; at some stage local political leaders would find themselves in collision with the colonial authorities and were consequently locked up in prison. In time, and with their nationalist credentials enhanced by their detention, they were discharged to take their places at their gaolers’ conference tables. This pattern had been established during the 1930s and 1940s when Indian Congress leaders, including Gandhi, were incarcerated: Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta and Dr Hastings Banda followed, in the Gold Coast, Kenya and Nyasaland respectively.