The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (67 page)

Article Seventy-six of the United Nations Charter, which committed Britain to putting its imperial subjects on the path “toward selfgovernment or independence.” Britain’s record on this score became

even more awkward as more and more former imperial territories

joined the General Assembly and British Commonwealth as member nations after gaining their independence.

The metropolitan public found little reason to excuse the damage

that the Kenyan fi asco did to Britain’s national reputation, particularly after it became obvious that the new imperialism’s promised

returns were ephemeral. India, one of the last vestiges of the fi rst

British Empire, had been unquestionably profi table, but now it was

gone. While exports from the remaining imperial territories helped

generate dollar earnings after the war, the key factors in Britain’s

recovery were a grant from the Marshall Plan and the devaluation of the pound. By the mid-1950s, the wider empire bought just

13 percent of Britain’s exports and supplied only 10 percent of its

imports. Most territories ran up their own dollar defi cits, which

meant that they no longer played a role in supporting the pound.57

With the empire becoming more of an obvious burden, many Britons began to ask whether they would be better served by joining

the European Common Market than by wasting economic, diplomatic, and military resources trying to hold together the last vestiges of the empire.

Recognizing these realities, the Conservative governments of the

1950s adopted a pragmatic strategy of granting individual territories

self-rule, followed by independence, on the condition that the new

rulers respected British investments and remained within the western sphere of infl uence. Essentially, they sought to turn the clock back

a century to revive the institutions of informal empire. Senior Colonial Offi ce offi cials and later generations of imperial apologists tried

to portray this retreat as part of a planned strategy, but their revisionism was really just an attempt to put the best face on events that had

spun out of control. Moreover, the fi ction of planned decolonization

was plausible only in the Caribbean and West Africa, where there

were no signifi cant British expatriate populations. African majority rule in the settler-dominated territories in eastern and southern

344 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

Africa was a nonstarter because the British government had theoretically pledged that they would remain white.

In Kenya, the expense and international embarrassment of Mau

Mau led metropolitan British offi cials to make limited concessions

to buy time and win over moderate African leaders. Over the vehement objections of the settlers, who refused to share power under any

terms, they offered non-Europeans a political role through constitutional “multiracialism.” Continuing the imperial policy of granting

rights to communities rather than individuals, multiracialism denied

Africans a full vote on the grounds that they were not suffi ciently

advanced to qualify for the franchise. Contending that civilization

was the basis of political representation, the Colonial Offi ce drew up

constitutions that granted voting rights only to propertied or educated Africans and allocated legislative seats based on disproportionate ethnic quotas. This ensured that Europeans outnumbered African

representatives by a ratio of two to one.

The vast majority of Africans understandably detested multiracialism, and in 1957 most African legislative council members boycotted the fi rst elections held under the new constitution. Despite this

opposition, the Kenyan authorities believed that they could water

down this resistance. Sensing that popular opposition to multiracialism was breaking down tribal boundaries, they looked to divide the

subject majority on the basis of class. To this end, they endeavored

to create a small cadre of landed elites through a radical policy shift

that gave their allies, particularly the Kikuyu chiefs and loyalists,

the means to acquire private land titles in the reserves. Theoretically,

these prosperous commercial farmers would have a vested interest in

supporting continued British rule in Kenya. In fi nally backing African agricultural development, the imperial planners hoped that the

resulting surplus would drive industrial development, thereby reducing unemployment and relieving the colony’s chronic land shortage.

Hard-core settlers opposed these reforms to the very end, but more

pragmatic government offi cials realized the colour bar was politically

unsustainable. Buoyed by an entirely unrealistic War Offi ce plan

to develop Kenya into a major military base in the late 1950s, they

hoped to win enough African support to push back the day when they

might have to enfranchise the subject majority.

The metropolitan authorities did not actually have an explicit plan

to abandon the empire at this point, and it is possible that British

British

Kenya 345

rule in Africa might have lasted longer had it not been for the 1956

Suez crisis. The United States’ opposition to the British, French, and

Israeli plot to undo Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the canal

by reoccupying the Canal Zone under the guise of a peacekeeping

mission was a powerful demonstration that the new imperialism was

unsustainable in the Cold War era. Fearing that the Soviets would

exploit the nonwestern world’s near universal hostility to the FrancoBritish invasion, the American government forced Britain to withdraw by threatening not to support its application for a loan from the

International Monetary Fund.

This humiliation drove Prime Minister Anthony Eden from offi ce

and brought Harold Macmillan to power. At a time when the French

and Belgians were making plans to leave Africa and a new United

Nations resolution called for full independence for subject peoples,

Macmillan resolved that Britain would not be the last imperial power

on the continent. To this end he told the South African parliament in

1960: “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.”58 This declaration of Britain’s intention to retreat from

Africa was also a tacit admission that multiracialism had failed to

blunt African demands for full citizenship, if not total independence.

The Afrikaners were entirely unmoved by Macmillan’s warning

about the power of African nationalism and calculated that violent

repression would keep them in power. Startled imperial offi cials in

the rest of British Africa, however, found that true national independence was no longer a vague promise but an immediate reality.

In Kenya, the settlers complained indignantly that Macmillan had

betrayed them, but they were swiftly losing their remaining support

in metropolitan Britain. It cost the British taxpayer roughly fi ftyfi ve million pounds to rescue them from the Mau Mau uprising, and

reports that jailors at the Hola detention camp had beaten at least ten

Kikuyu prisoners to death touched off a public scandal that threatened Macmillan’s majority in Parliament. Although the Conservative

Party had a history of defending the empire, the Tories were now

unwilling to risk their party’s larger political fortunes by defending

a privileged imperial elite. As one of the new younger generation

of Conservative politicians told the settler leader Michael Blundell:

“What do I care about the fucking settlers, let them bloody well look

after themselves.”59

346 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

Thus the wind of change swept through Kenya along with the rest

of British Africa. Accepting that independence would come within

a matter of years instead of decades, the Kenyan authorities hoped

to turn over power to a friendly African regime that would respect

British investment and guarantee the settlers’ lives and property. At

fi rst they tried to accomplish this by allying with the leaders of the

Kenya African Democratic Union’s (KADU) minority communities.

Sharing fears of domination by the more numerous Kikuyu and Luo

peoples that constituted the Kenya African National Union (KANU),

KADU cooperated with the British government in drafting a federal

constitution that divided the new nation into seven autonomous tribally based regions under a weak central government. This would have

meant that the settlers would have become simply another minority tribe with a constitutional guarantee of autonomy in the postimperial era. However, KADU won only 20 percent of the vote in the

1961 elections that chose a provisional government to guide Kenya

to independence.

Although the settlers reviled him as the satanic force behind Mau

Mau, Jomo Kenyatta proved to be the imperial regime’s most useful

African ally during this transitional period. Far from being a radical or socialist, as his critics suggested, he actually had closer ties

through marriage and sentiment to the landed Kikuyu elite. He was

also unquestionably innocent of the government’s fabricated charges

that sent him into detention and internal exile for almost a decade,

but this inequity had the silver lining of sparing him from having to

take sides during the Mau Mau civil war and established his credentials as a national hero. In August 1961, the authorities gave into the

inevitable and released him. Although he claimed to be above politics,

he won a landslide victory in the 1963 independence elections as the

KANU candidate.

One of Kenyatta’s fi rst priorities on taking power on December

12, 1963, was to abolish the federal system, but in almost every other

regard he proved surprisingly cooperative in working with his former imperial rulers. Declaring that all Kenyans had fought for independence, he passed over the former forest fi ghters and Mau Mau

detainees in favor of infl uential ex-chiefs and loyalists when forming

his new government. He made it clear that there would be no radical redistribution of land or wealth, committing Kenya to a program

of capitalist development and emphasizing economic continuity and

British

Kenya 347

respect for private property. Most important from the settlers’ perspective, Kenyatta agreed to buy at above-market rates the land of any

farmer who wanted to sell and to welcome those who wanted to stay.

Although international donors provided the means for some common people to acquire a share of the former white highlands, most of

the former settler farms went to the president’s wealthy allies.

Many of the supporters who had hailed Kenyatta as a champion

of the poor and landless during the imperial era were terribly disappointed by these policies. They assumed that
uhuru
(freedom) would

bring land by breaking up the great highland farms and create jobs

by forcing Europeans and Asians to leave Kenya. Yet the neomercantilist economy that the postimperial government inherited from

the former regime largely tied Kenyatta’s hands. Admittedly, his fi rst

priority was to secure his own power base by rewarding his closest

allies, but the new president had few resources to make good on the

promises of independence. After the transfer of power, the emptiness

of the new imperialists’ avowed commitment to civilize and modernize Kenya became painfully clear as Kenyatta’s government strove to

turn an artifi cial imperial conglomeration into a viable nation-state.

The legacy of the colour bar and the dismally inadequate imperial

education system meant that there were only a handful of Africans

with the skills to guide Kenya through this transitional period. The

new nation similarly inherited the imperial regime’s narrow industrial base, inadequate infrastructure, and bleak urban slums. These

were the new British Empire’s true legacies.

The rapid and largely unexpected demise of the imperial regime

in Kenya refl ected the unstable and contradictory nature of the new

imperialism. While the emergence of powerful national identities in

the nineteenth century suggested there would be no more empires

in Europe, western technological and capitalist advances appeared to

give empire building a new lease on life in regions in Africa and Asia

where identities remained dangerously local. Westerners took their

short-term political, economic, and military advantages over these

communities as evidence of their own cultural superiority, but the

quick and relatively easy victories that built the new empires were

simply the result of the uneven advance of globalization around the

world. A broader historical view, coupled with the economic rise of

the nonwestern world in recent years, reveals the fallacy of the racial

and cultural chauvinism that legitimized the new imperialism.

348 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

What was actually novel about the new imperial projects was

that largely democratic liberal nation-states were their sponsors.

The voting western European public considered themselves civilized

and moral and would not tolerate a return to the excesses of earlier imperial eras. Consequently, the new imperialists had to disguise

their base ambitions by promising to create humane liberal empires

that would reform and uplift subject societies in addition to bringing

wealth and national glory to the imperial metropole. This intrinsic