AN EMPIRE RELINQUISHED
Glimpses of the Departing Raj in India and Africa
by
The recent stately and cordial departure of “the captains and the kings” from Britain's last major colony was a reminder to me of how skilled the British became, after the Second World War, at beating dignified and amicable retreats from their overseas possessions. During the mid-century decade in which I first lived in India and then regularly visited Africa, former British colonies occupied themselves primarily with preparing for such imperial recessions and their aftermaths.
Early in 1954, my family and I sailed for India, where I was to serve as a Ford Foundation consultant to the Union Ministry of Education in New Delhi. I soon found that the warm welcome that I received as a nongovernmental American was not extended to my official countrymen. As our ship (one of the last P. & O. liners) neared Bombay, the Eisenhower administration had announced its fateful decision to sell arms to Pakistan in order, as a leading American policy maker later explained, “to shore up the eastern end of CENTO.” That decision abruptly cooled the warmth engendered in the first years of Indian independence by our first ambassador, Chester Bowles. Thereafter the American line — “We, too, threw the British out” — ceased to work with Indians, if indeed it ever had.
Another surprise for American arrivistes was the good standing enjoyed by the recently departed Raj. India's former rulers were respected rather than reviled by the new leaders of India whom they had so often jailed. This apparent anomaly was explained to me by an Indian intellectual shortly after I had arrived. “We have settled our accounts with the British,” he said, “and are now free to admire them.”
Unsettling, too, was the polished speech of many Indian officials. "Geez,” said one American agricultural expert, “these guys speak better English than I do.” The president and the prime minister were “Oxbridge” graduates, and my Indian counterpart in the Ministry of Education, himself widely known in India as the first Indian Secretary of the Oxford Union, once told me that there were eighteen Oxonians among his colleagues: “enough,” he added, “for an annual dinner.”
Indeed, some of our hosts gave off more than a whiff of hauteur toward Americans that had presumably been inculcated by their British dons. This attitude was revealed in a number of ways. A ministry colleague first informed me that “the Sikhs are very energetic and superficial,” and then, on a later occasion, called them “the Americans of India," leaving me to complete the unflattering syllogism.
But perhaps my probationary status was made clearest by our bearer. He had once served Jim Corbett, the fabled tiger hunter. When word reached Delhi of Corbett's death in Kenya, I tried to console him. “Yes, Sahib,” he sadly replied. “There aren't any sahibs like that any more.”
I returned from India in the Fall of 1958 and for the next five years directed the Ford Foundation's first program of “development assistance” in Africa.
In contrast to India, where British rule had already ended, many African states were still colonies when the Foundation’s program began. Nor did all of their various European masters regard the prospect of their colonies’ independence in the same way. Indeed, Salazar’s Portugal, in its ahistoric way, saw no reason to accept the new Africa at all.
On my first visit to Leopoldville (now Kinshasa), my Belgian host conceded, with an air of reluctant discovery, that Belgian rule might last for no more than another fifty years. His estimate was off by forty-nine years. Soon after the Congo became independent, I was having tea on the lawn of a hotel overlooking Lake Victoria when I saw what the Congo's independence meant to at least one family of Belgian refugees. A Belgian woman sitting at the next table with her children and their African nanny rummaged through her handbag until she came upon her house key. She held it before her for a moment and then, with a bitter shrug, tossed it into the nearest bush.
The French and British departures were less grudging. The French divorced and then remarried most of their former colonies through the single grand gesture of the pater familias of the French Community, Charles de Gaulle. The British disengaged through a sensible succession of planned devolutions and transfers of power extending over a number of years. (These serial departures by the British were sufficiently numerous and well spaced as to enable one enterprising British firm to specialize in the rental of bunting and other paraphernalia required for the proper celebration of the birth of each new state.)
When I visited Tanganyika (now Tanzania) in 1960, it was a British-managed U.N. Trust territory. Julius Nyerere had already been designated as Tanganyika's first president. Against his populist instincts, he was living in the official residence on the edge of Dar-es Salaam, where, escorted by the American consul, I spent the evening with him. After a number of brandies, someone mentioned the British-African constitutional talks then going on at Lancaster House in London in preparation for the independence of a number of East African states. The talks were moving slowly, but far from accusing the British of stalling and duplicity, Nyerere said, “One can't really blame the British. They keep drafting constitutions, bringing them to the meetings, and saying, ‘Why not try this one?’” The phrase, enhanced no doubt by the brandies, seemed to please him, and he repeated it several times. In addition to reflecting Nyerere's fair-mindedness, it was an early glimpse, lost on me at the time, of the rivalry and mutual wariness among the future leaders of East Africa on which the East African Federation would later founder.
The realistic statesmanship displayed at this time by British officialdom in London was not always matched by British colonial officers still serving in Africa. “If it had not been for your Woodrow Wilson,” charged the British Permanent Secretary for Education in the then Eastern Region of Nigeria, “I'd still be ruling my natives in my district.” But judging by the sullen reception he was given by “his natives” when I accompanied him on a homecoming to his former district, the proximate cause of his loss of authority lay nearer at hand.
Of course, it was galling for the run of colonial field officers to face the early end of their careers, despite the “golden handclasp” with which they were consoled as they left the service. The sight of uninformed Americans seeking roles in post-independence Africa only deepened their resentment. “How long have you been in Nigeria, Mr. Ward?” l was asked by one British wife. “Ten days? We've lived here for nineteen years.” The next day, as I toured government offices in Kaduna, I got a glimpse of the way of life which was now coming so reluctantly to an end. My hosts were on the phone to each other but not strictly on Her Majesty's business. They were putting together the afternoon's tennis doubles. “No, not Simpson,” I overheard one say. “I don't think his backhand is quite up to it.”
Perhaps, as a general rule, it can be said that the smaller the imperial power, the meaner the spirit of its departure (although French Guinea, where the French were said to have taken even the light-bulbs with them after Guinea voted “Non!” to the French Community, was an obvious exception). Here I include, along with Portugal and Belgium, the Dutch in the East Indies. Perhaps it is simply a matter of the greater importance attached to their few colonies by the smaller European countries. One of the first strong leaders in Mozambique, Eduardo Mondlane, once told me that he had grown up believing that Portugal was infinitely large and rich. But once he got there and saw how small and poor Portugal really was, he said that he felt “much less resentful” of Portuguese rule.
Although the imperial departure was often orderly and sometimes magnanimous, it didn’t necessarily follow that the colonies thus formally empowered were, in fact, ready to become successful nations. In the case of Zanzibar, the British were barely over the horizon before the Sultan fell from his unsteady throne. Here the contrast between Asia and Africa is striking and may prove fateful for Africa's future. On the whole, the new nations of Asia were co-extensive with old cultures, but in Africa, which had been wracked by the slave trade well before Europe colonized it, new nations and nationalism were themselves artifacts of colonialism. A case in point is Cameroon. Its very name derived from the Portuguese word for shrimp and its two principal components legacies of British and French rule. Indeed, during the Cameroon's pre-independence period, one nationalist party made a patriotic point of spelling the country's name with a "K" as the Germans had when the Kaiser ruled Kamerun.
Geography, too, made for social indigestion within a number of African states. The combination of a savannah interior inhabited by austere and undereducated Muslims and penetrated less deeply by colonial rule, with coastal peoples — many of whom, as the British used to say, were either "Christians or bare-assed pagans” — proved as difficult in Africa as has the mixture of Bedouins and Palestinians within the single nation of Jordan.
A number of countries in Africa — Ethiopia, for example — share with such non-African countries as Lebanon, Malaysia and the former Soviet Union the misfortune of being dominated by one ethnic linguistic or religious group which constitutes about half the population. It is as if every other American were a Texan or white or a Christian, or spoke Spanish. In most cases, the hegemony of the dominant group is maintained but the resentment it inspires in other groups chronically threatens national unity and social order. In Asia the breakup of Pakistan is in part explained as the resentment of the Bengalis of the East toward the hegemony of the West Pakistanis.
The divisive effect of tribal loyalties and antipathies, often extending across national frontiers, is another and, by now, familiar obstacle to national cohesion in Africa. For a time, many Americans, ignorant of intra-African complexities, tended to see Africans as divided only by their colonial masters. With independence Americans expected them to speak, think, and act as one. I recall Thurgood Marshall's surprised dismay when, as an observer at the Lancaster House meetings on Kenyan self-rule, he asked a Kikuyu leader about opening-up the highlands to farmers of other tribes after independence. “Just let them try it,” came the grim reply.
Sometimes, Americans who had come to know the pervasiveness of African tribalism would try to reduce it in small ways. A colleague in Nigeria started out bravely with one Ibo, one Yoruba, and one Hausa as his household staff in Lagos, but he finished with three Ibos after one member of the experimental trio took a knife to one of the others on the ground that, as he angrily explained, “That man is a stranger!”
Not that tribalism is unique to Africa. Flemish and Francophonic heads were being broken in Brussels even as tribal conflicts broke out in the Belgian Congo. And the Congo, when I first visited it, reflected the linguistic, ethnic, and religious divisions of the home country. Louvanium University in Leopoldville was Catholic, and so the “Confessional” University in Elizabethville was Protestant; students in either university were entitled to be educated in either French or Flemish. The Belgians in Leopoldville told me that it had cost some fifty thousand dollars to educate the one student who had opted for Flemish. I have often wondered about that student's reflections when and if he got to Europe and tried to order lunch.
Other barriers to successful development in black Africa, ranging from friable soil and unevenly distributed rainfall to widespread illiteracy, discouraged any illusions that early and smooth progress toward mature nationhood and economic prosperity could be expected in Africa's first decades of political independence.
Even these scattered and personal observations seem to me to support the conclusion that although all colonial empires began in evil, some have behaved better than others. Certainly, the first Vice-President of Indonesia thought so. He once told an Indian audience that his fellow Indonesians “had to use force to win our independence, as you would have had to do if you had been ruled by the Dutch. The Dutch would have hanged Gandhi long ago.”
A comparison of the aftermaths of the British departures from India and Africa might suggest that Britain stayed too long in India and then left Africa too soon. But unless one regards the bloody partition of the subcontinent as the inevitable consequence of an imperial policy of Divide and Rule, it may be more instructive to point out that since 1947 India has repeatedly changed governments by means of free national elections, now has a huge and growing middle class, and feeds itself. (Other, less tangible gains, as a member once said of a proposal before the Indian parliament, “must await improvement in the national character.”)
In the case of Africa, hindsight is more difficult. Events so often seem to have been inevitable, once they have happened. However, in the sixties, it did seem clear that the die had been cast. Most Africans (but not all) were not prepared to wait any longer for independence. Before the Gold Coast became Ghana, I heard Kwame Nkrumah, then Ghana's president-in-waiting, tell a New York audience, "They say we aren't ready for independence, but here we come, ready or not."
Can it be that the turnover of Hong Kong was the posthumous handiwork of Rudyard Kipling? Or is it only coincidence that Kipling's prescient “Recessional” was published in June, 1897, almost exactly a century ago? At the jubilant height of Victoria's Empire, Kipling's poem urged his fellow-countrymen to abjure the pomp and “far-flung battle-line” of empire in favor of “an humble and a contrite heart.”
Although the Labour Party rightly receives the primary credit for Britain's successful disengagement from its overseas possessions, and although one does not quickly attribute humility and contrition to Margaret Thatcher, the Tory decision to enter into the Hong Kong agreement, however belated and reluctant it may have been, should be noted as one more example of that conservative practicality which has often helped to ensure the solidarity of Great Britain in uncertain times.
Some future Gibbon, seeking to explain the decline and fall of the British Empire, may cite such causes as the struggle of indigenous independence movements, Britain’s post War economic and human exhaustion, and party politics at home. To these one hopes he or she will add the British people’s increasing discomfort with the contradictions between maintaining an empire and pursuing their own democratic aspirations. But whatever the “verdict of history,” the manner of Britain's leaving deserves respect for the practical wisdom and common decency that British policy makers and officers eventually brought to the task of dismantling the largest empire in history. Perhaps now, at long last, we too can be “free to admire them.”
F. Champion Ward is a former Vice President of the Ford Foundation.
