Roberts A.D. The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 7: from 1905 to 1940
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1930—194°
a pupil of Malinowski, was studying the Bemba, a people
particularly affected by labour migration to the mines. Between
1932 and 1939 the IAI provided from Rockefeller funds 17
fellowships for extended research in Africa. All but three were for
work in British territories, and most were given to social
anthropologists trained by Malinowski in the study of' culture
contact', of whom six were South African, four were German or
Austrian and two were British.
47
Social research in south-eastern
Nigeria, and by Evans-Pritchard in the Sudan, was funded by the
Leverhulme Trust.
Governments also promoted research. In Britain,
a
government
research committee helped in the later 1920s to extend to Africa
the new science of nutrition. A League of Nations report on the
subject in 1935 prompted the Colonial Office to collaborate with
the Medical Research Council and the Economic Advisory
Council in organising a survey in 1938 of nutrition in British
colonies. In probing the causes of malnutrition, the ensuing report
stressed ignorance rather than poverty, despite evidence from
Richards and others that economic pressures could seriously
impair African diets. Nonetheless, there were leading experts who
found good sense in African farming practices, and in any case
there was increasing official concern to improve subsistence
agriculture. The Colonial Development Fund helped to finance,
among other research, ecological surveys in Northern Rhodesia.
In Tanganyika and southern Nigeria administrative officers con-
ducted full-time enquiries into land-tenure. Two academic social
anthropologists were employed by governments: Schapera in
Bechuanaland and Nadel in the Sudan. In 1925 the former German
agricultural research station at Amani in Tanganyika had been
revived. Scientists in government employment gathered at im-
perial conferences and at others held in East and West Africa.
Museums were enlarged or created in the Rhodesias and provided
bases for archaeological research (for which the South African
government had created a department in 1935). In Northern
47
Two IAI fellowships were given to French ethnographers for work in Algeria. Social
research by French academics in tropical Africa in the 1930s consisted only of
a
team
study of the Dogon people, in Soudan, led by Marcel Griaule of the Institut
d'Ethnologie (from which the Musee de I'Homme was formed in 1938). In 1929 the
administrator-anthropologist Henri Labouret wanted to study labour migration from
Upper Volta to the Gold Coast, but the federal government at Dakar took no interest.
Matters improved after the foundation at Dakar in 1938 of the Institut Francais de
I'Afrique Noire.
7
1
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THE IMPERIAL MIND
Rhodesia, the initiative of
a
colonial governor led to the foundation
in 1937
of
the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute
for
Social Research;
its first director,
the
social anthropologist Godfrey Wilson,
embarrassed the government by tackling the contentious question
of Africans
in
towns. This episode illustrated
the
distance which
in practice separated colonial governments
and
professional
anthropologists, despite assertions from both sides of belief in
the
value
of
'applied anthropology'.
There was
a
modest growth
of
concern with Africa
in
British
universities,
and in
subjects other than social anthropology.
Rockefeller, which
had
financed
the
expansion
of
the
London
School of Tropical Medicine in the
1920s,
now advanced the study
of African languages
at
the
School
of
Oriental Studies.
At the
London School
of
Economics
the
anthropologist Lucy Mair
lectured
on
colonial administration.
At
Oxford, Coupland's
historical research treated Africa chiefly
as a
field
for
British
philanthropy and diplomacy,
but
his younger colleague Margery
Perham travelled widely on the continent and wrote a major study
of indirect rule
in
Nigeria. Another Oxford lecturer, John Maud,
was commissioned
by
Johannesburg
to
study
its
administration;
a third, Christopher Cox, became director
of
education
in
the
Sudan.
In
1937 Coupland
and
Perham started
an
annual summer
school
on
colonial administration
for
officials
on
home leave.
From Cambridge, the economist
E. A. G.
Robinson contributed
to
the IMC
report
on the
Copperbelt,
and
scientific expeditions
visited
the
East African lakes.
As in
France
and the
USA,
numerous doctoral theses were written
on
African topics.
48
48
British and 1
UK: 1920-40
USA: 1905—40
JS doctoral theses
Total
96
104
Accep-
ted after
1950
70
66
on Africa (excluding
Humanities
and
Social Sciences
64
2O 2) 19
90
22 )5 27
I
•4
ancient
Natural
Sciences
i
1
•
*3
—
4
Egypt):
<
ui
8
8
London
Ji
Oxford
or Cam-
bridge
22
Many of the theses on South Africa were by South Africans, and most of those on Egypt
for British universities were by Egyptians.
72
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1930—194°
Much of the research achieved during the 1930s was drawn
upon for the African Research Survey. This project may be said
to have originated in Smuts's proposal at Oxford in 1929 for a
centre of African studies that would serve the interests of
European governments, but especially that of South Africa.
Funds for this were not forthcoming, but the idea
was
transplanted
and transformed at the Royal Institute of International Affairs
(Chatham House). This had been founded after the war at the
instigation of Lionel Curtis, a member of the
Round Table
group,
and it was he who in 1931 persuaded the Carnegie Corporation
to finance an African research survey. The aim was to examine
the impact on sub-Saharan Africa of European civilisation,
including its 'economic revolution', in the hope that through
better-informed government this impact would help and not harm
Africans. The survey was directed by Sir Malcolm Hailey, until
recently a provincial governor in India. Ironically, in view of the
survey's origins, the appointment thus epitomised the growing
tendency of British rule in Africa to depend on expertise from
India rather than South Africa.
49
The survey resulted in the
publication in 1938 of three volumes: S. H. Frankel's Capital
investment
in Africa and two collective compendia, E. B. Worth-
ington's
Science
in Africa and Hailey's own An African
survey,
which collated information on an international basis from
academics and officials. Meanwhile Chatham House had also
sponsored the first of R. R. Kuczynski's studies of African
population statistics and W. K. Hancock's
Survey
of Commonwealth
Doctoral theses in law, letters and
Area studied
Maghrib
Africa S. of Sahara
Madagascar
science
Total
355*
>3>
2
46'
for French
1931-40
109
JO
'9
universities,
Law or
letters
323
no
3i
1905-40:
Science
30
21
M
1
j by Arab authors; 85 for University of Algiers
2
} by African authors (incl. 2 from Anglo-Egyptian Sudan)
J
1 by Malagasy author
In addition, there were 1)2 such theses on Egypt (excluding ancient Egypt); at least
90 authors were Arab.
40
Next to Hailey and Pirn, the most influential colonial adviser with Indian experience
was Arthur Mayhew, secretary of the Advisory Committee on Education in the
Colonies, 1929-39.
73
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THE IMPERIAL MIND
affairs; this last included searching analyses of economic change
in South and West Africa.
Hailey's An African survey presented an enlightened and
cautiously reformist view of the continent. It was the first British
work to give serious attention to the African empires of other
European powers, which Hailey himself visited during a tour of
Africa in 1935—6. The
Survey
gave no currency to prejudices such
as still survived in officialdom about African indolence or brain
capacity.
50
It confronted many of the implications of economic
change and implicitly at least offered a critique of indirect rule.
The prevailing tone was humane and by no means complacent.
Yet the
Survey
exhibited the faults as well as the virtues of the
mandarin, and it reflected a dominant trend in contemporary
social thought insofar as it implied that Africa was a vast
laboratory for experiments in scientifically controlled social adap-
tation. ' The African' appeared frequently in its pages; individual
Africans, scarcely at all. The existence of African organisations
was barely acknowledged, let alone the diversity of contemporary
African culture. ' Nation-building' was seen as work for adminis-
trators, not agitators. It was inevitable that the
Survey
should have
taken little account of the African past, for this had been neglected
both by historians and by anthropologists, who mostly ignored
unmatched opportunities to record oral historical testimony. But
it was significant that neither Hailey nor Worthington could find
room for any account of such work as had been done on the Iron
Age archaeology of Africa — which now included excavations
at Mapungubwe in the Transvaal and Schofield's studies of
pottery in southern Africa. All in all, what passed for a survey
of Africa was primarily a survey of Europe in Africa.
Hailey's team, for all their distinction, might well have echoed
the recent remark of
a
former official in Northern Rhodesia:' We
...complacently rejoice in our high-mindedness, forgetting that we
are still as arrogantly dictating, still every whit as compelling... '
5I
Indeed, one senior administrator had recently accused himself and
50
Two doctors in Nyasaland argued that one cause of African insanity was excessive
education, and as late as 19)9 the naked and indolent negro still basked in the
condescending sunshine of a history book published by the Colonial Empire Marketing
Board, The story of
the
British
colonial
empire.
51
Frank Melland, in F. H. Melland and Cullen Young, African
dilemma
(London, I9J7),
35-
74
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his colleagues of being 'too much obsessed with our thoughts,
our teaching, our plans. It is high time we heard a little from the
other side.'" One remarkable purge for spiritual pride was
supplied by a German museum curator who, before fleeing from
Hitler, had sought out representations of white people by African
artists.
53
Besides, Nazi behaviour had itself done much to discredit
beliefs in racial superiority. Colonial rule in Africa was criticised
in books by Leonard Barnes and W. M. Macmillan, both in the
Labour Party's circle of advisers, and in Geoffrey Gorer's account
of travels in French West Africa. The voices of Africans were
mediated through Perham's collection
Ten
Africans
(1936)
and less
directly through the novels of Joyce Cary.
54
But closer contact
was exceptional. Creech Jones (who from 1936 served on the
advisory committee on colonial education) corresponded with
political leaders in West Africa. Jomo Kenyatta and Z. K.
Matthews participated in Malinowski's seminar; Malinowski
himself warned that by ignoring African agitators ' we may drive
them into the open arms of world-wide Bolshevism', and noted
the catalytic effect upon African opinion of Italy's invasion of
Ethiopia.
ss
But between colonial governments and their African
wards dialogue scarcely existed: dissent was commonly treated as
sedition. Even in West Africa, constitutions had stagnated since
the early 1920s, while little came of Governor Guggisberg's bold
plans for Africanising posts in the Gold Coast civil service. To
be sure, African voices had not been wholly impotent: in eastern
and central Africa they had influenced decisions regarding closer
union, while strikes and boycotts compelled some official re-
thinking in Northern Rhodesia and West Africa. But to rely on
the dialectic of neglect, explosion and commission of enquiry was
poor trusteeship by any standard. Against those who claimed that
good government was better than self-government, there were
grounds for arguing that government could not be good unless
it was self-government, or at any rate moving in that direction.
52
C. C.
Dundas (chief secretary, Northern Rhodesia)
to the
International Colonial
Institute, 19)6 (quoted
by
Rosaleen Smyth, 'The development
of
government prop-
aganda
in
Northern Rhodesia up
to
19J 3' (Ph.D. thesis, University
of
London, 198)),
43-
53
Julius Lips, The savage hits back (London and New Haven, 1937).
54
Aissa saved (1932),
An
American visitor (1933), The African witch (1936),
Mr
Johnson
(1939). Cary had been
in
the Nigerian political service from 1913
to
1920.
55
Introduction
to
Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya (London, 1938),
x.
75
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THE IMPERIAL MIND
All
the
same,
An
African
survey
did induce some forward
thinking. It acknowledged that' the political future which British
policy has assigned to the African colonies must be understood
to
be
that
of
self-government based
on
representative
institutions'.
56
It
prudently refrained from attaching any sort of
time-scale to this future, but it drew attention to the difficulty of
reconciling elected legislatures with the structures of indirect rule.
In October 1939 this problem
was
discussed
at a
meeting
convened by the colonial secretary, Malcolm MacDonald. This
exposed sharp disagreement. The officials, supported by Coup-
land, pressed the claims of the African intelligentsia to a share of
power at the centre; Perham and Lugard wished to confine their
scope to local government. Hailey was despatched on another tour
of Africa, to make a report on which to base a policy. Meanwhile,
the
Survey
had given weighty backing to those who believed that
British investment in colonial development under the act of 1929
should be increased and extended in range: a new bill was drafted
in 1939.
In September the Second World War broke out. Colonial
questions, so far from receding into the background, seemed more
urgent than ever. Reform was needed, both to forestall subversion
and to advertise to the world Britain's fitness to be a great power.
The Colonial Development and Welfare Act was passed in July
1940.
War, and the threat of war, also changed Britain's attitude
to
the
French empire
in
Africa.
An
early sign
of
awakening
interest had been an academic enquiry in 1935 into education in
French West Africa. But the War Office continued
to
regard
France as the major threat to British power in Africa. By 1937
this was patently absurd, for
a
real menace to Britain's position
in Egypt, the Sudan and Kenya was now posed by the Italians
in Libya and Ethiopia. In 1938—9 air services connected French
and British colonial capitals between Dakar and Khartoum.
In
October 1939 MacDonald made history by visiting the French
colonial minister. But
the
time
for
such exchanges was fast
running out. Paris would soon cease to matter; what Britain now
needed in Africa was the goodwill of the USA.
s6
Hailey,
An
African
survey,
1,659.
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CHAPTER
2
ASPECTS
OF ECONOMIC HISTORY
FOUNDATIONS OF THE COLONIAL EXPORT ECONOMY
The economic changes that took place
in
Africa
in
the period
under review have been summarised in terms of varied implication,
as the economic revolution, the second stage of Africa's involve-
ment
in the
world economy,
the
intensification
of
dependent
peripheral capitalism, the completion
of
the open economy,
or
simply
as
the cuffing
of
Africans into the modern world.
1
The
concrete fact, however, from which these descriptions take off in
different directions is not itself in much dispute. Between 1905-9
and 1935—9, exports from African countries between the Sahara
and the Limpopo
2
increased by about five times
in
value and
by
nearly
as
much
in
volume; import values rose
by
some three-
and-a-half times, import volumes between two-and-a-half and
three times. Total trade thus grew
in
real terms
at an
annual
average rate of
a
little over
3
per cent.
3
At first sight this is hardly
a momentous expansion. For even though
it
was nearly double
the rate of growth of world trade taken as a whole, it started from
such low levels that the global impact was hardly perceptible, and
was not of primary significance for the economies of the colonial
powers themselves; before
the
Second World War, trade with
1
This selection alludes
to
the work
of
Allan McPhee, The
economic revolution
in British
West Africa (London, 1926) and
S. H.
Prankel, 'The economic revolution
in
South
Africa', chapter
3 of
his Capital
investment
in Africa (London, 1938);
A. G.
Hopkins,
An
economic
history
of
West Africa (London, 1973), 168 and ch.
6; I.
Wallerstein, 'The
three stages
of
Africa's involvement
in
the world economy',
in P. C.
Gutkind and
I.
Wallerstein (eds.), The political
economy
of
contemporary
Africa (London, 1976), 30-J7
(cf.
Frankel, Capital investment,
ch. j,
'Africa joins
the
world economy'); Samir Amin,
' Underdevelopment and dependence in black Africa',
Journal
of Modern African Studies,
1972,
io, 4,
J03-24;
R. E.
Robinson and
J.
Gallagher, 'The partition
of
Africa',
in
F.
H.
Hinsley (ed.), New Cambridge
modern
history,
XI
(Cambridge 1962), 640.
1
This chapter pays
no
heed
to
Mediterranean Africa, nor, regrettably,
to
the Horn.
South Africa, where the decisive changes began earlier,
is
excluded from this sentence
but not from the chapter.
1
These figures, especially the volume ones, must
be
taken
as
very approximate.
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ASPECTS OF ECONOMIC HISTORY
sub-Saharan Africa (South Africa still excluded) never accounted
for a twentieth part of the United Kingdom's exchanges.
4
So
inconspicuous, indeed, were the short-term and even the medium-
term commercial gains accruing from the European conquest of
tropical Africa that many metropolitan observers, unaware that
the investment was a long-term pre-emption, have concluded
either that it was a mistake or that it must have been undertaken
for reasons that were not commercial. For Africa, however, none
of the innovations of
the
early and middle colonial periods, apart
from the spread of literacy, compared in importance with the
advance of overseas trade, to which most other economic changes
were directly related either as condition or as consequence.
The most crucial of the conditions was the conquest
itself,
that
is to say the incorporation of African societies into larger and
solider systems of political order than had existed before. (The
reference is to the colonial empires, not to the individual units
of colonial administration, which were not always decisively
larger than earlier African states.) The linkage is unmistakable but
its nature may need to be clarified. It was not primarily that trade
was no longer interrupted by warfare or banditry, for in fact
long-distance commerce had often been conducted across dis-
turbed African frontiers. It was rather that most Africans were
now released from the posture of defence and enabled to
concentrate on productive enterprise. That is not to say that they
had formerly spent all or most or even any large part of their time
fighting one another, but readiness to fight had been the first
obligation of males in the most vigorous period of their lives and
work had had to take
a
subordinate place. In economic terms, the
conquest meant (and this change appeared to be permanent) that
the function of protection was specialised, taken away from the
general body of adult males and assigned to very small numbers
of soldiers and policemen, whose organisation and weapons gave
them an unchallengeable monopoly of force. For the others, there
4
See chapter i, table i. For relations with other metropolitan powers see chapters 6
and 7 (France), 9 (Belgium) and 10 (Portugal). The gold-mining boom in the 1950s
greatly increased South Africa's share of the British export market; in 1935-8 it
averaged 8.7 per cent, as against only 4.7 per cent for the rest of sub-Saharan Africa.
In 1925—8 the respective figures had been 4.8 and 4.1. (Calculated from B. R. Mitchell
andP. Deane, Abstract ofBritish historical statistics (Cambridge, 1962), 284, j2o;Mitchell,
International historical statistics: Africa and Asia, 414.)
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FOUNDATIONS
was a loss of autonomy, even of the sense of manhood, as well
as unprecedented possibilities of oppression, but the economy of
human energy was very great.
Above all, the new order made long-term investment possible.
It is no accident that tree-crops such as coffee and cocoa were not
planted on any scale on the mainland of Africa until there was
no longer a risk that they would be cut down by raiders just as
they were coming into bearing. But most important was the
investment in transport which, as most colonial rulers knew, was
what colonial rule was mainly for. As Adam Smith had remarked,
5
nature had so constructed the African continent that most places
were a long way from sea or navigable river, and so from what
in his and all earlier times had been by far the cheapest mode of
transport. In addition, diseases of stock were so prevalent that
between the camels of the desert and the horses and trek-oxen of
the far south there were no load-moving animals except a few
donkeys. Tropical Africa thus moved straight from head porterage
to the railway and the motor lorry. To an extent which can hardly
be overstated, it is today the creation of these devices, and
especially the former. Railways are uniquely large, expensive and
vulnerable pieces of fixed capital, which demand political security
over very wide areas. They are necessarily at least partial
monopolies; but even so, since they yield mainly external econo-
mies,
the profits from their construction are more likely to accrue
to other enterprises than to the
builders.
For all these reasons, even
in societies otherwise committed to pluralistic capitalism, they
have always been closely regulated, usually at least partly financed
and very often built and managed by the state. More than
anything else, it was the exigencies of railway-building that had
brought the European states into Africa, persuading their ruling
classes that they must move from informal to formal empire in
a continent that could not provide the political cover needed for
the revolution in transport without which the exploitation of its
resources could not proceed much further.
The converse is also true. Once colonial governments had been
established they had to build railways in order to justify their
existence, and sometimes in order to be able to govern. There was
in consequence some construction which, as will appear, was
5
The wealth of
nations
(1905 edition), 16.
79
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ASPECTS OF ECONOMIC HISTORY
premature or wrongly located and yielded too little trade to justify
the heavy burden of debt charges imposed on the peoples it was
supposed to serve. Most lines, however, easily vindicated
themselves, in the sense that they gave access to resources which
would otherwise have been unusable and brought the territories
far more revenue than they took out.
Railway-building was in full swing well before 1905, and by
1914 the crucial thrusts into the interior had mostly been
completed. As in all forms of development, South Africa was far
ahead of the rest of the continent; and even at the end of the period
it contained nearly half the total mileage south of the Sudan
(13,600 miles out of 30,700). Construction had of course been
undertaken mainly to connect Kimberley and the Rand with the
outer world, and had been stimulated by competition between the
business and political interests identified with the ports of Cape
Town, Port Elizabeth, East London, Durban and Lourenco
Marques. Already by 1914, however, there was a true network,
with lateral and interlocking lines as well as those leading to the
coast, promoting activities other than mineral export alone.
Elsewhere there were at that time only tentative and isolated
ventures, undertaken at the lowest possible cost and with no
overall planning, each administration probing from its coastal
base towards real or imagined sources of future wealth in the
interior. Typically the railway struggled to the nearest stretch of
navigable water, where it thankfully handed over to steam-boats.
Thus the famous 'Uganda' Railway, having opened up the Kenya
Highlands on its way, reached the easternmost gulf of Lake
Victoria in 1901, bringing much of the fertile lake basin within
reach of world markets. The Germans, though they pushed a line
past the Usambara mountains to the base of Kilimanjaro by 1911,
were slower to traverse the unpromising central and western parts
of their East African sector and did not reach Lake Tanganyika
till the eve of war in 1914; and by the next year the lake was also
linked to the Atlantic by four separate bits of railway and three
smooth stretches of the Congo river. Meanwhile the Nyasa
country had been reached by a line which started from the
just-navigable lower Shire, and the South African system had sent
out a long tentacle through the Rhodesias, reaching Bulawayo in
1897,
Salisbury (Harare) in 1902 and the Broken Hill mine in 1906;
Salisbury had also been provided with a much shorter link to the
80
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