Roberts A.D. The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 7: from 1905 to 1940

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1914-193°

The First World War caused important changes in the way in

which Africa was regarded by its white rulers. War compelled

them to take new account of the resources of Africa, human and

material. France chose to use men. Her trade with black Africa

(which was mostly with Senegal) was scarcely 1 per cent of all

French trade in 1913, and even less by the end of the war, but

this was largely because potential African producers were

conscripted south as well as north of the Sahara to bear arms on

the Western Front, thus easing demands on French manpower

which would otherwise have crippled industrial production. In

Britain, the Colonial Office strenuously resisted War Office

pressure to use African fighting troops in Europe, but they played

a major part in the East African campaign, while huge numbers

of men served in it as carriers and suffered still higher death-rates.

Britain also increased her dependence on African produce during

the war: the proportion of total British imports (excluding gold

and diamonds) derived from sub-Saharan Africa rose from 2.8 per

cent in 1909-13 to 4.3 per cent in 1919-23. These figures reflect

a rapid growth in the relative value of raw materials from British

colonial Africa, even if their absolute value, in real terms, changed

little.

Besides, colonial governments helped in a small way to pay

for the war: not only did they contribute to the costs of African

campaigns; they also made

war contributions' to the metropolis.

The war revealed the value of Africans as servants of empire,

and the scale of their efforts quickened in at least some of their

rulers a sense of obligation; more generally the appalling

experience of trench warfare could strengthen commitment to the

service of an ideal — and scepticism towards higher authority.

But if the war helped to bring some whites and Africans closer

together, it also sowed new seeds of white doubt and fear. Little

weight need be given to the view that war between whites had

tarnished white prestige: this says more about white anxiety and

vanity than African deference. But it did matter that the pressures

of war much increased the burdens imposed by colonial regimes.

Here and there, especially in West Africa, Africans offered

'» Cf. F. H. Melland, In witchbound Africa (London, i

2j), 26-7; R. E. Wraith,

Cuggisberg

(London, 1967), 69-70; W. B. Cohen, 'Robert Delavignette', in Gann and

Duignan, African

proconsuls,

186.

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THE IMPERIAL MIND

resistance to these burdens, and began to use new forms of

organisation, such as the trade boycott. In March 1919 Sir Harry

Johnston, a veteran explorer and pioneer pro-consul, told the

African Society that the war had seen the 'beginning of revolt

against the white man's supremacy.

>l6

Already this supremacy was

beginning to give way. Between 1919 and 1922 nationalists in

Egypt compelled Britain to concede internal self-government,

even if Britain hoped thereby to strengthen her grip on Egypt's

external relations. And in 1917 the British government committed

itself to ' the progressive realization of responsible government in

India as an integral part of the British Empire'.

This was bound

to have implications, sooner or later, for Africa as well.

In Britain, converging thoughts about the opportunities,

obligations and hazards of empire were crystallised in the word

' trusteeship'. The aftermath of war gave this

special significance.

Germany had been defeated and her colonies occupied by the

Allies, while Turkey had been shorn of the Ottoman empire. The

future of these spoils of war was a major concern of the Peace

Conference in Paris in 1919. The USA, traditionally mistrustful

of European imperialism, wished these occupied empires to

become an international responsibility, a goal that was shared by

pressure groups in France and Britain. The conference agreed that

they should be governed by the victorious Allied powers, but as

mandates of the League of Nations. The final distribution of

mandates was not complete until 1922, but meanwhile the League

had to determine the responsibilities of those to whom mandates

were assigned. The African mandates were adjudged to be

territories whose peoples were 'not yet able to stand by themselves

under the strenuous conditions of the modern world'; their

well-being and development was 'a sacred trust of civilisation'.

Thus the African mandates required the mandatory powers to

suppress slavery and the slave trade, and the use of forced labour

for private gain, and forbade them to use African manpower to

strengthen their own armed forces. The mandatory powers were

further enjoined to maintain an open door to Christian missions

and (except in South West Africa) to the trade of other League

members; they were forbidden to grant monopolistic concessions.

H. H. Johnston, 'The Africa of the immediate future',

Journal

the

African Society,

1919,

18, no. 71, 16}.

Kenneth Robinson, The dilemmas of trusteeship (London, 1965), 4.

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1914-1930

Finally, the mandatory powers were urged to 'promote to the

utmost the material and moral well-being and the social progress

of the inhabitants'.

These goals were left conveniently vague, and although a

Permanent Mandates Commission was set up in 1921 to monitor

the performance of the mandatory powers, it was never given the

means to interfere. Nonetheless, the code of behaviour expressed

in the mandates was an implicit critique of earlier phases in

colonial history. It represented a reassertion of the international

conscience which had animated the anti-slavery conference at

Brussels in 1890 and the campaign against the Congo Independent

State. True, the code did not oblige Britain to change its ways;

Britain, after all, had taken a lead in framing it. Yet there lay its

main significance: as a formal statement of what Britain's rulers

expected of

colonial administration. Indeed, the junior minister

for the colonies, Leo Amery, had in July 1919 declared that

parliament was ' in the position of trustee' to the peoples of the

colonial empire in general. And in 1922 Lord Lugard, who had

retired from Nigeria in 1918, published

The dual mandate in British

tropical

Africa. This developed Joseph Chamberlain's view that

the welfare of Europe and that of Africa were essentially inter-

dependent, but Lugard refined it in the light of twenty years' more

experience of colonial rule and stressed the need to protect

Africans by restricting the scope of alien economic enterprise. A

similar doctrine of trusteeship was extended to the colonial world

at large when in

1922

the League of Nations set up the International

Labour Organisation.

This emphasis on the protective role of the imperial trustee was

at odds with the dominant trend among the makers of British

colonial policy. The war had given new scope to imperialists.

Milner, the architect of reconstruction in South Africa after the

Boer War, entered Lloyd George's War Cabinet in 1916. Smuts,

who had led the British imperial forces in East Africa in 1916-17,

and was also a member of the South African parliament, joined

the War Cabinet in 1917; he also took a leading part in the Paris

Peace Conference, where he pressed South Africa's own claims

to empire. As the economic power of Britain and France declined

in relation to that of the USA, their governments became more

ibid.

20-1.

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THE IMPERIAL MIND

attentive to those who argued the value of imperial links, whether

with dependent, territories or with autonomous partners such as

South Africa and other British Dominions. When Milner became

colonial secretary in 1919, he sought to make the colonial empire

an engine of economic growth. Like his radical French counter-

part, Sarraut, Milner called for investment in colonial infra-

structures to boost production. But the times were unpropitious.

Economic weakness at home might be a reason for strengthening

empire, but it was also an obstacle. Besides, there were more

pressing concerns: for Britain, trouble in Ireland, India and the

Middle East;

for France the reconstruction of her war-ravaged

north-east. The trade depression of

1920—1

stiffened the ingrained

reluctance of the British Treasury to facilitate colonial ventures.

It was ready enough to join Milner in encouraging private

enterprise (which had received much favour from colonial

governments during the war). But this was opposed by senior

officials in the Colonial Office.

Nonetheless, it still seemed worthwhile to pursue imperial

ambitions on a political plane. Union in South Africa had very

largely fulfilled one British dream of imperial federation; at the

same time, it was also the inspiration for other such dreams,

expounded in the pages of the Round Table. This journal was

founded in 1910 (the year of Union) by Philip Kerr, a former

member of Milner's 'kindergarten' in South Africa. It sought to

promote closer links between populations of British origin and

culture around the world, and it lent intellectual weight to belief

in the genius of the British for government, especially over other

' races'. The defeat of Germany — where some had cherished

visions of a Mittelafrika straddling the continent — gave new

hope to imperial dreamers in Britain. Before the war, Britain and

Germany had made provisional plans to dismember Mozambique,

of which Portugal herself controlled only the southern third.

Milner now enabled Union Castle, a British shipping line, to

acquire confiscated German shares in a subsidiary of the Niassa

Company, which mis-ruled the far north. Milner also enabled the

British-dominated Mozambique Company to finance a railway

from Beira to Nyasaland, at the expense of the latter; this was

In 1920 Milner sought, against the advice of his own officials, to help the War Office

use African soldiers in Mesopotamia, but the rising there was quelled by the RAF and

Indian troops.

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1914-193°

explicitly meant to boost British influence in an area on which

American firms were thought to have designs. Most important

of all, when the League of Nations assigned the mandate over

most of ex-German East Africa to Britain, the way seemed clear

for building some sort of British Dominion that might encompass

the continent from the Limpopo to the borders of Ethiopia.

However, plans towards this end had to wait upon events in

Kenya and the Rhodesias.

By the end of the war, the charter of the British South Africa

Company was approaching expiry. The company had no wish to

renew it, but argued over the terms of transfer. When Winston

Churchill succeeded Milner as colonial secretary in 1921, he tried

to persuade the settlers in Southern Rhodesia to join South Africa

as a fifth province: like Smuts, he saw them as a potential

counterweight to nationalist Afrikaners. The settlers voted instead

for self-government, which they achieved in

1923,

and meanwhile

Churchill had taken the fateful decision to let them run their own

defence force. In theory, Britain retained control over external

relations, but in practice this was rapidly obscured by Southern

Rhodesia's participation in imperial conferences. Britain also

reserved the right to veto legislation affecting Africans, but this

was never used; more important, in practice, was the informal

agreement that such legislation should be discussed in draft with

officials in London. In this way, Britain sometimes exercised a

moderating influence, but in matters of detail rather than principle.

As for Northern Rhodesia, this was problematic. Back in 1899,

Milner had considered that it lay beyond the proper frontiers of

British-dominated southern Africa. Twenty years later, there was

reason to see Northern Rhodesia differently. True, it had attracted

little white settlement, and the prospects for large-scale mining

had scarcely been investigated. But even if its main use to

capitalists was still as a labour reserve for mines elsewhere, it could

serve imperial ends as a link in a chain of white settlement up the

central spine of eastern Africa. It was clearly too soon to think

of self-government, and the Colonial Office took it over from the

company in 1924. But the first governor, Herbert Stanley, was an

old South Africa hand who soon set about plans for encouraging

white settlement, while confining Africans in reserves.

Over Kenya, the British government was at odds with

itself.

White aspirations to self-government were encouraged by Milner

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THE IMPERIAL MIND

when he allowed British subjects of' European' descent

large

elected minority

in the

legislative council.

The

much more

numerous Indians were championed by the India Office. Settlers,

alarmed by new plans for Indian representation, plotted rebellion

in 1922: no less significant, settler non-cooperation had obliged

the government to withdraw a new income tax. A constitutional

compromise was achieved

1923 when the

paramountcy'

African interests was upheld by the colonial secretary, now the

Duke of Devonshire. This could perhaps be seen as a reassertion

by the Colonial Office

control over Kenya

the expense of

the India Office as well as the settlers. But the Colonial Office

continued to exercise this control very cautiously: official attitudes

to both Kenya

and

Northern Rhodesia were henceforward

dominated by concern

avoid any further confrontation with

settlers. White interests

Kenya were effectively,

discreetly,

served by the appointment of men with South African experience

to key tasks

agriculture, the railways, education and local

government. Besides, Kenya was central to any wider plans for

entrenching white hegemony

eastern Africa. The first steps

were taken by

parliamentary commission which toured Northern

Rhodesia, Nyasaland and East Africa in 1924.

was instructed

by the short-lived first Labour government to examine prospects

both for coordinating policy in the region and for improving the

condition of Africans. But it was dominated by the Conservative

chairman, Ormsby-Gore; its conclusions, reported in 1925, were

congenial to the new Conservative colonial secretary, Leo Amery;

and Ormsby-Gore became Amery's deputy.

Amery remained

the Colonial Office throughout Stanley

Baldwin's government from 1924

1929; his tenure was the

longest of any colonial secretary between Harcourt and Creech

Jones (1946-50). True, this degree

stability (and that

Amery's senior civil servants) must be measured against the reign

of Warren Fisher as permanent secretary

the Treasury from

1919

1939; this undoubtedly cramped

the

style

other

departments. Still, Amery made the most of his time. He set up

the Empire Marketing Board

1926, through which modest

sums were directed to agricultural research

the colonies.

toured the Dominions in 1926—7 and made a point of visiting the

Rhodesias; he furthered the interests of white tobacco farmers in

Southern Rhodesia and sought to boost white settlement there.

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1914-1930

In 1926 he arranged a£iom loan for transport works and scientific

research in East Africa; this was justified as a way of stimulating

British exports, and thus employment. The same rationale was

offered for moving towards the idea of outright grants for colonial

development: a Conservative policy implemented by the second

Labour government in the Colonial Development Act of 1929.

But Amery's special concern was to further the emergence of a

white Dominion in eastern Africa. In 1925 he appointed as

governor of Kenya Edward Grigg, neither a civil servant nor a

soldier but a politician sympathetic to

Round Table

ideals. In 1927

Amery sent out the Hilton Young Commission to East Africa to

report on the possibilities for closer union — a term generally

understood to mean the subordination of regional policies to

settler minorities, especially those in Kenya. This time, however,

the visitors were much more impressed by the force of Indian (as

well as African) opposition: their report in 1929 held out no hope

of reconciling the rival claims of settlers and Indians. The cause

of closer union was not abandoned, but it was seriously retarded

by the fall of the Conservatives in

1929,

the greater weight of India

in imperial counsels, and the onset of the 1930s depression.

The Milner-Amery vision of empire was shared by few, if any,

civil servants. Fiddes, permanent under-secretary at the Colonial

Office from 191610

1921,

had worked for Milner in South Africa

but was plainly irritated by settler pretensions in Kenya. Samuel

Wilson, head of the Colonial Office from 1925 to 1933, though

more soldier than mandarin, was despatched to East Africa by

Amery in 1929 to tackle local opinion on closer union yet again,

but his few crumbs of comfort were offset by the vehement

objections of the governor of Tanganyika, Sir Donald Cameron.

Senior officials in London regarded Grigg's ' South African' plans

for Kenya as a direct challenge to their own authority. But it is

easier to say what the Colonial Office opposed than to say what

it approved. The question came more sharply into focus when in

1925 the Dominions Office took over responsibility for relations

with the self-governing empire. This might seem to have opened

the way for the Colonial Office to achieve a distinctive new

identity, as the chief trustee for Britain's subject peoples outside

India. But Amery remained head of both departments; the

accretions of the Colonial Office in the Middle East complicated

the picture; and in any case senior officials had been trained to

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THE IMPERIAL MIND

guard rather than to guide. The Colonial Office was organised to

deal with places rather than problems; despite the appointment

in the 1920s of specialist advisers on trade, medicine and agri-

culture, it was ill-adapted to promote the economic initiatives

wished upon it by Amery. Ormsby-Gore in 1926 found it

'out-of-date and creaking badly'.

The same charge was made

by Sir George Schuster, who as a member of the Hilton Young

commission dampened Amery's hopes of closer union. Schuster,

fresh from reorganising the finances of the Sudan, wrote from

Northern Rhodesia in 1928 that 'it is astounding to find each little

Government in each of these detached countries working out, on

its own, problems which are common to all, without any

knowledge of what its neighbours are doing and without any

direction on main lines of policy from the Colonial Office'.

These narrow perspectives were perpetuated by the structure

and management of the colonial

service.

From

1919

all recruitment

to administrative posts in Africa was handled by Ralph Furse, who

firmly believed they required not brainpower so much as force

of character, as developed by the team sports and prefectorial

discipline of the average English public school. Selection was

based on personal impressions: a degree was desirable (and most

recruits had been to Oxford or Cambridge) but its quality

mattered less than for entry to the Sudan Political Service, let alone

the Indian Civil Service. From 1926 most recruits to the

administrative service spent several months at Oxford or

Cambridge, taking courses that included anthropology and

colonial history. But this was much less rigorous than the training

provided by the Ecoles Coloniales in France and Belgium, or the

Colonial University set up at Antwerp in 1920, and until 1937

there were no formal arrangements for in-service training. In

Nigeria, as late as 1940, out of no administrative officers

empowered to act as magistrates only thirteen were professionally

qualified.

Furse's methods of selection accorded well enough with the

priorities of colonial administration, which could still be defined

as keeping the peace cheaply. Furse himself later remarked that

good district administration consisted of'a reasonable hut

tax,

the

W. G.

Ormsby-Gore, minute,

December 1926,

967/2B (cited

Mandy

Banton

in a

forthcoming thesis).

Sir George Schuster, Private work and public causes (Cowbridge, 1979), 78.

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preservation of tribal customs, young men respectful to their

elders, proper care of native agriculture'.

It was logical to

employ men who had been brought up to regard themselves as

natural rulers, because holding down Africa was largely a matter

bluff.

Members of the colonial administrative service remained

thin on the ground in Africa, even if they continued slowly to

increase. In Nigeria, they rose by 30 per cent during the 1920s

but numbered only

431

in 1930, when the population was around

20 million. By then the Nigerian police included some 4,000

Africans and 80 British officers, but the armed forces numbered

only 3,500; as elsewhere in British colonial Africa, military

establishments were much smaller, in relation to total population,

than those of the French, Belgians or Portuguese.

For all

branches of government, mobility was a key element of strength;

the motor car, and the motorable road, became central to the

preservation of colonial authority between the wars. Ironically,

this could mean that district officers spent less time than before

1914 on trek, and more time in court or on paperwork; their

contact with Africans tended to become increasingly formal.

Besides, medical advances (and improved steamship services)

encouraged the advent of white women: between 1921 and 1931

their proportion of the white population of Nigeria rose from

about one-tenth to one-fifth. As elsewhere in the tropics,, the

presence of white families tended to contribute to the estrange-

ment of rulers and ruled, and officials with black mistresses or

concubines faced still greater hostility in white circles in British

territories than they did elsewhere in tropical Africa.

British rule in Africa between the wars was predicated on the

assumption that routine tasks of local government should be

delegated to ' traditional' African authorities. This accorded with

the pressures to economise, and also with the diminishing need

for governments to innovate once the foundations of an export

economy had been laid and the financial basis of British over-rule

secured. But to these negative reasons for relying on local African

leadership were added positive arguments. Belief in the British

Furse, Aucuparius, 298.

Permanent armed forces as percentages of estimated total population, <\i93o:

Nigeria, 0.18; Gold Coast, 0.43; Kenya, 0.47; French West Africa, 0.86; French

Equatorial Africa, 1.5; Belgian Congo, 1.6; Angola, 2.6 (based on data kindly supplied

by Dr David Killingray and on Lord Hailey, An African

survey.

A study of problems

arising

in Africa

south

the

Sahara (London, 19)8), 108).

THE IMPERIAL MIND

genius

for

ruling alien races was quite compatible with the belief

that

the

customs

alien races also

had

merit, albeit

of a

lower

order. This view became easier

sustain

as the

less acceptable

aspects of African tradition yielded to superior force, and it gained

weight as educated Africans began to challenge white monopolies

of power. Mixing cultures made trouble;

was

better

keep

them apart.

The

crudities

a legalised colour

bar

might indeed

be abhorrent,

but

more subtle forms

discrimination were

not

necessarily

to be

opposed. Obviously African societies could

not

be wholly isolated from

the

forces

change

they were

contribute

to the

world's wealth.

But

the

basis

for

social

and

political change should be African, not British, institutions.

was

better to build upon African notions of justice and order, however

primitive, than

risk anarchy

replacing them with patterns

which

few,

any, could understand.

Such thinking, which

had

long ancestry

India, underlay

Lugard's influential exposition,

The dual

mandate,

the virtues

of indirect rule. This term, already given currency

Lugard's

erstwhile subordinate, C.

Temple,

was

widely adopted

the

course

the 1920s,

African styles

government were more

systematically adapted

imperial ends.

part,

course, this

trend was encouraged by the accumulation of colonial experience;

but

also derived from the

belief,

widespread among

the

British

ruling classes, that country life was good while towns were

bad.

British policy

Africa was informed

not

only

contemporary

ethnology

but

also

by the

latest version

an ancient rural idyll:

the virtue and beauty of the English countryside had been spoiled

by modern industry.

Social policy

late Victorian London had

been dominated

fear

of a

rootless, lawless, disease-ridden

Lumpenproletariat,

and

such fear spread

Africa. Racial segrega-

tion

South African towns

was

rationalised

grounds

hygiene,

and

when Milner became colonial secretary he espoused

academic schemes

for

urban segregation

similar lines, until

forced

retreat

governors

Nigeria and Uganda who could

see

the

practical difficulties

enforcing commercial

well

residential segregation. Hygiene, indeed,

was

potent imperial

metaphor: when

Sir

John Maffey arrived from India

govern

Cf.

Martin

Wiener, English culture

and

the

decline

the industrial spirit,

(Cambridge,

1981).

5°