Roberts A.D. The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 7: from 1905 to 1940
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1914-193°
the Sudan he sought to develop 'native states' which, as in India,
might be protection against the 'septic germs' of nationalism.
If towns were feared, so too was trade, which helped to make
towns and enticed people away from traditional authority. Trade
might be a source of revenue, but it was also a dangerous social
solvent; besides, it was not an occupation for gentlemen. British
officials were often better guardians than their critics allowed: in
Kenya and even in Southern Rhodesia some attacked the use of
African taxes to subsidise white farmers; but they were usually
lukewarm and ill-informed in their attitudes to entrepreneurs,
whether African or Asian. To be sure, colonial governments
promoted the conservation of natural resources: indeed, this
(together with transport) largely accounts for the rapid expansion
of British staff in the technical services during the 1920s; but
African initiative was regarded more often as a threat to these
resources than
as
their indispensable complement. Such paternalist
concern largely accounts for the general reluctance of British
colonial governments to enable Africans to register freehold titles
to land, and thus become eligible for bank loans.
The ideology of indirect rule obstructed thought about long-
term political change. Britain's rulers agreed that in theory they
should, as trustees, prepare their wards in tropical Africa for
eventual self-government, on the analogy of the white Dominions
and recent trends in India. But this was a far-distant prospect.
Lugard believed that' the era of complete independence is not as
yet visible on the horizon of time',
25
and this view was often
repeated. There seemed no reason to think much about the
possible role of Africans in the central institutions of government;
it was far more obviously important to develop African partici-
pation within frameworks with which Africans were already
familiar. The question was how best to integrate those frameworks
within the structures and requirements of the colonial state. The
answer was usually conceived in terms of chiefs and tribes.
Indirect rule was by no means a doctrine of
laissez-faire;
it often
involved meddling with African societies to make them conform
more nearly to British notions of the ideal ' traditional' society.
People without chiefs were given them, while chiefly hierarchies
served to delineate tribal frontiers of which Africans themselves
2S
F. D. Lugard, The
dual mandate
in
British tropical
Africa (London, 1922), 198.
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THE IMPERIAL MIND
might hitherto have been little aware. Citizenship within the
colonial state was to be fostered by degrees, by instilling attach-
ment to local authority and language group. There is, indeed, a
sense in which colonial regimes actually invented tribes: contrasts
based merely on dialect, or location, or livelihood, were hardened
into legal and administrative constructions. In the process,
'customary' law might also be invented: colonial courts were
inclined to emphasise bonds of kinship (especially in the male line)
at the expense of other, less clearly traditional, principles of
association. The ethnic kaleidoscope of Africa was being trans-
formed, not into modern states, but into a jigsaw of discrete tribal
blocks.
Much as the British might wish to protect Africans from the
modern world, exceptions had to be made. Literate blacks on the
West African littoral had long been part of that world and pressed
for a greater share in its counsels. Milner, while allowing whites
in Kenya to elect legislators, refused to concede the same right
to West Africans. He did not prevail; between 1922 and 1925 (and
following constitutional advances in the smaller West Indian
islands), a limited franchise was introduced for the legislative
councils of Nigeria, Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast. But it was
contingent on property qualifications and restricted to certain
coastal areas. It is instructive to compare these arrangements with
those for the only other legislative council (besides that of Kenya)
to which elections were made between the wars. The franchise
in Northern Rhodesia was extended in 1926 to all British subjects:
it was thus ostensibly based on legal status rather than racial
category (as in Kenya) or wealth (as in West Africa). Since,
however, almost all British subjects in Northern Rhodesia were
white, this was a trifling distinction; the key point was that
indigenous Africans were classed as protected persons, whose
spokesmen, at the level of territorial politics, were to be their
self-appointed trustees, the colonial administration. In urban local
government, white power was also on the increase: from the start,
whites were given elective majorities in the municipalities of
Nairobi (1918), Ndola (1927) and Livingstone (1930). In Sierra
Leone, by contrast, Freetown council was reconstituted in 1927
with an official instead of an African majority, while in other town
councils on the West African coast the minority of African-elected
seats excited little interest.
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1914-1930
In the 1920s, however, it was not African political rights but
African education which created most complications for the
theory of indirect rule. After all, colonial governments needed
African clerks and interpreters, while businessmen and Christian
missions also sought literate auxiliaries. But West Africa — and
still more India — showed what trouble could follow from
education uncontrolled by imperial guardians. Much thought was
therefore given to advancing African education in such a way that
it would promote rather than frustrate the ends of indirect rule.
Since education was still so largely in the hands of missionaries,
their collaboration was crucial, and the Colonial Office looked for
guidance to J. H. Oldham, secretary to the International
Missionary Council.
26
He in turn had learned much from the
experience of negro colleges in the USA, and took a leading part
in the newly-formed Colonial Office advisory committee which
reported in 1925 that:
Education should be adapted to the mentality, aptitudes, occupations and
traditions of the various peoples...Its aim should be to render the individual
more efficient in his or her condition of life..., to promote the advancement
of the community as a whole through the improvement of agriculture...the
training of the people in the management of their own affairs, and the
inculcation of true ideals of citizenship and service.
27
This approach informed the development of secondary education
in both West and East Africa between the wars. It was not an
ungenerous vision, but it was firmly paternalist. As a compromise
between tradition and progress, it seemed far-sighted at the time,
but whether Africans would consent to it remained to be seen.
If the motives for cherishing African culture were often very
mixed, it was certainly studied more systematically than hitherto.
In West Africa, three British officials, Rattray, Meek and Talbot,
were appointed ' government anthropologists'. In the Sudan and
Southern Rhodesia, journals were founded in which officials and
others reported local researches; other such journals followed in
the 1950s in other British territories. A comparable development
in French West Africa was the formation at Dakar in 1917 of a
committee for historical and scientific studies. Far more than in
British Africa, however, ethnography was dominated by the few
26
See chapter
}.
27
Advisory Committee on Native Education in British Tropical African Dependencies:
Education in British tropical Africa (Cmd. 2574, 192$), 4.
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THE IMPERIAL MIND
officials who specialised in such work: Marty, Tauxier, Delafosse
and Labouret. The courses on Africa at the Ecole Coloniale were
too often wasted: few French officials stayed in the same territory
more than five years; few knew the language
of
their subjects;
and they were not encouraged to pursue research.
Meanwhile, academic interest in Africa had gathered pace. The
study of its languages was carried forward from the compilation
of dictionaries
(in
which missionaries continued
to do
much
notable work) to the investigation of grammatical structure and
phonetics. The age of the gifted amateur reached
a
climax with
the publication
in
1919-22
of
Johnston's comparative study of
Bantu languages. The new paths were signposted by the work of
Meinhof and Westermann in Berlin, Lilias Homburger in Paris,
and Alice Werner, who taught at the School of Oriental Studies
in London from
its
foundation
in
1917. Linguistic expertise
contributed
to the
improved recording
and
appreciation
of
African oral literature. The phonograph was occasionally em-
ployed for the recording both of speech and of music, though at
this early stage in its history its use in the field was problematic.
There was also
a
new approach
to the
study
of
African
institutions, at any rate in much of the English-speaking world.
Before 1914,
the
academic study
of
'primitive' peoples
had
consisted either
of
ethnology, with its search
for
genetic links
between cultures, or of anthropology, which then usually signified
the measurement
of
physical characteristics. These modes
of
analysis and differentiation now began
to
yield
to
sociological
theory, which had already been applied to ethnographic data by
Durkheim, Mauss and van Gennep. In such theory, human society
was conceived somewhat
in
terms
of
a living organism, whose
various parts (institutions, customs, beliefs, modes of livelihood
and so forth) should be regarded as functionally interdependent.
This emphasis
on
function characterised the new discipline
of
social anthropology. A chair in the subject was founded at Cape
Town
in
1920; the first professor was A.
R.
Radcliffe-Brown,
whose own research had been outside Africa but whose influence,
direct and indirect, bore much fruit among South African scholars
between the wars. However, he left in 1925 and had no more to
do with Africa until appointed to an Oxford chair in 1937. More
central,
in
this period, was Bronislaw Malinowski, who taught
social anthropology
at
the London School
of
Economics from
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1914-193°
1922 to 1937. It was his particular distinction to have studied a
'primitive' people (on a Pacific island) by living among them as
a friendly neighbour rather than as someone in authority; unlike
almost all other scholars in this field he had learned through
observation and casual conversation rather than through formal
interviews. Fieldwork of this kind became characteristic of the
new discipline. It was Malinowski's example, rather than that of
his colleague Seligman, which guided their student, E.E. Evans-
Pritchard, who between 1926 and 1930 lived among the Zatide
of the south-western Sudan and sought to relate their beliefs in
witchcraft to their social and economic context, a project for
which the work of Levy-Bruhl on
'
primitive mentality' was also
a potent stimulus.
Functional anthropology, especially that of Radcliffe-Brown,
has latterly been charged with retaining, albeit in altered guise,
the nineteenth century's predilection for biological analogies and
taxonomy, thus entrenching the notion of primitive societies as
discrete units or tribes; it has also been criticised for exaggerating
the importance of kinship in social relations.
28
There is indeed a
marked congruence between aspects of social anthropology and
the ideology of indirect rule; an interest in integration, stability
and continuity consorted more easily with conservation than with
change. Nonetheless, the new discipline represented an important
break with established attitudes towards colonial subject-peoples.
It rejected explanations of human behaviour in terms either of
'conjectural' history, based on mere inference from the present,
or of innate racial difference — a concept which, as in Seligman's
own work, muddled up cultural and physiological criteria. And
it opened the way to a more humane understanding of African
value-systems; this was no small matter when the weight of
missionary disapproval was still so widely felt.
The art of Africa made an impact on the West which extended
well beyond the restricted circles of those who worked in Africa
or read about it. A Fang mask acquired by the painter Vlaminck
in 1905 caused great excitement among other artists in Paris,
including Picasso and Matisse; by 1914, art from Africa, Oceania
and pre-Columbian America had been studied by them and by the
sculptors Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska. The extreme stylisation
28
E. R. Leach, 'Social anthropology: a natural science of society?'
Proceedings
of the
British Academy, 1976, 62, 5-26; idem. Social
anthropology
(London, 1982), chapter 1.
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THE IMPERIAL MIND
characteristic of much primitive art was clearly congenial to
Western artists moving towards abstraction, though it was
scarcely responsible for the trend. African art was displayed not
only in museums but in exhibitions at Marseilles in 1906 and 1922
and at Paris in 1925; in the 1930s it was prominently featured in a
dozen exhibitions in Europe, while several important sales were
held. The subject began to be discussed in aesthetic terms,
29
while
von Sydow, Kjersmeier and others refined the ethnographic
analysis of museum collections. Such work, however, was seldom
informed by any first-hand acquaintance with Africa. Growing
familiarity with African art in this period may have bred respect
for its creators but it also tended to reinforce popular notions of
the ' otherness' of Africa, and in particular the misconception of
the primitive artist as the anonymous vehicle of a communal,
rather than individual, imagination.
There was one kind of African art which could not be removed
and displayed overseas: the rock paintings of northern and
southern Africa. By 1930 many of them had been copied by a
number of scholars, of whom the most remarkable was the
German Leo Frobenius. More keenly, perhaps, than any other
scholar of
his
time, Frobenius appreciated the imaginative power
of African cultures and their various forms of expression. On
numerous expeditions, both before and after the First World War,
he collected artefacts, conducted archaeological excavations and
recorded oral traditions. Unfortunately his methods were far from
scientific, and his materials were pressed into the service of
theories typical of the cloudiest German idealism. Frobenius
believed his discoveries could throw light on the African past, but
like lesser Germanic ethnologists he conceived of cultural history
as a mixture of unsystematic comparison and speculation. It was
hardly surprising that his grandiose schemes should have tended
to discredit the very notion that Africa had a recoverable past of
its own. Another approach to cultural history was available, in
the chronological techniques characteristic of British archaeolo-
gists,
but these were seldom applied to Africa. Sites in the Sudan,
in Nubia and around Meroe, attracted expeditions both before and
after the war; and by 1930 the study of the Stone Age had been
initiated by Goodwin and van Riet Lowe in South Africa and by
19
C. Einstein, Negerplastik (Leipzig, 1915); Paul Guillaume and Thomas Munro,
Primitive
negro
sculpture (New York and London, 1926).
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1914-193°
Louis Leakey in Kenya. But until 1929, when Gertrude Caton-
Thompson followed up Maclver's work at Great Zimbabwe, no
further light was shed by archaeologists on the cultural history
of contemporary black Africans.
The study of African history was by no means neglected.
Between 1905 and 1930 at least forty books on the African past
were produced by British authors. Most, however, including
those few written by academics, were about whites rather than
blacks. Only nine were chiefly concerned with the history of
Africans, and none of these dealt with Africa south of the
Equator. The main focus of interest was northern Nigeria, and
the work of its foremost scholar-administrator, Richmond
Palmer, was vitiated by a preoccupation with the search for alien
influences and origins. This was typical of the times: Seligman
was by no means alone in ascribing African cultural achievements
to light-skinned, long-nosed 'Hamitic' intruders. The white
community of South Africa generated its own voluminous
historiography, to which Afrikaner authors made a rapidly
growing contribution after the First World War. And there the
history of at least some African peoples had long been so closely
involved with that of whites that it did not entirely escape
attention. Bryant, for example, attempted to synthesise Zulu oral
traditions. In the course of the 1920s the relations between white
governments and black South Africans began to be studied by
professional historians, notably W. M. Macmillan. But the only
general histories of Africa to be written in our period, those by
A. Moulin (1920), Delafosse (1921) and G. Hardy (1923), were
produced in France; and perhaps the most impressive editorial
achievement came from Italy — Fr Beccari's publication
(1902-17) of reports by early western visitors to Africa.
One remarkable feature of the expansion of knowledge about
Africa between the wars was the crucial part played by the USA.
This was part of
a
broader movement to promote racial harmony,
and the extension of capitalism, through greater understanding
between white and black, and the dissemination of technical skills
among Africans. In 1911 the Phelps-Stokes Fund was set up to
further the education of blacks in Africa as well as the USA; the
fund despatched two commissions to tour sub-Saharan Africa in
1920-1 and 1924 and report on the educational scene. In South
Africa, educational planning owed much to a continuing con-
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THE IMPERIAL MIND
nection with Columbia University.
30
From 1925 the Carnegie
Corporation (established in 1911 to advance 'knowledge and
understanding' in Britain and her colonies as well as North
America) provided support for a variety of educational projects
and also for the South African Institute of Race Relations.
Meanwhile, American scholars conducted field research in
Morocco, Liberia and Angola. In
1931
the anthropologist Melville
Herskovits visited Dahomey while Harry Rudin completed a
thesis on German rule in the Cameroons: more than any others,
these scholars introduced the study of Africa to universities in the
USA. But even their achievements were overshadowed by R. L.
Buell's The
native problem
in Africa (1928), a comprehensive and
frequently critical survey of colonial regimes south of the Sahara
which was sponsored by Harvard University and based on a
fifteen-month tour of the continent in 1925-6.
It was the Rockefeller Foundation which made possible the
establishment, in
1926,
of the International African Institute (IAI).
The diplomacy was conducted by J. H. Oldham, secretary of the
International Missionary Council; the moving spirits were Edwin
Smith, an outstanding missionary-anthropologist; the philologist
Diedrich Westermann; and Hanns Vischer, a former director of
education in Northern Nigeria and now secretary of the Colonial
Office advisory committee on education. Lugard served as an
active chairman from 1926 until just before his death in 1945. The
object of the Institute was 'To promote an understanding of
African languages and social institutions, with a view to their
protection and use as instruments of education'. Within a few
years,
it had gone far towards standardising the spelling of African
languages; it stimulated African vernacular writing; pressed for
the reform of schoolbooks; and founded the quarterly journal
Africa.
Britain, France and Germany were strongly represented in the
IAI,
and it rapidly advanced the international exchange of ideas
and information among scholars, educationists and missionaries.
Among colonial rulers there was no such co-operation. The one
organisation concerned with the comparative study of empire was
the International Colonial Institute. This had been created in
30
During out period, at least nine South Africans wrote Ph.D. theses for Columbia
University about education in South Africa; they included C. T. Loram (191;) and
E.
G. Malherbe (1926).
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1914-193°
Brussels in 1894. It held meetings almost annually up to 1913 and
several times between the wars; these generated a mass of
documentation on colonial principles and practice. In the 1920s
its members included Lugard, Ormsby-Gore, Oldham, Lyautey,
Delafosse and Rolin; but until the 1930s serving colonial officials
seldom took part. By and large, British imperial circles showed
remarkably little interest in other colonial systems. The French
and Germans were less parochial. Before 1914 and in the 1930s
at least nine French books of substance were published on
non-French colonial Africa, other than works of ethnography. In
Germany, at least 18 such books on non-German colonial Africa
were published during our period. Britain, by contrast, could
point to little beyond official handbooks and polemics against
Leopold, the Portuguese and the Germans.
Colonial Africa was still in any case of marginal interest to
British intellectuals. Journalists in Britain paid it scant attention;
they produced nothing in the 1920s that could stand comparison
with the damning reports on the French Congo by Albert Londres
or Andre Gide, or the critique of the Belgian Congo by the
socialist Arthur Wauters, who foresaw the trouble his compatriots
were storing up for themselves by seeking profits in Africa rather
than black partners. In Britain such criticism was most
knowledgeably pressed by Norman Leys, who had been a medical
officer in Kenya and Nyasaland, and MacGregor Ross, former
director of public works in Kenya. Both became key members of
the Labour Party's advisory committee on imperial questions.
This was formed in 1924 by Leonard
Woolf,
who during the war
had argued strongly for international trusteeship as an alternative
to imperialism. But the formulation of a distinctive Labour policy
for Africa was fraught with difficulties. In some respects, especially
in its opposition to white settlers, the committee was close to
opinion in the Colonial Office, whence indeed came one of
its
first
members, J. F. N. Green. On education, Leys and Woolf had
much more ambitious ideas. Leys valued education as a defence
against oppression; Woolf believed that it should prepare Africans
for self-government. This breadth of vision was snared by few
in the Labour Party, which was mostly sceptical of African
abilities. Besides, such concern as was shown by Labour MPs was
understandably focused on Kenya; they cared little for colonial
development or news of West Africa. Moreover, British trade
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THE IMPERIAL MIND
unionists were more attentive to their white brothers in South
Africa than to the claims of black or brown workers, despite the
eloquent advocacy of Olivier. Racial difference was a more
palpable fact than class solidarity.
The sentiment of 'race' continued to exert a powerful hold
upon white people, and at all intellectual levels. Press coverage
of Africa may have been too slight to have made much impact,
but the entertainment industry popularised the image of the black
man as at best a simpleton and at worst a monster. This was the
message of pulp fiction, hunters' tales and the Broadway theatre,
31
and it was reinforced by the cinema: Africa was an apt setting for
escapist fantasy, but Africans appeared only as a form of wild life.
The belief that black people were fundamentally, and perhaps
immutably, different from whites informed some of the best-
intentioned paternalists. Lugard simultaneously extolled equal
opportunity, race purity and race pride. Oldham acknowledged
that' race' was a term without scientific validity for the study of
human beings, but he did not discard it: he concluded a sceptical
discussion of intelligence tests by observing, 'while races pre-
sumably do differ in native capacity, how they differ, and to what
extent, we do not know'.
32
'Race' survived even in the highest-
minded discourse partly because it was not yet possible to replace
the all-too-convenient cultural-physiological concepts of 'the
black man', 'the African', 'the Bantu' or 'the Hamite' with
classifications based solely on physiological criteria: the study of
blood groups, for example, was still in its infancy.
All the same, if men of good will continued to write of ' the
African race', they were increasingly inclined to attribute its
apparently distinctive characteristics to environment and history
rather than to heredity: colonial governors as well as missionaries
could be quoted to this effect. One eccentric theory was pro-
pounded by the psychiatrist C. G. Jung, who was so impressed
in 1925 by the tribal displays in the British Empire exhibition at
Wembley that he went off to East Africa and found evidence of
the 'collective unconscious'. The Elgonyi people, on the Kenya-
31
E.g. the
plays The Emperor
Jones
(Eugene O'Neill, 1922),
and At
home
abroad,
or the
musical Golden dawn (1927). Broadway musicals
by
American blacks presented black
Africans
in a
more sympathetic
(and
even romantic) light,
but
were less successful:
cf.
In
Dahomey
(1902), Abyssinia (1906)
or
Africana (1934). Late
in 1914
Oscar Asches
had
brought
a
'Zulu show',
Mameena,
to
London,
but it
flopped:
no
doubt
it was
ill-timed.
3t
J. H.
Oldham, Christianity
and the race problem
(London, 1925),
61, 75.
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