Roberts A.D. The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 7: from 1905 to 1940
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1914-193°
Uganda border, were 'still sound in their instincts', due to
minimal contact with whites: evidently the savage who lurked at
the back of the white man's mind was a noble savage. More
prosaically, some writers tackled the problem of race prejudice
and attributed it to the defence of privilege. This was Olivier's
view; it was also that of the zoologist Julian Huxley, who toured
East Africa in 1929 on behalf of the Colonial Office advisory
committee on education. Huxley noted that even in the mandated
territory of Tanganyika the full implications of trusteeship were
obscured by
various current assumptions which are felt rather than thought out, and felt
as so self-evident that they are hardly ever questioned. The chief such
assumption is that black men are in their nature different from white men and
inferior to them. The second is that since white men know how to do a great
many things of which black men are ignorant, they therefore know what is
best for black men and are entitled to lay down what they ought to do and
how they ought to live. The third, continuing the second, is that natives should
develop ' along their own lines' — their own lines being those on which there
is the greatest possible taking on of European useful arts; the least possible
taking on of European ways of dress or ways of general thought; the least
danger of their claiming or obtaining political, social or intellectual equality
with Europeans; the greatest chance of perpetuating the gulf between the races.
The fourth is economic: it is that production for export is virtuous, while
production merely for your own local consumption is not — and is, indeed,
rather reprehensible.
33
Malinowski, in the course of
a
denial in 1930 that anthropology
should be merely a tool of colonial government, saw Africa as a
field of conflict between a variety of interests that cut across the
lines of
race'.
A. V. Murray, who taught British missionaries how
to teach, toured Africa in 1927 and concluded, 'It would almost
seem as if the race problem is simply one aspect of the class
problem'; he likened arguments against educating Africans to
those advanced in the nineteenth century against educating the
British working classes.
34
Charlotte Leubuscher, who taught
political economy in Berlin, visited South Africa in 1929 and made
the first extended study of Africans as workers and townsmen,
though as it was written in German it made little impression on
33
Julian Huxley, Africa view (London, 1930), 576-7.
34
A. V.
Murray, The school in the bush:
a
critical study
of
the theory and practice
of
native
education
in Africa (London, 1929), preface and appendix I. Even by the 1930s only 20
per cent of the adolescent population in Britain was receiving secondary education, and
of these more than half paid fees.
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THE IMPERIAL MIND
the English-speaking world.
35
And in 1931 Robert Delavignette
published
Paysatts
noirs,
a
novel
in
which
he
drew
on
his own
experience as an official in French West Africa to portray Africans,
not as ethnographic curiosities, but as people whose attitudes were
not essentially different from those of the French countryman.
It
was still a romantic view, which glossed over the extent to which
African rural life was already moulded by colonial constraints, but
it was Delavignette who most succinctly summarised the problem
facing British as well
as
French officials in Africa at this time:' the
natives
are
evolving faster than
the
administrators
or the
administration \
36
1930-1940
The economic depression
of
the 1930s was
a
new stimulus
to
reappraise imperial attitudes to Africa. The trend towards imperial
protection
in
economic policy accelerated
the
growth
of
trade
between Africa
and the
metropolitan powers. This was most
marked
in
France: Africa's share of her external trade rose from
about one-tenth
in
the 1920s
to
over one-fifth by 1935. Algeria
then took 12.5 per cent and had become France's main trading
partner; the share of black Africa and Madagascar had risen
to
5 per cent. By the end of the decade North Africa accounted for
27 per cent
of
French foreign investment; tropical Africa,
6
per
cent. That fraction of British trade directed to sub-Saharan Africa
increased from 5.3 per cent in 1930
to
7 per cent in 1938.
37
This
was chiefly
due to the
gold boom
in
southern Africa
and to
copper-mining in Northern Rhodesia; by 1938 Britain's trade with
the Rhodesias was two-thirds
of
that with West Africa. As
the
world moved out of depression, Africa's value as a source of base
metals was revealed: by 1937-8 the continent provided
16
per cent
of the world's copper output and 12 per cent of its output of tin.
The imperial estates were giving abundant proof
of
their utility
to Britain and France as their own economic stature continued
to decline,
and as
Nazis made irredentist claims
on
Germany's
former colonies.
15
C.
Leubuschet, Der
siidafrikanische Eingeborene
ah
Industriearbeiter undah Stadtbewobner
(Jena, 1931).
In
193) she was dismissed
by
the Nazis and thereafter worked
in
England
on economic studies
of
Africa.
36
Quoted
by W. B.
Cohen, Rulers
of
Empire (Stanford, 1971),
128.
37
These figures exclude African exports
of
gold
and
diamonds.
See
above, table
1,
p.
25.
62
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Meanwhile the depression and its local consequences had
compelled some reconsideration of
priorities.
White settlers were
more clearly exposed as high-cost producers by comparison with
African farmers. Cut-backs in employment, and industrial unrest,
drew attention to the problems posed by semi-proletarianised
African wage-earners. Financial crises provoked enquiries into the
operations of colonial governments. At the centres of empire,
trade was likely to seem more important than tradition. There was
decreasing faith in indirect rule and the omnipotence of the
district officer. At least in some quarters, there was a new
awareness that not only the doctrine of trusteeship but imperial
self-interest called for social as well as economic investment in
Africa: manpower was itself a resource to be husbanded and
nurtured. Besides, the British Empire was increasingly on the
defensive. The enemy circle extended from Soviet Russia and Nazi
Germany to Japan and Italy. All seemed real or potential rivals
for the allegiance of colonial peoples. British imperial trustees
became more sensitive to the movement of African minds, if only
for fear that, if they did not seek to direct this movement, others
would. In a still spasmodic and unsystematic way, African
opinions were sought out and made known in the higher reaches
of imperial government.
The intellectual climate was congenial to this new assertiveness.
In Britain, there were conservatives as well as socialists who
believed that national economies required deliberate management,
while the economist John Maynard Keynes had radically
questioned the value of balanced budgets. Moreover, thanks to
American funding, there was now a substantial body of academic
knowledge about Africa, much of which was specifically focused
on contemporary social problems. Reform was in the air, even if
its implementation was obstructed by officials invoking indigence
to excuse inaction, or deferred by the outbreak of war.
For the visionaries who still saw the future of eastern Africa
in terms of a new white Dominion, the decade brought new
grounds for hope but also new setbacks. Smuts himself had
forcefully pleaded their cause in his Rhodes Memorial Lectures
at Oxford in 1929. In a probably accidental echo of Ruskin's
inaugural Slade Lecture at Oxford in 1870, Smuts urged the
British to populate their empire and thereby diffuse a higher
civilisation. For Smuts,' No
flash
in the pan of tropical exploitation
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THE IMPERIAL MIND
will really help the cause of African civilisation.
It
will be a slow,
gradual schooling
of
peoples who have slumbered and stagnated
since
the
dawn
of
time,
and
only
an
ever-present, settled,
permanent European order
can
achieve that high
end.
'
38
However,
Smuts's enthusiasm
for
British colonisation was shared by few
of
his fellow Afrikaners; besides, plans
for
closer union
in
East
Africa were
in
effect shelved after
a
joint select parliamentary
committee
in
1931
had
heard eloquent objections from African
as well
as
Indian witnesses.
The
field
of
controversy
was in-
advertently shifted to central Africa by Sidney Webb, the veteran
Fabian who as Lord Passfield was colonial secretary in the Labour
government
of
1929-31.
In
1930 he affirmed publicly that African
interests should prevail
in any
clash with those
of
immigrants.
This
was
ironic, since
in the
same year, while still serving also
as Dominions secretary, Passfield
had
failed
to
exercise Britain's
right
to
veto Southern Rhodesia's Land Apportionment Act
—
a measure ignored
by the
colonial experts
in the
Labour Party.
Thus Passfield
had
provided
two
good reasons
for
settlers
in
Northern Rhodesia
to
seek escape from Colonial Office rule
by
joining
up
with their southern neighbours,
and the
region's
growing mineral wealth fortified their hopes. Eventually settler
pressure prompted
the
visit
of a
Royal Commission
to
Central
Africa in 19 3
8,
but once again African opinion proved
a
stumbling-
block
to
regional unification which threatened
to
entrench white
supremacy. Furthermore, Africans
in the
High Commission
Territories who opposed incorporation in the Union now had able
advocates
in
London,
and the
British government became
increasingly sceptical
of
white South Africa's eagerness
to
offer
them
a
slow, gradual schooling.
In this respect, then,
the
momentum
of
Amery's years
at the
Colonial Office
was not
sustained.
In
another respect,
it un-
doubtedly was. From 1930
the
secretary
of
state
no
longer
had
to look after
the
Dominions Office. Despite
the
comings
and
goings
of
politicians," the Colonial Office improved its ability
to
specialise
in
problems
as
well
as
territories,
and to
interfere
18
J. C.
Smuts, Africa
and some
world
problems
(Oxford, 1930),
66.
19
Secretaries
of
state: Lord Passfield (1929-31);
J. H.
Thomas (1931);
Sir P.
CunlifFe-Lister(i93i-j); M. MacDonald (1935); J.
H.
Thomas (1935-6); W. Ormsby-
Gore (1936-8);
M.
MacDonald (1938-40). Permanent under-secretaries:
Sir
Samuel
Wilson (1926-33);
Sir
John Maffey (1933-7);
Sir
Cosmo Parkinson (1937-9);
Sir
George Gater (1939-40).
64
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
1930-194°
accordingly. In 1927 and 1930 it had summoned colonial
governors and senior officials to conferences in London, but this
was an unduly cumbersome procedure. More significant was the
handling of business according to subject as well as region, a
process already initiated by Samuel Wilson. Africa was central to
this reorganisation, for in the 1930s it accounted for four-fifths
of the area and population of Britain's colonial empire, albeit only
one-fifth of its trade. Within the Colonial Office, new departments
were created for economics (1934), social services (1938) and
defence (1939). Between 1932 and 1938 the administrative and
specialist staffs of colonial governments were brought into a series
of unified services according to function; this facilitated the
transfer of expertise between territories. There were also
occasional secondments of staff between the Colonial Office and
the colonial administrative service. And the seasoned expert from
outside played a growing part in the formulation of policy;
indeed, in most fields of action it is only from this period, if then,
that one can point to anything so definite.
Thought about the means and ends of colonial rule in Africa
was stimulated from several quarters during the 1930s. Commis-
sions of enquiry appointed by the Colonial Office crystallised
trends of thought which were to become dominant in the 1940s.
In 1933, the legal adviser to the Colonial Office chaired a
commission to investigate the administration of criminal justice
in East Africa. Of the other members, all of whom came from
East Africa, only one was a lawyer, but all agreed that this work
should in principle be shifted from officials in the administrative
service, acting as lay magistrates, to professional lawyers of the
High Courts (whose scope had recently been extended in Nigeria).
This advice was opposed by the local governors, but they
postponed rather than prevented the separation of judicial and
executive powers. The Colonial Office also instigated a series of
financial investigations by Sir Alan Pirn, late of the Indian Civil
Service: he reported on Zanzibar and Swaziland
(1932),
Bechuana-
land (1933), Basutoland (1935), Kenya (1936) and Northern
Rhodesia (1938). Pirn's far-reaching reports, which proposed a
variety of social as well as economic reforms, challenged the
status
quo in these territories more powerfully than any unofficial
critiques in Britain at the time; they provided a valuable rationale
for colonial development as government resources began once
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THE IMPERIAL MIND
more
to
expand. For West Africa,
a
philosophy
of
state inter-
vention
was
argued
by the
commission
set up in 1938 to
investigate protests
by
cocoa farmers against
the
marketing
system;
it
advocated large collective agencies which would
eliminate supposedly wasteful intermediaries.
Meanwhile,
a
policy on higher education
in
Africa had begun
to germinate in Whitehall.
In
1932 there were talks in East Africa
about the possible future development of Makerere, a college for
higher education
in
Uganda.
As a
result,
a
Colonial Office
sub-committee was prompted
to
consider
the
whole future
of
higher education
in
British tropical Africa. The chairman,
Sir
James Currie, had been director
of
Gordon College, Khartoum.
He swept past
the
hesitations
of
those who thought western
civilisation
a
dubious gift
to
Africa,
for
Africans were already
helping themselves: 'What the native wants
is
knowledge
of
a
kind that will enable him to take his place in the world's economic
struggle
on
equal terms with the white man.'
40
His report was
at once imaginative and pragmatic: it concluded that five existing
colleges should be developed into universities, for
if
the thirst of
Africans
for
higher education
was not
satisfied they would
continue
to
go abroad
or
create their own institutions
at
home.
In either case, British prestige would suffer, African opinion
would be alienated, and the risk of political trouble increased. The
Currie Report was then circulated to colonial governors: in West
Africa
it ran
into
the
sand,
but in
East Africa
it
prompted
a
commission
in
1936-7 on the future
of
Makerere which recom-
mended
the
early establishment
of a
university college. This
advice was approved
in
London, though the immediate results
were disappointing.
Social tensions within the colonial empire, and international
tensions outside
it,
heightened concern both with maintaining
British prestige
and
with finding new ways
to
shore
up
white
authority. Even
in the
usually unpromising circumstances
of
tropical Africa, buildings were sometimes conceived not simply
as shelter but
as
symbols
of
power. Moreover, the mystique
of
royalty was believed
to
exercise
a
powerful hold upon African
imaginations, and it was sedulously cultivated by colonial govern-
ments. Architecture and royalty might even be jointly enlisted in
40
Sir James Currie, 'Present day difficulties of a young officer in the tropics',
journal
of the African Society, 1933, 32, no. 126,
32.
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1930-194°
the attempt to mould minds. In
1935,
the year of the Silver Jubilee
of King George V, Lusaka became the new capital of Northern
Rhodesia; it was planned around a large Government House,
designed in classical style by a pupil of Sir Herbert Baker (who
had himself left a considerable mark on Nairobi and much of
South Africa as well as New Delhi). Those who might have
criticised the project for needless extravagance at a time of general
retrenchment were reminded that 'Northern Rhodesia is a
Protectorate in which the Africans outnumber the Europeans by
a hundred and twenty to one. To them, this House and its great
occasions will be the outward and visible sign at all times of the
dignity of the Crown. '
4I
Yet in that same year, 1935, strikes by African mine-workers
on the Copperbelt, some two hundred miles away, called in
question the adequacy of such techniques of social control. This
at least was the conclusion of the colonial judge who chaired a
locally appointed commission of enquiry into the disturbances
arising from the strikes:
It is all very well putting a District Officer in the open in the middle of 100,000
natives and with half a dozen askari to keep order...But mining areas are a
different matter...The whole position rests on
bluff—
the prestige of the white
man — a good and effective bluff which must continue in this country — but
not at the mines.
42
However, the commission persuaded itself that the root of the
trouble lay in the subversive influence of literature distributed by
Jehovah's Witnesses. There was little else for Africans to read,
and the provision of more suitable reading material became a
matter of official concern. The government started a newspaper
for Africans in order to pre-empt the emergence of an independent
and less desirable press. Elsewhere, too, there was anxious
discussion of what Africans ought to be reading. The IAI had
already begun to help Africans to produce the right sort of books
themselves. Reginald Coupland, professor of colonial history at
Oxford from 1920 to 1948, became chairman of a committee
formed in 1937 to advise authors intending to write history books
41
Lusaka (London, 1935), 44.
41
Sir Alison Russell to Sir John Maffey, August 193), quoted by Ian Henderson, 'The
origins of nationalism in East and Central Africa: the Zambian case', Journal6/African
History, 1970, 11, 4, 598.
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THE IMPERIAL MIND
for African schools; at least six such books on the "history of
individual British territories were produced in the course of the
decade.
This was worthy work, but most Africans were illiterate. Films
and broadcasting could exert far more influence, for good or ill,
than the written word, especially where Africans gathered in large
numbers for work in proximity to white people. In 1926 King
George V had told Amery of his concern that Hollywood was
projecting a disreputable image of the white man. In practice, the
censorship needed to put this right was largely exercised by South
Africa, from which were distributed the American films seen in
East and Central Africa. A few commercial films provided useful,
if crude, propaganda for white rule in Africa,
43
and in 1939a short
film for this purpose,
Men
of Africa, was specially commissioned.
Besides, the cinema could also be used to instruct: films were made
in Kenya and Nigeria to inculcate principles of hygiene, and in
Egypt to combat drug-trafficking. The International Missionary
Council, backed by the Carnegie Corporation, obtained the
co-operation of the Colonial Office for the Bantu Educational
Kinema Experiment; in 1935-7 this made both instructional and
entertainment films in East and Central Africa, though the desire
of the Colonial Office for some follow-up was not snared by the
East African governments. The first attempts to promote
broadcasting for Africans followed a similar course. The king's
Christmas broadcast to the Empire in 1932 demonstrated the key
role that radio could play in cementing imperial ties. In British
West Africa, from 1934-5, rediffusion by wire to subscribers
extended the reach of the BBC's Empire Service.
44
In 1936 the
colonial secretary set up a committee to consider colonial
broadcasting. This stressed the educational as well as political
advantages, and governors were asked to develop plans for local
broadcasting to African audiences, though little had been done
by i939.
4S
Labour, however, was the issue which most severely tested the
43
E.g. Palaver (1926), Sanders of
Ibe
river (1935), Rhodes
of
Africa (19)5).
44
By
1937 there were 1,600 African subscribers
in
Accra.
Sir
Arnold Hodson, then
governor
of the
Gold Coast, had developed
a
keen interest when governor
of the
Falkland Islands, 1926-31. Sidney W. Head, 'British colonial broadcasting policies: the
case
of
the Gold Coast', African Studies Review, 1979, 22,
2,
39-47.
45
The
South African Broadcasting Corporation was formed
in
1936;
it
succeeded
a
commercial service begun in 1924 and by 1937 there were over 160,000 wireless licences
in
the
Union.
68
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
capacity of imperial governments to interpret social change in
Africa and influence what was done there. It was also an issue on
which there was pressure for reform from an international body.
In 1930 the International Labour Conference approved a con-
vention on forced labour. This was largely the work of a
committee which included four former colonial governors
(Lugard among them) and the official adviser on African mine
labour in the Transvaal. The convention required little more than
the restriction of forced labour to a limited range of public works
and a commitment to its progressive abolition. Over the next
seven years it was ratified by all colonial powers in Africa with
the exception of Portugal, though France and Belgium made some
reservations. Three more conventions relevant to Africa were
issued in the course of the decade. None, however, could be said
to have made any practical difference to labour administration in
British Africa: more significant were discussions in and around
the Colonial Office.
Metropolitan intervention in local labour policy was steadily
opposed by senior civil servants in London, and they were not
immune from lobbying by commercial pressure groups.
46
With
the advent of the second Labour government in 1929, other views
were encouraged. Passfield's deputy, Drummond Shiels, soon
called for a thorough overhaul of colonial labour legislation.
Throughout British colonial Africa, breaches of contract between
black workers and their employers were subject to penal sanctions;
this was a legacy from early English labour law. Since the 1870s,
industrial relations in Britain had largely been removed from the
sphere of criminal law to that of civil law, and India had followed
suit in 1926. Shiels believed Africa should do the same, but he
succeeded only in West Africa; elsewhere, it was widely argued
that civil damages could not be expected from migrant workers
who lacked distrainable property. Thus penal sanctions continued
in East and Central Africa to subject African employees to what
was in practice very lopsided justice. Shiels was still less successful
in persuading governors to introduce local legislation regarding
the formation of trade unions, even though he recommended this
as a means of countering subversion. By July 1931 he was out
46
Since 1925 the Joint East Africa Board, a group of British businessmen, had been
in regular contact with the Colonial Office and with governors; it was also represented
in the imperial affairs committee of the Conservative Party.
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THE IMPERIAL MIND
of office, and his reforming momentum was not sustained. Senior
officials were indifferent, and colonial labour problems receded
into the background as Palestine made increasing demands upon
ministers, while India absorbed parliamentary time. Nor was
much pressure
in
these matters exerted
by
the Labour Party's
colonial advisory committee:
it
had,
in
Arthur Creech Jones,
a
pertinacious spokesman
in
parliament, but
it
was chiefly pre-
occupied with wider political questions.
It was not trouble in Africa but the general strike and ensuing
riots in Trinidad in 1937 which forced the Colonial Office to think
again about labour. The colonial secretary, Ormsby-Gore, advised
governors
to
review their own labour legislation and
set up
specialist labour departments.
In 1938 the
Colonial Office
appointed its own labour adviser,
G.
Orde Browne, who had
reported
on
labour
for
the IAI and
the
Northern Rhodesian
government. Between 1937 and 1939 — when there were at least
a dozen strikes in East and West Africa — trade-union legislation
was introduced in Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria and Sierra Leone.
It
was becoming steadily harder
to
maintain
the
pretence that
African workers were merely tribesmen on short-term loan to the
capitalist; an influential white minority began to argue that labour
relations and urban administration were too important to be left
to companies, chiefs and district officers. Some officials in London
argued that Britain had much
to
learn from
the
Belgians
in
Katanga, who in the 1920s had begun to create semi-permanent
urban communities
of
relatively skilled and well-paid African
workers. Meanwhile, the British labour movement was beginning
to take
a
more informed interest:
in
1937 the TUC formed
a
colonial advisory committee which closely resembled that of the
Labour Party.
The involvement of rural Africa in the operations of capitalist
enterprise was
a
major theme of social research in the 1930s.
In
South Africa, pioneering work on rural poverty had been done
by W. M. Macmillan; now a variety of local academic expertise
was deployed in 1928-32 in a study of the 'poor white' problem.
This was funded by Carnegie, as was the team which
in
1932
studied social conditions on the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt
on behalf
of
the International Missionary Council. Meanwhile
Monica Hunter
was
investigating social change among the Pondo,
in the eastern Cape, and in Northern Rhodesia Audrey Richards,
7°
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