ski under house arrest, now London had a prelate under lock and key!61The old concepts of Empire, of conquest, domination and exploitation are fast dying in an awakening world.
KWAME NKRUMAH
On 19 April 1956 the legislative assembly in Accra, the capital of the Gold Coast, published detailed proposals for an end to British rule in the West African colony. A new constitution would see ‘supreme legislative power’ vested in a national parliament, to be elected every five years, with the government taking full responsibility for defence and foreign policy, in addition to internal affairs.1 Subject to a plebiscite, the new state would also incorporate British Togoland – thirteen thousand square miles of territory to the east, which was administered by Britain under the auspices of the UN.2 The newly independent country would be known as Ghana: a name that, by conjuring up the great medieval empire of western Africa, was intended to inspire a new generation of Africans as they remade the continent in their own image.3 A few weeks later Alan Lennox-Boyd, the secretary of state for the colonies, informed the House of Commons that ‘If a general election is held [in the Gold Coast], Her Majesty’s Government will be ready to accept a motion calling for independence . . . passed by a reasonable majority in a newly elected Legislature, and then to declare a firm date for this purpose.’4
In the years following the Second World War, the sun began to set on an empire that, at its height, had covered a quarter of the world’s surface. With colonies, dependencies, protectorates and self-governing dominions stretching across North America and the Caribbean, the Pacific, the Mediterranean, Africa, Asia, the Far East and Australasia, more than four hundred million people had lived under the Union Jack. Barely two decades after the defeat of Nazi Germany, it had virtually all been swept away – a remarkable development in world history, and one over which historians have puzzled ever since.5 Economic forces certainly played a part. Britain’s parlous position in 1945, for instance, resulted in policies designed to increase the supply of vital foodstuffs, raw materials and commodities from the colonies. This so-called ‘second colonial occupation’ inflamed (and helped to unify) local opposition to British rule and strained the fragile systems of colonial governance. Moreover, Britain’s relative economic decline during the post-war era meant that the increasingly untenable burden of maintaining the empire, and the limited rewards of being associated with it, became ever more obvious.6 At the international level, meanwhile, the superpower rivalry between the USA and the USSR (both of whom had ideological objections to colonialism) and the growing influence of the United Nations (whose Charter affirmed the principle of ‘equal rights and self-determination’) augured a new era in which formal empire became something of an international liability.7 The British were, for a time, able to convince the Americans that the empire represented a bulwark against Communism. But the rising tide of anti-colonialism could only be resisted for so long. The choice, then, was ‘to scuttle first or await the inevitable collision with an iceberg’.8
Probably the most important factor in the ‘end of empire’ – at least when it came to determining the pace of events on the ground – was the rise of anti-colonial nationalism. Taking advantage of Britain’s military and economic difficulties, exploiting the weak and perennially under-resourced structures of colonial government, and seizing on the rhetoric of self-determination and democracy that was now in vogue, a succession of nationalist leaders overcame significant obstacles – notably ethnic and religious divisions and the arbitrary borders of most colonial states – to mobilise mass support for a rapid end to colonial rule.9 Their efforts proved contagious, encouraging a domino effect that saw almost all of Britain’s significant overseas possessions gone by the mid-1960s – far sooner than the planners in Whitehall had ever imagined.
The Gold Coast, which the British had begun to colonise during the early nineteenth century, was a beautiful, captivating land of three distinct regions: the Colony, a densely populated coastal area (it took in the cities of Accra, Cape Coast and Sekondi) whose arid scrubland featured cotton trees and coconut palms; the central Asante region, with its tropical forests and cocoa farms; and the burnt savannah of the Northern Territories, whose inhabitants eked out a living through subsistence farming.10 By the mid-twentieth century, this West African colony was one of the most advanced in the empire.11 Thanks to the export of cocoa, as well as gold and diamonds, the Gold Coast’s economy had prospered; it boasted a significant urban population, a well-developed system of mission and state schools and a burgeoning rail and road network.12 In contrast to most of the other African colonies, a large proportion of the Gold Coast’s population of four million spoke similar dialects, practised similar customs and shared a common culture.13 There was also no entrenched white settler population to complicate matters. The Gold Coast, then, faced fewer obstacles to decolonisation than would be the case elsewhere.
In London, policymakers knew that the Second World War had both stirred the political consciousness of Africans (especially returning soldiers) and delivered an international climate that was hostile to colonialism. They also understood that the social and economic development of the colonies required the participation of the indigenous population. They therefore developed a ‘new’ policy for the African colonies to promote and strengthen ‘efficient, local, representative government’ and to enable them to gradually take on ‘full responsibility for local affairs’. What today we would understand as ‘independence’ was not initially on the table, although ‘internal self-government’ was believed possible within perhaps twenty or thirty years.14
In the Gold Coast, the governor, Sir Alan Burns, encouraged a series of political reforms culminating in a new constitution, introduced in 1946, that allowed for an elected majority on the legislative council for the first time. But Burns’s confidence that ‘the people’ were ‘really happy . . . and satisfied’ with this outcome was quickly dispelled. In 1947, Dr J. B. Danquah, an Oxford-educated lawyer, founded the United Gold Coast Convention to demand ‘self-Government in the shortest possible time’. At the end of February 1948, riots broke out in Accra. Triggered by economic grievances (namely high inflation and shortages of consumer goods) and lasting for several weeks, they left twenty-nine dead, more than two hundred injured, and the country in a state of emergency. Then, in June 1949, Danquah’s fiery young lieutenant, Kwame Nkrumah, broke away to form the Convention People’s Party (CPP). Its aim was to ‘fight relentlessly to achieve and maintain independence for the people of Ghana’, and Nkrumah rallied his forces under the less deferential slogan of ‘Self-government Now!’15
The renowned African American writer Richard Wright described Nkrumah as ‘slightly built, a smooth jet black in color; he had a largish face, a pair of brooding, almost frightened eyes, a set of full lips. His head held a thick growth of crinkly hair and his hands moved with a slow restlessness, betraying a contained tension.’16 Born in September 1909 in Nkroful, a village of mud huts and bamboo compounds in the south-west of the country, just a couple of miles from the coast, Nkrumah trained as a teacher at the elite Prince of Wales College at Achimota, in Accra, before moving to Lincoln University, Pennsylvania, to study theology (working his way through college as a bellhop and dish washer, and by selling fish on street corners). Then, in May 1945, he moved to London to study law and quickly immersed himself in the anti-colonial and pan-African cause.17 In 1947, after a twelve-year absence, he returned to his homeland and put his talents at the disposal of Danquah’s UGCC. But Nkrumah, a Christian Marxist who was captivated by the vision of a proud, united and independent Africa that had been championed by Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican-born black nationalist and charismatic president of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, in the years following the first world war, and inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s pioneering use of nonviolent resistance against the British Empire, quickly became disillusioned with the respectable, middle-class ‘stooges’ (as he called them) of the UGCC, and their gradualist approach to ending colonial rule. They, in turn, viewed Nkrumah as a dangerous zealot. After being expelled from his post as UGCC secretary in June 1949, he immediately set up a rival organisation that pitched its appeal squarely at the masses.
There is no doubt that the British would have preferred to negotiate with Danquah and his fellow moderates, and in private they disparaged Nkrumah as ‘our little local Hitler’.18 But a successful campaign of civil disobedience in January 1950 and a strong performance in that year’s municipal elections showed that the CPP was a force to be reckoned with. In the general election of 1951, it won thirty-four of the thirty-eight seats available in the National Assembly. Nkrumah directed the election effort from his jail cell (where he was serving a three-year sentence for his role in promoting mass protests), smuggling out instructions written on toilet paper; he achieved a personal mandate by defeating his UGCC rival in Accra by 20,780 votes to 1,451.19 No wonder, then, that Sir Charles Arden-Clarke, who had succeeded Burns as governor in August 1949, concluded that there was little choice but to work with Nkrumah.20
At 1 p.m. on 12 February 1951, the CPP leader walked through the gates of the James Fort prison to be greeted by a rapturous crowd. Carried aloft to an open-topped car, he was then driven to the nearby arena for a rally. Several years later, Nkrumah wrote that he found it ‘difficult even now to describe all I experienced as this car moved at a snail’s pace like a ship being dragged by an overpowering current in a sea of upturned faces’. The sight of thousands of supporters, and the ‘deafening clamour of their jubilant voices made me feel quite giddy’. The following morning, Nkrumah strode into the courtyard of Christiansborg Castle, the fortified seventeenth-century trading post that served as the seat of the colonial government. It was his first ever visit, and ‘the glaring white stone of the battlements, the impressive forecourt and the beauty of this imposing building with the roaring surf battering against its foundations, seemed to me like a new world’.21 Once inside, he was promptly invited to become Leader of Government Business. A year later the post was upgraded, and Nkrumah became the colony’s prime minister.22 After a second general election victory in 1954 (this time the CPP secured seventy-two out of 104 seats in the General Assembly) and the appointment of an all-African cabinet, full self-government for the Gold Coast appeared within reach.23 Ironically, the biggest obstacle to the end of empire now came from within the colony itself.
Early on the morning of 19 September 1954, tens of thousands of Asante men, wearing traditional mourning dress, began to gather at the source of the sacred Subin River in Kumase, the historic heart of the Asante Empire. Just before noon, the ancient battle cry rang out, ‘Asante Kotoko, woyaa, woyaa yie’ (‘Asante Porcupine, we are moving forward, no moving back’), before, to the beat of ceremonial drums, a giant flag was unfurled: green symbolising the region’s lush forests, gold the mineral resources, and black the Asante’s revered ancestors. At the flag’s centre, beneath a cocoa tree, stood a cocoa pod, the basis of the region’s wealth, and a porcupine, symbol of the once formidable Asante military. By the day’s end, the vast crowds had endorsed plans to form the National Liberation Movement in order to ‘save Gold Coast from dictatorship’. The NLM’s principal demands were for the price paid to farmers for their cocoa, which Nkrumah’s government had recently frozen at seventy-two shillings per 60 lb load, to be doubled, and for the Gold Coast to adopt a new, federal constitution that would guarantee autonomy for the regions.24 Although discontent over the cocoa price had provided the immediate catalyst, the NLM’s emergence reflected deeper concerns over economic exploitation and corruption, and real anxieties about the centralisation of power in Accra.25 Indeed, the Gold Coast’s charismatic leader was widely distrusted by the Asante, whose king, the Asantehene, believed, as one British report put it, that ‘Dr Nkrumah was a madman and that once he had secured power in an independent Gold Coast a number of his more eminent opponents in Asante would have their throats cut’.26
Against a backdrop of serious street violence – including the firebombing of cars and homes – and ominous talk of secession, a compromise was eventually forged. Although there would be no federal constitution (both Nkrumah and the British believed that a unitary government would be more efficient and effective), the regions were promised a greater say. Nkrumah – with great reluctance – agreed to a further general election to resolve the constitutional crisis and secure a popular mandate for independence.27
The election campaign of 1956 was fiercely fought. The NLM denounced the CPP as ‘thieves, rogues, traitors . . . and gangsters’. Its rallies in the Asante heartlands attracted enthusiastic audiences of ‘young men, elders, market women, farmers, petty traders, teachers and clerks’, and featured emotional proclamations of loyalty to the Asantehene and the Golden Stool (his sacred throne) and raucous celebrations of Asante military prowess.28 Meanwhile the CPP’s pitch to the electorate was clear:
ALL YOU HAVE TO DO is to ask yourself two questions:
(1) Do I want FREEDOM and INDEPENDENCE NOW – THIS YEAR – so that I and my children can enjoy life in a free and independent sovereign state of Ghana thereafter?
(2) Do I want to revert to the days of imperialism, colonialism and tribal feudalism?29
The only way to secure independence – and defeat the ‘saboteurs’ and ‘tribalists’ who wanted to break up the country – was, proclaimed Nkrumah and his supporters, to vote for the CPP.30 It was a message that Nkrumah would reprise throughout the campaign: speaking at a giant election rally in Accra, for example, he told his countrymen that they had reached ‘the end of the road. Whether we go through the golden gate to freedom, or whether we remain behind is now a matter for you to decide.’31
On Tuesday 17 July the people of the Gold Coast went to the polls. The Times’s colonial correspondent painted an exotic picture for his readers back home, describing how ‘in the ports and towns of the south, with their two-storied houses with verandas . . . the majority of the men voters will come in European suits, or at any rate shorts and singlets, though there will be plenty of “market mammies” in their attractively coloured “cloths”’. In contrast, in the ‘mud and wattle villages’ of the Asante ‘the cocoa farmers will throng in wearing the bright togas that set off so well their muscular torsos’, and in the more remote parts of the north (where some ballots had been distributed by canoe) ‘white-clad Muslims’ would join with ‘naked pagans’ to cast their vote.32 Despite fears of violence, election day itself was orderly and peaceful. Turnout was modest: about half of the country’s registered voters placed their ballot paper in the box bearing the relevant party symbol (a red cockerel for the CPP, a green and yellow cocoa tree for the NLM) before having their thumb marked with indelible ink.33 The CPP performed strongly, even securing 43 per cent of the popular vote in Asante, and ultimately winning seventy-one out of the 104 seats in the new General Assembly – which promptly passed a resolution calling for independence.34
At noon on 18 September 1956, Kwame Nkrumah rose in the Assembly chamber to announce that the secretary of state for the colonies had just published an official despatch confirming that ‘Her Majesty’s Government will, at the first available opportunity introduce into the United Kingdom Parliament a Bill to accord Independence to the Gold Coast and, subject to Parliamentary approval, Her Majesty’s Government intends that full independence should come about on the 6th March, 1957.’ ‘The whole of the Assembly’, Nkrumah recalled, ‘was for a few seconds dumbfounded. Then all at once the almost sacred silence was broken by an ear-splitting cheer.’ Many of his fellow parliamentarians were in tears. Amid chaotic scenes, the prime minister was carried into the streets, where jubilant crowds were already gathering to celebrate. It was, Nkrumah later wrote, ‘the most triumphant moment of my life’.35
British imperial power was coming under pressure elsewhere during 1956 too. The year had begun with the granting of formal independence for the Sudan. Technically a province of Egypt, this Anglo-Egyptian ‘co-dominium’ had been a de facto British colony since 1899. On 1 January 1956, following complex diplomatic negotiations that had seen Egypt withdraw its own sovereignty claims, the Republic of Sudan was born (even as the flags were being lowered and the congratulatory telegrams read, simmering tensions between the broadly Arab, Muslim north and the African, part-Christianised south augured bitter conflicts to come).36 Then, on 1 March, Jordan’s twenty-year-old King Hussein dismissed Lieutenant General Sir John Bagot Glubb from his post of commander of the Arab Legion. Glubb, who was denounced by the Egyptians as an ‘imperialist scorpion’, personified Britain’s influence in the Middle East and his forced departure (which was widely, though erroneously, blamed on Egypt’s General Nasser) was a humiliation for Sir Anthony Eden’s government.37 But one of the bloodiest challenges to empire during the early months of 1956 would come from the Mediterranean island of Cyprus.
At 3 p.m. on Friday 9 March, Makarios III, Archbishop of Cyprus and spiritual head of the Cypriot Orthodox Church, was driven from his palace to Nicosia airport to catch a flight to Athens, where he was due to attend a series of meetings with Greek supporters of the Cypriot cause. Just over an hour later, as he walked onto the tarmac, the archbishop suddenly found himself surrounded by British troops, ushered to a specially screened-off area on the runway and then bundled into a Hastings Mark II transport aircraft. After a refuelling stop in Aden, Makarios’s plane touched down in Nairobi, where a military convoy was on hand to escort the prelate to the Kenyan port city of Mombasa. Transferred into the custody of the Royal Navy, Makarios was then taken aboard the frigate HMS Loch Fada for the final nine-hundred-mile leg of his journey to Mahé, the largest island of the Seychelles archipelago, in the Indian Ocean. He would spend the next year under house arrest at Sans Souci, the country residence of the colony’s governor (the British cabinet had vetoed an earlier plan to house Makarios in a more modest residence when they discovered, to their horror, that it was named La Bastille).38 In his radio address explaining the decision to exile the archbishop, Field Marshal Sir John Harding, Cyprus’s governor, accused Makarios of having ‘remained silent while policemen and soldiers have been murdered in cold blood, while women and children have been killed and maimed by bombs . . . His silence has understandably been accepted among his community as not merely condoning but even as approving assassination and bomb-throwing.’39
Ceded to the British by the Ottomans in 1878, Cyprus, long neglected by its rulers, had by the 1950s become a key strategic asset. The island’s airfields enabled RAF bombers to reach targets – including oilfields – in the south of the USSR, and the Crown Colony also gave the British a vital foothold in the Middle East during a period when their influence there was being squeezed.40 The British were, uniquely, confronted with a demand not for straightforward self-determination, but rather for enosis – union – with Greece.41 This scenario was deemed unacceptable in London, not least because it would set a dangerous precedent for other colonies (notably Gibraltar and Hong Kong) and inflame the island’s substantial Turkish minority and the government in Ankara.42 Britain, in fact, was caught between two NATO allies: Greece, which supported enosis and championed the Cypriot cause at the United Nations, and Turkey, which served as an important bulwark against the spread of Communism in the Middle East, and which was keen to see the rights of the Turkish Cypriot population protected.43 The British also feared that, given Greece’s chronic political instability, enosis might result in London suddenly being faced with a government in Athens that was hostile to her military and strategic interests on the island.44
There could, though, be no doubting the strength of support for enosis among Greek Cypriots, who made up about 80 per cent of the population. In January 1950, a plebiscite organised by the Orthodox Church saw more than 215,000 men and women (some 96 per cent of the adult Greek population) vote in favour of a union with Greece. The Cypriot Church, which had been founded by St Barnabas the Apostle in AD 45, occupied a privileged and influential position in the life of the island. In the fifth century it had been awarded autocephalous status by the Roman Emperor Zeno, which gave it independent jurisdiction on both spiritual and temporal matters and granted special privileges to the archbishop: he was permitted to carry a sceptre rather than the traditional pastoral staff, to wear the imperial purple under his vestments, and to sign his edicts in vermilion. On 28 June 1950, at the age of just thirty-nine, Makarios III was elected as the new archbishop and swiftly became the spiritual and political leader of the campaign for enosis.45
The son of a goatherd, Makarios (born Michael Christodoulou Mouskis) had entered the famous Byzantine monastery at Kykkos in 1926, before going on to study at the University of Athens and then at a seminary in Boston. Youthful, energetic and cosmopolitan, the Ethnarch cut a magnetic figure; the English poet James Fenton wrote that ‘the robes, the head-dress, the beard, the smile, assured him of world-wide fame; he might hardly have needed a voice to add to his accomplishments. Yet the voice alone would have made him a hero. It was distinctive enough in English . . . in Greek it was music of the most heady kind.’ Makarios was, moreover, a committed evangelist for enosis; on assuming the throne of St Barnabas he had promised that he would ‘not let my eyes close to sleep until the golden wings of the sun arise to announce the longed-for day of national liberation’.46 Unfortunately for the British, however, the campaign for enosis was not to be restricted to the spiritual front.
On April Fool’s Day 1955, EOKA (the National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters) began its campaign for the ‘liberation of Cyprus from the British yoke’, bombing government buildings in Nicosia, Limassol and Larnaca.47 The organisation was led by Colonel George Grivas, an extreme anti-Communist and fanatical supporter of enosis. Described by one journalist as ‘a dull, competent, obstinate and somewhat courageous professional soldier’, Grivas – fifty-six years old, five foot six and a half inches tall, with a ‘strong, broad face’, trademark moustache and beret, and ‘large ears set low’ – had been born in the Famagusta district of Eastern Cyprus in 1898, before moving to Greece during his teens.48 Commissioned into the Greek army, he had fought in the Balkans during the Great War, in Asia Minor during 1921–2 and on the Albanian front during 1940. A shadowy figure, Grivas had first come to national prominence during the resistance to the Nazi occupation (his exact role remains murky) and then, during the Civil War that erupted in 1944, he had led a far-right paramilitary unit dedicated to the restoration of the Greek monarchy. Following a failed attempt at a political career, Grivas had switched his focus to enosis and begun to formulate plans for a guerrilla campaign that would eject the British from the land of his birth.49 The attacks of April 1955 marked the start of a sustained terrorist campaign – an armed rebellion that, as the revolt’s leading historian has explained, lay in the clash between Britain’s determination that Cyprus had to be exempted from the ‘process of imperial retraction’ and a belief among Greek Cypriots that, as the heirs of Hellenic civilisation, they were ‘exceptionally qualified to determine their own future’. Cypriot resentment at Britain’s refusal to countenance self-determination was only heightened by the process of imperial retreat elsewhere – most notably, of course, in the Gold Coast.50 The British, determined to crush the revolt, deployed thousands of troops and imposed a series of repressive measures including detention without trial, the banning of strikes and assemblies, censorship, the jamming of radio broadcasts, the use of curfews, the shutting down of ‘troublesome’ schools and the liberal use of the death penalty. These policies, though, simply made things worse.51
The deterioration of the situation on the ground provided a suitably grim backdrop to the last-ditch talks between Governor Harding, Archbishop Makarios and Alan Lennox-Boyd at the end of February 1956. Lennox-Boyd, six feet five inches tall, was elegant, charming and exuberant, blessed with formidable powers of recall and a drive that was matched, it seemed, only by his extraordinary tolerance of alcohol. Appointed colonial secretary at the end of July 1954, Lennox-Boyd – who had first been elected to the House of Commons in October 1931 and had seen active service in the Royal Navy during the Second World War – was, according to his contemporary Michael Foot, ‘a real Tory without prefix, suffix, qualification or mitigation’.52 Yet in office this ‘Imperial diehard’ proved surprisingly pragmatic; on the eve of the talks in Nicosia, he urged Sir Anthony Eden to concede that any revived national assembly for the island would contain a Greek-elected majority. Fearing a negative reaction from within his own party, the prime minister refused this ‘sweetener’, thereby dooming the summit. The negotiations, which took place in the drab official residence of the Anglican Archdeacon, quickly broke down; Lennox-Boyd’s final words to the archbishop were ‘God save your people.’53
The British, convinced that Makarios was complicit in EOKA’s campaign of terror, now moved to deport him. Their reasoning was not entirely spurious: after all, in July 1952 he had joined with Grivas in swearing a ‘Holy Sacred Oath’ in support of enosis and, while Makarios was careful never to explicitly endorse violence, he had declared that ‘we shall accept assistance even from unclean hands’.54 Nevertheless, for all the British claims that Makarios had played a leading role in the ‘foundation and major operational planning of EOKA’, or that Grivas was merely the prelate’s ‘henchman’, the relationship was far more ambiguous. The EOKA bombs that rocked Nicosia on 29 February, just as the talks were getting under way, were probably intended as much to remind Makarios of the dangers of ‘selling out’ as to intimidate the British.55
The archbishop’s deportation may have delighted large parts of the Conservative Party and the right-wing press in Britain, but it caused outrage elsewhere.56 Dr Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury, expressed his deep unease at the imprisonment of a fellow church leader, explaining that many around the world viewed the British action as a ‘sacrilege’. Meanwhile Earl Attlee, the former prime minister, noted wryly that ‘the rebels of the past generally tend, sooner or later, to be the Prime Ministers of the British Commonwealth’.57 In the United States, one journalist’s warning that ‘advice from the land of Autherine Lucy’ was unlikely to ‘go down too well in Britain’ was largely ignored. Many Americans took the view that the British were engaged in a ‘last-ditch stand of “colonial imperialism” in the Mediterranean’.58 New York’s mayor expressed solidarity with the Cypriot cause, the labour leader George Meany demanded self-determination for Cyprus and, in off-the-record comments that caused dismay in London, State Department officials briefed that the British had made a ‘grave mistake’ that would likely worsen the situation.59
There was also strong criticism from the Danish, Dutch and Spanish press, while the Norwegian daily Arbeiderbladet accused Britain of engaging in old-fashioned colonialism.60 Soviet coverage was surprisingly restrained, possibly because Khrushchev and Bulganin were shortly to begin an official visit to Britain. In Poland, however, the tone was sharply critical. Trybuna Ludu denounced the ‘brutal deportation’ of Makarios, delighted in the apparent difference of opinion with the United States and portrayed Britain as hypocritical: having condemned the Polish government for placing Cardinal Stefan Wyszyski under house arrest, now London had a prelate under lock and key!61
The reaction in the eastern Mediterranean was far more visceral. In Heraklion, Crete, the British Consulate was sacked, and there were angry demonstrations in Athens, where the offices of British European Airways were attacked, and Thessaloniki, where a mob of two thousand students set wooden barricades alight and fought running battles with the police. Cyprus, meanwhile, was immediately paralysed by a general strike, and British troops unleashed tear gas and baton charges against several hundred protesters in Limassol after being pelted with stones. Meanwhile EOKA, which now promised to ‘fight to death for free Cyprus or destroy it completely, under whose ruins will be buried both the British and ourselves’, stepped up its campaign of violence – targeting houses occupied by British families and attacking soldiers and military bases. EOKA also dealt ruthlessly with suspected collaborators. In the little village of Dhora, for example, ‘three masked men walked into a coffee shop and ordered all the customers to stand with their hands on the wall. Three men were picked out and told: “You are traitors and must pay the price.” Two of them were shot dead, but the third escaped with a bullet through the hand.’62
Grivas’s aim was to ‘strike and strike again at the enemy and never give them a moment of relaxation wherever they might be . . . we must be everywhere in attack, and nowhere when attacked ourselves.’63 EOKA carried out bombings, shootings, ambushes and sabotage all over the island, targeting the island’s police force (increasingly reliant on seconded British officers and recruits from the local Turkish population) along with the British military.64 Grivas’s forces, never more than two hundred active fighters, were audacious too.65 On 3 March, an EOKA bomb had destroyed a Hermes aircraft at Nicosia airport – only an unforeseen delay in its scheduled departure prevented the deaths of sixty-eight passengers.66 Two and a half weeks later, an attempt to blow up the governor by placing a bomb underneath his bed narrowly failed. When, on 10 May, two EOKA fighters were hanged in the courtyard of Nicosia Central Prison, Grivas retaliated by executing two British corporals that they had taken hostage.67
As in Algeria, both sides committed appalling atrocities as the conflict intensified. On 8 July, for example, George Kaberry, a customs official who had been on the island for five months, and his wife were ambushed as they drove to the Kyrenian coast for a picnic. As their car approached a sharp bend on an isolated, tree-lined pass, they came under fire from EOKA gunmen armed with automatic weapons, shotguns and hand grenades. The thirty-one-year-old Marjorie, who was pregnant with her first child, was killed instantly; her husband died at the side of the road.68 On 23 October, a large bomb hidden beneath a water tap at the edge of Lefkonico High School’s football field was detonated at the end of an army rugby game (the signal was given by two young girls, waving their handkerchiefs). Two young soldiers were disembowelled in the resultant explosion and four more were left badly injured. The British reacted to this attack with undisguised fury.69 Grivas recalled that troops:
rushed through the village beating and kicking everyone they met, smashing windows and ransacking shops . . . Then they arrested every man they could find and herded them into the village square [where] they were made to stand against the wall with their hands up, while they were kicked or punched or struck with rifle-butts.70
Throughout the ‘Cyprus Emergency’ the British, as elsewhere in the empire (most notoriously Kenya, where much of the country was turned into a police state in the attempt to crush the Mau Mau), routinely resorted to repressive measures, including collective punishment, reprisals, harsh interrogation techniques and even torture.71 Alan Staff, who served with the Parachute Regiment, described taking part in an operation near Trapeza, on the north of the island, where his unit discovered five EOKA fighters hiding in a barn, together with shotguns, bombs and ammunition: ‘Well, we just guarded these blokes and were getting quite matey when the police arrived, Special Branch, and they were bastards. They really knocked those blokes about; I could hear them crying. None of us liked this but I have to admit that the terrorists talked . . .’72 Although such tactics degraded EOKA’s effectiveness as a fighting force, they also fuelled resentment against the British and solidified popular support for Grivas, embodied in the popular phrase, ‘We are all EOKA now!’73
The struggle to end British rule in Cyprus would last for four years and claim the lives of more than five hundred people (230 of them civilians), with a further twelve hundred injured, many of them seriously.74 As the French were discovering in North Africa, the attempt to hang on to empire could be a painful and bloody business.
The flag-draped coffins of some of the young French soldiers who lost their lives during an FLN ambush near Palestro, Algeria, May 1956.
Credit: Pages François
