Reflecting on his illustrious career, Hubert Deschamps, a former governor of the Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), told an audience at London’s International African Institute in 1963 that apparently profound doctrinal differences between French and British imperialism in West Africa were nothing of the sort. In fact, they were irrelevant. Few successful colonial officials were great theoreticians. Once ‘on the spot’, at all levels of colonial administration everyone soon worked out that compromise and co-option worked better than rigid adherence to programmatic change. Assimilation versus association in the French case, indirect versus direct rule in the British; these theoretical opposites became homogenized in practice thanks to the inescapable force of expediency. A tired, rather cynical judgement perhaps, but Deschamps, once a committed ‘assimilationist’ himself, pointed to an underlying truth. The stylistic differences between French and British colonialism in West Africa were less important than their common motivations. Each traced a path from conquest, through political consolidation to economic extraction and eventual departure.1 And neither wanted expensive fights along the way. Deschamps’ comments, perhaps tailored to flatter his British audience by extolling the virtues of pragmatism over principle, could be put differently. Ruling empire was all about muddling along, a matter of getting away with it for as long and as cheaply as possible.
Was it really this simple? To be sure, the less confrontational paths to colonial withdrawal in this region, unusual in its melange of French and British-ruled colonies, are sometimes depicted as an exemplar of constructive nationalist engagement with reforms more or less willingly conceded—a counterpoint to the violence in East and southern Africa described in the preceding chapters. But the idea of ‘managed’ decolonization that this implies does not hold up. The manoeuvrings among rival African political groups as well as various forms of ‘pressure from below’ suggest that colonial withdrawal was less serene.2
A telling example of such pressure—and an indication that it began early—was the mass walkout by leprosy patients at the central leprosarium in Djikoroni, French Sudan (now Mali), on 24 August 1945. Angry about reduced rations and heavy labour obligations, the patients gathered outside the director’s office to demand improvements. Gendarmes were called in and ten of the demonstrators were expelled from the leprosarium. A defeat for the patients, their protest revealed something deeper nonetheless; a strengthening community will to press claims for better treatment from colonial institutions. A full government investigation of the patients’ complaints ensued.3 In its way, the ‘revolt’ at Djikoroni’s Institut Central de la Lepré exemplifies the pattern of negotiations resumed after spells of repression, pointing to the dominance of ‘flight’ solutions in West Africa.4 But, as we shall see, the general absence of long-term political violence is not enough to confirm Deschamps’ judgement that colonial policies throughout West Africa were inter changeable. For one thing, political violence there certainly was, particularly in the sphere of labour disputes. For another thing, the differences between British and French decolonization in West Africa remained profound. These differences are reducible to two things: first, their contrasting attitudes towards independence and its desirability, and second, the presence of a federal system in the French case, its absence in the British. To untangle these points we need to look at the institutional apparatus and economic characteristics of West African colonial rule.
Two vast colonial federations dominated France’s sub-Saharan empire. French West Africa (Afrique Occidentale Française, AOF, shown in Map 10) comprised seven territories: Senegal, French Sudan (now Mali), Guinea, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Niger and Dahomey (now Benin). An eighth was added in 1948 with the re-designation of Upper Volta (now Burkina-Faso), an inland territory formerly incorporated into its neighbouring territories. French Togo, previously a League of Nations Mandate, became a UN trusteeship territory in 1945. It, too, gravitated economically and politically towards AOF. The outward appearance of federation, so appealing to metropolitan governments, belied AOF’s economic and cultural disparities. Three of its colonies were landlocked, making it hard for them to prosper alone.5 Contrasts were stark between widespread poverty in the Sahel—the semi-arid pre-Saharan north—and extensive plantation agriculture, forestry, and commerce in more southerly communities.6
Map 10. French West Africa.
Acute regional variation in population density, economic opportunity, and wealth made economic migration crucial to AOF’s socio-economic structure. Peasant labourers headed south and westwards to work in the cash crop and forestry sectors in Senegal, Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire, and Dahomey.7 Senegal and Ivory Coast stood out as the federation’s ‘pearls’. Yet, much as these two colonies were, respectively, political and economic showcases of French rule, both were centres of the earliest and most significant African political mobilization against colonial abuses. An added political complication was that remnants of imperial reforms from the mid nineteenth century survived in the original French slaving settlements in West Africa: the ‘Four Communes’ of Senegal (the towns of Dakar, St Louis, and Rufisque, and Gorée Island). After 1848 the Communes’ administration was modelled on the French system of local government. From October 1916 their inhabitants enjoyed ‘citizen’ status as opposed to that of mere colonial ‘subjects’.8 By 1936 there were some 100,000 black African and mixed race (métis) citizens in the Four Communes, but under 2,500 throughout the rest of AOF.9 No surprise, then, that the Four Communes’ uniquely assimilated status made them, at once, a model, a magnet for political activism, and a monument to the inequity of colonialism elsewhere in AOF.
The colonial economies of AOF remained beholden to export crop production, rubber extraction, and forestry; industries still dominated by old-style colonial trading companies at the end of the Second World War.10 Two stood out. The Société Commerciale de l’Ouest Africain (SCOA), founded in 1887, and the Compagnie Française d’Afrique Occidentale (CFAO), established in 1906, towered over French West Africa’s export trade.11 But their dominance was beginning to fade. On the one hand, growing industrial unrest among African wage earners was matched by recognition in France that the old exploitative ways of colonial business were an embarrassment. The introduction in 1945 of a distinct colonial currency, the franc CFA, pointed to a renewed French commitment to develop a more integrated French African economy. But the new currency regime did not silence African cash-crop farmers clamouring for an end to price controls and labour restrictions.12 Among them was Félix Houphouët-Boigny, a Baule cantonal chief and future national leader of Ivory Coast. It was his coffee-cultivation interests that led Houphouët-Boigny to organize an African planters’ association, the Syndicat Agricole Africain (SAA) in 1944. His call for substitution of forced labour with a competitive wage market in Ivory Coast’s plantations won him the backing of African farmers and labourers alike.13 Their demands were soon answered, albeit not as they envisaged. The surge in metropolitan demand for African commodities as France’s reconstruction proceeded in the late 1940s was immediately followed by sharper increases in raw material prices triggered by the Korean War rearmament boom of 1950–53. Black African colonies, for the first time, acquired economic importance as dollar earners, and were soon integrated into the US-directed bureaucracy of the Marshall Plan.14
In late 1945 the Dakar government established a planning directorate to vet development projects put to the federal authorities. The first criterion for approval was that such programmes improve the welfare of the African population.15 Investment capital was made available as never before. State funding for infrastructure modernization through the Economic and Social Development Fund (Fonds d’Investissment pour le Développment Economique et Social, FIDES), created on 30 April 1946, was quickly followed by some 10 billion francs of Marshall Aid spending in AOF between 1948 and 1952.16 The annual GNP of the AOF territories grew by an average 13.8 per cent between 1947 and 1951.17 Although little of the increased wealth in French West Africa trickled down to the wider population, but the post-war trade boom still had momentous social effects. It stimulated urbanization and added to the numbers of politically active African wage earners. The new commercial prospects presented to adventurous capitalists also increased the opportunities for African workers to press claims for a decent wage, better working conditions, and employment protection. So much so that the greatest shift in the post-war balance sheets of the large trading companies was not the surge in capital investment and annual profit, but the rising proportion of turnover allocated to wage payments.
These structural factors go a long way to explaining differing local reactions to what the imperial rulers proposed and did. The French African leaders who sat in the French Constituent Assembly at the end of the war were models of Francophile refinement. Most were French educated, products of Dakar’s William Ponty Lycée, a training school for administrators, lawyers, and mid-level managers. Through its corridors passed most of the first generation of French West Africa’s politicians, including eleven of the African deputies elected to Paris in 1945. William Ponty graduates were modernizers, educated to view a republican state as the key agent of social change. They endorsed the closer partnership between France and West Africa to which the French Union aspired. Several of them helped define it in the first place.18
French West Africa’s new political elites were also quick to recognize something else: that the political architecture of AOF, combining a federal administration with national constitutions, partnership agreements, and electoral arrangements in individual francophone West African states, while complex, maximized the opportunities for constructive engagement. The experience in neighbouring British-ruled territories was very different. Few British policy-makers thought nationalism an existential threat to their strategic and commercial interests in Nigeria, the Gold Coast (now Ghana), or Sierra Leone. The fact that key British industrial concerns, some of which counted senior Conservatives among their board members, were equally sanguine was valuable, but not decisive.19 ‘Fighting’ the consolidation of West African anti-colonialism with the full force of military intervention was no more seriously contemplated in the City of London’s square mile than it was in nearby Whitehall. In part, this was because hostility to European rule in anglophone West Africa, although heartfelt, left room for compromise. Even the more radical politicians—Kwame Nkrumah in the Gold Coast or I.T.A. Wallace-Johnson in Sierra Leone for instance—ultimately recognized the benefits of dialogue. In part, it was because the rapid acceleration in plans for self-government, local and national elections, economic reorganization, and eventual withdrawal left British officials preoccupied with more pressing concerns.
Indeed, the term ‘nationalist’ is too simplistic to explain the ways in which West African politicians such as the future presidents, prime ministers, party and union leaders, Nkrumah in Ghana, Nnamdi Azikwe in Nigeria, and Wallace-Johnson in Sierra Leone, articulated their vision of independence and pan-African cooperation. Several of British Africa’s leading anti-colonial radicals had attended the Fifth Pan-African Congress, which opened in the unlikely setting of Chorlton-on-Medlock Town Hall in All Saints, Manchester, in mid October 1945. Perhaps the location was less unusual than might appear. Many of the delegates had backgrounds in trade union activism and left-wing journalism that chimed with Manchester’s radical tradition. Eschewing the label of ‘nationalist’, the delegates stressed a more fundamental objective: they were, they said, ‘determined to be free’.20
Their French African counterparts, the Senegalese Léopold Sedar Senghor, his colleague Mamadou Dia, even the Guinean trade unionist Sékou Touré (ultimately, the most militant among West Africa’s ‘big men’), approached the challenges of African identity, self-rule, and economic development with a similar clarity of vision. They, too, recognized the fundamental importance of questions of liberty and sovereignty. But they were less consumed than the English-speaking pan-Africanists by the idea that racial division and the need to overcome it were the fundamental goals of anti-colonialism.21 What is so striking is that so many francophone African politicians embraced the possibilities offered by French claims of greater inclusivity, welfare entitlements, and citizenship rights for west Africans within the framework, first of the French Union and, after 1958, of the French Community. Even Touré, who eventually spurned such a partnership, did so in reaction to the overweening influence that France exercised nearby. Touré was the exception, not the rule. Numerous political leaders from Senegal’s cosmopolitan administrative hub of Dakar in the west to dusty Niger in the east sought additional rights and improved social welfare for their compatriots, not within wholly independent states but as autonomous members of a West African confederation still tied to France.22
Their logic in doing so rested on four elements. Two were negative, the product of anxieties about the terms on which independence might be secured, and two were positive, reflecting hopes for a better future for West Africans. The negatives first. One was that French West Africa’s colonial boundaries, some barely fifty years old, were ethnically artificial, commercially nonsensical, and socially limiting. Underlying this view was a second anxiety: the fear that independence would precipitate what Senghor dubbed ‘balkanization’ or sub-division into territories that were neither economically nor politically viable. Viewed this way, ‘nationalism’ in the narrowly instrumental sense of support for individual nation states roughly equivalent in size and structure to the erstwhile colonies was deeply unattractive.23 For Senghor and other federalists who thought like him, national independence of this sort promised only lasting poverty, under-development and political marginalization. As for the positives, first was the belief that cultural, economic, and strategic partnership with France offered greater possibilities for Africans as workers and citizens to attain improved living standards and guaranteed individual rights. Linked to this was a second, regionally-focused ambition—to transform the old federal structures of colonial West Africa into a free association of autonomous territories. Each would be sovereign in domestic affairs, and thus effectively independent. But all would be connected to something greater: a confederation with shared economic interests, a single global voice, and free internal movement for all its peoples; in short, a West African Union to match the institutions and cultural ambitions of the European Community.24
The peoples of French West Africa would thereby transcend the limitations of ‘national’ independence based on a replication of former colonial frontiers, bureaucracies, and economies. They would, instead, attain something better: a powerful regional grouping that overcame the national particularity imposed by colonial rule.25
As these ideas indicate, both the complexion of politics and the substance of political debate in French West Africa were quite unlike their equivalents in adjacent British-ruled territories. For one thing, francophone African politicians, trade union leaders, student organizers, and other civil society activists had an entire imperial constitution, the French Union, from which to draw their claims for everything from higher wages and employment protections to educational entitlements and legal rights as citizens of an imperial super-state. Admittedly, as we saw in Chapter 3, the French Union in its final form was vague about the rights conferred by imperial citizenship. It was ambiguous about the scope for African political participation in decision-making. And it was conspicuously silent about the extent to which metropolitan welfare benefits would be extended to overseas territories.
Yet, for all its ambiguities, indeed, perhaps because of them, the French Union presented West Africa’s new political parties with numerous opportunities to make political and economic claims to which French governments had to respond. The French African politicians pitching these demands worked assiduously to pin down the rights conferred by citizenship and the entitlements due to colonial workers performing tasks comparable to their French equivalents.26 The governments of the Fourth Republic and their subordinate colonial administrations were thus presented with a basic dilemma. How to reconcile the persistence of a French-directed imperial system with the republican rhetoric of equality, inclusivity, and democratic participation that France and the French Union purported to represent?27 The written articles of the Union, the presence of elected African deputies in Paris as well as in individual colonial capitals, and the institutional structures set up under the FIDES and its associated economic programmes were tangible and arguable in a way that the Commonwealth’s more decorous but largely vacuous conventions were not.
Differences were equally apparent in the realm of party politics. There was no equivalent in British West Africa of Houphouët-Boigny’s Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA). This was an inter-territorial alliance that functioned as an umbrella organization for several of the leading nationalist groups in individual territories. Although its reach extended throughout French West Africa, the RDA pivoted around the Parti Démocratique de la Côte d’Ivoire, its largest component party and the core of Houphouët-Boigny’s regional power. More importantly from the French domestic perspective, between 1946 and 1950 the RDA maintained a working relationship with the Communist Party in France. Several RDA activists underwent their political apprenticeship as members of the Communist Study Groups that proliferated in French West Africa’s major towns at the end of the War. Orchestrated by Raymond Barbé, head of the French Communist Party’s colonial section, the Study Groups were meant to align young African radicals with the French Party’s opposition to colonial capitalism.28 They also provided valuable organizational training, which helped RDA sections survive renewed repression that gathered momentum following the Communists’ eviction from the French government in May 1947. In Guinea, for instance, Sékou Touré, Madéïra Kéïta, and Léon Maka, joint founders of the colony’s RDA branch, all passed through the Communist Study Group in the capital, Conakry.29 The RDA, formally launched at the Bamako Congress in October 1946 (itself part funded by the PCF), thus drew more from Communist political culture—the Party’s way of seeing and doing things—than from Marxist ideology.30
Other French African parties, Senghor’s Senegalese Socialists for instance, cultivated similar filial ties with their metropolitan party political counterparts.31 And still others remained close to the French West African labour movement. Industrial trade unions were a rich source of leadership cadres for national parties in Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire and Niger, individuals who proved equally adept at mobilizing public support for political demands as for workers’ rights.32 There were no British echoes of the formal ties between French and colonial political parties, although the Labour Party fostered looser transnational connections with socialist parties in Asia and Africa through the framework of the Second International. Nor was there any British equivalent to the complexities of imperial citizenship facing franco-phone populations whose rights and economic opportunities would be materially affected by the alternatives of post-colonial federation, looser confederation, or unitary ‘national’ independence.33
Nigeria perhaps came closest to the institutional complexities of French West Africa. It also acquired unprecedented importance within British colonial policy in the late 1940s. Immediately after Indian independence, Nigeria’s population of thirty-one million constituted one in four of Britain’s remaining colonial subjects. Bewilderingly diverse and territorially extensive, the Nigerian state was ethnically, religiously, economically, and politically divided between north and south, east and west. Its main urban centres and regional divisions are shown in Map 11 below. Flying in the face of its substantial material and cultural disparities, Nigeria’s colonial existence represented a loose federation from which the north in particular might secede as the reality of a southern-dominated post-colonial state loomed larger. As in French West Africa industrial unrest destabilized the major port cities of Nigeria’s south immediately after World War II. A highly politicized general strike in May 1945 brought Lagos, the colony’s commercial capital, to a standstill.34 The political effervescence in the south only accentuated the social and cultural divide with the generally more placid Nigerian North. Efforts to prevent secession through the cultivation of conservative Muslim chiefs in Northern Nigeria were, therefore, as pivotal to British policy as the end of the colonial period as they had been at its beginning.35
On 4 December 1929, a time when imperialist propaganda helped alleviate the looming reality of economic depression, a future Conservative Colonial Secretary, William Ormsby-Gore, explained Nigeria’s importance in simple terms in a BBC radio broadcast for British schoolchildren: ‘our largest African dependency is nearly seven times the size of England, with about twenty million inhabitants, that is, as many human beings as Canada, South Africa, and Australia put together.’ He went on to describe a tour around the magnificent northern city of Kano whose ‘great walls are fourteen miles round’. ‘Towards evening’, he continued, ‘the market places are absolutely thronged with people, and you can buy and sell almost anything—cotton goods from Manchester, hardware from Birmingham, mixed up with native medicines made of bits of birds’ legs, lucky stones, dried fish; and, of course, animals galore being driven in and out of the thronging crowd.’ Relatively tame as colonial propaganda, Ormsby-Gore’s effusive broadcast still encouraged his listeners to swallow the colonial construction of Northern Nigeria’s distinctiveness under British rule. ‘All this trade has brought tremendously increased prosperity to all sections of the community. Education is advancing. New hospitals are going up, but nowhere else does society seem to be so little affected. Hausa and Fulani [northern Nigeria’s largest ethnic groups] alike are dominated by a sense of courtly dignity. Good manners are expected from everyone. The casual visitor must, I think, be impressed by the fact that of all the Mohammedan countries Northern Nigeria comes closest to living up to the ideal of fraternity which is the best element of the Mohammedan code.’36
Map 11. Nigeria before independence.
In the late 1940s Nigeria fell short of the exuberant, harmonious co-existence that Ormsby-Gore conjured up twenty years before. Racial segregation excluded black Nigerians from hotels, bars, even town districts, firing an animosity to British racism that cut across the colony’s internal ethnic divides. The prevalence of Nigeria’s ‘colour bar’ was brought to light in February 1947 when the owner of the Bristol Hotel in Lagos made plain that he would have refused admission to a senior British colonial official of mixed race parentage had he known he was ‘black’.37 Nigeria’s colonial authorities eschewed such overt discrimination but there was a pronounced racial flavour in their intolerance of labour unrest, which occasionally exploded into lethal police violence in the decade after the war ended.38
The worst such incident occurred on 18 November 1949 when police fired into a crowd of striking miners at Enugu colliery in Nigeria’s southeastern coalfield. Twenty-two died and a further fifty were injured, provoking rioting throughout the region.39 Dedicated officials and Nigerian progressives did, on occasion, bridge these racial and workplace divides, a point proven by the rise of the Gaskiya Corporation, an Anglo-Nigerian publishing house that disseminated Hausa literature in the immediate post-war years.40 But ‘spatial apartheid’ between whites and blacks was more common, the gradual ‘Nigerianization’ of the colony’s civil service rarely being matched by any commitment among foreign-owned corporations to employ local personnel in Nigeria.41 Royal Dutch/Shell, which, in 1946, resumed oil exploration operations in and around Owerri in south-eastern Nigeria’s Delta region, could boast only three Nigerians among its staff of over 2,000 in 1954.42
Three communally-based parties were contesting power at regional and national levels meanwhile. Strongest among them was Nnamdi Azikiwe’s National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC). It was founded in 1944 and was strongest among the Igbo peoples of the south-east. The NCNC also made inroads into Lagos, where Igbo economic migration was increasingly visible.43 For all that, Obefami Awolowo’s Action Group (AG) remained the dominant force in the Yoruba territories of the south-west with Lagos at their heart. The two southern movements favoured rapid independence with a powerful central government, knowing that it was likely to come under their control. For the same reason, their Muslim Hausa-Fulani rivals in the Northern People’s Congress (NPC) dreaded ‘southernization’, a phenomenon the NPC equated with Igbo and Yoruba dominance.44
Between 1948 and 1953 Governor Sir John Macpherson, his chief secretary Hugh Foot, and Sir Bryan Sharwood-Smith, Governor of the Northern Region, worked assiduously to placate northern anxieties that Britain’s relatively light colonial touch in the North risked replacement by an all-controlling central government after independence. Macpherson promised a harmonious future in which regional particularities would be respected. His hopes rested on a new constitution designed to counter-balance the power of a national parliament with three strong regional governments.45 Much of this was devised to safeguard northern interests, the Governor’s inner circle of advisers finding the cautious NPC leaders more congenial than their southern counterparts.46 Colonial Secretary Oliver Lyttelton felt the same way, praising the ‘courtly manners’ and ‘high bearing’ of NPC representatives in London, whose conservatism ‘democracy and the Daily Mirror have not yet debased’.47
For all this admiration, British negotiators did not ignore southern concerns entirely. The key issue here was the inter-relationship between the ethnic and regional power-bases of Nigeria’s three major parties and their standing in a national parliament or House of Representatives. Simply put, the dangers were that each would remain sectarian and that the two southern groups—the NCNC and AG—might, in combination, negate the collective voice of Nigeria’s seventeen million northerners. Other factors came into play. The Gold Coast’s march to independence and the quickening pace of reform throughout much of French West Africa after the RDA broke with their Communist mentors in 1950–1 (both discussed below) increased the pressure for an accelerated devolution of ministerial authority in Nigeria.48 Chief among the local issues was to guarantee the status of minority communities by fostering cooperation among the regional party groups.49
Macpherson and his colleagues soon found their elaborately-laid constitutional plans for Nigeria’s future unravelling around them. Under the new political arrangements put in place in 1951, Nigerians elected to the impressively-named Council of Ministers were denied real authority. The colonial government could still act independently of them. In June 1952 the AG leadership began insisting that, without genuine Nigerian ministerial responsibility and additional local government powers, Macpherson’s new constitution was an elaborate sham. By the end of the year the AG had joined the NCNC in demanding full self-government within four years.50 On 31 March 1953 Anthony Enahoro, a leading AG organizer and editor of the Lagos Morning Star newspaper, reiterated the demand during a House of Representatives debate. With this, Macpherson’s flawed attempt to play Nigeria’s political puppeteer collapsed.51
Voted down amid chaotic scenes in the chamber, Enahoro’s historic demand accomplished several things regardless. For one thing, it stole NCNC thunder, compelling Azikwe to work more closely with the AG in its Lagos heartland. But this jockeying for influence between the two southern parties was as nothing when compared with the hostility each directed towards their NPC rivals from the north. Seen from an NPC perspective, Enahoro’s call for full self-government raised the prospect of northern subordination within a Nigerian state permanently ruled in southern interests. Vicious caricatures in Enahoro’s Morning Star and other Lagos newspapers depicted northerners as parochial, reactionary stooges of British colonialism. NPC representatives ran a gauntlet of southern railway-workers’ jibes as they returned northwards by train.52
This accusatory tone was matched by escalating inter-communal friction on the streets. On 17 May 1953 a provocative AG rally in Kano, the city so beloved by Ormsby-Gore and still the largest in the north, ignited a week of ethnic violence. At least 36 died and hundreds more were injured.53 A train rumoured to be ferrying NCNC politicians was attacked in Kaduna to the south. Government and police were losing control and the break-up of Nigeria, once a remote spectre, was becoming a real possibility. In the event, the principal political victim was Governor Macpherson. Recalled to London before the Kano riots, he was overruled by Colonial Secretary Lyttelton. There would be an immediate cession of power to regional governments to take the heat out of northern secessionism.54 Nigerian party delegates were instead invited to London in late July 1953 to discuss constitutional revision.55 No one in the Colonial Office anticipated how far this meeting would go. But, when faced with Azikwe’s renewed insistence on self-government by 1956 and the threat of an inter-party boycott unless a firm date for independence were agreed then and there, British negotiators gave way. In July 1954 a new ‘Lyttelton constitution’, which ought, more accurately, to have born Azikwe’s name, confirmed the London conference deal.56 Nigeria’s internal ferment had catalysed independence.
The irony was that once Macpherson’s schemes for Nigeria’s long-term future went up in smoke, the political air cleared. The policy reverses precipitated by the 1953 self-government crisis made it easier for Macpherson’s administration to resuscitate its other main objective—inter-ethnic ‘national’ cooperation. Central to this was an NPC–NCNC alliance. Colonial officials nurtured this tender flower assiduously, helping to assure victory for NPC leader Tafawa Balewa during national elections in 1959. Strongly Anglophile, Balewa became independent Nigeria’s first prime minister in the following year.57 British championing of compromise between Nigeria’s ‘big three’ political groups marked the logical end-point of indirect rule. Insofar as Nigeria’s decolonization was ‘managed’ at all, this was its essence. The point was that such collaboration was feasible only after the colonial authorities had retreated on the more fundamental question of Nigerian self-rule. Flight, in this case, was a two-stage process in which Macpherson’s initial efforts to impose constitutional devolution on British terms disintegrated amidst the violence of the Kano disorders. A Nigeria taken to the brink of uncontrollable inter-communal violence was the dismal, but essential prelude to renewed negotiation. Only then could the self-government scheme embodied in the Lyttelton constitution, its outlines freely negotiated with Nigeria’s political leaders at the London conference, take flight.
Gradual, orderly transition to ‘responsible’ self-government (translatable as hopefully democratic, but definitely pro-British) was also the aspiration for the Gold Coast (Ghana), Britain’s other main wealth-generating colony in West Africa. By 1947 the hope was that a new African elite, British-educated and commensurately respectful of Britain’s advice, would take up the reins, first of local government, then of national affairs, abandoning the old ways of ‘chieftaincy politics’ and ignoring the temptations of pan-African or leftist ideologies.58 The ‘romantic cultural conservatism’ of indirect rule, in which the British singled out the African institutions that could be accommodated before prodding them to follow their bidding, would be supplanted by the mechanisms of English local government.59 Direct taxes would at last be introduced to provide money for domestic spending. ‘Customary’ law-making, poorly understood by the Colonial Office reformers who despised it, would be rationalized into a network of magistrates’ courts.60 Framed in this light, Gold Coast self-government was less the prelude to decolonization than the institutionalization of British practice.61 Government of the shires was coming to Accra.
The problem was that such imperial managerialism, so much in vogue at the Colonial Office, was overtaken by events before the Second World War even ended. During three years from February 1944 Gold Coast politics was held in thrall by a well-publicized murder case. Seven high-born southern Ghanaians were convicted of the gruesome killing of a local Akan-speaking chief. The prosecution persuaded a largely African jury and a Turkish Cypriot colonial judge that the accused used the blood of the dead man, Akyea Mensah, in an elaborate royal funeral ritual. At a time when colonial administrations were proclaiming the impending triumph of development and reform, the case came as a jolt; at best, a discomfiting throwback to customary practices out of step with social modernization; at worst, a glimpse into a Conradian heart of darkness.
Gold Coast Governor Sir Alan Burns was at the time putting the final touches to a more inclusive colonial constitution designed to engage not only young Ghanaian government officers but also chiefly elders akin to those on trial. Politically, the case had concluded at just the wrong moment. Burns acted quickly, confirming the jury’s verdict and the judge’s choice of the death penalty. All seven were condemned to hang. But the Governor’s authority was eroded by a tortuous appeals process, much of it conducted via increasingly acrimonious correspondence between Whitehall and Accra. In March 1947 Burns threatened resignation, a move sufficient to send three of the defendants to the gallows. There was uproar, not just in the colony, but in Westminster too. Barristers-turned-MPs on both sides of the House of Commons, including the Conservatives R.A. Butler and Quentin Hogg and Labour members Sidney Silverman and Leslie Hale figured among eighty-five MPs who petitioned the Colonial Secretary, Creech-Jones, to commute the remaining death sentences. Ostensibly, it was the Minister’s flip-flopping on the matter that so infuriated Governor Burns. His anger was intensified by the fact that the condemned men’s all-Ghanaian defence team was led by an eloquent lawyer, Dr J.B. Danquah, a former Gold Coast youth–movement leader. Within months of the executions, Danquah went on to establish the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), the colony’s first nationalist party.62
What should we make of this? Three points bear emphasis. Firstly, although the actual circumstances of Chief Mensah’s murder remained obscure, its legal outcome was openly adjudicated by local people and freely discussed by a local press, albeit operating within the confines of a colonial legal system. A second, countervailing observation is that, while the conduct of the case was fair by the standards of the day, it became highly politicized. So much so that it destroyed the relationship between a previously successful colonial governor and his Whitehall superiors. Burns’ increasing obsession with the case fed his hostility to Danquah and the relatively moderate political organization he founded—the UGCC. This rendered the Accra administration better disposed to another party political grouping that emerged from a subsequent rift within the UGCC: Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party (CPP). Ironically, this latter organization was the more militant. Casting further doubt on the idea that decolonization could ever be ‘managed’, the third point is simply to highlight the importance of historical contingency, of the unforeseen. Although Burns is recalled in histories of decolonization for the new Gold Coast constitution that bore his name, a dramatic, in some ways atavistic murder case did more to shape official reactions to the emergence of an organized nationalist challenge in the colony.63
Wider social pressures also came into play. Most important was a severe crisis in the agricultural economy caused by swollen-shoot disease, a virus afflicting the Gold Coast’s staple export: cocoa. The virus devastated cocoa farms in the colony’s Eastern Province and was prevalent throughout the Gold Coast rainforest. Government agronomists prescribed aggressive control measures, dubbed ‘cutting out’, to halt its advance. In December 1946 the Accra administration duly enacted ‘Swollen Shoot of Cocoa Disease Order Number 148’, a compulsory tree-felling programme. Government-recruited labour gangs brandished the requisite administrative order on the estates selected for cutting out. Fury among growers and labourers whose livelihoods were literally destroyed before their eyes was compounded by uncertainty about compensation arrangements. Amid the felled timber a political firestorm was about to ignite.64
It took seven years from planting before a cocoa tree yielded its distinctive pods for harvest. What would happen meanwhile? Farmers’ credit lines were broken. Their workers were laid off. The entire agricultural economy might disintegrate. Large commercial trading companies dominated the cocoa market, selling to the British chocolate giants Cadbury and Fry’s. Longstanding complaints that the cocoa market, always geared to British export requirements, operated to cultivators’ disadvantage grew louder. Expatriate banks offered little in the way of start-up loans to put agriculturalists back on their feet. Urban moneylenders and pawnbrokers, many of them Syrian and Lebanese, filled the gap to some degree but were often decried as sharks. In this tense atmosphere, rising goods prices turned seething resentment, first into a consumers’ boycott, then into street protest. Uniting rural chiefs (many of them cocoa district landowners) with unemployed city youths, a farmers’ movement with UGCC lawyers, this was popular opposition to manifest unfairness rather than anti-colonial mobilization.65
And it snowballed. Former members of the Royal West African Frontier Force pressed their case for the fulfilment of government pledges of support for demobilized Ghanaian soldiers. On 28 February 1948 a contingent of the ex-servicemen’s union sporting old uniforms, their campaign medals glinting in the sunshine, marched on Accra’s Christiansborg Castle, seat of the colonial government. They aimed to present a petition detailing economic grievances about pensions and unfulfilled promises of resettlement.66 Accra’s police chief, Commissioner B. E. A. Tamakloe, did not anticipate problems from men who had served King and Empire loyally in the past. He not only authorized the demonstration but limited police numbers on the day.67 Gradually, however, the orderly veterans’ procession was hijacked by the city’s young unemployed. By the time the demonstrators encountered the police cordon at the Chris-tiansborg crossroads their numbers had swollen to several thousand. Visibly intimidated, the policemen’s fright turned to violence. Shots were fired, killing three protesters and wounding many more.68 News of the incident triggered rioting in Accra and several of the Eastern Province towns worst affected by the cocoa crisis.69 Briefly, it looked as if colonial politics in the Gold Coast would trace a path depressingly familiar from recent experience in Kenya or even Palestine. The inevitable commission of inquiry into the 1948 disorders hunted obsessively for reds under beds before acknowledging the colony’s post-war economic problems as the real driver of dissent.70 Colonial government meanwhile resumed its preparations for what turned out to be an abortive new constitutional settlement, something that the CPP, from its inception in 1949, pledged to oppose.71
For the authorities at least, these apparently dark clouds revealed unexpected silver linings. First, escalating disorder in 1948–9 led to expanded police intelligence-gathering. The colony’s Special Branch dedicated itself to collecting information about internal political threats in general and Communist infiltration of the CPP in particular. Thanks to informants within the CPP executive, the resultant political intelligence suggested that Nkrumah’s party was not a Marxist Trojan horse but a viable political client.72 Better information about their political adversaries illuminated another change taking place. Far from driving the CPP towards extremism as was initially feared, the Party’s espousal of non-violent protest, or ‘positive action’ in support of self-government, provided the platform for the CPP’s rise as a nationalist party with practical ideas about how Gold Coast/Ghana should be run. As several British MPs pointed out, recognizing that the CPP’s alternative proposals were negotiable made it imperative to release Nkrumah, who had been imprisoned for directing the CPP’s civil disobedience campaign.73 A third change, then, lay in the colonial authorities’ reversal of past policy. The previous indulgence of chieftaincy politics was dropped in favour of dialogue with Nkrumah’s new party as the more viable alternative.74 The turn towards cooperation with the CPP signalled that the colonial authorities favoured negotiation and concession over force and inflexibility. Having flirted with a fight strategy at the height of the swollen-shoot crisis, by late 1951 flight was preferred.
Nkrumah’s CPP, a self-consciously modern party with a young, literate, largely urban membership, won elections in 1951, 1954, and 1956. But its voter support was never rock solid. Northern Muslim groups grew disillusioned with Nkrumah’s hostility to chieftaincy politics and Islamic tradition.75 The challenge presented by an emergent Asante nationalist alternative was stronger still.76 In all, the CPP’s rapid rise was more vigorously contested than Nkrumah’s lieutenants cared to admit. Still, it heralded the decisive transition of power in the Gold Coast.77 This shift occurred on two levels. The first, the gradual relaxation of British colonial control, is well known—a short-lived turn to Indian-style diarchy or ‘joint rule’ with the CPP before the de facto admission of self-government that preceded ‘formal’ independence in 1957. It is the second, the rise of CPP predominance and the commensurate demise of customary chiefly authority in the countryside that held greater significance for most Ghanaians. Once Nkrumah was appointed ‘leader of government business’ after the 1951 elections, then prime minister in 1952, the CPP’s determination to dismantle the political and juridical apparatus of ‘chieftaincy politics’ became apparent. This signified a revolutionary transformation in the social relations at the heart of Ghana’s civil society. And it prefigured the establishment of a one-party state. Few could have been surprised by the CPP’s impatience to assimilate the Ewe-speaking regions of British-administered Togoland, Ghana’s eastern neighbour and a former UN trust territory. In its quest to absorb this territory, the party steamrollered over the demands of villagers and towns-people in the region for a separate Ewe state.78 More unusually, these developments took place, not just under the noses of British colonial officials, but with their blessing.79
Largely because of its agricultural crisis, the Gold Coast missed out on the spectacular post-war economic growth taking place in nearby French West African territories like Ivory Coast and Guinea. But there, too, popular dissent intensified in the late 1940s. Aggrieved that the export boom conferred few local benefits, French African salaried workers provided the impetus for social reform. Many were organized into local trade unions, several of which were tied to France’s Communist-affiliated Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT). French organizers played little part in the resultant worker protests that swept through West Africa’s cities after the war, however Vestigial paternalism, entrenched racism, plus a limited understanding of the region’s industrial sector impeded the growth of working partnerships between French trade unionists and their West African counterparts.80 A cautionary note here: under five per cent of French West Africa’s working population were wage labourers, perhaps no more than 70,000 by 1948. This was fewer than the number of African ex-servicemen who drew army pensions from the French state after 1945.81 But force of numbers was not everything. If former colonial soldiers inclined towards conservatism, unionized workers did not. Their capacity to shape events reflected their urban concentration in strategic industries. Unionization registered its biggest impact in French West Africa’s dockyards and the federation’s largest industrial conglomerate, its railway company, the Régie des Chemins de Fer de l’AOF or ‘RAN’.82
Spurred by a reform-minded Governor, René Barthes, the federal government’s Labour Inspection Service tried to steer African trade unionism towards moderation. Success hinged on an implicit recognition by both sides that industrial disputes were facets of capitalist modernization, not the seedbed for anti-colonialism. The administration enjoyed a critical advantage here. Thanks, in part, to their CGT connections, African trade unionists typically sought parity in wages and conditions with their French counterparts rather than a clean break with France.83 Even so, industrial unrest persisted throughout the late 1940s, notably in Senegal and the Guinean capital, Conakry, where rank-and-file militancy was strongest.84 Wildcat strikes that began on Dakar’s dockside in December 1946 mushroomed into an eleven-day general strike in mid January 1947. Government clerks, market women, skilled and manual labourers joined the dockworkers in claiming equal pay for equal work irrespective of race. Additional demands for a guaranteed minimum wage and family allowances confirmed that the strikers were well aware of similar concessions being extracted by their French counterparts. Just as significantly, rather than colonial-style repression, the strikes were arbitrated by the Labour Inspection Service.85 The principles of colonial assimilation were being turned upside down. Union action secured equivalent rights for black public-sector workers without any prior requirement to adopt the cultural trappings of ‘Frenchness’.86
For all these successes, leading African political figures in AOF remained ambivalent about trade union power. Suspicion of African organized labour ran deep among the ten West African deputies elected to the Constituent Assembly in October 1945. Anxiety about workers’ demands came naturally to the five deputies elected by citizens; in other words, principally by Europeans, other than in the one seat reserved for the Four Communes of Senegal. But the other five deputies elected by AOF’s 118,000 enfranchised African subjects—Léopold Senghor (Senegal), Félix Houphouët-Boigny (Ivory Coast), Sourou Migan Apithy (Dahomey), Yacine Diallo (Guinea), and Fily Dabo Sissoko (Soudan-Niger)—also distanced themselves from the post-war strike-wave.87 This was an ominous portent. African national leaders, some of them former union officials, proved less sympathetic towards industrial dissent once they held the levers of power. Trade unionism in French West Africa, impelled by a grass-roots activism that blazed a trail in consolidating workers’ rights, was eventually felled by the insecurities of post-colonial regimes.88
In the late 1940s West African trade unionism filled the void left by the government’s clampdown against RDA organizers. During the three years of centre-right ‘Third Force’ coalitions in France between 1948 and the general elections of June 1951, government hostility to the RDA was personified by several newly-appointed hard-line governors. Foremost among them was the Ivory Coast’s Laurent Péchoux.89 Mass arrests, party bans, and press censorship appeared increasingly irrational even so. Was the RDA menacing because of its inter-territorial organization? Or did the threat lie in its Communist connections? Neither viewpoint withstood scrutiny. For all its federal connections, the RDA rested on individual territory-based parties. Several of these were already haemorrhaging. And only two of them, Sékou Touré’s Guinean RDA branch and Djibo Bakary’s Parti Progressiste Nigérien, faced pressure from their grass-roots supporters for any kind of socialist transformation.90 As for the RDA’s alignment with the Communists in France, this, too, was fraught with the tensions of a loveless, unequal marriage. Surely negotiation with the RDA made more sense than driving local activists, trade unionists, and student protesters in West Africa’s port cities underground? Numerous Third Force politicians realized this. But they had a pre-condition: the RDA leadership had to break with the Communists. Only this would rupture the links made in French official minds between the RDA’s radical populism and Communist subversion.
Three senior politicians in France performed the necessary U-turn. Unsurprisingly, the first was RDA leader Félix Houphouët-Boigny. Second was the Martinique-born Senator for Guinea, Raphael Saller. Third was François Mitterrand, appointed Minister for Overseas France by Prime Minister René Pleven on 12 July 1950. Houphouët-Boigny pushed through the RDA’s disaffiliation from the PCF, splitting the party in the process as a minority of Communist diehards rallied to RDA secretary-general Gabriel d’Arboussier.91 Raphael Saller was Pleven’s closest adviser on colonial affairs. His achievement was to persuade his boss to seize the chance to drive a wedge between RDA moderates and the radical party branches in Guinea and elsewhere.92 With Pleven on board, Mitterrand began advocating the RDA’s rehabilitation. The colonial administrators identified with the previous crackdown, including Governor-General Béchard and his deputy, the Ivory Coast Governor Péchoux were replaced. The deal was sealed by Houphouët-Boigny’s January 1952 decision to affiliate his movement with the Union Démocratique et Sociale de la Résistance (UDSR)—which just happened to be Pleven and Mitterrand’s party.93 The RDA’s rightwards shift was more than a political bargain to end years of persecution; it also played into the power-struggle between the movement’s Paris leaders and their militant party sections, trade union followers, women’s groups and student supporters at the bottom.94 This battle was far from over.
The RDA was not alone in spurning its former mentor on the French left.95 West African Socialists also turned away from their metropolitan counterparts in the early 1950s. The actions of the RDA and of Senghor’s Senegalese Socialists in particular reflected their exasperation with the French left’s hypocrisy in colonial affairs. Communist anti-imperialism was less unequivocal than it seemed. Its guiding precept was hostility to capitalism, not to colonialism itself. Neither the PCF executive nor their rank-and-file members were as racially colour-blind as their internationalist rhetoric suggested. Time and again the Communists used the language of Marxist structuralism to stifle colonial demands for equality or national autonomy. Ever since Party leader Maurice Thorez disappointed Algerian hopes in 1939 by defining the colony as a ‘nation in the making’, the argument went that French-led modernization would be the catalyst to class formation or ‘proletarianization’ in Marxist terminology. This was identified as the prerequisite to genuine working-class liberation rather than the ‘false freedom’ advocated by colonial nationalists. It was a clever argument but impossible to sell to the very political leaders that the Communist Party disparaged. These limitations were amplified within the Socialist Party. It had struggled for years to reconcile its republican egalitarianism with enthusiastic support for empire. Socialist claims that colonial rule was justifiable as a modernizing, humanist project only seemed credible for a post-war instant: when the first, reformist French Union scheme was in preparation in 1945 and before the Party sanctioned war against the Vietminh in 1946.96
Despite the French left’s dismal colonial record, the French African politicians who served in the National Assembly after 1945 regarded French republicanism as a worthy political ideal. Steeped in French values, at home in the politicking and literary ferment of Paris, Senghor and Houphouët-Boigny especially were Fourth Republic ‘insiders’.97 Houphouët, as we have seen, became alienated from the RDA’s grass-roots as a result.98 African trade unions were increasingly unsympathetic; West African student groups still more so. Each suspected that the RDA executive had sold out: to UDSR politicians, to conniving colonial officials, to the comforts of Paris.99 Certainly, the UDSR recognized the need to burnish Houphouët’s credentials as a man of influence.100 Young educated city-dwellers were a key target and 1,320 bursaries were awarded to black African students to study in French universities by 1954. Up to four times that number studied in France with the financial backing of their families. But hopes that graduates would return home, their faith in France restored, proved misguided. Student journalists of the Federation of black African students in France spearheaded criticism of politicians seduced by ‘the system’.101
What about other parts of West Africa’s civil society? It is hard to fit either religious or literary dissent into a pattern of mounting friction between people and colonial regime. Yet each was highly significant. Rarely directly confrontational, the pull of Islamic devotional practice with its implicit rejection of French values and integrationist ideas highlighted how limited colonial influence over African cultural expression really was.102 This autonomous ‘Islamic sphere’ remained a marker of the superficiality of French control.103 Nor is it easy to see French churches or missionary societies as championing an alternative model of social integration. French missionary groups in Senegal and elsewhere, theoretically committed to racial equivalence in the eyes of God, proved less accommodating to black advancement within the ranks of West Africa’s Catholic churches. During and after the Second World War it was the Vatican that pushed for greater ‘Africanization’ of Senegal’s Catholic Church in defiance of the colony’s French apostolic elite whose positions of authority were threatened by it.104 The cultural assertiveness of black African writers and artists also shaped the form that decolonization took. The West African poets and essayists who discerned a uniquely African cultural resilience—or négritude (literally, ‘blackness’)—challenged colonialism’s capacity to remould the ideas and practices of colonized peoples. Indeed, the very eloquence of négritude writers disarmed imperialist presumptions of Africa’s backwardness.105
Real enough, the contesting visions of French Africa’s future between federalists and nationalists, between parties, across generations, and between secular republicans and the devout never spiralled out of administrative control as occurred in North Africa. But Maghreb disorder and the pullout from Indochina did have consequences south of the Sahara, encouraging Pierre Mendès France’s government to press ahead with plans for West African self-government over the winter of 1954.106 The outcome was the Gaston Defferre enabling law, passed by the newly-elected National Assembly in February 1956. The legislation marked a decisive turn away from assimilation. The ideal of cultural and political convergence between France and West Africa was replaced by recognition that independent states should chart distinct paths to autonomy, devising legislation in accordance with their local circumstances.107 Defferre was a good choice as the law’s advocate. A well-respected Marseilles mayor, the Socialist Defferre enjoyed his Prime Minister Guy Mollet’s confidence. He was given free rein to ensure that his eponymous legislation got through. The Gaston Defferre law was duly voted on 23 June 1956. It heralded the introduction of universal suffrage and the election of national governments throughout French West Africa, marking the culmination of the constitutional reforms toyed with since the launch of the French Union a decade earlier.108 And it helped convince French ministers and officials that they, and not the peoples of French West Africa, retained control over the pace and extent of decolonization.109 Even though French army commands throughout the region quietly activated plans to impose military control in case of major unrest, power, it seemed, was being devolved territory by territory without a fight.110
The politics of African claims to greater rights and entitlements, pursued incessantly since 1946, had reached a crossroads. Unwilling to meet each and every African demand, Mollet’s government deflected back to the individual colonies the tasks of defining the limits to welfare, rights, and benefits—and of finding the means to finance them. Alongside the election of national governments came the devolution of budgetary powers. For the first time, African electors would choose, not just their governing authority but the scope of its spending as well. Often interpreted as the beginning of the end of French political oversight and an accelerated transition towards national independence, this ‘territorialization’ of French West African politics marked a huge reverse for the advocates of confederation and inclusive imperial citizenship.111 With each territory shortly to match greater political autonomy with control of its own financial resources, the likelihood receded of pooled sovereignty or any redistribution of ‘national’ wealth from French West Africa’s richer coastal territories, Côte d’Ivoire first among them, to its poorer, land-locked ones.112
When explaining the absence of sustained political violence in the history of French West African decolonization one factor stands out. It is that the redesign of French imperial rule, one that embraced both its constitutional form and its basic purpose, enabled West African political leaders, trade unionists, and civil society groups to press demands for additional civil rights, improved working lives, and more inclusive politics. Challenging the political elites of post-war France to live up to their claims that colonialism would give way to authentic partnership, these West African voices grasped the opportunities offered by the rhetoric of reform, development, and shared imperial citizenship. In simple terms, West Africa’s political elites saw greater potential in exploiting the new rules of empire than in defying them.113 Equipped with the legislative instruments and institutional tools to press demands without recourse to violence, it became possible to navigate a peaceful route to decolonization. The dream of Eurafrique, the economic and cultural integration of France and French black Africa, meanwhile helped French politicians and investors stomach negotiations over withdrawal.
For all that, the idea of dialogue sustained by a combination of rights conceded and pledges irrevocably made should not be taken too far. The very different French approach to Sékou Touré’s Guinean RDA, the leading French West African political group to reject French tutelage in any form, reveals a different side to French colonial politics. First wooed, then cajoled, Touré’s independent Guinean state was ostracized from the club of franco-phone West African states that retained close political, financial, and cultural ties to France. Among these countries, the battle between Senegal’s future president Léopold Sedar Senghor and his Ivoirian rival, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, over the relationship between French West Africa and France also reminds us that it took some spectacular policy reversals to reinvent former political opponents, notably the ‘quasi-Communist’ RDA, as favoured partners once flight became policy.
The British administrations in Nigeria and the Gold Coast also struggled to keep one step ahead of popular protests triggered by economic problems, ethnic tensions, or unfulfilled government pledges. Anything but planned, one might even argue that decolonization in these two British colonial cases boiled down to the attempt to wrest the initiative for reform from local politicians increasingly able to press demands without serious threat of repression. This explanation may account for the pattern of flight solutions in British West Africa’s elite politics, but it remains limited all the same. For most Nigerians the balance of ethnic forces in an independent Nigeria was always more significant than the fine detail of British concessions (although the two were never mutually exclusive). For most Ghanaians, the condition of the agricultural economy, its cocoa sector especially, as well as the reaction upon it of Nkrumah’s piece-by-piece dismantling of chieftaincy politics were every bit as crucial as their famed status as British Africa’s first post-colonial nation state. The conclusion implicit in this is deceptively simple. The key to the success of Britain’s flight solutions in West Africa was less a matter of engagement with ‘constructive nationalism’ and more a reflection of the irrelevance of British preferences. It was to the credit of most senior officials and ministers that this was a trend they eventually chose not to buck. Keeping the peace in British and French West Africa was a triumph of adaptation, not planning. It also pointed the way to something deeper, the dawning recognition that decolonization need not represent the total breach so much feared by its long-term opponents. Perhaps empire could be ended with a whisper and not a scream after all.
