Following in Ghana’s footsteps, Britain’s other territories in West Africa – Nigeria, Sierra Leone and even the tiny sliver of land known as The Gambia, a miniature colony consisting of little more than two river banks – made their way up the independence ladder. The timetable for independence was determined not so much by any British reluctance to set them free but by local complications on the ground.
The birth of Nigeria as an independent state proved especially difficult. The most populous country in Africa, it was beset by intense and complex rivalries between its three regions, each of which was dominated by a major ethnic group with its own political party. No national party emerged.
The North, with an area comprising three-quarters of Nigeria’s territory and containing more than half the population, was largely Muslim and Hausa-speaking, accustomed to a feudal system of government run by the Fulani ruling class. Both Hausa and Fulani looked disdainfully on the people of the South. After travelling to Lagos for the first time in 1949, the principal Northern leader, the Sardauna of Sokoto, observed: ‘The whole place was alien to our ideas and we found the members of the other regions might well belong to another world as far as we were concerned.’ Few traces of the modern world – in education or economic life – had been allowed to intrude in the North. By 1950 there was only one Northern university graduate – a Zaria Fulani convert to Christianity. Southerners who migrated to the North were obliged to live in segregated housing and to educate their children in separate schools; they were also prevented from acquiring freehold titles to land. Northern Muslims were taught to regard Southerners as ‘pagans’ and ‘infidels’ and forbidden on both religious and administrative grounds to associate with Southerners.
The West, which included the capital, Lagos, was dominated by the Yoruba, who traditionally had been organised into a number of states ruled by kingly chiefs. Because of their early contact with Europeans and long experience of city life, the Yoruba had progressed far in education, commerce and administration and absorbed a high degree of Western skills.
In the Eastern region, on the other side of the Niger river, the Igbo, occupying the poorest, most densely populated region of Nigeria, had become the best educated population, swarming out of their homeland to find work elsewhere as clerks, artisans, traders and labourers, forming sizeable minority groups in towns across the country. Their growing presence there created ethnic tensions both in the North and among the Yoruba in the West. Unlike the Hausa-Fulani and the Yoruba, the Igbo possessed no political kingdom and central authority but functioned on the basis of autonomous village societies, accustomed to a high degree of individual assertion and achievement.
In addition there were some 250 ethnic minority groups, each with its own language, occupying distinct territories, amounting in total to one-third of the population. In the North the Hausa-Fulani constituted only about half of the population; some 200 other linguistic groups lived there, most of them in the lower North or ‘Middle Belt’, as it was called. In the West the Yoruba constituted about two-thirds of the population; and in the East, the Igbo, about two-thirds. In each region, minority groups resented the dominance of the three major ethnic groups and the neglect and discrimination they suffered as minorities and harboured ambitions to obtain their own separate states within Nigeria and the resources that would go with them. Some non-Muslim minorities in the North had long been engaged in struggles to overthrow their feudal Muslim overlords; Tiv resistance exploded in riots in 1960. In the West the Edo-speaking people of Benin province yearned to restore the old autonomy of the kingdom of Benin, once renowned for its artistic achievement. In the East the Ibibio and Efik hankered for the former glory of the Calabar commercial empire.
There was also an immense development gap between the North and the two Southern regions. At independence, after expanding its education system, the North, with 54 per cent of the population, still produced less than 10 per cent of the country’s primary school enrolments and less than 5 per cent of secondary enrolments. Only fifty-seven students at the University College in Ibadan out of a total of more than one thousand came from the North. The shortfall in qualified Northerners meant that many government positions were filled by highly educated Southerners, notably Igbos. On a national level, barely 1 per cent of Nigerian officials in higher executive posts were Northerners. A constant fear in the North was that its own traditions and conservative way of life would be undermined by Southern encroachment; the ruling aristocracy in particular were determined to protect their own position against radical change.
Finding a constitutional arrangement that satisfied so many diverse interests was a protracted business. The 1951 constitution lasted for no more than three years. The 1954 constitution was more durable. Each region was given its own government, assembly and public service and allowed to move separately towards self-government. The West and the East attained self-government in 1957 but then had to wait until 1959 for the North to catch up. The independence constitution provided for a federal structure that was regarded as an effective compromise balancing regional interests, though it left the North, because of the size of its population, in a commanding position, with a potential stranglehold over the political process, capable of dominating the combined weight of the other two regions.
Nevertheless, when Nigeria was finally launched as an independent state in 1960, it was with a notable sense of optimism. Led by popularly elected politicians, endowed with a strong, diversified economy and an efficient civil service, Nigeria, by virtue of its size, population and resources, was marked out as one of Africa’s emerging powers.
In Britain’s colonies in east and central Africa, because of the presence of vociferous and powerful white minorities, a different timetable was envisaged. Britain’s aim in postwar years was to develop what it called ‘multiracial’ societies there, a ‘partnership’ between white and black, albeit under white leadership. White leadership was regarded as indispensable for economic development. The white populations were the economic mainstay of each colony; they constituted the only reservoir of professional skills. Because the African peoples of the region had come into contact with European colonisation relatively recently, compared to West Africans, they were considered to be several generations behind in terms of political advancement. Whereas the first African nominated to the local legislature in the Gold Coast made his debut in 1888, the first African to sit in the legislative council in Kenya was appointed in 1944, in Tanganyika and Uganda in 1945, in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) in 1948, and in Nyasaland (Malawi) in 1949.
At any sign that Africans or Asian immigrants might advance at the expense of the white community, the white reaction was invariably hostile. Protracted battles were fought over the exact balance of representation between each community. In Kenya the British eventually decided on a ratio of two European representatives to one African and one Asian – 2:1:1. In Uganda, with a different population mix, the ratio was 1:2:1. In Tanganyika it was initially to have been 1:2:1, but as a result of strong European pressure, it was finally fixed at 1:1:1.
Determined to entrench white rule, the region’s white communities campaigned vigorously for the British government to establish two new dominions in Africa – one in East Africa comprising Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika, and one in Central Africa comprising Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. They made little headway in East Africa. But in Central Africa, by stressing the economic benefits to be derived from closer association and their commitment to the idea of ‘partnership’, they eventually won the approval of the British government for the establishment of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, even though there was persistent opposition from African populations who feared being placed under the control of reactionary whites intent on entrenching white minority rule. When explaining their idea of ‘partnership’, white Rhodesians invariably spoke of senior and junior partners, or, as the Southern Rhodesian prime minister, Sir Godfrey Huggins, put it more memorably, ‘the partnership between the horse and its rider’. But for the British government, the federation seemed a progressive step forward with its plans for developing ‘multiracial’ societies.
The whole strategy was blown off course by a rebellion against colonial rule in Kenya. The rebellion grew out of anger and resentment at the mass expulsion in postwar years of Kikuyu peasants from the White Highlands, an area of 12,000 square miles of the best agricultural land in the country, set aside for the exclusive use of white farmers. It spread to other sections of the Kikuyu people, to the Kikuyu reserves where long-standing grievances over land were already festering, and to Nairobi, where militant activists set up a central committee to direct the violence.
Taken by surprise by the scale of the rebellion, the colonial authorities ordered outright repression. They blamed the violence on the nationalist leader, Jomo Kenyatta, portraying him as a criminal mastermind who employed witchcraft and coercion in his drive for power and profit, and proceeded to rig his trial to justify their claims. But the repression they ordered, far from crushing the rebellion, turned into a full-scale war. At the height of the Emergency, as it was called, the government employed eleven infantry battalions, 21,000 police, air force heavy bombers and thousands of African auxiliaries to contain it. It took four years before the army was able to withdraw. With such a massive commitment needed to protect Kenya’s small white minority, British officials began to rethink their strategy.
No other revolt against British rule in Africa gained such notoriety as the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya. It was cited for years to come as an example of the atavistic nature of African politics lying just beneath the surface. White settlers, colonial officials, missionaries and the British government were unanimous in regarding Mau Mau as a sinister tribal cult affecting a largely primitive and superstitious people, confused and bewildered by their contact with the civilised world and prey to the malevolent designs of ambitious politicians. In the words of the official Colonial Office report published in 1960, Mau Mau was a subversive movement ‘based on the lethal mixture of pseudo-religion, nationalism and the evil forms of black magic’.
All the fear and hatred that the white community felt facing this threat focused intensely on the person of Kenyatta. No other figure in colonial Africa was so reviled. Everything about him – the grip he appeared to exert over the Kikuyu, the hypnotic effect of his eyes, his suspicious visits to the Soviet Union, his left-wing connections in London – increased their sense of loathing. Tracing the signs of African unrest back to the time of his return to Kenya in 1946 after a period abroad of fifteen years, they were convinced that he had brought with him an evil scheme to subvert the Kikuyu and drive out the whites.
British officials held fast to the same view. In 1960, a year after Kenyatta had completed his sentence of seven years’ imprisonment for ‘managing’ Mau Mau, the British governor, Sir Patrick Renison, refused to release him, describing him as ‘the African leader to darkness and death’ and claiming he still posed a threat to national security. Even though the British were soon thereafter obliged to release Kenyatta and, as they had done with other nationalist opponents, subsequently came to value his judgement and leadership, the stigma of Mau Mau and Kenyatta’s involvement in it remained as marked as before. The reality, however, was somewhat different.
Kenyatta’s career as a political activist had been one of the most adventurous of all nationalist leaders in Africa. Born in about 1896, educated by missionaries at the Church of Scotland headquarters near Nairobi, he had taken sundry jobs before becoming a full-time general secretary of the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA), a pressure group set up by the first generation of Kikuyu nationalists to campaign over land grievances. It was on behalf of the KCA that Kenyatta first travelled to London in 1929 bearing a petition on land grievances to the Colonial Office. The impression that he made on the missionary network in London who took an interest in his work was highly unfavourable. There were concerns about his poor English and shock at his unwholesome taste for expensive clothes and loose women. It was thought best that he should return to Kenya as soon as possible. But a West Indian talent-spotter for Comintern, George Padmore, who met him in London, recognised his potential. Within a few months of reaching London, Kenyatta had been taken on an extended tour of Europe and Russia. He returned to Russia in 1932 to study at Moscow’s special revolutionary institute for colonial candidates, the University of the Toilers of the East.
Being a Moscow-trained revolutionary, however, was only one of the roles that Kenyatta was adept at playing. After his return to London in 1933, he joined Professor Bronislav Malinowski’s classes in anthropology at the London School of Economics and duly published a study of Kikuyu life and customs entitled Facing Mount Kenya. He also worked briefly as an extra in Alexander Korda’s film Sanders of the River. During the war he retreated to a village in Sussex, worked as an agricultural labourer and lectured to British troops. He even volunteered to join the Home Guard. Outwardly, he seemed as much at home whether gossiping with local villagers in the pub in Sussex or striding down Piccadilly dressed flamboyantly in a red sports jacket and carrying a silver-headed cane. He had an English family, a wife, Edna, and a son.
By the end of the war, however, approaching the age of fifty, he hankered to return to Kenya, anxious to engage in the nationalist struggle. ‘I feel like a general separated by 5,000 miles from his troops,’ he once exclaimed with exasperation to Edna. By the time he reached Kenya in September 1946, the first stirrings of rebellion amongst the Kikuyu had already begun.
They were an industrious, able and acquisitive people, with a deep attachment to the land, numbering more than 1 million, the largest tribe in Kenya, and fast expanding. Living close to Nairobi and almost surrounded by the White Highlands, they had felt the impact of colonial rule more fully than most others. More than 100 square miles of Kikuyuland in the vicinity of Nairobi had been alienated for European settlement, a constant source of grievance. The cry for the return of ‘lost lands’ was the main demand of the Kikuyu Central Association. At the outbreak of war, the KCA’s opposition to government policies was deemed subversive and the movement was banned.
Another grievance over land was burgeoning in the main part of the White Highlands, the Rift Valley province. The land there had been cleared for white occupation largely by removing the pastoral Maasai people. As well as white landowners who established farms there, large numbers of Kikuyu peasants from Kikuyuland emigrated to the Rift Valley, keen to use the vast, undeveloped area for themselves. The Kikuyu ‘squatters’, as they were called, were welcomed by white farmers who needed a regular supply of labour. A system of labour tenancy emerged. In return for a plot of land to grow crops and graze their sheep and goats, Kikuyu squatters paid rent in labour and in kind. Many squatters were born and grew up in the Rift Valley and looked on the White Highlands as their home. Despite growing friction with white farmers, the squatters managed to survive as independent producers. By the mid-1940s, the population of Kikuyu squatters and their families had risen to about 250,000, one-quarter of the Kikuyu people.
In the postwar era, however, the squatter communities came under increasing threat. White farmers needing more land for their expanding operations, and requiring only wage labourers, imposed tight restrictions on squatter activities, forcing thousands to leave in destitution. The British government added to the pressure, setting aside a quarter of a million acres in the White Highlands for use by British ex-servicemen. In the three years following the end of the Second World War, some 8,000 white immigrants arrived in Kenya, escaping postwar austerity in Europe, bringing the total white population to 40,000.
Facing the loss of land and grazing rights and the destruction of their communities, the squatters embarked on a resistance campaign, binding themselves together with secret oaths. The Kikuyu traditionally used oaths for a variety of social purposes. In the 1920s, KCA leaders, impressed by the ceremonial accompanying the oath of allegiance to the Crown that the British employed, introduced their own oath of loyalty to the Kikuyu people. The oath involved holding a Bible in the left hand and a handful of earth in the right hand pressed to the navel, while swearing to serve the Kikuyu people faithfully. In the postwar era, members of the banned KCA, meeting in secret, devised a new oath of loyalty using only Kikuyu symbols: the meat of a goat replaced the Bible. The oathing campaign spread throughout the squatter communities in the Rift Valley. White farmers reported a mood of increasing truculence and incidents of cattle-maiming and sabotage.
In 1948 the District Commissioner of Nakuru in the Rift Valley, in his annual report, made the first official mention of the name Mau Mau. It was a name which in the Kikuyu language was meaningless. Its origin was lost in the Kikuyu passion for riddles. The authorities, convinced that it was a sinister secret society, outlawed the ‘Mau Mau Association’ in August 1950. But what they were really facing was an incipient revolt among the Kikuyu for which Mau Mau became, by common usage, the fearsome expression.
On his return to Kenya, Kenyatta rapidly assumed command of the Kenya African Union (KAU), a nationalist group formed in 1944 to campaign for African rights. His forceful personality, his powers of oratory and his flamboyant manner soon captivated the crowds who flocked to listen to him. Preferring a rural base in Kikuyuland to Nairobi, he bought a small farm, built a spacious house, filling it with books, pictures and mementoes from Europe, and married into the most powerful family in southern Kikuyuland, the Koinanges. His headquarters at Githunguri, where he was appointed principal of an independent teachers’ training school, became the centre of an extensive political network. His aim was to develop the KAU into a truly national movement. But the mass support that KAU won came largely from the Kikuyu tribe, as did its leadership. It was among the Kikuyu that the mood of anger against the government and against the whites was at its most intense.
Not only squatters in the Rift Valley were on the verge of rebellion. In the heavily populated Kikuyu reserves there was growing resentment of new conservation measures enforced by the government to prevent land degradation, adding to old grievances over ‘lost lands’ and government restrictions on African production of lucrative cash crops like coffee. The pressure on land in the Kikuyu reserves was aggravated further by senior tribal figures accumulating ever more land for themselves. Landless peasants from Kikuyuland, along with dispossessed squatters from the Rift Valley, poured into the slums of Nairobi.
In postwar years the African population of Nairobi doubled in size. More than half of the inhabitants were Kikuyu, their ranks swelled by a growing tide of desperate, impoverished vagrants. Adding to their numbers were groups of ex-servicemen returning from the war with high expectations of a new life but finding little other than poverty and pass laws. Unemployment, poor housing, low wages, inflation and homelessness produced a groundswell of discontent and worsening crime. Mixing politics and crime, the ‘Forty Group’ – Anake wa 40 – consisting largely of former soldiers of the 1940 age group who had seen service during the war in India, Burma and Ethiopia and other militants were ready to employ strong-arm tactics in opposing the government’s policies and in dealing with its supporters. The trade unions, gathering strength in Nairobi, carried the agitation further, conducting a virulent campaign against the granting of a royal charter to Nairobi. In the African press, too, the tone was becoming increasingly strident. By 1948, the oathing campaign, started by squatters in the Rift Valley and taken up in the Kikuyu reserves and in Nairobi, was in full swing. At fervent gatherings, Kikuyu songs, adapted from church hymns, were sung in praise of Kenyatta and prayers recited to glorify him. In all, several hundred thousand Kikuyu took the oath.
The rising temper of the Kikuyu made little impression on the British governor, Sir Philip Mitchell, a solitary, unapproachable figure from the old colonial school, contemptuous of African nationalists, more preoccupied with the recalcitrant white community than with signs of African discontent, and singularly ill-equipped to deal with the crisis unfolding before him.
Kenyatta, too, found difficulty in controlling the surge of militancy. He favoured constitutional means to oppose colonial rule but was outflanked by militant activists prepared to use violence. In 1951 a hardened group, including two prominent trade unionists, Fred Kubai and Bildad Kaggia, captured control of the Nairobi branch of the KAU, proceeded to gain a virtual stranglehold over the national executive and then formed their own secret central committee with plans for an armed uprising. Kaggia, a former staff sergeant in the army, had seen wartime service in Africa, the Middle East and England. Outbreaks of violence – murder, sabotage, arson and forced oathing – became more frequent.
The move towards violence split the Kikuyu people. Both the old Kikuyu establishment – chiefs, headmen and landowners – and the aspiring middle class – businessmen, traders, civil servants and government teachers – opposed violence. So did large numbers of Christian Kikuyu. But by 1952, much of the Kikuyu tribe was caught up in rebellion.
Kenyatta tried to ride out the turbulence, seeking to defuse the crisis rather than to stir it up. Leading activists in Nairobi, while using his name to justify their actions, regarded him with profound suspicion. When the government asked him to denounce Mau Mau publicly, he duly obliged, using a traditional Kikuyu curse. ‘Let Mau Mau perish for ever,’ he told a huge crowd in Kiambu in August 1952. ‘All people should search for Mau Mau and kill it.’ His speech infuriated the central committee. Summoned to a meeting of the central committee at KAU headquarters in Nairobi, he was clearly surprised to discover who its members were. ‘We said, “We are Mau Mau and what you have said at this Kiambu meeting must not be said again”,’ recalled Fred Kubai. ‘If Kenyatta had continued to denounce Mau Mau, we would have denounced him. He would have lost his life. It was too dangerous and he knew it. He was a bit shaken by the way we looked at him. He was not happy. We weren’t the old men he was used to dealing with. We were young and we were serious.’
As the violence grew worse, with daily incidents of murder, forced oathing and intimidation, a new governor, Sir Evelyn Baring, on the advice of his officials, concluded that the best way to deal with it was to lock up all KAU leaders. In October 1952, shortly after his arrival, Baring declared a state of emergency and ordered the detention of Kenyatta and 150 other political figures, a move taken by Mau Mau activists as tantamount to a declaration of war. In growing panic, white farmers in the Rift Valley expelled some 100,000 squatters, providing Mau Mau with a massive influx of recruits. Many headed straight for the forests of the Aberdares and Mount Kenya to join armed gangs recently established there. Far from snuffing out the rebellion, Baring’s action intensified it. It was only after the emergency was declared that the first white settler was murdered.
The brunt of the war, however, fell not on the whites but on loyalist Kikuyu. They became the target of Mau Mau leaders determined to enforce complete unity among the Kikuyu people before turning on the whites. Nearly 2,000 loyalists died. The official death toll of rebels and their supporters was listed as 11,500, though modern researchers put the real figure far higher. Some 80,000 Kikuyu were detained in camps, often subjected to harsh and brutal treatment. As the tide against Mau Mau turned, gang leaders in the forests tried to keep control by employing ever more perverted oaths, horrifying to the Kikuyu and to whites alike. By comparison, the white community escaped lightly. Though white farmers in isolated farmsteads often lived in fear of attack, after four years only thirty-two white civilians had been killed, less than the number who died in traffic accidents in Nairobi during the same period.
Baring was determined to pin the blame for all this on Kenyatta. ‘He desperately wanted a conviction and a quick one at that,’ wrote Baring’s biographer, Charles Douglas-Home. The difficulty was the lack of evidence and the shortage of witnesses. Baring authorised ‘rewards’ to be paid to witnesses willing to testify. Informing the Colonial Office of his decision, he wrote: ‘Every possible effort has been made to offer them rewards and to protect them, but no one can tell what will happen when they are confronted in court by Kenyatta’s formidable personality.’ The main prosecution witness, Rawson Macharia, was offered two years’ study at an English university, with all expenses paid, and, on his return to Kenya, a government job. Macharia testified that he had witnessed Kenyatta administer oaths to several people in 1950. Kenyatta denied the story and so did nine defence witnesses. However, the magistrate, a retired High Court judge, Ransley Thacker, regarded as a ‘sound chap’ by the white community, chose to accept Macharia’s evidence as the truth. ‘Although my finding means that I disbelieve ten witnesses for the defence and believe one for the prosecution, I have no hesitation in doing so. Rawson Macharia gave his evidence well.’ What was not known at the time was that on Baring’s instructions Thacker had been promised an ex gratia payment of £20,000 to compensate him for having to leave Kenya after giving his verdict, to avoid reprisal. For his part, Macharia subsequently admitted that his evidence against Kenyatta was false.
Thacker’s verdict was that Kenyatta was the mastermind behind Mau Mau who had used his influence over the Kikuyu to persuade them in secret to murder, to burn, to commit evil atrocities, with the aim of driving all Europeans out of Kenya. ‘You have let loose upon this land a flood of misery and unhappiness affecting the daily lives of the races in it, including your own people.’
Duly convicted, Kenyatta was imprisoned at an inaccessible spot in the northern desert called Lokitaung, and the government did its best to erase memory of him. Githunguri was turned into an administrative centre; Kenyatta’s house was pulled down and his small farm turned into an agricultural station. Baring publicly promised that never again would Kenyatta and other convicted leaders be allowed to return to Kikuyuland, not even when their sentences were finished.
In the aftermath of the rebellion, the British government recognised the need for more rapid African advancement if its strategy of developing a multiracial partnership was to survive. Notable progress was made with agrarian reform: restrictions preventing African farmers from growing a range of cash crops were removed; and in October 1959 the White Highlands were formally opened to all races. But political advancement was still hampered by white objections. The first African elections in 1957 brought eight elected Africans to the legislative council; they included the trade unionist Tom Mboya, and a minority Kalenjin leader, Daniel arap Moi. The following year the number of Africans increased to fourteen, giving them parity with white representatives, but this racial balance was expected to remain unaltered for ten years.
There still seemed ample time available to lay out long-term plans. When Britain’s Colonial Secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd, and the governors of East Africa gathered for a conference at Chequers in the English countryside in January 1959, they considered some likely dates for independence. Tanganyika, they agreed, would come first, but not before 1970; Uganda and Kenya would follow by about 1975.
Less than two months later, there was another explosion of violence, this time in Nyasaland, which rendered the idea of long-term planning obsolete. The root cause of the violence was mounting African opposition to the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland and to plans by its white leaders to obtain independent dominion status. The opposition was led by an elderly medical doctor, Hastings Banda, who had only recently returned to Nyasaland after spending forty-two years abroad, most of them in England. Before leaving London in 1958, Banda had called on the Colonial Secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd, an enthusiastic supporter of the Federation. Of their meeting, Lennox-Boyd recalled: ‘Banda said to me, “I go back to break up your bloody Federation.” I said: “This may well end in your detention.” We got on very well.’
Banda was an intensely conservative figure, an Elder of the Church of Scotland, with puritanical views on dancing and dress. As a doctor in north London, he enjoyed a prosperous middle-class life, owned a house, drove a small car, dabbled on the stock market and took to wearing a black homburg hat and carrying a rolled umbrella. He was renowned for many acts of generosity and so highly respected that patients in the waiting room of his surgery would stand up when he entered. In politics he tended not to venture beyond anything respectable. But from the time the idea was first promoted, he was vehemently opposed to Nyasaland’s inclusion in the Federation, campaigning tirelessly against it. When the British government gave the Federation its approval, Banda complained bitterly of the ‘cold, calculating, callous and cynical betrayal of a trusting, loyal people’.
Welcomed home as the saviour of his people, Banda, at the age of sixty, threw himself with remarkable energy into the task of building up the Nyasaland African National Congress into a mass movement. Touring one district after another, invariably dressed in a dark three-piece suit and black homburg hat even under a hot midday sun, he discovered, to his surprise, that he had a talent for mob oratory. Wherever he went, there were excited, cheering crowds, relishing his attacks on the ‘stupid’ Federation. ‘Things are hot here,’ he wrote to a colleague in November 1958. ‘I have the whole of Blantyre and Zomba on fire. Very soon I hope to have the whole of Nyasaland on fire.’
His campaign soon led to violence and disorder. Convinced that the government was facing a widespread conspiracy, including a plot to murder whites, the governor, Sir Robert Armitage, summoned Rhodesian troops in February 1959 to help keep order, thus exacerbating the crisis. He then declared a state of emergency, arrested Banda and hundreds of his supporters and banned the Nyasaland African National Congress. Far from restoring order, however, the emergency measures provoked greater disorder. Riots and demonstrations broke out, in which nearly fifty Africans died.
The report of an official inquiry into the violence had a devastating impact. Though finding that the governor was justified in taking emergency measures, it pointed out that they had turned Nyasaland into ‘a police state’. Moreover, the report challenged the British government’s contention that nationalist agitation over the Federation was confined to ‘a small minority of political Africans, mainly of self-seekers’. Opposition to the Federation, it said, was ‘deeply rooted and almost universally held’.
Britain’s entire strategy for the region was now in disarray. The report’s description of Nyasaland as ‘a police state’ reverberated around the world, severely damaging Britain’s reputation for progressive colonial management. Plans for the future of the Federation were also thrown in doubt. No longer were British ministers able to portray the Federation as a bold experiment in racial partnership. The difficulties of colonial rule were multiplying. In Northern Rhodesia, the authorities, fearing disorders in the 1959 election there, banned one militant group advocating a boycott of the polls and arrested its leader, Kenneth Kaunda. In Kenya there was uproar over the death of Mau Mau detainees in a prison camp. Where Britain had once been in the vanguard of progress towards colonial emancipation, now it was seen to be trailing behind France, its standing much impaired. But what British ministers feared above all, in the wake of the Nyasaland emergency, were further outbreaks of anti-colonial violence that available British forces would be stretched to control.
The change of course in 1959 was abrupt. Britain jettisoned all long-term plans for independence and accelerated the whole process. No longer would African political progress be held up by the objections of white settlers. ‘Any other policy would have led to terrible bloodshed in Africa,’ maintained the Colonial Secretary Iain Macleod, who pushed through the new programme. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan sounded the retreat in January 1960 during an African tour to Ghana, Nigeria, Southern Rhodesia and South Africa. ‘The wind of change is blowing through the continent, and whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact,’ he said in Cape Town. ‘We must all accept it as a fact and national policies must take account of it.’
Neither Macmillan nor Macleod believed that the remaining African colonies were ready for independence. Most were economically weak; all were inadequately prepared. But the risks of moving rapidly in Africa were now outweighed by the dangers of moving too slowly. Macmillan was especially fearful of the advance of communist influence. ‘As I see it,’ he said, ‘the great issue in the second half of the twentieth century is whether the uncommitted peoples of Asia and Africa will swing to the East or the West.’ To drive nationalism back, he maintained, would be to drive it into the hands of the communists.
In short order, Kenya’s white community were told they would have to accept African majority rule. Opening a constitutional conference in London in January 1960, Macleod declared: ‘We intend to lead Kenya to full self-government, or, if I may use a plainer word, to independence.’
When African politicians pressed for the release of Kenyatta, the authorities eventually agreed. Released in 1961, Kenyatta made strenuous efforts to overcome the fear and suspicion with which whites regarded him, making clear his disdain for Mau Mau. ‘We are determined to have independence in peace, and we shall not allow hooligans to rule Kenya,’ he said in 1962. ‘We must have no hatred towards one another. Mau Mau was a disease which has been eradicated, and must never be remembered again.’ In his book Suffering without Bitterness, published in 1968 when he was president, he was even more forthright in denouncing Mau Mau: ‘Those who built up an organisation of unbridled violence in Kenya were never the political associates or executive colleagues of Kenyatta.’
Banda too was released and quickly won British assent to African majority rule in Nyasaland. The battle over the Federation, however, was protracted. It raged on for three years as white politicians fought tooth and nail to keep it intact, railing against British treachery. Its demise in 1963 added to the mood of distrust and bitterness among Rhodesian whites who regarded Britain’s withdrawal from Africa as an act of surrender to the forces of black extremism with dangerous implications for their own position.
The speed of the change meant that colonies in east and central Africa advanced towards independence with a minimum of trained local manpower. Whereas the Gold Coast could boast some sixty lawyers by the late 1920s, Kenya’s first African lawyer did not begin to practise his profession until 1956. In Northern Rhodesia only thirty-five Africans had gained higher education by 1959; in Nyasaland the figure was twenty-eight. Not until 1957 was an African appointed a district officer in Tanganyika. In 1961, the year of Tanganyika’s independence, every senior civil servant in Dar-es-Salaam, every provincial commissioner and fifty-five out of fifty-seven district commissioners were still British expatriates.
Using the old Colonial Office criteria for self-government, British officials estimated at the time that a minimum period of between ten and fifteen years of intensive training was needed to prepare reasonably efficient and stable modern administrations. But in the rush to transfer power, all previous rules were discarded. In West Africa the Nigerians had participated in elections to the legislature thirty-eight years before independence; in Ghana it had been thirty-two years. In Tanganyika the period between the first national election and independence was a mere thirty-nine months. Whereas Nigeria had nine years of ‘responsible’ government before independence and Ghana six years, in the case of Tanganyika it was nineteen months.
So rapid was the pace of change that in some cases British officials dealing with arrangements for the transfer of power – new constitutions, elections and parliamentary legislation – were hard pressed to complete them in time. The drafting of the Independence Order in Council for Uganda was finished only one week before the independence date. In Northern Rhodesia negotiations over the transfer of mineral rights owned by the British South Africa Company were still going on behind a tea-tent at a garden party in the grounds of Government House a few hours before independence.
For all the unseemly haste, the transfer of power was accomplished efficiently and with a remarkable amount of goodwill. One by one, the new states emerged amid much jubilation and to the world’s applause. In 1961 came Sierra Leone and Tanganyika; in 1962, Uganda; in 1963, Kenya and Zanzibar. In 1964 Nyasaland gained independence as Malawi and Northern Rhodesia became Zambia. In 1965 tiny Gambia was set up as an independent state. The three southern Africa territories – the ‘fleas in the Queen’s blanket’ – soon followed: Bechuanaland (Botswana) and Basutoland (Lesotho) in 1966 and Swaziland in 1968.
Whatever their experience of British rule, African leaders were fulsome in the tributes they paid. Dr Banda, commenting on his year’s imprisonment by Britain, remarked: ‘It was the best turn the British ever did for me.’ Kenneth Kaunda, twice jailed by the British authorities, referred proudly to the fact that independence in Zambia had been achieved without bitterness. Seretse Khama, once banished from Bechuanaland because of his marriage to an English girl, duly became president of Botswana, deeply attached to the British. The Sierra Leone leader, Sir Milton Margai, when asked at a London conference on what date he would like his country to become independent, burst into tears and said he never expected to live long enough to be asked that question. In his independence message, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa of Nigeria spoke warmly of Britain’s colonial contribution, ‘first as masters, then as leaders, finally as partners, but always as friends’. But the most poignant speech, in the circumstances, was made by Kenyatta. ‘We do not forget the assistance and guidance we have received through the years from people of British stock: administrators, businessmen, farmers, missionaries and many others. Our law, our system of government and many other aspects of our daily lives are founded on British principles and justice.’
It was all in marked contrast to what happened in the Belgian Congo.