Decolonization in Africa

John D. Hargreaves

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317891130
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

John Hargreaves examines how the British, French, Belgian, Spanish and Portuguese colonies in tropical Africa became independent in the postwar years, and in doing so transformed the international landscape. African demands for independence and colonial plans for reform - central to the story - are seen here in the wider context of changing international relationships.

CHAPTER ONE
Conditions of Tranquility in Black Africa

During the 1920s those citizens of western Europe who were aware that their governments controlled substantial territories and populations in tropical Africa usually assumed this to be a fact of nature, or at least of history. Over much of the continent small numbers of white men appeared to be governing their African subjects with relative ease and economy; where signs of resistance did appear they were commonly shrugged off as the dying kicks of moribund cultures. Some regarded colonial empire as the white man's burden, some as his nest-egg for the future; but very few could have imagined that it would be substantially liquidated within half a century. The terms in which the architects of the Paris peace settlement described the inhabitants of the former German and Turkish empires - peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world - were widely accepted as applicable to most of the African continent.

But not quite to all. Different conditions applied in both north and south of the land-mass. Around the Mediterranean coasts well-structured Islamic societies existed; in western Asia the peacemakers acknowledged that these had reached 'a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized', though subject to external advice and assistance. Egypt, never brought formally within this mandate system, achieved nominal independence in 1922. But British troops remained, to reinforce the advice and assistance which continued to be offered by a powerful High Commissioner; and the international sovereignty of the Egyptian monarchy was still limited by treaty. And neither France in the Maghreb nor Italy in Libya believed their Muslim subjects to have reached the stage of even conditional independence.

European control was tightest in Algeria, where settlers from the European shores of the Mediterranean, numbering between an eighth and a tenth of the population, controlled half of the land north of the Sahara desert, including all the most fertile areas. French myths of assimilation contrasted with the realities of economic exploitation and racial ascendancy; although ultimate control of what were technically three départements of metropolitan France was centralized in Paris, locally power was in the hands of colons who resisted even modest concessions to the Muslim majority. Morocco and Tunisia, where foreign settlement and exploitation of mineral resources were increasing on a somewhat lesser scale, were Protectorates, where international treaties obliged France to acknowledge the identity of formerly independent nations (while in the north and south of Morocco Spain ruled on similar terms). The French administration had to some degree succeeded in appropriating the secular if not the religious authority of their clients, respectively the Sultan and the Bey; but locally they also had to strike bargains with wealthy Muslim potentates like the Glaoui family of Marrakesh, whose power rested on formidable combinations of religious charisma, commercial wealth and private armies. The breakdown of such alliances presented the most immediate threats to colonial control; between 1921 and 1926 'Abd al-Krim led a formidable armed revolt in the Rif mountains, initially directed against Spain and later against France also. In Libya Italy faced similar threats, notably from Muhammad Idris, leader of a Sufi desert brotherhood, the Sanusiyya, and of a major rebellion during the war. In 1919 they came to terms with him, conceding substantial measures of local self-government and civil liberty throughout the colony; but with the advent of Mussolini these concessions were withdrawn. Large-scale Italian settlement resumed, and so did Sanusi resistance.

In the longer run a greater threat to alien rule than that from the essentially conservative hierarchies of Sufi Islam was presented by salafi doctrines of reform and modernization. The religious call to return to the foundations of the faith, as heard by younger Muslims in the growing towns, was often married with secular doctrines of revolutionary nationalism inspired from Europe. In 1919 the Emir Khaled (an officer in the wartime French army, and grandson of the nineteenth-century resistance hero 'Abd al-Kader) petitioned President Woodrow Wilson to support the claim of Algerian Muslims for full French citizenship. When it became clear that the French intended to reject such appeals to their own professed principle of assimilation, other ex-servicemen and migrant workers began to assert the rights of a separate Algerian nation. Their Paris-based organization, the Étoile Nord-Africaine led by Messali Hadj, received some encouragement from French Communists and other sympathizers. But the French authorities in North Africa maintained strong police surveillance (far more effectively than in more distant colonies), and locally based political parties like the Tunisian Destour of 1920 and the Moroccan League of 1927, had to be circumspect in their demands for civil rights. And in the mosques the French encouraged more old-fashioned Muslim clerics to temper the influence of salafi doctrine.

Modernizing influences enjoyed more freedom in Egypt. After 1922 the British could still use their influence to persuade the monarch to appoint moderate ministers, prepared to tolerate continued military occupation in practice. But the nationalist demands of the largely middle-class Wafd party were stimulated by threats of violent action from radical students, Muslim fundamentalists of various schools, trade unionists and army officers. One continuing cause of anti-British protest was the government of the Sudan, which a diplomatic compromise of 1899 had constituted as an Anglo-Egyptian condominium, but where Egyptians were in practice allowed little influence over government. So long as educated Sudanese tended to sympathize with Egypt, British administrators sought alliances with the more co-operative Sufi orders, treating them as more authentic spokesmen of the Sudanese people; they eventually allied themselves with the powerful brotherhood led by 'Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi, posthumous son of the prophet who had resisted both the Egyptians and the British in the 1880s.

Muslim North Africa was thus not a tranquil region, even in the 1920s. But the European military presence was relatively strong, and it was widely assumed that the physical and cultural barrier of the Sahara desert would prevent its rebellious spirits from infecting Black Africa.

The south of the continent seemed somewhat more tranquil, being under the control of settled populations of European origin who were fully confident of survival in the strenuous modern world. The United Kingdom had completed its formal decolonization of the Union of South Africa in 1910, the war of 1899-1902 having shown that its important economic and strategic interests would have to be protected by collaboration with representatives of the white population rather than by military force. The First World War proved the value of that strategy when the less intransigent Afrikaner nationalists had joined with London-oriented capitalists in supporting the allied cause; but J. C. Smuts, the key figure in that coalition, had displayed, notably by the terms on which he assumed the Mandate for former German South-West Africa, the clear intention of white South Africans to pursue their own imperial mission at the expense of earlier inhabitants of the region. This new empire would be based on some form of compromise among the agrarian, mining and industrial interests of the white population; even if in the longer run there might be limited opportunities for an African petite bourgeoisie, the primary role of the Africans would be to provide reserves of unskilled labour in their constricted and impoverished homelands.

This programme for post-colonial development, would, it was already clear, be challenged by different groups within the Union. Afrikaner extremists aimed to establish an exclusive racial hierarchy based on apartheid - a term implying separation from the Anglo-Saxon enemy as well as from the non-white majority. In 1922 Smuts had to use force to suppress Afrikaner Republican commandos who supported white miners, on strike to preserve their differential privileges. Threats to the Smuts consensus from non-whites were less immediate. The Coloured population, which under the 1910 settlement still enjoyed substantial civil and political rights in Cape Province, seemed easily reconcilable; the immigrant Indian community of Natal, where Gandhi had served a political apprenticeship, was more articulate, but no great threat in isolation. The protests and petitions of the relatively small elite of educated African Christians, as voiced through the South African Native National Congress founded in 1912, still tended to be deferential in tone, expressing hopes that the British monarch would intervene paternally to protect his South African subjects against those to whom he had entrusted their government. Potentially the greatest threat lay in the growing African labour force. The Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU) of Clements Kadalie, an immigrant worker from Nyasaland, led strikes of Cape Town dockers in 1919, and of miners on the Rand in 1920. Later in the decade the ICU claimed 100,000 members, some in the impoverished rural areas from which the migrant miners came. But there was no united labour movement; most white trade unionists regarded Black workers as threats to their own high living standards, rather than as allies against capitalism. Even the attempts of the South African Communist party to recruit African members were marred by doctrinaire tactical errors, as well as by the inherent difficulties of mobilizing temporary migrants. So the many manifestations of African resistance, whether constitutional or militant, failed to challenge white control. Instead of political rebellion, African victims of social and racial injustice looked for consolation to independent churches, 'Ethiopian' or Zionist, which claimed a million members by 1936. Though many whites feared that these might foster dangerous racial doctrines, they presented no immediate threat.

Foundations of Colonial Control in Black Africa

Although, with the partial exception of Egypt, internal challenges to European control in North and South Africa were in their early stages, they were stronger than among the Black peoples who inhabited the vast central regions of the continent. That they existed at all caused some concern to foreign rulers in those regions which appreciated their historic links of commerce and religion with the Muslim North, or the sense of racial solidarity which might be aroused during temporary labour-service in the Union. A perceptive officer of the Kenya government had noted during the war the danger of a conjunction between Islamic propaganda and 'Ethiopian' ideas of 'Africa for the Africans'.¹ But in the 1920s the peoples of Black Africa seemed centuries short of any capacity to stand by themselves in the modern world. With no immediate threats evident from anti-imperialist parties in the metropolis, from foreign states or from their African subjects, colonial governments appeared stably balanced on a sort of tripod of acquiescence. What has been called 'the tranquil assumption of the long-term character of colonial rule'² was rarely questioned.

1. Minute of October 1917, quoted John Lonsdale, 'Some Origins of Nationalism in East Africa' JAH, 9 (1968): 132-3.

2. K E. Robinson, The Dilemmas of Trusteeship (1965), p. 7.

This confident tranquillity was not based on the presence of overwhelming military force. A Commission of 1935 declared somewhat smugly that:

To set down two or three British officials at an outstation to rule 100,000 natives, with a handful of police to keep order, is a customary British risk which many years of colonial development has proved to be successful.³

3. P. P., 1934-35, VII, Cmd 5005, 'Disturbances on the Copper Belt...', p. 61.

But it was not only in British colonies that small numbers of white men, unsupported by any considerable investment of metropolitan resources, were able to impose laws, collect taxes and exact labour from African subjects. During periods of conquest small but welldisciplined armies had used modern firearms to overcome courageous resistance from larger African forces, and later the deadly new weapon of air-power was used effectively and economically against rebels in Somaliland and the Sudan. But continuing foreign rule depended more on collaboration than on force. Colonial armies were organized for external defence as much as internal security - or, in the French case, as reinforcements of imperial power. Even so, they were of modest size. Belgium's African empire, which maintained a Force Publique of 16,000 for a population of around 13 million, was heavily militarized by comparison with the four British West African colonies, whose Frontier Force numbered 8,000 in a population twice as large. Settler colonies did have the reserve resource of white militias, but men with farms and businesses to run could be mobilized only in real emergency.

In normal times public order in British Africa was the responsibility of civilian police forces, separated from the military at early stages of colonial rule. These were rarely powerful repressive agencies, as regards either their capacity to gather political intelligence or their numerical strength. When the forces of Northern and Southern Nigeria were amalgamated in 1930 there was an establishment of eighty-five officers (plus some African Chief Inspectors) for a population estimated at 20 millions. The total strength of the Nyasaland Police was usually around 500 men.⁴ In rural areas police duties were executed by Native Administration forces (who often adapted crude pre-colonial methods of law enforcement) or by small units of uniformed Court Messengers. There were indeed frequent complaints about the ways in which such forces collected taxes, recruited labour or enforced colonial law, but these usually alleged unsupervised acts of extortion, partisanship or vindictiveness rather than centrally directed tyranny.

4. T. N. Tamuno, The Police in Modern Nigeria (Ibadan, 1970), p. 66; John McCracken, 'Coercion and Control in Nyasaland: Aspects of the History of a Colonial Police Force', JAH, 27 (1986): 130-1; cf. D. Killingray, 'The Maintenance of Law and Order in British Colonial Africa', AA, 85 (1986): 411-37.

The confidence with which most District Commissioners and commandants de cercle exercised their extensive powers was thus not founded wholly, or even primarily, on the coercive force at their direct disposal, but on their belief that their technical, moral and racial superiority was acknowledged by their subjects. Power, good imperialists believed, did not flow only from the barrel of a gun, but from scientific and technological knowledge; having expedited conquest, this would now ensure the material and moral progress of die conquered. Their faith in colonial expertise now seems to have been complacentiy exaggerated; the fallibility of western science and the relevance of much indigenous technical knowledge have become familiar themes in recent literature. But the early colonizers could perform enough spectacular conjuring tricks to convince many Africans that they did possess supe...