Decolonization

Raymond Betts, Raymond F. Betts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415318211
• eBook ISBN: 9781134368372
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Raymond F. Betts considers the 'process' of decolonization and the outcomes which have left a legacy of problems, drawing on numerous examples including Ghana, India, Rwanda and Hong Kong. He examines:

• the effects of the two World Wars on the colonial empire
• the expectations and problems created by independence
• the major demographic shifts accompanying the end of the empire
• the cultural experiences, literary movements, and the search for ideology of the dying empire and the newly independent nations.

With an annotated bibliography and a chronology of political decolonization, Decolonization gives a concise, original and multi-disciplinary introduction to this controversial theme and analyzes what the future holds beyond the empire.

1 Empire in the afternoon

The interwar years

Only twice in the twentieth century did colonial empire acquire the unity and grandeur that its proponents desired. Both occasions were expositions, held in the capital cities of the two greatest imperialist powers of the time: Great Britain and France. The British Empire Exposition of 1924 was held in Wembley Park in London; the International Colonial Exposition was held in 1931 in the Bois de Vincennes in Paris. Each exposition was an elaborate effort to display and advertise empire as colorfully varied but purposefully well ordered. Miniaturized and sanitized, each gave the viewer the immediate illusion of a whole that exceeded the sum of its parts, a worldwide enterprise of divergent peoples and ecologically different territories brought together under one flag for the declared benefit of colonizer and colonized alike. As the brochure for the British Empire Exposition announced, “There the visitor will be able to inspect the Empire from end to end.”

The seeming order of it all, the impressive but easily encompassed reality of it all (170 Chinese workers were to be found at the Hong Kong section which took “the form of an exact reproduction of a street in Hong Kong”) on the 216 acres of London park serving as a local expression of the one-quarter of the globe then under British control, suggested rather enduring and well-structured form. The French International Colonial Exposition was an even grander effort to express a lesser colonial empire, laid out across 500 acres. With one of its principal buildings designed to be the permanent Museum of Colonies, the French planners made a public and most visible statement of historical intent. A bas-relief that ran around the building depicted the French colonial world and, at 1,200 square meters in total length, was the largest such sculpture ever executed, an artistic expression of the imagined place France occupied in the world and in modern history.

These two expositions suggested the first of the two principal perspectives from which colonial empire was measured and assessed. Seen at a great distance, which was from the detached metropolitan view of things, the enormous diversity of cultures, people, and environments was given an orderly yet dramatic assembly that was happily wondered at. On the neatly landscaped grounds of Wembley the visitor was invited to tour the world “at a minimum of cost, in a minimum of time, with a minimum of trouble, studying as you go the shop windows of the British Empire,” or so stated the official brochure.

The second perspective was the close-at-hand view of things, shaped by the experience of the local colonial official, the British “district officer” or the French commandant, the person given the administrative responsibility for maintaining the pax colonia, that so-called colonial peace which primarily consisted of assuring order and collecting taxes. This dual activity was not done single-handedly, of course. There was need of collaborators, of locals with power (tribal chiefs and mandarins) and influence (merchants and traders). Their positions now being maintained and reinforced by the European officers, these individuals stood to benefit from the colonial experience. Equally significant were the interpreters who translated the commands and wishes of the Europeans, along with complaints and requests of the local population. Even though all of the colonial powers had established schools for training administrators, the language gap was an important one in preventing understanding and in confusing purpose.

Generally assuming what has been called an “enclave mentality,” the Europeans in the colonial territories remained socially and geographically separated from the indigenous peoples, and therefore seldom encouraged a meeting of minds. In his novel, A Passage to India (1924), E. M. Forster describes a “bridge party” arranged so that the two women visitors from England, who are also central characters of the story, may meet “real” Indians, as they had desired. The two groups stand apart facing each other on the lawn, perhaps thirty feet apart physically but separated culturally by an immeasurable distance. Whether in India or Indochina, Senegal or Somaliland, the unbridged distance was great. If European colonial attitudes toward the colonized varied, they usually ranged narrowly between undisguised contempt and romantic condescension. The term “native,” now so derisive in connotation, was then a descriptive term of the essence of the colonial world which consisted of objects to be viewed, examined, and cataloged as part of a particular setting. In this sense anthropologists and administrators were as one: concerned with living among but standing apart from the peoples they officially encountered. In the process they defined themselves and their own culture in a negative manner, as not being what the colonized people were, as being distinct from what the local cultures “demonstrated.” Popular terms to describe one or the other were: childlike, primitive, superstitious, irresponsible. The Europeans were seen, by themselves, as beneficially contrary. When Norman Leys, a British medical officer, wrote of his experiences in Kenya in the first decade of the twentieth century, he said that the two great contributions of the British to Africa were the railroad and the hall of justice. Cultural advancement and order, the much vaunted ideals of Europe before World War I, were what the Europeans thought they were providing the rest of the world.

The rhetoric of imperialism as expressed in book prefaces and after-dinner speeches was regularly cast on a high plane. No one better summed up the imperial ideal than did Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India between 1899 and 1905, whose language was only matched by his resplendent appearance in his official portrait as viceroy. In a speech given in Birmingham in 1908, he spoke of empire as an “inspiration” and then asserted that empire must give to “the people on the circumference . . . what they cannot otherwise or elsewhere enjoy; not merely justice or order, or material prosperity, but the sense of partnership in a great idea.”

That idea was European rule, declared to be beneficent and usually summarized for home consumption in one of two terms: “civilizing mission” or “White man’s burden,” the latter being the title of Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem (1899) which was directed by the English poet to the Americans as commentary of what they must do and might expect as they assumed responsibility in the newly conquered Philippine Islands.

From our contemporary perspective such terms and the notions they embraced are abhorrent. They are at best pretentious and at worst racist. They further express the peculiar geography of imperialism wherein Europe was the center of world affairs. In simple cultural geometry, the world consisted of two vast circles, a core and a periphery (Curzon’s “circumference”). From the core, Western Europe, radiated outward those attributes we describe today as “modern.” They were defined as technological, organizational, and rational. They were displayed in modern cities with efficient transportation systems, in parliamentary government and capitalist corporations, in university degrees and scientific research, in the market system and the industrial process. The French critic and novelist Pierre Mille caustically remarked on this attitude in 1905 that “the Chinese, having no railroads, mechanical textile machinery, no Napoleon and no Moltke, are extremely inferior to us.” As he obviously implied, the link between technological advancement and cultural superiority was easily made.

That superiority was also assumed to be timely, an expression of historical circumstances. The expression “advanced” as a term descriptive of the condition of European civilization was synonymous with “forward,” the position in which the Europeans placed themselves in the march of time. This condition is what Joseph Conrad had accepted in Heart of Darkness (1902), when the narrator Marlow comments parenthetically about the Africans aboard his ship heading up the Congo:

I don’t think a single one of them had any clear idea of time, as we at the end of countless ages have. They still belonged to the beginning of time – had no inherited experience to teach them as it were.

Marlow speaks, as today’s post-modernist critics would argue, as the master narrator, the individual of the culture which considered all of humankind linearly arranged – through ages, periods, and times – from still obscure beginnings to the now, the “modern,” of the enlightened Western condition and ideal. (“Darkness” and “light” were the extremes, and this visual metaphor, so ironically and heavily used by Conrad in his famous novella, was commonplace in the rhetoric of empire.) As the world was thus made to converge on the European present, its configurations, its meaning and purpose were determined by the Europeans as well. The Europeans had a “planetary consciousness,” an awareness of global proportions and a desire to define what they saw and encountered.¹ They were the “discoverers” who established the dimensions and the measures of whatever fell before their gaze – or under their boot. The names and nomenclature were European: French Guinea and the Belgian Congo, Mount Cook (New Zealand), and Victoria Falls (Zimbabwe); protectorates (the form of French rule over Tunisia and, briefly, of British rule over British East Africa, to become Kenya in 1920); and federations (French Indochina and the Federated Malay States). The point of view was European: the “maidan” as a grassy line of division between English and indigenous residential areas in urban centers; the governor-general’s palace in Dakar on the “plateau,” the high land overlooking the sea and the city; the Litoranea Libica, the grand coastal road constructed by the Fascists in Libya and inaugurated by Benito Mussolini in a motorcade in 1937.

Even the history itself was European: discoveries and explorations came from without and with them came the assumption that the “modern” phase of history was initiated by the Europeans. “Precolonial” was a popular descriptive adjective for “before,” and it frequently contained the assumption of the rudimentary and the primitive. More than one author went so far as to assert that African history began with the arrival of the Europeans. Even to this day something of that peculiar cultural consciousness that allowed easy division of the world into the English dualism of “home” and “abroad”² or the French of métropole and territoires d’outre-mer is found in the American academic custom of lumping all of history that is neither American nor European into the category of “non-Western.”

In an obvious way the two colonial expositions discussed in this chapter can be seen as narratives of power, the arrangement of lands and peoples according to European purposes and principles. The arrangement was of viewer and viewed, of dominant and dominated, of colonizer and colonized. Both expositions offered visions of a world constructed by Europeans and obtaining its meaning in those terms alone. Here were the British empire and the French overseas empire, the national adjectives standing as the exclusive determinants. And here in temporary buildings on two sites far removed from colonial lands was declared testimony of a European-dominated world. “French expansion,” wrote Pierre Lyautey in a book (L’Empire colonial français) printed on the occasion of the French colonial exposition, “is durable and permanent.” The tautology only reinforced his argument.

Even though World War I had shattered many illusions about progress and Europe’s assumed justifiable supremacy, the significant changes in attitudes toward colonies were much more of tone and temper than of purpose. Grafted to the older idea of “civilizing mission” was the newer one of needed colonial economic development for the benefit of all humankind. Strident nationalist arguments were replaced by an international sentiment in part engendered by a recognition in Great Britain and France of the contribution of the colonies to the war effort, as the suppliers of manpower and goods. Yet still affirmed were those conditions that are most easily appreciated in the contemporary literary term “binary opposition.” The metropolitan country and the colonial regions formed contrasts in European eyes: the one considered to be “advanced,” as determined by its high degree of organization, technology, and skill; the other seen as “backward,” as evidenced by its rudimentary or decadent forms of government, its unproductive way of doing things, its lack of the skills, motivation, and level of cultural attainment necessary to generate economic development. One of the statements most clearly expressing this binary opposition was that made in 1931 by Pierre Ryckmans, soon to be governor of the Belgian Congo (1934–60). His words were addressed to a group of young lawyers in Brussels: “What we must overcome in order to make the Black [African] work is not so much his laziness as his disdain for ourconcept of work, his indifference to ourconcept of wages.”³ Residing within this remark are all the conditions which critics of European imperialism would later denounce: a barely disguised racism; a blanket treatment of the “other,” of an imagined collectivity here expressed in the collective personal noun, “the Black”; of disdain or disrespect for other cultures; of an assumption that history, considered as the forward march of progress, sided with the Europeans, as suggested in the originally underlined personal possessive “ours.” Put otherwise, modern European imperialism was unidirectionally driven toward European needs and intentions in thought such as this, the thought of those who supported empire.

Armed with such thought, few persons who considered the colonial situation ever enquired, as did King George V, whose last recorded and only memorable words were: “How is the Empire?”

The answer, as we now know, ought to have been “going, going, gone.” But hindsight is the wisdom of historians, not of the actors and thinkers of the time. In 1924 and again in 1931 the imperial enterprise seemed quite secure. And it certainly was widely and unabashedly celebrated. The United States was dotted with movie and vaudeville theaters named “empire” and “imperial,” while the Chrysler Motor Company gave new motion to the concept when it named its new, top-of- the-line model “Imperial” in 1931. Out West, in the far reach of the American continental empire, Hollywood encouraged the establishment of an English settlement colony of sorts for those actors in the escapist movies of the 1930s who were so successful at playing duty-bound sergeants-major, resolute colonels, and, occasionally, generals with bushy eyebrows supposedly grown from the experience of battlefield command in the northern passages of India or across the vast sweep of the Arabian Desert. Never was loyalty to the imperial idea affirmed with greater resolution than when Shirley Temple in the film version of Kipling’s short story Wee Willie Winkie (1935) stood at attention and announced her devotion to Queen and empire, no matter that empire was strictly a male affair and that Kipling’s little hero was just that, a young boy.

What was projected on the movie screen was also newly mapped out with global air routes. Enthusiasts expected empire to be more closely and quickly bound together by such companies as KLM, Air France, and British Imperial Airways, all in operation by the 1930s. The overly optimistic Lord Thomson, British minister of air in 1931, embarked on what he considered a new and luxurious service from west to east, from a mooring mast at Cardington, north of London, to another in Karachi, then part of British India. Between the two, the imperially proportioned airship R-101 (777 feet in length) would make its progress, laden with Lord Thomson’s ample luggage, with champagne and fine china to allow a banquet aboard at Ismailia, an intermediate touchdown point in the journey. Seven hours out on its maiden flight and only 300 miles along the way, the R-101 crashed and burned in woods just outside Beauvais, France. The airship and the tragic event are commemorated by a stone marker.

The prophet, rather than the historian, might have read into the fate of the R-101 that of empire: huge, underpowered, flimsy in construction, hollow within, ill-directed, and soon to crash. But such an interpretation would be falsely prescient. Empire showed few signs of structural weakness in the interwar period.

In truth, the physical dimensions of the colonial world reached their largest scope in this era. World War I resulted in the defeat of the German and Ottoman empires and their debris was added to the British and French colonial empires and to the Belgian as well. On the other side of the world, the outcome of the war even allowed Australia and New Zealand to engage in a sort of sub-imperialism as they picked up island parts of the former German oceanic empire. Through the mandates system initiated by the Peace Conference at Versailles and instituted within the League of Nations, territories including Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon, former German East Africa (Tanganyika), Southwest Africa, and Togo and Cameroon were placed under new colonial administration. Article 22 of the League Covenant spoke of a “sacred trust” that the mandatory powers had to respect and initiate through the betterment of these territories for the benefit of their resident populations. Article 3 of the mandate to Great Britain and Belgium over former German East Africa read:

the Mandatory shall be responsible for the peace, order and good government of the territory, and shall undertake to promote to the utmost the material and moral well-being and social progress of its inhabitants.

Moreover, the official intention of all the mandates was that of guidance toward self-rule. Little of the sort was achieved, and Cameroon, divided in mandate between the French and the English, was soon treated as if a regular colonial territory which was what most of the supporters of colonial empire wanted. Rather than enthusiastically support the mandates system, they merely tolerated it in order to silence the anti-colonial rhetoric of the American President Woodrow Wilson. Prime Minister Lloyd George of Great Britain attempted, albeit unsuccessfully, to get the United States to assume a mandate. He did so with the thought that the Americans and their idealistic President Woodrow Wilson would thus be denied “any prejudice against us on the ground of ‘land grabbing’.”

Such language as that of Lloyd George did not accompany public pronouncements or major policy decisions made at the time. “Empire” had replaced “imperialism” in the established lexicon. Whereas the British had used the term with pride and flair for some time, it now also became popular in France. It was even given official sanction by the Italians in 1936, when, after the conquest of Ethiopia, the government adopted the term Impero (and shortly thereafter gave the name to a new battleship). The Italian conquest may be seen as a glaring exception because empire now meant to its proponents economic development and political responsibility more than anything else. The term “domination,” used rather unhesitatingly before World War I, was now generally replaced by “dependency.” The latter term suggested a beneficial relationship in which one party helped the other. It was, perhaps, given its most significant definition by Sir Frederick Lugard in his famous study, The Dual Mandate in Tropical Africa, first published in 1922. According to Lugard, the European presence in Africa had allowed raw materials which “lay wasted and ungarnered . . . because the natives did not know their use and value” to be made available to Europeans, while the Africans received from the Europeans in turn “the substitution of law and order for the methods of barbarism.” The result of this activity, he asserted, “can be made reciprocal, and that is the aim and desire of civilized administration to fulfill this dual mandate.” Economic development and cultural development, such was the simple sum of Lugard’s argument about the “dual mandate.” The French minister of colonies, Albert Sarraut, echoed similar sentiments in his work La Mise en valeur des colonies françaises (The Economic Development of the French Colonies), published in 1923:

The France that colonizes does not do so for itself: its advantage is joined with that of the world; its effort, more than for itself, must be of benefit to the colonies whose economic growth an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Titlt Page
• Copyright Page
• The Making of the Contemporary World Edited by Eric J. Evans and Ruth Henig
• Illustrations
• Introduction
• 1: Empire in the afternoon
• 2: The sea change of empire
• 3: Instability and uncertainty
• 4: Pronouncements, denunciations, and the search for ideology
• 5: Countryside and city
• 6: “Gotta be this or that”
• 7: Outside in
• 8: Land and language
• 9: In the wake of the past
• 10: Beyond empire
• Chronology of political decolonization
• Glossary
• Notes
• Annotated bibliography