Policing and decolonisation

David Anderson, David Killingray, David Anderson, David Killingray

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781526162984
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Colonialismo e post-colonialismo

CHAPTER ONE

An orderly retreat? Policing the end of empire

David Killingray and David M. Anderson

Sometime not long after 3 p.m. on Saturday 20 February 1948, a procession of ex-servicemen and others sympathetic to their grievances advanced upon Christiansborg Castle, Accra, the seat of the governor of the Gold Coast. The marchers were halted by a police cordon on the road approaching the governor’s residence, and were ordered to disperse. The crowd refused and stones and missiles were thrown. The police used tear gas, but the wind was in the wrong direction and this proved fruitless: a baton charge was out of the question as the police detachment was outflanked. The European officer in charge of the police detachment warned that his men would open fire, but according to the official report on the incident and its aftermath (the Watson Commission), his order appeared not to have been heard by the constables. The commanding officer then seized a rifle from one of his constables and fired six shots at the crowd.¹ Thus did Police Superintendent Imray write himself into the history of the decolonisation of Africa.

It is ironic that Imray should emerge as one of the very few policemen to be credited with a distinctive role in the history of British decolonisation. As nationalism enveloped the British in each colony, the colonialists struggled to secure their immediate and longer-term interests. Managing an orderly retreat from empire was, in almost every case, an essential part of the political strategy developed by the British. The role of the colonial police in this process was absolutely crucial. In the specific ‘events’ of decolonisation – such as Imray’s actions at the crossroads below Christiansborg Castle – the police were placed in closer proximity to the forces of nationalist politics and anti-colonial protest than any other arm of government, while in the final arrangements for the transfer of powers, the transition of the police from their role as the principal agency of colonial control to becoming an institution at the service of a new independent government was the most sensitive and important of political issues. The colonial police were therefore a ubiquitous presence in the story of decolonisation, yet so far they have played a strangely anonymous part in its retelling.

The essays in this volume examine the role and functions of the colonial police forces during the process of British decolonisation and the transfer of powers in eight colonial territories. State structures within the colonial empire varied, as did the nature and extent of the political challenge offered by emergent nationalisms and the timing of decolonisation. In some territories the transfer of powers was a relatively peaceful process: in others it was accompanied by long periods of opposition to colonial rule, by inter-communal conflicts, by rural and urban disorder, and by armed insurrection. But whatever the social or political circumstances of particular territories, the colonial police forces played a major and increasing role in the attempts to maintain the authority of the colonial state and in upholding law and order during the process of disengaging and transferring power to the new rulers. The maintenance of law and order was a vital element in the political economy of all colonial territories, and the nature, level and intensity of policing said much about official perceptions of political security and stability. When the legitimacy of colonial rule was barely questioned, policing was modest: as legitimacy was increasingly challenged and political instability grew, so the operational role and intensity of policing was extended.

In this process, colonial policing also changed from a local to a metropolitan concern: politicians and officials in London drew upon the experience of policing in one colony to inform the practice in another. Policing, security and the gathering of political intelligence became closely interwoven activities that were directed from London to an unprecedented extent. Despite all of this, much of it implicitly acknowledged in the many text books and surveys of decolonisation now available, historians have been slow to train their sights upon the police themselves.² These essays are amongst the first examples of historical research focused specifically upon the decisive part played by the police in the final days of British rule in the colonies of Africa, Asia and Europe.³

The cases gathered here each provide a detailed account of policing in a specific territory. They focus upon several related themes – the impact of nationalist politics, the difficulties of policing communal conflicts, the militarisation of police forces and their use in counterinsurgency measures, political intelligence-gathering and its uses, and the reform, development and shifting ideologies of policing: and they cover a chronological span of nearly half a century, from the First World War to the mid-1960s. Yet in only one of our cases, Ireland, did decolonisation take place before 1945: for the remaining cases the 1940s and the 1950s were the critical years. There are those who might question the inclusion of Ireland as an example of the process of decolonisation, if for no other reason than its independence struggle took place in an earlier and quite different era. However, there can be no doubt, as Charles Townshend (chapter 2) emphasises, that the British adopted a ‘colonial’ solution to their problems in policing insurgency in Ireland.⁴ Nor should there be any doubt as to the importance of the Irish example for later decolonisation. Both the methods of policing used in Ireland, and the personnel involved, spread their influence to other parts of the empire from the 1920s to the 1950s. For the military especially, as the recent study by Thomas Mockaitis has shown, Ireland marked the beginnings of a new learning curve in the handling of insurgency:⁵ with regard to Emergency Powers, to military-civil relations in the organisation of counter-insurgency, and to the nature and extent of the problems confronting the police in a political situation of this sort, the Irish example has a pertinence for later colonial experience that is now glaringly apparent with hindsight, but that was also consciously drawn upon at the time. There are therefore powerful reasons for taking Ireland as the first benchmark in any discussion of the policing of decolonisation.

All our other cases – India, Palestine, Ghana, Malaya, Kenya, Malawi and Cyprus – are closely grouped chronologically, each gaining their independence from Britain over a period of less than twenty years after 1945. But here, India also stands somewhat apart from the rest. The decolonisation of South Asia was a protracted business, in which the various arms of government had considerable time to take stock of the changing political horizon after 1918. There may have been more time to prepare the ground, yet in the final phase, decolonisation was as rushed in India as anywhere else, and the problems that the acceleration of the political timetable for the transfer of powers brought for the Indian Police, described here by David Arnold (chapter 3), were not so very different from our other colonial examples. In India, as in Ghana and Malawi, the police had to deal with considerable unrest and disorder leading up to the transfer of powers, but not with armed nationalist insurgency. In Ireland, Palestine, Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus armed rebels led the assault upon the authority of the colonial state, and in these territories the impact upon the routines and functions of police duties were more profound. There were some broad similarities along with many specific differences from colony to colony in the experience of the police, but in all cases the process of decolonisation marked a distinct, novel and important phase in the evolution of policing. For all colonial police forces it was an unfamiliar and often uncomfortable experience, and one that bears careful analysis if we are to better understand the history of the end of empire.

Reaction and reform

Each colonial territory had its own police force. They varied greatly in size, structure and organisation. Many were very small while some, the Indian Police for example, were substantial bodies with an important role at central and provincial government level. Everywhere, as empire drew to a close, the police service was expanded. In India during the period 1938 to 1943 the police grew from just over 190,000 to 300,000, with an increasing proportion of the force carrying arms: in the Gold Coast from 1945 to 1956 police numbers increased from 2,500 to 5,360: over the same period in Nigeria central government police forces doubled in size to 10,500: and in Ireland the increased police presence after the Easter Rising of 1917 was described as ‘an army of occupation’. Most forces were armed and performed an internal security role. Ultimate authority for the police lay in the hands of the executive, usually the governor himself. Colonial policing had initially developed in an ad hoc way, each colony cutting its coat from local cloth. From the later 1930s, in the wake of the Fisher Committee recommendations, a Colonial Police Service was established to coordinate and regulate policing throughout the dependent empire, and London took an increased role in dictating the methods and standards adopted in colonial policing and in monitoring the performance of individual police forces.⁶

Most colonial police forces were centrally organised and controlled. In some territories provincial police forces also existed, along with specialist police for railways, ports and customs, frontiers, mines and so on, but these also generally came under central control. Against this pattern there were the Native Authority Police Forces, found all over British Africa and also in Aden and Fiji. A product of the practice of indirect rule, these forces were established during the inter-war years mainly for the purpose of rural policing. With this development the policing of the countryside became the province of the native authorities and the local district administration. A similar system of local police under local control existed in India, although here it had much deeper historical roots.⁷ ‘Native’ police forces varied greatly in size and effectiveness: too often they were little more than ‘Chiefs’ Messengers’, the agents of an arbitrary ‘traditional’ rule. In general they were strongly disliked by the populations they policed.⁸ In much of the empire, then, it was assumed that the ‘professional’ centrally-controlled Colonial Police and Indian Police took care of serious crime, security matters and the ordering of urban society, while locally-controlled ‘native’ police coped with the trivia of day-to-day affairs in the countryside. The army also had a role to play, and whether in Ireland, India, Palestine or Africa, there existed an ill-concealed rivalry between the army and the police over questions of security. The army was reluctant to perform the civil duties of policing, while police officers increasingly saw their function as markedly different from that of soldiers. These tensions, first and perhaps most vividly exposed in Ireland, were especially evident when Emergency Powers and other special orders threw police and army into each other’s arms in combined operations. The experience of Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s graphically demonstrates this point (Smith, chapter 4).

In all cases where nationalist politics challenged the authority of the colonial state, from India to Aden, colonial police forces invariably had an awkward dual role to perform: the police were expected to continue to perform their general civil duties, involving the prevention and detection of crime and the regulation of society through the enforcement of the law, yet they also took on an increased security function in dealing with unrest and insurrection prompted by anti-colonial politics. Most colonial police forces were already armed, but to meet these new challenges they were re-equipped and reorganised. Transport and communications systems were greatly improved, armoured vehicles – from water-cannon to gun-carriers – were put at the disposal of the police, and new units were created to perform ‘special duties’. These units ranged from highly-trained riot squads and special operations teams to untrained men recruited for guard and escort duties. Among such units were the ‘Black and Tans’ in Ireland, the Police Mobile Force in Nyasaland, the General Service Unit in Kenya, the Mobile Police Reserve in Cyprus, and auxiliaries and Special Constables almost everywhere. At the same time the gathering of political intelligence became a central aspect of police work, and where the British were confronted by armed rebellion, police Special Branches often worked closely with military intelligence. Ireland here taught the British many lessons, some learned at considerable cost, that would be applied in the methods and organisation of intelligence gathering in later colonial emergencies. By the mid-1950s colonial intelligence-gathering, prompted by the Cold War and anxieties over communism, was becoming a more sophisticated operation (see Rathbone, chapter 5, and Stockwell, chapter 6).

The rapidly changing political conditions of the 1940s and 1950s, coupled with the emergence of metropolitan interests in creating a more efficient and modern police service in the colonies, placed colonial policing under the reforming gaze of London. In 1948 an Inspectorate General of Colonial Police was established within the Colonial Office, the first appointee being W. C. Johnson. He was served by a small office of police advisers who scrutinised details of policing from all parts of the colonial empire. The office also drew upon the advice of the Home Office, frequently appointing senior officers from British constabularies to serve upon commissions of inquiry and appointment boards for the colonies.⁹ This reflected a broad intention to inculcate in the colonial police services the methods and standards of policing in Britain.

The establishment of the Inspectorate resulted in the regular monitoring of police forces and their activities. Each colony had a tour of inspection from the Inspector General, or his deputy, at least once every three years, and Commissio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of maps and tables
• Contributors
• General Editor’s introduction
• Acknowledgements
• 1 An orderly retreat? Policing the end of empire
• 2 Policing insurgency in Ireland, 1914–23
• 3 Police power and the demise of British rule in India, 1930–47
• 4 Communal conflict and insurrection in Palestine, 1936–48
• 5 Political intelligence and policing in Ghana in the late 1940s and 1950s
• 6 Policing during the Malayan Emergency, 1948–60: communism, communalism and decolonisation
• 7 Crime, politics and the police in colonial Kenya, 1939–63
• 8 Authority and legitimacy in Malawi: policing and politics in a colonial state
• 9 Policing and communal conflict: the Cyprus Emergency, 1954–60
• Index