Clive Ponting – Decolonisation

Pimlico History of the 20^th Century

DESPITE THE belief expressed during the Second World War by the colonial powers that the subject peoples of the empires were totally unsuited to self-government, within twenty years the colonial empires had effectively ceased to exist. Why did this happen? Harold Macmillan, the prime minister who presided over the rapid end of the British Empire, wrote in his memoirs that the British people:

had not lost the will or even the power to rule. But they did not conceive of themselves as having the right to govern in perpetuity. It was rather a duty to spread to other nations those advantages which through the course of centuries they had won for themselves.

This attempt to describe a complex process as an act of magnanimity by states who had only ever had in their hearts the best interests of the people they ruled does not bear even the most cursory scrutiny. The process was less one of magnanimity, still less one where large-scale revolt against foreign rule was the norm; it was more a matter of redefining the links between the core and the periphery. The core states found they were able to retain their influence over the periphery by methods other than direct political control, which had lost much of its utility in the changed circumstances after the Second World War.

Turkey

The end of the colonial empires was part of the wider process of declining European influence in the world in the twentieth century. Early signs of this changing balance were visible in the first thirty years or so of the century in three states - Turkey, Iran and China. In 1900 all these states had seemed likely to fall under European political control. However, they were gradually able to ensure their formal independence, limit foreign influence and begin the long process of building new economies and societies. For more than two centuries the Ottoman Empire had been the 'sick man of Europe'. Yet in the early twentieth century it was, after Japan, the second state to begin a process of 'modernization' without direct Western intervention. The Young Turk movement was founded in 1889 by an Albanian, Ibrahim Temo. In 1908, acting through the Committee of Union and Progress, the Young Turks staged a military coup and forced the sultan to restore the relatively liberal 1876 constitution. Elections were held in late 1908 under the control of local elites, but the power of the committee depended on the army, especially the Third Army under Enver Pasha and Mustafa Kemal. Defeat in the Balkan wars and then entry into the First World War on the side of the Central Powers limited the reforms, but the basis had been laid for Mustafa Kemal, when he took power in 1923, to begin the process of 'Westernization' and modernization within the new state of Turkey.

Iran

Under the weak Qajar dynasty (a minority Turkman tribe which had ruled since 1796), Iran seemed on the point of being divided between the British and the Russians in the early twentieth century. An elitist revolution which created the first national assembly (the Majlis) in 1906 was countered a year later by an Anglo-Russian agreement which created 'spheres of influence’, with the British predominant in the south where the oilfields were located. After the 1917 Revolution in Russia the British took effective control of most of the country and, although their troops were withdrawn in 1921, they continued to dominate Iranian finances. In 1926 a new ruler, Reza Khan, seized power and founded his own dynasty. Nominally a nationalist whose aims were similar to the Turkish nationalists', he found it difficult to make any significant steps towards modernization. His attempt to end the British oil concession in 1933 only led to the imposition of a worse deal for the Iranians. However, Iran survived as an independent state and remained so despite occupation by British and Soviet forces in 1941 and the imposition of Reza Khan's son as the new Shah.

China

The Boxer revolt in China in 1900 had already demonstrated the strength of Chinese nationalism. Imposition of harsh terms by the western powers after the occupation of Peking only increased such feelings. After 1900 the imperial government began its own programme of change, designed to strengthen the state, which it hoped would be along the lines of the successful Japanese reform after the Meiji restoration. The education system was remoulded along Japanese lines and over 100,000 modern schools were opened by 1909. The old imperial army was disbanded and new units were formed, organized along western lines. New ministries of trade, police, education, war and foreign affairs were established. The first cautious steps were taken towards a parliamentary system with the establishment of provincial assemblies in 1909 (on a very restricted franchise) and a national consultative assembly (but not a parliament) the next year. Although these essentially conservative reforms were not sufficient to win over the more revolutionary groups, they went too far for the ultra-conservative groups in the imperial court and government where the child emperor Pu-yi was under the control of a reactionary regent.

Growing Chinese nationalism expressed itself in both anti-Manchu-dynasty and anti-foreign sentiments through the creation of numerous secret societies. Many of the revolutionary leaders such as Sun Yat-sen were in exile and therefore not influential However, the United League, formed in 1905 by a fusion of the Revive China Society, the China Revival Society and the Restoration Society, did accept Sun Yat-sen's three principles of nationalism, democracy and socialism. In practice these principles were limited to being opposed to the Manchu dynasty, advocating a representative government with separation of powers and a land tax. Overall, there was a highly optimistic belief that this limited programme would bring about 'progress3, but it ignored the three major problems facing China -peasant discontent (there were over 280 peasant risings in 1910 alone), hostility to existing political and social structures and huge external pressures.

The spark that brought down the imperial government was, surprisingly, the decision to nationalize the railways in May 1911. This alienated the local gentry who owned the railways. Financing the programme with a £6 million foreign loan alienated the nationalists. During the second half of 1911 three disparate movements came together: the gentry in the 'Railway Protection League', peasant uprisings and army mutinies. In November the Manchu dynasty was removed and once the revolutionaries had accepted all treaties and loans made by the imperial government, the Western powers reluctantly allowed them to take power. Sun Yat-sen was in Denver when the revolt began, but he quickly returned and was elected president of the new republic on 1 January 1912, which became Year 1 of the new calendar.

The main problem facing the new government, given its dreadful inheritance, was whether it could organize and unify China and begin the process of renewal. The high level of foreign influence was combined with difficulty in raising new loans from the west. Even when loans were obtained, more Chinese assets had to be handed over as collateral. Sun Yat-sen proved incapable of strong leadership and resigned within six weeks, to be replaced by a very weak parliamentary system (in which most MPs belonged to more than one party). This was itself replaced in late 1913 by a military dictatorship under Yuan Shi-kai, who was supported by the consortium of foreign banks which provided the loans necessary for the administration to function. Britain and Russia refused to recognize the new government until it had, in its turn, recognized the autonomy of Tibet and Outer Mongolia. On the outbreak of the First World War Japan invaded and took over the German concessions in China. In January 1915 it presented the 'Twenty-One Demands' which would have turned China into a Japanese dependency with Japanese 'advisers' in all the key posts and with only Japan allowed to supply China with arms. The Chinese government accepted despite popular opposition, but the demands were opposed by the western powers, especially the United States, whose own interests would be affected. Between 1916 and 1919 a central state in China existed in name only after the death of Yuan Shi-kai and the emergence of regional military rulers.

A major turning point came on 4 May 1919 when news of the Treaty of Versailles reached China. Although China had declared war on Germany in August 1917 and sent over 200,000 coolies to Europe to assist the Allies, the treaty confirmed that the German concessions would not be restored to China, but instead they would be given to Japan. Student demonstrations and strikes by workers across the country were a massive patriotic protest against both the government, which was prepared to accept the western demands, and the Japanese. It was a spontaneous series of protests led by a new generation of leaders (many of the key figures in the Communist Party such as Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai began their political careers in this way) and another example of the strong current of Chinese nationalism. China, despite the 1911 Revolution, had been unable to produce the strong reforming government found in Turkey, but it had survived as a political entity less through its own strength than because of the divisions among the western powers, who could only agree that a weak Chinese government was better than a rival power taking control of the country.

The Fourth of May movement was only one aspect of growing anti-western sentiment in the periphery, a belief that indigenous cultures and values were important and that national reassertion against the imperial powers could, and should, be undertaken. In 1921 in his novel Batouala the West Indian writer Rene Maran wrote of 'Civilization - the Europeans' pride and their charnel house of innocents', a view also expressed by the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore in his accusation, 'You build your kingdom on corpses.' In February 1927 the first meeting of the International Congress of the League against Imperialism and Colonial Oppression in Brussels declared:

The development of the African people was abruptly cut short and their civilization was most completely destroyed. These nations were later declared pagan and savage, an inferior race, destined by the Christian God to be slaves to superior Europeans.

Five years later Emile Faure, writing in Race negre argued:

Because for centuries a few vicious rakes and whores succeeded in having palaces built for themselves at Versailles, and temples elsewhere, they're called 'civilised' . . . Peasant people, unambitious and hardworking, who till the land, tend their herds and venerate their ancestors, are despoiled and decimated by nations as industrious as they are inhuman.

India

Political movements were beginning to emerge across the periphery dedicated to achieving independence. One of the first was the Indian National Congress founded in 1885, which by 1906 had adopted the aim of swaraj or 'home rule'. In neighbouring Burma and Ceylon there were also nationalist movements, in the former under the guidance of U Ottoma, leader of the General Council of Buddhist Associations. In the 1900s a nationalist movement, Sarekat Islam, was founded in the Dutch East Indies. In 1919 a delegation seeking independence for the Philippines was sent to the United States.

In general the imperial governments were able to keep these movements under control until the outbreak of the Second World War. The only exceptions were in Egypt and India, where the British faced major problems. Britain formally declared Egypt a protectorate in 1914 although they had occupied the country since 1882, ruling through a weak king. Nationalist agitation increased in 1919 when the British initially refused to allow Egypt its own representation at the Versailles conference. In order to contain nationalism and retain effective control, the British recognized Egypt as formally independent in 1922, but subject to conditions giving the British all the essential powers over military and foreign policy that they thought they needed. The main nationalist party -the Wafd - was a party of conservative, elite landowners unwilling to risk any widespread nationalist agitation that might undermine their social position. In 1936 after the first moderately free elections the Wafd formed a government and the British negotiated a new treaty. This restricted British troops to a zone along the Suez Canal in peacetime, agreed a final withdrawal in 1956, but allowed the British to re-occupy the country in the event of war. The British retained effective control and found nominal Egyptian independence no hindrance to their military operations during the Second World War.

The situation in India was much more complex. At one level (and in conformity with Harold Macmillan's argument) it might seem that the British made a series of reforms and declarations, in 1908, 1917, 1919, 1929 and 1935, which were all designed to move India progressively along the road to independence as Indian capability for self-government increased steadily. In practice the situation was much more complex. The British needed to find a group of collaborators to help run India. The princes provided this in their states, but in British India a different solution was required. A permanent British policy was to divide India into as many different communities and political units as possible so as to make it more difficult for a single movement dedicated to removing the British to emerge. When the Congress Party became stronger after 1919, the British tried to limit its influence as far as possible.

In 1908 the Morley-Minto reforms set up local councils in British India, elected on very restricted franchises to provide both a group of Indians prepared to work with the British and a vast patchwork of centres of power. In 1917 the British committed themselves to the 'progressive realization of responsible government', but the phrase was so ambiguous it could mean almost anything. In 1919 the Government of India Act (the so-called Montagu-Chelmsford reforms) continued the process started in 1908, of decentralizing power and widening the group of local collaborators with the British. Eight uniform provinces were created in British India with limited local administration of those policies which were unimportant to the British — health,  education, public works, agriculture and industry - with all other powers being retained by the governor. In New Delhi a powerless parliament was created with a majority of elected members (fewer than 7 million people were allowed to vote). The viceroy retained control of finance and could promulgate legislation regardless of the wishes of the legislature. Congress refused to co-operate with the reforms and a campaign of nonco-operation and civil disobedience under Gandhi was suppressed by the British. Between 1920 and 1939 the British were able to keep control of Indian resistance and the various campaigns run by Gandhi. These campaigns were acceptable to the socially conservative groups which supported Congress in that they were strongly anti-British and helped to divert any enthusiasm the peasants might have for land reform or economic change.

In 1929 the British committed themselves to eventual dominion status for India, but the timescale remained carefully undefined, as did the internal governmental arrangements. The British were still determined to avoid the emergence of a united India under Congress control and the Government of India Act 1935 was designed to ensure that the British aims were achieved. Control of the provinces' mundane affairs no longer seemed very important for the British and they did not recruit civil servants for this role after 1924. Under the 1935 scheme each province in British India was to have an autonomous Indian government, although the British governor retained the right to declare a state of emergency and rule by decree. The electorate was small (about 10 per cent of the adult population) and the distribution of seats far from democratic - in Bengal, for example, a few thousand Europeans controlled twenty-five seats and 17 million non-Muslim Indians controlled fifty seats. These separate racial and religious electorates (a separate Muslim electorate had been conceded as early as 1906) were part of the aim of fragmenting India as much as possible. New provinces such as Sind and North-West Frontier were created to provide areas with a Muslim majority. The viceroy in Delhi retained full control of all imperial matters, but his Executive Council was carefully constructed to reflect the divisions the British wished to emphasize in India. It was composed of representatives not just from the major communities but also from both artificial and minute social categories - caste Hindu, Muslim, scheduled castes, Sikhs, Europeans, Christians, Parsees, landlords and businessmen. The 562 princely states were excluded from all these arrangements. A federation comprising all of India (Burma became a separate colony) - the eleven provinces, the small group of territories controlled directly by Delhi and the princely states -was in theory possible but in practice highly unlikely because the princes had a veto. The Congress leadership wanted to refuse to co-operate with such a deliberately divisive scheme, but local Congress politicians, attracted by the possibility of power in the provinces, forced them to change their minds. The British were pleased that Congress had been forced to collaborate with a scheme which ensured they could never control a unified India, but worried that Congress controlled all the provinces except Punjab and Bengal when the new system began operating in 1937. However, the new arrangements only survived for two years before they collapsed at the outbreak of the Second World War. In September 1939 the Viceroy declared war without consulting any Indian politicians. This gave Congress the excuse it needed to withdraw from the British system by resigning from all its provincial governments, leaving the governors to declare a state of emergency and rule by decree. Congress could return to the more congenial politics of opposing British rule.

The Far East

The crisis of imperial rule in the Far East came in 1940-2. In the summer of 1940 the French and Dutch colonies were left highly vulnerable following defeat by Germany in Europe and Japan took over the northern part of Indo-China. The most decisive event came with the Japanese attack in December 1941, which led to their occupation of the Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, Indo-China and Burma. The carefully maintained facade of western superiority, which was so vital for colonial governments because of their military and administrative weakness, was destroyed in a few months by an oriental power. It was a blow to their prestige from which the imperial powers were never to recover. In the major colonies - India, Burma, Ceylon, Indo-China, the Dutch East Indies and the Philippines - it proved impossible to restore effective imperial rule after 1945.

In 1942, with Japanese troops on the borders of India, the British tried to come to terms with Congress. The negotiations failed because many in the British government, especially Churchill, did not want the talks to succeed and Congress was reluctant to take over responsibility in the middle of a disastrous war. Congress then shifted to a policy of 'Quit India' and civil disobedience. The British were able to use force to keep control and arrested the leaders of Congress. However, by 1943 over a hundred battalions were being used on internal security duties rather than fighting the Japanese.

The British believed they could continue to control events and keep Congress from power at a national level. For many it was still a racial problem. Leo Amery, the Secretary of State for India during the war, wrote to the viceroy:

If India is to be really capable of holding its own in future without direct British control from outside I am not sure that it will not need an increasing infusion of stronger Nordic blood, whether by settlement or intermarriage or otherwise. Possibly it has been a real mistake of ours in the past not to encourage Indian princes to marry English wives ... and so breed a more virile type of native ruler.

In other colonies, in particular, Burma, the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies, local nationalist politicians were happy to work with the Japanese and they gradually established positions from which it would be difficult to dislodge them when the colonial powers took back control at the end of the war. This problem was made worse by the fact that no colony was fully reoccupied before the Japanese surrender in August 1945 and the resulting hiatus in power before colonial rule could be re-established further strengthened the position of the nationalists.

Ten years after the war imperial rule in the Far East was essentially over; only a few relatively unimportant colonies were not either independent or clearly on the road to independence. In the Philippines the United States transferred power to the local oligarchy, which had long dominated the economy and society, and in return a compliant government granted the Americans the extensive military facilities which were all that they really wanted. The British had much greater difficulty in finding any basis on which they could hand over power in India without massive loss of face. During the war the Muslim League, which demanded a separate Muslim state of Pakistan, continued to co-operate with the British and was in a strong position by 1945. Congress was deeply opposed to a partition of India and also continued to oppose the British insistence on a weak central government based on a federation including the princely states. The British tried, in a number of different negotiating rounds, to reach a settlement, but by early 1947 it was clear that their rule was beginning to break down. The only option left was to announce a date for withdrawal (August 1947) and negotiate the best deal possible. In the end the solution was one which none of the parties wanted and one that met none of the British aims. The Muslims gained an independent Pakistan, but it was weak and geographically divided and hundreds of thousands of Muslims died in the communal riots that followed the partition of Bengal and the Punjab. Congress took power over a unified but shrunken India. The British had to accept the domination of Congress, the princes were left in the lurch to get the best deal they could from Congress and the Sikhs, the supposedly loyal warrior group, were left without their own province or separate state. Most importantly, from Britain's point of view, India refused to play the role allocated to it by the British of being a bulwark of British power and defence policy in south-east Asia.

In Burma all attempts to slow down progress towards independence failed and the British were forced to deal with the man who had co-operated with the Japanese, Aung San, in order to maintain some vestiges of control. The Burmese nationalists insisted on becoming a republic on independence and rejected any defence arrangements with Britain. In the end the British had no power to impose a different solution and Burma became independent in January 1948. The only area where the British faced few problems was in Ceylon, where they were able to hand power over to conservative Sinhalese landowners and obtain the military bases they regarded as essential. In Indonesia the Dutch attempted to restore colonial rule in the last months of 1945, even though the nationalists under Sukarno had already declared independence in the immediate aftermath of the Japanese surrender. There was bitter fighting as the Dutch tried to gain control of Java, while they also tried to impose a federation in which the outlying islands, still under Dutch influence, would provide a counterbalance to nationalist-controlled Java. Once Sukarno had suppressed the Communists the Americans pressurized the Dutch into a settlement and in August 1949 a solution which sketched the outlines of a Dutch-Indonesian union provided enough of a fig-leaf for the Dutch to withdraw, leaving behind a unified Indonesia.

Indo-China

The colonies which provided the greatest problems in the decade after the end of the war were in Indo-China. In the months of chaos following the Japanese surrender the Vietminh nationalists under the Communist Ho Chi Minh (who had been backed by the Americans during the war) were able to gain control in the north around Hanoi. The French, with British assistance, controlled the south, in particular Saigon. During 1946 the French tried to negotiate a new form of colonialism based on a federated Indo-China consisting of a French-controlled southern Vietnam, monarchical Laos and Cambodia and Vietminh control of the north. At the end of the year the French decided to pressurize the Vietminh into a quick agreement by bombarding Haiphong. They occupied Hanoi in February 1947- The result was a growing guerrilla war and Vietminh control of much of the north. By emphasizing the anti-Communist rather than the colonial nature of the war, the French gained increasing American support. However, they were unable to control the guerrillas and by 1954 they were also facing regular units of the Vietminh army. An attempt to fight a large conventional battle at Dien Bien Phu was a disaster and led to the surrender of the French army in early May 1954. At this stage the great powers intervened to divide Indo-China at the July 1954 Geneva conference. Laos and Cambodia became independent and Vietnam was split along the old wartime boundary of allied spheres of interest — the seventeenth parallel. Both sides promised to hold 'free elections3 in 1956 to produce a unified Vietnam, but nobody really believed this was likely. The United States took over the French role of trying to build a coalition in South Vietnam that could govern the country whilst the north was controlled by the Communist Vietminh, who never accepted the division of their country.

Although in the immediate post-war period nearly all the colonial empires in the Far East collapsed, this was not seen by the imperial powers as signalling the end of empire worldwide. The British and French, in particular, regarded possession of empire as a way of maintaining their role in world politics and asserting their claim to be substantial powers in an age dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union. They began, almost for the first time, programmes of economic development within their empires, especially in Africa. The British aimed to extract cheap minerals and food from within a monetary area they controlled at a time when they were very short of dollars. The French started constructing mines and deep-water ports, as, to a more limited extent, did the Belgians in the Congo.

Britain was determined to hold on to its empire by force if necessary and to create new structures to maintain imperial control. In Malaya, after the failure of the scheme to produce a unified colony out of the old federation, the British found themselves by the late 1940s involved in a war against the Chinese community and the Communists. The British allied with the Malays against the Chinese and Indian communities in a vicious guerrilla war involving the forced resettlement of almost a quarter of the Chinese people in Malaya. Britain fought in Malaya because it provided tin and rubber which could be sold to the United States for dollars and to retain Singapore as a military base. By early 1954 the British had secured control of most of the colony in collaboration with the Malays, who were happy to see the Chinese community kept in a subordinate position. In Africa the British were also trying to create a new dominion - the Central African Federation - from the colonies of Nyasaland and Northern and Southern Rhodesia. The aim was to prepare the federation, which would be run by the local white settlers, for independence by the early 1960s.

In 1954 the British government carried out a review of the future of its empire. The cabinet greatly resented the fact that since 1947 a number of non-white countries had achieved independence and entered the Commonwealth:

The admission of three Asiatic countries to Commonwealth membership had altered the character of the Commonwealth ... [and it] would be further diluted if full membership had to be conceded to the Gold Coast and other countries ... It was unfortunate that the policy of assisting dependent peoples to attain self-government had been carried forward so fast and so far.

The review concluded that colonies such as Cyprus, Malta, Aden and Somaliland were never to be granted independence; they were too important as military bases on which Britain's continuation as a world power depended. By the mid-1970s it was thought that only a handful of colonies would be independent states: the white-run Central African Federation, Malaya, a federation of the West Indian islands and Nigeria and the Gold Coast in Africa. The French too felt that despite events in Indo-China they would be able to hold on to the rest of their empire. As Rene Pleven, colonial minister, put it: The African peoples want no other liberty than that of France.' Similarly, the Belgian and Portuguese governments were still determined to maintain their empires.

During the mid-1950s both the French and the British began new and difficult military campaigns to hold on to parts of their empires. On 1 November 1954 a revolt by the National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria signalled the start of what was to become the most vicious of all the wars for colonial independence. The French government under strong pressure from the determined and powerful settler lobby (the pieds noirs) fought hard to defeat the nationalists. Within a year nearly half a million troops were in the colony. In early 1957 the tough parachute troops under General Jacques Massu were let loose on the capital, Algiers, in a brutal campaign of reprisals, killings and torture, strongly supported by the French public and the pieds noirs. By the end of the year the French had regained control of the city. The war brought about the fall of the Fourth Republic in 1958, when the government appeared to be willing to negotiate with the FLN. This led to a general strike in Algiers by the pieds noirs, an army takeover in Corsica and the threat of a coup in France itself. General de Gaulle took power, established the Fifth Republic and backed continuing French rule over Algeria.

In the summer of 1954 the British stated publicly that Cyprus could never become independent. Their reasons were essentially strategic - after finally agreeing to leave the Canal Zone in Egypt they did not, for reasons of prestige, want to make another withdrawal and they intended that Cyprus should become their major base in the Middle East. This meant opposing the demands of the Greek community on the island under the leadership of Archbishop Makarios for union with Greece, something which was anathema to the minority Turkish population. Guerrilla war began in April 1955 and a year later Makarios was arrested and exiled in the Seychelles.

Wind of Change

However, as these new military campaigns to sustain empires were being launched, a reappraisal of imperial policy began, which led to the almost total end of empire within a decade. This was the result of a number of factors. The humiliation of the failed Anglo-French invasion of Egypt in the Suez crisis of 1956 demonstrated that neither was a world power capable of acting on its own. This, combined with the emergence of the European Economic Community with the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957, produced a policy reappraisal, particularly in France after de Gaulle's accession to power. French interests seemed to be at stake in Europe, especially in controlling the rising economic power of West Germany. (The British arrived at the opposite conclusion and tried to draw closer to the United States.) Within the colonies it was also becoming clear that, following decades of neglect, economic development would be very expensive and it was unlikely that the colonial power would see much benefit from the huge investment required. The strategic situation had also changed. The great imperial expansion of the late nineteenth century had, to a large extent, resulted from competitive pressures within Europe - the need to deny territories to rival powers. After 1945 that was no longer the case. There was no competition for colonial possessions and any that became independent would not be taken over by rivals. There was the possibility of an expansion of Communist influence, but countering that threat could be left to the Americans with their larger resources. In this situation the economic rationale for colonial possessions could be reassessed. The imperial powers had always been concerned about their access to certain raw materials, but it was possible to obtain this without formal political control. The core powers and transnational corporations dominated the world economy and they were powerful enough to ensure that any newly independent powers had little choice but to allow continued access to the resources they controlled. The imperial powers always relied on the collaboration of certain groups within their colonies; independence would therefore mean little more than handing over formal political power to these groups while leaving the core powers with access to the resources they required. In this situation the task facing the imperial powers was to select which groups would be allowed to take power in the newly independent states. Once this process started, with one state moving down the road of decolonization, it was more difficult for others to resist and so the process snowballed.

Gold Coast - Ghana

The first signs of this new approach can be traced back to the immediate post-war period in the relatively stable and prosperous Gold Coast colony. In 1946, as part of the policy of economic development, the British decided they needed a new group of collaborators to support the changes. The old system of 'indirect rule' was abandoned. Provincial legislatures, dominated by conservatives, were established. They elected members to the central Legislative Council, which had a majority of Africans rather than British officials, although the governor retained his absolute veto. This scheme might have produced a new and larger collaborating group than the rural chiefs who dominated under 'indirect rule', but new leaders, in particular Kwame Nkrumah and his Convention People's Party were able to gain the support of the urban Africans. In February 1948 riots in the capital Accra led to a breakdown in security and the arrest of Nkrumah and other nationalist leaders. The 1951 elections, which the British expected the conservative groups to win, instead saw the victory of Nkrumah and the CPP, even though their support came mainly from the coastal and urban elite. The British had to release Nkrumah from jail and work with him. He was happy to do this on condition that the CPP dominated and the rural groups were excluded. Over the next six years more functions were gradually transferred to the African government, as both the British and Nkrumah wanted the transition of power to be smooth. On 6 March 1957 the Gold Coast became the first black African country to become independent and changed its name to Ghana. The transition was relatively straightforward: an African group had emerged to take power, the country was of no strategic importance to Britain, there were no white settlers to complicate the process and the British would, after independence, still be able to obtain what they required.

The political changes in the Gold Coast had an impact on neighbouring French West Africa. Here, after 1945, the French had been able to strike up an alliance with local political groups and politicians who were interested in bargaining with the French over patronage and positions in the bureaucracy. Men like Felix Hophouet-Boigny in the Ivory Coast did not represent mass political movements and were no more than educated, elite politicians interested in local power. In 1956 the French offered them a deal similar to that in the Gold Coast in the late 1940s -responsibility for local affairs within the French empire - as a way of heading off more radical demands and more radical politicians. In 1958 de Gaulle, seeking to dominate a French community in West Africa, offered a referendum. The choice was between immediate independence with no French help or membership of a federation with French aid and control over foreign and defence policy, ultimately the subjects that always interested the imperial powers. The voting was rigged and all the French colonies except Guinea under Sekou Toure voted in favour of federation. Sekou Toure saw himself as another Nkrumah gaining the prestige associated with independence, but the French cut off all aid in retaliation. In practice the French could not keep control of developments. The federation of the remaining French colonies broke up in 1958 under pressure from Houphouet-Boigny and two years later all the French colonies in West and Equatorial Africa became independent, partly because they did not wish to be seen as lagging behind the ex-British colonies of Ghana and Nigeria (which became independent in 1960). Nevertheless the French retained a huge degree of influence over their ex-colonies.

Algeria

General de Gaulle faced a far more difficult situation in Algeria, where he had to manoeuvre between the nationalists, the settlers, their terrorist group the OAS, and the army, some elements of which were prepared to support the settlers. On taking power in 1958 he seemed to symbolize the movement to keep Algeria French, but almost immediately he began to search for new solutions. In September 1959 he suggested three options, none of which was the status quo or independence. Algeria could secede from France without the Sahara, which with its extensive oil and natural gas reserves was also where the French conducted their nuclear tests. Algeria could be fully assimilated into France, although de Gaulle did not favour this option because he thought too many Muslims and 'foreigners' would move across the Mediterranean. Finally, there was the option de Gaulle himself favoured, under which Algeria would have limited self-determination but France would control foreign affairs, defence and the economy. None of these options was acceptable. The war against the nationalists continued. The settlers barricaded part of Algiers in January i960, but received no backing from the army, and in April 1961 an attempted army coup failed, as did a number of attempts by the OAS to kill de Gaulle. Eventually de Gaulle agreed to negotiate with the Algerian nationalists at the Evian conference, which lasted for nearly a year before agreement was reached in March 1962. The French gained hardly any of their objectives. In particular they lost control of the Sahara and hundreds of thousands of settlers left for France. The most bitter of all the colonial struggles ended after eight years of conflict with complete victory for the Algerian nationalists.

The Congo and consequences

French policy, especially in West and Equatorial Africa, increased pressure on other imperial powers to follow suit. The Belgian Congo controlled a vast range of important minerals and was a stable colony. For fifty years the Belgian government had made no attempt to promote local groups, other than a few chiefs with whom they might collaborate. Then suddenly in January 1959 they announced that they intended to move towards independence. As late as October 1959 the earliest date envisaged was 1964. In mid-December the Belgians decided on independence within a year and a conference with local leaders in January i960 agreed on independence within six months. Not surprisingly, there was a political vacuum in the country as a few leaders scrambled to create organizations which might be able to govern the country and, more important, secure them power. Politics fragmented along ethnic lines. The rapid withdrawal of Belgian rule led to chaos and anarchy

within weeks. The army mutinied against its European officers in order to gain the pay and status it saw as one of the benefits of independence. The premier, Patrice Lumumba, was murdered and the mineral-rich province of Katanga seceded under the leadership of Moishe Tshombe, who had the backing of the Belgian settlers and the corporations controlling the mining operations. It was another four years before an elite group subservient to western industrial interests gained power across the whole of the country.

Events in the Congo only increased the pressure on the remaining colonial powers, especially the British, to withdraw before they too were caught up in similar disasters. The British had, in the late 1950s, given independence to Malaya once the local elite agreed to the continuation of the military base in Singapore and to remain in the sterling area so that the British could still benefit from the sale of tin and rubber on the world market. They also agreed to grant independence to the West Indian islands, as they were of no strategic value (they had long been within the American sphere of influence) and little economic benefit. The British felt that they wanted to keep pace with the French and ensure that there were a number of English-speaking African states to balance the Francophone bloc. However, Britain had no plans to end its empire in East Africa, where they faced problems with the small group of white settlers. In January 1959 a conference of governors, Colonial Office officials and ministers suggested independence could not be achieved before the mid-1970s at the earliest. In April that year the colonial secretary told parliament that he could not foresee a date when Kenya could be independent. At the same time it was still intended that the Central African Federation should become independent under local white settler rule. Such political developments as did take place were designed to uphold the position of the tiny number of white settlers. The ‘Mau-Mau' revolt among the Kikuyu in Kenya was brutally suppressed and across East Africa the aim was to develop so-called 'multi-racial polities', which were, in practice, no more than a fig-leaf for white 'leadership'. By the late 1950s the Africans were allowed the same number of seats as the whites in the Legislative Councils of both Kenya and Tanganyika, but this was at a time when in the latter colony there was one white for every four Asians and 430 Africans.

Accelerated decolonisation

The events of 1960, with the mass of French colonies becoming independent and the disaster in the Belgian Congo, concentrated the minds of policy-makers in London. The British, having neither the military capability nor any over-riding economic reason to take on massive internal security problems across Africa, decided on a new, more ruthless policy. Colonies would be forced to become independent and the white settlers would be abandoned. Within four years all the colonies in East Africa were independent and the Central African Federation was dissolved, with Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland becoming independent but not the white-settler-run Southern Rhodesia. As late as December 1959 the British refused to even consider universal suffrage and responsible government for local affairs in Uganda, yet in less than three years the colony was independent. Tanganyika became independent in 1961, Kenya and Zanzibar in 1963, Nyasaland (as Malawi) and Northern Rhodesia (as Zambia) in 1964. Other smaller colonies were pushed along the same road. Malta, which had seemed so important for strategic reasons, was given independence in return for the right to use the naval base and other facilities for ten years. Cyprus became independent, but Britain retained two substantial areas on the island as its own sovereign territory to provide military bases. Less strategically important colonies followed: Gambia and the Maldives in 1965; Botswana, Lesotho, Barbados and Guyana the next year; Mauritius and Swaziland in 1968; and Fiji and Tonga in 1970. The fastest scuttle of all came not in the Belgian Congo but in British Somaliland. As late as February i960 the colony still did not even have an elected majority in the governor's Legislative Council. At this stage a handful of local politicians demanded unification with Italian Somaliland, which was due to become independent in mid-1960. In May 1960 the independence conference in London agreed to grant self-government on 26 June and after five days of self-government a united, independent Somalia came into existence. The British had moved from colonial autocracy to independence in the space of just four and a half months.

Elsewhere Spain divested itself of its small empire relatively painlessly. It withdrew from its protectorates in Morocco when the French granted independence in 1956, Ifni was given back in 1969, but the coastal towns of Ceuta and Melilla were retained. The island of Fernando Po and the coastal area of Rio Muni were united to form Equatorial Guinea, which became independent at the end of 1968. The major problem was the mineral-rich but largely uninhabited Spanish Sahara. This was eventually split between Morocco and Mauritania in 1976, although Algeria sponsored the Polisario Front which claimed independence for the territory

Portugal resists

The one European power not to follow the general trend of decolonization was Portugal. At the very time that the British, French and Belgian empires in Africa were disintegrating, the Portuguese were making a major effort to retain and develop their empire, despite the loss of a few small enclaves such as Goa to India and Ajuda to Dahomey. After i960 over 350,000 new white settlers moved to Angola, but many of the old abuses, in particular extensive forced labour, remained. The problem the Portuguese faced was a growing revolt against their rule from Guinea and the Cape Verde islands to Angola and Mozambique. The successful containment of these revolts until the mid-1970s was a major burden - one in four adult Portuguese males was serving in the armed forces. However, the empire was maintained until a military coup in Lisbon in April 1974 unseated the right-wing dictatorship. The military situation in Guinea was so bad that independence was granted immediately and in Mozambique it was possible to negotiate a deal with the FRELIMO rebels under Samora Machel. Angola posed more difficult problems because of the number of Portuguese settlers, the mineral resources of the colony, the divisions along ideological grounds between the nationalist forces and external intervention, in particular from the United States. An attempted settlement collapsed and the newly independent country plunged into a long and bitter civil war. In the Far East, Indonesia invaded East Timor in the 1970s and imposed its rule in what was the last war of colonial conquest in the twentieth century.

Southern Rhodesia

After the wave of decolonization in the 1960s Britain was left with one major problem - Southern Rhodesia, which had been a self-governing colony since 1923. The white minority was well entrenched and the constitution had changed so that it was almost impossible for the African majority to take power within any conceivable timescale. When the Central African Federation was wound up, Britain refused to grant independence to the white government in Southern Rhodesia without a guarantee, however convoluted, of eventual majority rule — given the international climate of the 1960s any other policy would have been impossible to justify. Eventually in November 1965 the white government declared unilateral independence. The white settlers were viewed sympathetically by considerable sections of both the population and Conservative politicians in Britain, and the government decided against using military force to remove the rebel government. In these circumstances, and with only limited and poorly enforced sanctions in place, a stalemate ensued. Attempts to reach a negotiated settlement in December 1966, October 1968 and late 1971 failed even though the British government was not insisting on more than very weak guarantees about majority rule at some point in the future. The Southern Rhodesian government believed that, with the support of the South African government, they would survive and until 1974 they were able to contain the ethnically divided nationalist politicians and the relatively weak guerrilla forces. The situation changed radically with the collapse of the Portuguese empire and the decision by the new government in Mozambique to give major support to the guerrillas. The South African government also decided that, in the last resort, it was not prepared to engage in a major war to prolong white rule in Southern Rhodesia. By early 1978 the white government had been forced to negotiate an 'internal settlement' with moderate nationalists which excluded the guerrillas and which left the whites effectively still running the country. The British government was tempted to accept this deal, but pressure from the Commonwealth at the Lusaka conference in August 1979 produced a new settlement. The white government finally gave up power and a British governor took over as ruler. Elections were held in March 1980 and, much to the annoyance of the British, were won by the leader of the guerrillas, Robert Mugabe and his ZANU Party, which took power on independence. The only consolation for the British was that a long-running problem had finally ended.

Long-term consequences

By the mid-1960s all but a handful of the European colonies had become independent. However, their inheritance from the imperial powers was dire. When it became independent, the Belgian Congo had just sixteen African university graduates in the whole country and not one lawyer, engineer or doctor. In the top three grades of the administration there were 4,500 Europeans and six Africans. The main reason for this appalling situation was that the Belgians had not provided secondary education for the local population. Although the Belgian Congo was perhaps an extreme example, in most colonies little had been done to prepare for independence. During the decades of colonial rule little money or effort had been invested in developing the economic and social infrastructure necessary for self-government or in providing a stable political base. Everywhere only a weak administrative infrastructure was left behind. The rush to independence only exacerbated an already poor situation.

In Asia, where societies had long been more developed than in Africa, most ex-colonies finished up as authoritarian one-party states. Only India managed to keep the structure of democracy at a national level. In Africa the situation was much worse. Apart from huge inherited economic and social problems, the boundaries left by European colonialism were artificial, reflecting deals between the European powers rather than ethnic realities on the ground. During the colonial period the imperial powers had often created artificial chiefs and tribes for their own purposes. This meant that most of the new states were neither nations nor effective states. In addition many countries were so small as to be hardly viable. By 1980 twenty-two out of the forty-nine independent states had populations of fewer than 5 million and nine had fewer than 1 million people. The deals made at independence and the constitutions imposed were usually the result of an agreement between the imperial power and whichever group it judged was most likely to take over the colony smoothly. Little thought was given to the place of minorities or the general acceptability of the new arrangements. As a result factional groups came to dominate the new states: rich landlords in the Ivory Coast, the Mossi in Burkina Faso, the Shona majority in Zimbabwe and not the previously dominant Ndebele, the 'protectorate peoples' in Sierra Leone rather than the Creole descendants of the freed slaves, the Malinke in Guinea. In many states the divisions were fundamental - in Togo, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Tanzania, Liberia, Zaire and Uganda no single ethnic group made up more than a quarter of the population. In Dahomey there was a three-way split between the Abomey-JFou, Nagot-Yoruba and the Maga. In the immediate post-independence period presidents from each of the groups tried to dominate the other two and failed and each tried an alliance of two against the third and failed. Between 1970 and 1972 there was a bizarre three-man presidency. The army coup in 1972 not surprisingly also failed to resolve the ethnic conflict. In some states, such as Tanzania under President Nyerere and neighbouring Kenya under President Moi, the solution was rule by a member of a small minority group who was forced to balance between the major groupings.

In some African states such as Ghana under Nkrumah and Ivory Coast under Houphouet-Boigny, there was one-party, authoritarian rule from the start. By the early 1960s a similar situation prevailed in Senegal, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Benin, Togo and Mauritania. Nearly everywhere the constitutions imposed at independence disintegrated and were ignored. In many states effective power rapidly devolved to the army and military coups became commonplace. Once the legitimacy of the initial post-independence ruler was destroyed there was little legitimacy for any successor; anybody who could find the resources for a successful coup could take power and claim the right to rule. Politics disintegrated into clientelism, corruption and ethnic (real or imagined) conflict. In some states, such as Sudan, Zaire and Nigeria, civil war broke out over the secession of one area of the country, but in general the colonial boundaries were maintained because all states had a vested interest in not disturbing the existing arrangements however artificial they might be. Inter-state conflict was generally limited and violence was concentrated within the state. By the 1990s some states such as Somalia, Liberia and Sierra Leone had disintegrated into anarchy as economic decline, political factionalism and recurrent coups took their toll.