Imperial echoes..........

I have read a number of reviews of a new book about the British Empire. The writer is a young guy of Ghanaian parentage. He is public school and Oxbridge, a Tory MP and a rising star. What fun it would be if the first black PM was black! He says that being black and 6ft 4ins he is easily noticed by the Speaker!

But I shall not buy the book. I have more personal experience of how the Empire was run than he does because I have lived it. I have little patience with people who pontificate about stuff when they have no experience. Only the other day an ‘expert’ was pontificating about the Cape Coloureds being the offspring of unions between Afrikaners and the Bushman aka San people. Complete bollox! They are a mixture of black, white and SE Asian. Afrikaans was originally the language of the Cape Coloureds when the ‘Hollanders’ spoke Old Dutch. The San were treated as vermin by white and black alike. They were driven off their ancestral hunting grounds and had to take refuge in some of the most inhospitable country in Africa, the Kalahari and the Great Namib deserts. They are now being persecuted in Botswana, but this being black-on-black nobody much cares.

It seems that his general theme is that the wicked men who ran the Empire were a bunch of overbearing, bullying snobs who treated their subjects with contempt. Not so in my experience.

He only deals with Nigeria when writing about Africa, although Africa was the main continent of colonial administration. And it was not typical in that basically it was governed on a minimalist basis as in India.

In my experience the people who really administered the African colonies were the District and Assistant District Commissioners. They were extremely able, dedicated and resourceful people. They led lives that were often very isolated, with maybe 3 whites – the DC, ADC and a Police Inspector - manning a ‘boma’ hundreds of miles in the bush. They were required to become fluent in the local language within 6 months or it was ‘on your bike’. The ‘sleeping dictionary’ was often the chosen avenue of instruction. If they got posted to different colonies at the end of each 3-year tour they became very multi-lingual and often very fed up!

The DC was administrator, magistrate, engineer, arbitrator, and much else besides. His wife was often school-teacher, medic and general factotum. They were not allowed to get married until they were 26; but they were expected to find a wife on their first long home leave (6 months).

On first arrival in the colonial capital, the new ADC would be given a horse and baggage train and told to push off into the bush and find his boma maybe a 100 miles or more away. The DC frequently went off on ulendo – a tour of his district to collect taxes, resolve disputes, dispense justice etc. It is reputed that the role of the ADC was to minister to the needs of Mrs DC whilst the boss was away, but that might be merely anecdotal.

Their living conditions were pretty basic – no electricity, cooking over a wood-burning stove, water from a borehole, sanitation via a pit latrine. And no tarmac roads; in fact few roads of any kind.

Their shared characteristic was their dedication to their people, and the unshakeable integrity of their administration.

What is not appreciated is that in essence most of the Empire lasted only the span of a single lifetime. Let’s take Malawi as an example, as this was one of the countries in which I lived during colonial times.

Wikipedia says it was colonised in 1891. It wasn’t. It became a protectorate in 1891 at the request of the tribal chiefs to protect them from the ravages of slave-traders, Arabs in the north, Portuguese in the south. To show how short was the colonial era, I met an old askari at the veterans’ home in Zomba who had taken part in the last battle against the slavers at Fort Johnston in  the 1890s. I have a photo of Jumbe, the leader of the slavers, with his entourage, all with firearms. He reneged on the peace-deal after the battle and Harry Johnston promptly hanged him!

I also met  an ancient clergyman, Canon Winspear, who had accompanied a missionary ship,  the ‘Chauncey Maples’ which was portered in sections from Beira to Lake Nyasa at about the same time. The ship is still there.

In 1891 the entire colonial administration consisted of only 10 people. If the locals had been unhappy with the way they were governed the 10 would have lasted about as many minutes. Independence came 73 years later.

There was never any large scale white settlement and the early settlers, such as they were, bought their land from the tribal chiefs. Typically, the first brick building in Blantyre, the commercial capital was the Blantyre sports club, then the magnificent church of St Michael and All Angels together with the Henry Henderson Institute, a secondary school for African boys. All these actually preceded the establishment of British rule, so the mazungu obviously has a pretty good relationship with the Africans.

Those who criticise the colonialists for exploiting but not developing Africa should ask themselves how much it takes to bring people up to modern standards who often had not progressed as far as the invention of the wheel or formal written language. For example, in the late 1950’s my brother-in-law, who was an Inspector in the Northern Rhodesia Police, was tasked with moving a small tribe (called the Batonka, I think) out of the Zambezi valley as the waters rose from the construction of the Kariba Dam. He found himself at the receiving end of the last impi charge in colonial history.

Afterwards, they had to be persuaded to wear clothes; it was so hot in the valley that they had never been necessary.

This is very untypical, of course. The marvellous Great Zimbabwe is an architectural masterpiece that could only have been created by a sophisticated civilisation. The problem is it had long since disappeared by the time the whites arrived in 1890. We don’t know who they were or what happened to them, but my guess is that the population simply outgrew the food supply. We do know that the Portuguese were mining there for gold in the 16^th century.

Race discrimination? Plenty, but it was mostly social rather than political and at a time when you would still see ’No coloured, no Irish, no dogs’ signs in UK and USA, so this was a reflection of the era. And American military units were still segregated, and ‘coloreds’ made to sit at the back of the bus at a time when most colonies were free. Oddly enough, it was the memsahibs who were most colour-prejudiced. India is not a topic of mine, but I understand that discrimination scarcely existed in the early days, and intermarriage even the most exalted levels was completely acceptable. It was only when the ‘fishing fleet’ of young women looking for husbands began to arrive in India that it became frowned upon but not eliminated.

One very noticeable factor was that wives freshly out from the UK started off by fawning over their poor, downtrodden African domestics and ended up virulent racists, whereas the old-timers rubbed along quite easily. Personal relationships were much more complex than they would appear at first sight. For example, I met a old guy some years ago who had arrived in Nyasaland in 1944 as an Agricultural Extension Officer, mentoring Africans in improved agricultural techniques. He stayed on after independence.

When he first arrived he took on a ‘kitchen toto’, a small boy who helped around the house; 45 years later they were still together. He told me that every Xmas he will tell the ‘boy’ that it was time he retired and each time the reply was ‘But who will look after you?’ and that was the end of the conversation for another year. The relationship was no more ‘master and servant’ than Jeeves and Wooster.

The book maintains that colonial policy was made on the hoof and that this was a reason for post-colonial chaos. Rubbish. The chaos in India after independence was not caused by the Raj but by the lack of it. Partition was the cause; this only came onto the agenda late in the day because Ali Jinnah threatened to derail the negotiations otherwise. It was always contemplated that there would be one India. In any case, India as a nation did not exist before the Raj; it was a collection of fairly small states ruled by maharajahs and such. Britain created it.

There was no post-colonial chaos in British Africa, but only chronic and serious misgovernment that continues to this day. You can’t blame colonialism for your problems half a century on. The population of Africa has mostly been born into ‘freedom’, and that includes freedom to make a complete balls of things.

And colonial policy was admirably clear. It was that the interests of the native population were pre-eminent, and that they were to be encouraged to develop at their own pace and in their own way. The French, of course, tried with some success to convert their Africans into Frenchmen.

As for Britain ‘dashing for the exits’, as is suggested, the decolonisation process actually took 35 years.

The whole justification reminds me of John Cleese in ‘Life of Brian. ‘What did the Romans ever do for us? Apart from law and order, water, roads, sanitation, sport.......’

The Brits did all these things, the big difference being that the Romans had 1000 years and we had about 80.

My firm belief is that the British Empire was the greatest civilising mission since the Romans.

Our enduring legacy was the English common law and the English language. Imagine trying to get on in this day and age speaking only Chichewa, Bemba or Yao.