Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (100 page)

In theory the British Empire, latterly Commonwealth, had always worked on a quite different supposition: that all territories were to be prepared for independence, and given it when ready. The British White Paper of June 1948 stated: ‘The central purpose of British colonial policy … is to guide the colonial territories to responsible self-government within the Commonwealth in conditions that ensure to the people concerned both a fair standard of living and freedom from oppression in any quarter.’
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But both qualifications were invariably abandoned when expediency beckoned. Up to the mid-1950s the pace was too slow; from 1960 it was too fast. In neither case did it reflect the real readiness and needs of the territories concerned, but rather the pressures on the British government and its will, or lack of it, to resist them. The forces set up by the Bandung movement were the decisive factor. While France decided to cut and run in 1958, Britain followed a year later, when Harold Macmillan felt free to follow de Gaulle’s example. As Sir Michael Blundell, the shrewdest of the Kenya settlers’ leaders, put it, ‘… a dramatic change was to take place in the policy of the British government after the general election in October 1959 … the decision was taken to withdraw from Africa as quickly as decency would permit.’
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But even this switch, though rationalized in Macmillan’s ‘Winds of Change’ speech in Cape Town on 3 February 1960, was more a series of violent wobbles than a smooth U-turn. Macmillan’s agent, the Colonial Secretary Iain Macleod, later admitted there was no ‘resounding decision’ but more ‘a score of different deliberate decisions’.
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When Macleod used the term ‘deliberate’, he meant that the formalities of negotiations were preserved, ending in a grandiose orgy of constitution-making, usually at Lancaster House in London. One thing decolonization did not lack was paper constitutions. It is ironic that Britain, which had never had one, produced (by my calculation) more than 500 for its colonial territories in the years 1920–75, most of which lasted only a few years, some a few months, some never being applied at all; none surviving into the 1980s. The European empires began in paternalism and a denial of the spirit of politics. They ended at the opposite extreme, in over-democratization and political elephantiasis. The silver age of empire was completely dominated by endless conferences and constitution-making. Thus, the two Rhodesias and Nyasaland dithered for thirty years over whether or not to have a federation. There was the Hilton-Young Commission of 1927–9, the Bledisloe Commission of 1948–9, the Settlers’ Constitution of 1936 (never
implemented), two separate conferences in 1951 (boycotted by Africans), a third in 1953. This produced the ‘final’ constitution, which was too complex for most voters to understand and was out of date by the time it was put into practice.

With voting rolls depending on a weird mixture of property, income, residence and literacy qualifications, and electoral districts and candidatures ‘balanced’ to the point of incomprehensibility, men and women did not always know whether they had a vote or where or how to cast it. There were often several tiers of government and a multiplicity of parties at each. Thus a country’s destiny could be settled by a handful of people or by sheer muddle. In the 1962 election which led to the long Rhodesia crisis, and scores of thousands of dead, only 12,000 Africans out of a possible 65,500 actually voted; a mere 500 more African votes would have put in the moderates, and the whole of the country’s history for the next twenty years would have been different.
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Most of the Africans, and a good many whites, did not know what they were doing.

Constitutional complexities proliferated even when there were no fundamental problems of race. Thus Tanzania’s 1955 ‘reform’ produced one of the most complicated constitutions ever devised for a colonial territory, mainly to exclude the more belligerent nationalists. Further changes in 1957–8 added yet more subtleties, including a tripartite voting provision that each voter on the roll had to cast his vote for one person of each race (African, European, Asian), on pain of invalidation. A new kind of bureaucracy, expert at ‘balanced’ multiracial constitutions, emerged, invaded the
UN
Secretariat, and so internationalized itself. From 1956, under
UN
pressure, the Belgians in Ruanda-Urundi constructed one of the most rococo constitutions ever devised by man, with multi-roll elections to the Councils of Sub-Chiefs, Councils of Chiefs, Territorial Councils, African Council and, on top, a General Council to advise the Vice-Governor-General: a five-tier system. Here was one of the world’s most primitive countries with a political structure more elaborate than that of the United States.
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Colonies had once been under-governed. Now they were over-governed. One reason was that ‘independence’ meant full sovereignty, with all that such a status implied. The Gambia, with a population of 300,000, which was really one town, Bathurst, and its hinterland, surrounded on three sides by Senegal, became a fully-fledged state burdened with the entire apparatus of government, which finally flattened it into bankruptcy in 1981. The alternative was to hammer these small, separate chunks of colonialism into federations. But they seldom worked for long or at all. They involved, too, extra tiers of government, often with two legislative
chambers each, and elaborate safeguards to calm the mutual hatreds and fears of territories at different stages of development and with different racial mixes. Thus the British West Indies were over-administered, for historical reasons, even while still crown colonies. Independence added another tier, federation a third, so that while it lasted – generally not long – these islands, most of them poor and backward, probably had more legislators per head than any other community in history.

The former colonies thus became superlative prey for the great human scourge of the twentieth century: the professional politician. Indeed, if decolonization did possess an ethical principle, it was that political forms were the ultimate standard of value, the only true criteria of statehood. The principle had been adumbrated in India. The Montagu Report of 1918, which introduced it, condescendingly observed: if we speak of “Indian opinion”, we should be understood as generally referring to the majority of those who have held or are capable of holding an opinion on the matter with which we are dealing.’
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But every adult, even if he or she is an illiterate living in a remote village, is capable of holding an opinion about the future of the society to which they belong. What the Report was really saying, and this remained the conventional wisdom down to the tragic and savage end of the decolonization process, was that, in negotiating independence, the only valid mode of discourse was that of those who made their living by full-time politics: that unless an opinion could be expressed within the vocabulary and terms of reference and assumptions of that mode of discourse, it was not really an opinion at all, and could therefore be ignored or, if necessary, trampled on.

Hence the assumptions on which decolonization rested, and still more the constitutional clutter which accompanied it, tended to widen the gap between the ‘real’ and the ‘political’ nation, and to define the latter in the narrowest, most sectarian sense. The beneficiaries of decolonization were therefore the vote-manipulators. Therein lay the seeds of a great deception. The professional politicians see the
res publica
in terms of votes, ordinary people in terms of justice. For the ‘real’ nation, democracy matters less than the rule of law: the first is the form, the second the substance. When the ex-colonial peoples received independence, they thought they were being given justice: all they got was the right to elect politicians. Colonialism, of course, could not produce political equality; what it could, and at its best did, provide was equality before the law. But the process of transfer, by making the vote the yardstick of progress, left the law to take care of itself, so that in the long run the vast majority of Africans ended with nothing.

This helps to explain why those territories where the process of
transfer was longest and most elaborate fared no better, as a rule, than those where it was rushed. The outstanding and perhaps the most pathetic example was the Gold Coast. In the post-1945 period it was the richest black state in Africa. It was generally regarded as the most promising. It had no race problem. It was the first to get independence. The road to freedom was a long one. It had had a legislative council since 1850, a black (nominated) member as long ago as 1888; there were six by 1916. Full elections in local government came in 1925. In 1946 the Legislative Council got an African majority. 1948: constitutional inquiry commission. 1949: African-majority committee to devise new constitution. 1951: elections under new constitution. 1952: Kwame Nkrumah Prime Minister. 1954: final ‘independence constitution’. 1956: new elections. 1957: full independence. This was the slow, sure, copy-book progress to self-rule; and Nkrumah was regarded as the model African statesman, his new country, Ghana, the prototype for African self-rule. Young, handsome, ultra-articulate, he cut a notable figure at Bandung.

Yet there were portents even before independence. Ghana’s drive for independence had been the work of the barrister J.B.Danquah, who had hired Nkrumah as a full-time party organizer. Nkrumah was thus from the start a professional politician, nothing else. He hijacked the party organization, turned it into a mass-movement revolving round his own personality, and persuaded the British that he was the best, or simplest, man to back in the independence stakes. They made it easy for him. The Local Government Ordinances of 1951 and 1953, by creating political councils, which immediately fell into the hands of Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party, broke the power of the chiefs, the traditional authorities. Thus Ghana was an embryo one-party state even before the hand-over. Once in power, Nkrumah used British devices, such as ‘judicial enquiries’, and employed left-wing British legal and political advisers, to destroy all other centres of influence, and the constitutional restraints on his personal rule, and to drive the opposition into illegality. Having concentrated power in his party and himself, he then destroyed the rule of law. The decisive point came in December 1963. On the 9th, three opposition leaders (former colleagues of Nkrumah) were acquitted of treason by three judges in a special court. A careful five-hour judgement, a model of English judicial reasoning, was read by the Chief Justice, Sir Arku Korsah. He had been a Middle Temple barrister for forty-four years, a judge since 1945, Chief Justice since 1956. He was a symbol of the most vital governing principle of all: that in a civilized community, everyone and every institution, including, indeed above all, the state, is equal before and subject to the
law. He was, in a real sense, the end-result of a millennium of British constitutional development. On 11 December Nkrumah sacked him. The three men were tried again and convicted. Two years later, old Danquah died in gaol, where he was being held without trial.
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This destruction of the rule of law was paralleled by the moral destruction of Nkrumah and by the economic destruction of the country. The three were closely connected. In the heady atmosphere of Bandung in 1955, Nkrumah absorbed two fatal fallacies. The first was that all economic problems can be solved by political means. Colonies and ex-colonies were poor and backward not for intrinsic physical and human reasons but because of the political fact of colonization. The theory was emerging, and Bandung gave it enormous impetus, that colonialism did not merely hold back economic advance but actually subjected the colony to a deliberate process of ‘underdevelopment’.
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What politics had done, politics could undo. ‘Underdevelopment’ could be reversed by large-scale, politically motivated investment programmes. Continental prosperity could be promoted by the political process. Nkrumah preached this doctrine at the Pan-African Congresses he inaugurated at Accra in 1958. He summed it up at Addis Ababa in May 1963: ‘African unity is above all a political kingdom, which can only be gained by political means. The social and economic development of Africa will come only within the political kingdom, not the other way round.’ He therefore called for a Union Government of African States, a Common Market, a Pan-African Currency, an African Monetary Zone, a Central Bank, a continental communications system and a common foreign policy: ‘We shall thus begin the triumphant march of the Kingdom of African personality.’
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Nkrumah not only preached these fantasies: he tried to practise them in Ghana. The territory had been one of colonialism’s success-stories. By diligent housekeeping, its modest level of prosperity might have been consolidated and even raised. By politicizing the economy, Nkrumah rapidly eliminated Ghana’s balance of payments surplus; by the mid-1960s it had accumulated a mountain of foreign debt and a low international credit-rating.

The second fallacy or disease which Nkrumah (and others) contracted at Bandung, which operated as a mutual-admiration society, was the notion that the emergence of the new nations from the malign process of ‘underdevelopment’ required leadership by charismatic personalities. This idea was implicit in Leninism, which endowed vanguard élite
s
(and their guiding spirit) with quasi-sacral insights into the historical process. It was also implicit in Gandhiism, which gave a determining political role to the self-elect ‘holy man’ and was a primary influence on the Bandung generation. Nehru,
Sukarno, U Nu, and then Nasser and Nkrumah – and many others – were not just political leaders: they were spiritual leaders too, in the sense that the nation incarnated the spiritual yearnings of a people, and the ‘liberators’ incarnated the nation.

It was not long after he returned from Bandung that Nkrumah began to allow his followers to refer to him as
Osagyefo
, ‘the Redeemer’. The corruption set in rapidly; a form of bastardized Stalinism made its appearance. In 1960 an authorized biography recorded: ‘He is our father, teacher, our brother, our friend, indeed our life, for without him we would no doubt have existed but we would not have lived …. What we owe him is greater even than the air we breathe, for he made us as surely as he made Ghana.’
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The Redeemer began to believe this nonsense himself. ‘All Africans know’, he said in 1961, ‘that I represent Africa and that I speak in her name. Therefore no African can have an opinion that differs from mine.’
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It was against this background that Nkrumah crushed opposition and wrecked the rule of law. The charisma held for a time, especially at international conferences. But even there, as the 1960s progressed, newer, more up-to-date and fashionable figures arose and became the cynosure. Nkrumah lost his lustre. At home, the very fact of arrogating to himself quasi-divine powers made him vulnerable when the gradual, then rapid, fall in living-standards proved the magic did not work. But by the mid-1960s there was no constitutional means of removing the Redeemer. He fell to a military
coup
in February 1966, and died in exile in 1972.