Reverberations of decolonisation: British approaches to governance in post-colonial Africa and the rise of the ‘strong men’

Abstract

In the late 1940s and 1950s, much of Whitehall and the British media’s rhetoric concerning the rate at which decolonisation should ideally occur in Britain’s African colonies was rooted in assessments of the colonies’ capacity for the development of democratic institutions. Britain’s own rejection of imperial democratic accountability for the majority of the colonial era was predicated on the assumption that ‘good’ foreign authoritarian rule was preferable for all concerned to ‘bad’ self rule, but now, it seemed, stable multi-party democracy was an essential prerequisite against which exogenous (i.e. communist) subversion or endogenous chaos could be resisted. The initial emergence of multi-party elections in the late colonial era could, therefore, be trumpeted as a validation of Britain’s raison d’être as a ‘civilising’ power, serving as an ideological rearguard action by which the existence of Africans tentatively schooled in the ways of ‘responsible’ government meant imperialists could retreat with a sense of a job well done.

One would assume, therefore, that the rise of one-party postcolonial states in formerly British territories as varied as Ghana, Malawi, Sudan and Kenya would have challenged British conceptions of their own capacity to have done ‘good’ in Africa. After all, the speed of this rise was often rapid – beginning in the late 1950s and early 1960s – meaning British politicians and commentators had to consider the rise of African authoritarianism even as formal decolonization was not yet fully complete. Focusing on Nkrumah’s civil rule in Ghana and General Abboud’s military rule in Sudan, this chapter will consider how British journalists and politicians sought to make sense of Britain’s imperial past in light of their understanding of Africa’s present.

At a time when Britain was forced to fundamentally renegotiate its relationships with Africa, there were confused British responses to the issue of how their colonial legacy should be defined. But, coinciding with a British valorisation of the ‘strong man’ in African politics who could establish bastions against communist rule, one narrative that re-emerged with particular force was a conception of colonial rule that centred on the inculcation of ‘order’ rather than ‘progress’. Thus, Britons felt they could be congratulated on fostering Cold War warriors, not democratic statesmen. The chapter therefore examines how Britons recast the purpose of British imperial rule in light of a distinctively Cold War agenda.

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ORCID for Christopher Prior: orcid.org/0000-0002-1014-0598

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