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Colonial governors were an extraordinarily diverse group. At first sight, no single
category of professional men seems more heterogeneous than the chief colonial executives
who presided over the European colonies in sub-Saharan Africa from the so-called
Age of the New Imperialism to decolonization. They held a variety of titles—governor-general,
high commissioner general, high commissioner, governor, chief commissioner, administrator,
lieutenant governor, The total number of officeholders who ruled a designated territory
or a group of territories during this period exceeded 800. To be exact, between
the start of the Berlin conference in 1884 and the year in which Zambia and Malawi
attained their independence, 1964, there were 333 French officials, 293 British,
142 Portuguese, 27 German, and 26 Belgian.
This array of governors differed from
each other in every conceivable respect—in
manner, in appearance, in physical size, Sir Robert Coryndon, for instance, looked
like a hero straight out of Kipling—a commanding presence, tall broad- shouldered,
and physically strong; he could lift a pony on a bet or bend a half crown piece
for the amusement of his friends. Sir Gordon Guggisberg was a giant. On the other
hand, Sir Harry Johnston, a former art student, was a rotund, little man, as unlike
the conventional picture of the empire builder as could be imagined, Lord Frederick
Lugard's smallness of stature likewise contrasted oddly with his military manner
and aspirations.
In terms of personal qualities, governors had little in common. Eduard von Liebert
of German East Africa possessed in full the authoritarian personality so beloved
by the Frankfurt school of sociologists. He grew up under his grandfather's stern
and patriarchal guidance. At the age of eleven he was sent to a Prussian cadet
school, where life was harsh and where the youngest and weakest were beaten without
mercy by their more athletic peers, Liebert joined his regiment at sixteen as an
ensign, and from then onward the regiment was his home, his family, his fatherland,
his all. The emperor's friends were his friends; the emperor's enemies were his
enemies. He hated the Jews; he hated the Liberals; he hated the Social Democrats.
He joined the Nazi party long before Hitler seized power, at a time when members
of Liebert's social class still accounted membership in such a plebeian group as
a social disqualification. Butmen like Liebert were the exception. Heinrich Schnee,
son of a German provincial judge of liberal leanings, had a happy childhood. There
was nothing in his personality that remotely resembled Liebert's ruthlessness.
Robert Delavignette had a marvelous youth: his early life was not socially restricted;
he was inspired by two most unusual schoolteachers; his parents were reasonable
and kind. Like many other governors, Delavignette became a “solid and obstinate
liberal.”
Governors were equally diverse in their politics. There was a contingent of unrepentant
Tories. They included men like Sir Francis Chaplin, journalist, mine manager, South
African parliamentarian, and administrator of Southern Rhodesia under the British
South Africa Company. Chaplin was a Tory of Tories, one of the foremost representatives
of the “high mining” school in pre-World War I South African politics.
He stood for mining capitalism and the imperial connection. Chaplin would have
no truck with white workers; indeed, within his own lifetime, his position as a
right-wing Unionist became archaic. But Chaplin was by no means typical of colonial
governors. A substantial number veered to the left of center. Delavignette was
a left-wing Catholic married to an outspoke Socialist. José Norton de Matos
turned into a convinced opponent of the Salazar dictatorship. Louis Faidherbe,
a French soldier and governor, offended conservatives in the French army by his
admiration for Léon Gambetta and for Gambetta's determination in 1871 to
conduct a people's war against the invading German army. Louis Gustave Binger,
like most of his colleagues, was a Republican, well regarded by French anticlericals.
Schnee, in Germany, was a National Liberal with a reformist bent. Julius von Zech,
his compatriot, was an adherent of the Center party. Félix Eboué,
a black West Indian, owed his gubernatorial post to his Masonic connections and
to the Popular Front government set up in 1936; soon afterward he became a champion
of de Gaulle.
Their geographic origins do not lend themselves to rigid classification. A substantial
proportion of British governors came from the gentry and were linked by education,
social connections, and personal preference to London and the home counties. The “Celtic
fringe” did not go unrepresented but played in no way as important a part
as did southeastern England. The British administrators maintained close links
to the Anglican church, the older universities, and gentlemen's clubs. They took
pride in a common love of open-air pursuits and in their respect for form. Thus,
they achieved a remarkably cohesive ethos. Gentlemen on the whole trusted one another—and
with good reason. Personal corruption among British governors and judges was almost
unknown. Tensions between civilian and military officers were less than among continental
colonials. There was more social cohesion within the various ranks of the British
governing stratum than within those of its continental counterparts. junior clerks
in the upper division of the colonial office one day might head the ministry; assistant
district commissioners one day might reside in Government House. They were gentlemen
by definition. The very system in government offices whereby junior officials minuted
documents before sending them to their seniors for further comment reflected in
some measure the social cohesion of the British administrative elite.
British governors occupied a peculiarly favored position within metropolitan society.
When Britain acquired its new African empire, its financial and economic stake
in the area was small. But it had at least a long-standing tradition of overseas
service, and such service in the dependencies carried with it a good deal of prestige.
Colonial governance was an occupation fit for gentlemen. British governors on the
whole were more highly placed socially and better remunerated financially than
their confr6res on the continent. During the heyday of empire, British governors
formed part of the British ruling group—the most homogeneous ruling stratum
in Europe—or were easily assimilated into it. They therefore looked upon
themselves as gentlemen rather than bureaucratic or military specialists. As gentlemen,
they prized the virtues of the amateur, virtues that their education was designed
to enhance. Unlike their counterparts in continental bureaucracies, they had not
been trained exclusively in legal and administrative studies; instead, they had
taken degrees in a variety of subjects, commonly literary or classical. Most British
governors had been molded by the public schools, where members of the financial
aristocracy rubbed shoulders with sons of landowners and where a classical education
was prized beyond all. Those who had not gone to public schools had at least attended
good grammar schools shaped to a greater or lesser extent by the public school
ethos. A high proportion attended Oxford or Cambridge or a great military institution
like Sandhurst. Later in life they joined distinguished clubs where they once more
mingled on terms of social equality with merchants, bankers, senior civil servants,
and military officers.
The administrative cadres on the continent were not as tightly knit as the British.
In Germany a good number of colonial dignitaries were nobles from the more backward
rural areas-East Prussia, Pomerania, Bavaria, and so forth. The industrial cities
of the Ruhr or trading communities like Hamburg and Bremen, for whose collective
benefit the colonial empire had supposedly been built, went unrepresented. The
French recruited a considerable number of their colonial officials from peripheral
regions like Alsace, Corsica, and Algeria. The Portuguese relied heavily on northern
Portugal as an area of recruitment. The Belgians drew many of their administrators
from the Ardennes-a French-speaking, povertystricken region but one well supplied
with schools. In addition, the Belgian establishment had a strong urban orientation;
Brussels played a relatively larger part in furnishing senior officers than did
Paris or Berlin. But every rule had its exception, and every exception its subexception,
so that sociologists cannot easily establish all-embracing rules with regard to
gubernatorial provenance.
For all the differences, there were nevertheless distinctive uniformities. European
colonization in Africa was primarily a middle-class achievement. The majority of
governors came from the middle layers of society. Exceptions included Joaquim Mousinho
de Albuquerque and Ayres d'Ornellas, who were aristocrats of most distinguished
families. Adolf Friedrich, Duke of Mecklenburg, ranked high in the Almanac de Gotha;
Albrecht Freiherr von Rechenberg traced his lineage from the Silesian Uradel, more
ancient than many a ruling dynasty of European states. Such men, however, were
the exception, although the German colonial administration employed a larger number
of noblemen as governors than any other nation at the time. But men like Eugen
von Zimmerer or Hans Georg von Doering, though well connected and hoffähig
(fit to be presented at court), were essentially middle-class in taste and connections.
The average British governor—like the average German or Belgian or Portuguese
senior administrator—was the son of a civil servant, a military officer,
or a professional man. The British colonial service also had a strong link to the
ministry, a tie of a kind not possible in Catholic countries with a celibate priesthood.
Out of ninety-five twentieth-century governors whose social origins were investigated
by Colin Hughes and L.F. Nicolson 1, no fewer than thirty-four were the sons of
Anglican clergymen. Direct links with the instruments of production or with finance
were rare. The same was true in France and Germany. Manufacturers and bankers were
less likely to send their sons into the colonial service than were professional
men or civil servants. Again, there were exceptions: Wilhelm Solf, a well-known
German governor, later German secretary of state for the colonies, was the son
of a prosperous Berlin industrialist. By and large, however, the classes for whose
benefit the empires were supposedly being built did not administer the newly won
possessions.
Professionally, many governors had been trained as soldiers —Binger, Lugard,
Mousinho de Albuquerque, and von Zech. Others had started life in the navy; the
Portuguese especially were apt to advance sailors into high positions. There were
physicians—men like Jean Bayol in France or Sir James Maxwell in Great Britain;
there were engineers like Guggisberg; there were lawyers, artists, policemen, and
representatives of a host of other occupations. In their personal tastes, some
governors rarely opened a book; others were not only avid readers but were also
copious and competent writers. Portuguese governors often had a flair for literary
expression. So did many British governors, who with their classical educations
were better able to express themselves than their French colleagues—apt to
be trained in law and administration rather than in literature. Sir Ronald Storr's
Orientations figured in the catalog of the Readers' Union. Sir Charles Eliot was
a writer of merit and a fine linguist; his Turkey in Europe still ranks as a minor
classic. A substantial number of governors with scholarly inclinations made their
reputation as linguists (Binger, Johnston, and Eliot), and some were students of
ethnography, and one of crown jewels.
For the most able or the most fortunate members of the colonial administration,
the colonies were an open frontier that facilitated social promotion. Sir Edward
Twining, a failed district officer, became a successful governor and, later, a
peer. Lord Lugard, a humble subaltern, also rose to the peerage. So did Theophile
Wahis, a onetime soldier who had earned his king's favor in the Belgian Congo.
France, with its revolutionary tradition of la carrière ouverte aux talents,
was more likely to give a chance to a poor boy than either Germany or Great Britain.
A career like that of Binger, who advanced from a private in the army to national
fame as soldier, explorer, scholar, and governor, would have been unthinkable in
the Reich. Binger's experience was not exceptional. Of the pre-1900 French colonial
governors investigated by William Cohen (see p. 19), nearly half had no academic
training beyond primary school; educational achievement was much more important
after the turn of the century. Nevertheless, governors of lowly social origin rarely
came from the peasantry or the working class. They were apt to be sons of petty
officials, noncommissioned officers, or small tradesmen. Whatever their nationality,
the bulk of European governors thus were bourgeois in origin.
The criteria that entered a governor's promotion differed widely. Membership in
an establishment religion was an advantage. Most German governors were Lutheran;
most British governors were members of the Anglican church. Other French governors,
like Eboué, benefited from membership in Masonic orders and from a reputation
for republicanism and anticlericalism. In the eyes of the Belgian Catholic bourgeoisie,
the early Congo Free State administration was never quite respectable; the Congolese
service initially had an anticlerical flavor. An increasing number of Catholics
from provincial, middle-class families entered the service after the reprise of
1908, so that most Belgian governors adhered to the Church of Rome. German governors
were expected to be kaisertreu, and a regular—or at least a reserve officer's—commission
was almost a sine qua non for advancement; but Catholics like Count von Zech and
Freiherr von Rechenberg—members of the Center party and men with irreproachable
connections—were still able to secure high offices. Political or religious
patronage was less important for British governors. Given a decent respect for
the opinions of others, a gentleman might profess any creed—or none. Sir
Matthew Nathan was a Jew, Sir Hugh Clifford a Catholic, and Sir James Maxwell a
Calvinist: all of them gained distinction under the Union Jack.
Factionalism was more evident on the continent than it was in Great Britain. France,
Belgium, and Portugal were rent by quarrels between clericals and anticlericals.
In France and Portugal, there was also a sharp cleavage between republicans and
opponents of the republican system. These divisions affected a governor's promotion
prospects as they did not in England; they might also plague his professional life
in minor ways. The upper ranks of the bureaucracy were also structurally divided.
The French and Belgian administrations, for instance, maintained rigidly separate
corps, each with a tradition and an ethos of its own. Within the French bureaucracy,
the inspecteurs d'état formed an elite, many of whose members advanced to
high positions. The inspecteurs had no counterpart in Great Britain; their role
was to assure administrative centralization, to investigate abuses, and to weed
out wrongdoers. They operated in a system in which trust was less apt to be taken
for granted; they were heirs to an ancient centralizing tradition derived from
monarchical governance and to the quarrels and mistrust that divided French society
after 1789.
Despite their middle-class backgrounds, governors were apt to affect courtly ceremonial.
They were concerned to an extraordinary extent with the pomp and circumstance of
high office. Whatever his social origins, a governor stood at the head of local
colonial society. He combined executive leadership with ceremonial primacy, like
an eighteenth-century monarch. Medals, orders, gun salutes, splendid receptions,
and intense preoccupation with the formalities of social precedence helped to make
colonial rule visible. An impressive ceremonial and a magnificent Government House
were meant to overawe the indigenous people at a time when the physical power of
the colonial state machinery was weak—much weaker than the physical power
of the state apparatus in the metropolis. Honors and decorations also served to
supplement the colonial official's financial income with psychic rewards, as well
as with visible badges bearing witness to the recipient's achievements and position
in society. Again, British governors profited the most. A British governor normally
obtained a knighthood; he became a member of the gentry ex officio; a governor-general
invariably was raised to the peerage. Continental governors, on the other hand,
were more apt to be regarded as members of a purely bureaucratic elite. A German
governor was not eligible for a patent of nobility unless he had distinguished
himself as a soldier. The French and Portuguese republics naturally had no aristocratic
titles at their disposal, though advancement into the Legion of Honor served a
comparable purpose.
The financial fortunes of governors upon retirement were diverse. Chaplin ended
up with a string of directorships in the South African mining companies; Lord Lugard
became a director of Barclay's Bank after he left office; Ernest Roume, a great
Frenchman, went to Le Nickel Compagnie; Gabriel-Louis Angoulvant, a compatriot,
to the Compagnie générale des colonies. As Cohen points out, however,
French governors with a subsequent record of financial involvement had not necessarily
favored commercial companies while in office; governors who had supported free
enterprise in their colonies did not necessarily pick up directorships on retirement
(p. 19). The great majority of all governors, moreover, retired in modest circumstances.
Some died in relative poverty, like Schnee; others left their families in a position
of near deprivation—like Albert Dolisie, a Frenchman, whose friends had to
help his widow by obtaining a tobacco license for her.
Generalizations on the place of retired governors in this history of their respective
countries are difficult to formulate. They became high metropolitan officials,
diplomats, scholars, or propagandists. Norton de Matos was appointed as a cabinet
minister and played a major part in propelling Portugal into World War I. Bayol
was elected to the French Senate, where he sat on the democratic left. Faidherbe
helped save his country's military honor during the final stage of the Franco-German
war of 1870-1871. Hubert Deschamps occupied the first chair of African history
at the Sorbonne and became a successful man of letters. Many colonial dignitaries
combined several roles in their lifetime. Binger served in turn as soldier and
explorer, as governor, and then as a high-ranking civil servant in the French colonial
ministry. William Ponty successively made his name as conqueror, administrator,
and scholar. Delavignette started as a roi de la browse; he ended as a scholar
of international renown—and also as a bitter critic of French metnods designed
to quell the Algerian rising. Lord Lugard, after retiring from the governor-generalship
of Nigeria, acquired further laurels as a theoretician of colonial government.
His reputation was enhanced by the lucky chance of finding a biographer in Margery
Perham, who was able to use a vast array of written records in her research. Other
governors were not so fortunate. Count von Zech, a model ruler in every respect,
left no papers; his very name remains unknown to all but a tiny number of specialists.
The colonial governorships contained their share of failures and misfits. But,
as a rule, these officials were men well above average ability. They had arrived
at the top of their professional career-commonly by merit and ability displayed
under trying circumstances. Their achievements were considerable. They were the
unacknowledged state builders of modern Africa. The newly independent republics
that now cover the African map are, for the most part, of colonial provenance.
They owe their boundaries, their modern administrative systems, the foundations
of their modern economy, their modern social services and their modern transport
system, and—above all—the language of modern government and of modern
cultural intercourse to the colonial rulers—among whom the governors occupied
a key position.
In Germany, France, and Belgium alike, colonial enterprise was more marginal in
relation to the national economy as a whole than in Great Britain. In Belgium,
for example, Leopold II had been forced to persuade a reluctant bourgeoisie to
back the Congo enterprise, which had begun as the king's personal undertaking.
Bismarck soon lost interest in the colonies; few Germans wanted to settle there,
and anxious German parents—such as those of Schnee and of Theodor Seitz—warned
their sons not to enter colonial service. The French Parti colonialwas a small
group that gained influence only when it managed to gain to enlist in its support
the popular forces of French nationalism. Until at least the 1920s, the French
colonial ministry remained one of the least sought after cabinet posts. The ministry
itself achieved a level of incompetence and disorganization rivaled by no other
government department, and the colonial administration enjoyed correspondingly
low prestige. Except for a minority of dedicated men, it was apt initially to attract
the least able French officials, those who found it most difficult to make a career
in the metropole.
The main ambition of most colonial governors from France and from Portugal was
to spend as little time in the colonies as they could. As a result—at
least until the 1920s—French colonies changed governors with breathtaking
rapidity. Not surprisingly, both French and Portuguese colonies suffered more from
high-level corruption than did British or German dependencies. There were no British
or German equivalents for men like Governor Alfred-Louis Woelfel, the first commissioner
of the Togo mandate, who was involved in land speculation, or for Governor Frédéric-Charles
Hesling of Upper Volta, who pushed cotton growing to benefit his relatives. The
French position improved only after World War I, when educational standards rose
rapidly within the ranks of the colonial elite and when high-level corruption was
largely eliminated.
Whatever their nationality, colonial governors shouldered broadly similar tasks.
The colonial powers exercised only nominal control over the vast areas that they
claimed in the earliest stage of colonialism. The first representative of metropolitan
power was often a consular officer who resided at a coastal settlement. His military
resources were negligible; at best, he might call upon occasional support from
a visiting cruiser or gunboat. He was not expected to rule; his task was to assist
local merchants, to adjudicate between aggrieved traders, and to provide information
to the home government. He depended essentially on the goodwill of African potentates
and relied—above all—on his diplomatic skill.
This indirect influence gave way to conquest. Military occupation often was a long
drawn out affair. Governors were faced with an all-pervasive scarcity of men, money,
and means. They conquered great territories with armies of battalion size. They
ruled provinces as large as kingdoms with staffs fit to run a parish council. Their
fiefs were devoid of railways, bridges, modern port facilities, survey departments,
agricultural services, repair shops, electric power, modern schools, hospitals,
research facilities, and such; the very towns and essentials of modern life had
to be built from the start.
Empire building in the early days principally attracted professional soldiers,
experienced in commanding men in action, fitted by training and personality to
wage campaigns—but often educated in special skills like cartography, military
engineering, or the art of exploration. Early German governors, for instance, were
primarily military officers. King Leopold of Belgium drew his most faithful supporters
from the army. French and Portuguese governors were mainly naval and military men
from diverse social backgrounds. The pioneering period of empire building afforded
opportunities in addition to a variety of civilians not subject to promotion in
routine-bound bureaucracies. There were adventurous physicians turned explorers;
there were consular officials; there were big-game hunters; and former police sergeants
with a flair for government.
The pioneers ruled in an intensely personal fashion. The metropolitan organization
was weak; restraints imposed by the home governments often were feeble. Governors
were frontiersmen; they were concerned, above all, with conquest. But their ability
actually to control the territories under their nominal sway was strictly circumscribed.
A French colony in its early stage thus was correctly described as a fédération
des cercles in which the governor was little influenced by Paris and the commandants
often snapped their fingers at the occupant of Government House. The central machinery
at the governor's disposal was extremely simple. Business was conducted through
a chief secretary or a Kanzler or a secrétaire général, assisted
by a few senior officials including the head of the military establishment.
The second stage came with the end of pacification. The soldier gave way to the
civilian, the man of action to the bureaucrat, the amateur without academic rank
to the credentialed specialist. The change occurred at different times, in different
places; the rate of transformation varied strikingly from territory to territory
and from province to province. But there were certain regularities. The development
of civil government went with vast improvements in communications both within territories
and between the metropoles and the colonial peripheries. Steamships, railways,
and telegraphs—followed by trucks, bulldozers, and finally radio and aircraft—changed
the nature of government. The heads of outlying districts became more responsive
to gubernatorial decrees; the governors could be controlled more easily by their
home governments. Reform commonly entailed economic change. The local revenue of
the colonies no longer depended on precolonial commodities like ivory, wild rubber,
and gold dust-goods that had been produced with a small outlay of capital and often
by coerced labor. Instead, the colonies began to furnish the world market with
bulky crops like cocoa, coffee, and cotton. Mineral-rich territories started exporting
zinc, copper, and industrial diamonds-raw materials of a kind that could not have
been produced or transported in large quantities with the technology available
to precolonial societies.
Under the new dispensation, the colonial rulers attempted to attract more metropolitan
capital so as to improve their “undeveloped estates.” There was talk
of reform, promoted for both economic and humanitarian ends, from the beginning
of the present century by great colonial secretaries like Joseph Chamberlain in
Great Britain, Bernhard Dernburg in Germany, and Jules Renkin in Belgium. These
men and their disciples were convinced that profits, efficiency in government,
and African well-being went together. Ministerial organization in the metropole
improved. “Scientific colonialism” on the spot was represented by men
like Governor- general Roume, a brilliant intellectual, who also floated the first
development loan for French West Africa, promoted railway building, and reformed
the bureaucracy.
The place of governors in the economic development of the colonies deserves a book
to itself. Their activities showed immense variation. Transient potentates who
stayed only for a year or so in a French colony were plentiful; their part in economic
decision-making was obviously small. But there were many others who stayed long
enough to make their influence felt. Conventional Marxist historiography sees the
latter as mere agents of certain bourgeois pressure groups. This approach, however,
ignores the element of choice that was open to them—the voluntarist element
that went into the determination of policy at a time when the conquered colonies
seemed almost a tabula rasa to the uninitiated, when local pressure groups were
insignificant, and when a gubernatorial decision might have far-reaching consequences
for the future.
A governor who knew his own mind often had several alternatives open to him. There
were, for instance, the pro-settler governors. Liebert was determined to encourage
the enterprise of small white farmers in German East Africa. His successors—especially
von Rechenberg and Schnee—did not share Liebert's enthusiasm for petty white
entrepreneurs. Von Rechenberg thought primarily in terms of developing the country
through African cultivators; Schnee believed that the government should aim at
a compromise solution that would provide a place for peasant and planter alike.
In Kenya, Eliot played a major part in shifting economic policy. When he arrived,
Kenya was regarded as an appendage of Zanzibar, of little value except as a stepping-stone
to Uganda. But Eliot was convinced that the Kenyan highlands might develop into
another California or another New Zealand, where Europeans would become rooted
in the land. He amended the land regulations so as to make settlement more attractive
to white colonists. He encouraged European settlement in a variety of other ways.
The economic configuration of colonial Kenya probably owed more to Eliot's predilections
than to those of any other individual.
Partialities and prejudices of individual governors played an equally important
role in determining economic controversies between the rival merits of plantation
agriculture and peasant farming. In 1923, for instance, a famous confrontation
took place between Lord Leverhulme, the British soap and margarine magnate, and
Governor Clifford of Nigeria. Leverhulme argued that the British colonies had been
founded for the purpose of encouraging British commerce. Clifford considered this “a
monstrous and mischievous heresy.” He argued that the people of Nigeria should “retain
their independence.” Leverhulme never succeeded in obtaining any territorial
concessions in British West Africa, and he shifted his operations to the Belgian
Congo.
The construction of colonial infrastructures was greatly influenced by the governors.
In German East Africa the Northern railway had been built with a view to promoting
European plantation agriculture, but such plantations did not generate sufficient
traffic to pay for the railway's construction. The success of the Uganda railway
proved to von Rechenberg, however, that Africans could multiply their crops and
pay more taxes than ever before if transport were provided for their produce. Von
Rechenberg was convinced that the necessary traffic would come from Unyamwezi—the
core of German East Africa, a well-populated region in the interior—as well
as from Rwanda and Burundi, two densely settled interior regions. Railway building
would reduce African unrest by making the cultivators more prosperous; it would
also have strategic advantages in facilitating the rapid movement of soldiers in
the event of new African risings comparable to the Maji-Maji outbreaks in the southern
part of German East Africa. In 1907 von Rechenberg proposed that a railway be build
from Dar es Salaam (on the coast) to Tabora (in the interior); on its completion
in 1911, he suggested that the railway be extended to Lake Tanganyika. The construction
of a line from Tabora to Rwanda was being prepared when war came in 1914.
Pre-World War I governors like von Rechenberg had thought primarily in terms of
individual improvement schemes. These might center on the provision of railways
or on the elimination of disease—a theme stressed by men like Robert Codrington
in Northern Rhodesia. The postwar years saw the start of development plans envisaging
wider objectives. When Guggisberg arrived at the Gold Coast in 1919, he carefully
outlined a ten-year development plan. Its object was “the general progress
of the people of the Gold Coast towards a higher state of civilization”;
its keystone was to be education. Since schools were costly, government revenue
must increase. Like von Rechenberg, Guggisberg argued that this could be done by
improving the transportation and communication systems, thereby opening new areas
to trade and reducing freight rates for both imported and exported goods. His plan
called for an expenditure of Pound 24 million, a large sum for the time. The postwar
depression forced Guggisberg to reduce his expenditure to just over Pound 16 million,
yet he managed to carry out the major part of his plan. There were no natural harbors
in the Gold Coast so in 1928 Sir Gordon began to build an artificial harbor at
Takoradi. He laid out plans for Achimota College, initiated a drive for better
roads, built the country's first modern hospital, and devised a scheme for training
Africans to serve in responsible government positions. Guggisberg therefore foreshadowed
development planning, with its belief in state intervention and its wider social
objectives, which came to characterize the last decades of colonial rule after
World War II.
These colonial rulers tried to link two separate strands of policy. They wished
to promote economic development. They also started to speak in terms of a “dual
mandate,” of “trusteeship,” of Fürsorge, of moralisation
terms that began to gain wide currency from the first decade of the present century
and that served to legitimize the new period of bourgeois reform. Theoreticians
of colonial rule increasingly looked upon Africans as “economic men,” as
cultivators or as wage workers capable of responding to the economic incentives
of a market economyrather than as idle heathens who should be coerced for their
own and their employers' good.
Notions of government differed considerably over time and from one territory to
the next. By and large, however, the colonial rulers considered their task done
if they protected the security of person and property, raised revenue, and ran
essential services like transport. Development was to be left in the main to the
private enterprise of merchants and mine owners in the economic field and to missionaries
in the spiritual sphere. The bureaucracies at the disposal of governors remained
strictly limited. A few years before the outbreak of World War I, the Gold Coast—a
country as large as the state of Oregon—was still run by only 91 British
civil officials and about 100 British military and police officers.
During the heyday of colonialism, the governor played a decisive role in administration.
Within every colonial establishment he headed a strictly hierarchical organization,
bound by precedent. Governors were far from being autocratic rulers. Their powers
were rigidly controlled by law and restricted by the pervasive weakness of colonial
state machinery. As an example, between 1911 and 1950 British military power in
Northern Rhodesia—a territory larger than Great Britain, Germany, and the
Low Countries put together—consisted of a weak infantry battalion of 800
African soldiers commanded by a handful of British officers. The Colonial Office
liked governors who ruled in a pacific manner. The use of violence, entailing military
expenditure, unfavorable comments in the local and overseas press, Parliamentary
debates, and public commission of enquiry reports, was apt to blacken an official's
reputation. Colonial governance, moreover, was relatively stable for a time. A
colonial governor—unlike a Latin American dictator—could not be displaced
by a putsch or a coup d'état; the traditional type of African resistance
largely disappeared, and the new political forms of resistance and modern guerrilla
movements—based on political more than tribal affiliation—had not yet
developed into a powerful force. Unlike European tyrants such as Hitler or Stalin,
a colonial governor could neither “mobilize” the masses nor “liquidate” his
enemies. There were commotions. There was unrest, such as the riots that broke
out in the Northern Rhodesian copper belt in both 1935 and 1940. The bloodshed
involved in the two riots, however deplorable, was on a small scale (23 African
miners lost their lives). Yet the riots produced a vast body of reports, debates,
questions, and memoranda inquiring into the deficiencies of British rule. Official
apprehension contributed to the creation of a social science research organization,
the Rhodes- Livingstone Institute (now the Institute for Social Research at the
University of Zambia), with a marked left-of-center political orientation. There
was a sense of social concern and of moral outrage. Subsequent historians then
built a massive superstructure of learned works based on official and semiofficial
publications that would never have seen the light of day under less humanitarian
regimes. (In 1964, after Zambia had obtained independence, over 700 people were
killed in incidents occasioned by the suppression of the dissident Lumpa Church.
The destruction of the Lumpa Church, however, did not make the international headlines,
and failed to enter academic consciousness.) Compared to precolonial rule by warlike
conquerors like the Bemba and the Ngoni, for example, governance under the Union
Jack was mild. Contrasted with postcolonial potentates like Idi Amin in Uganda,
or Jean-Bedel Bokassa in the Central African Empire, or Macias Nguema in Guinea,
leaders like Sir Andrew Cohen—rightly portrayed by Ronald Robinson as a liberal,
high-minded, and highly cultured official (see pp. 3M-64)—were men of peace.
We are therefore unable to share A. E. Afigbo's assessment that colonialism created “one
of the most illiberal regimes of modern times,” run by men “perhaps
more amenable to psychoanalysis than to conventional historical investigation” (see
pp. 531-34).
We agree, on the other hand, with Afigbo's strictures regarding the unrepresentative
nature of colonial governance and the colonial penchant for government by conspicuous
display. The colonial powers were determined to impress their subjects. Among their
European colleagues, British governors generally held both the most powerful and
the most dignified position. The governor was appointed by his sovereign on the
recommendation of the secretary of state after consultation with the prime minister.
He was the monarch's representative; in theory, at any rate, all power and responsibility
rested with him. His pay was high—sometimes higher than the British prime
minister's. He initiated policies, shared in their making and implementation. He
supervised the work of all colonial departments. He headed the executive council-a
kind of cabinet. He acted as president of the local legislature. He alone communicated
with the secretary of state for the colonies. He usually held the title of commander
in chief *. His actual stay in the colonies was five years, much longer than his
Portuguese or French confrères. If he were a man of strong character, his
personality might permeate the entire administration. He might not have time to
enforce his policies down to the provincial or the district level, but he did enjoy
a good deal of de facto independence from the colonial office. Metropolitan authorities
usually hesitated to meddle with the man on the spot regarding matters on which
local administrators were better informed than their London colleagues. There was
a good deal of informal give-and-take between imperial and local authorities, strengthened
by the discrete ties of public school, church, clubs, and associations like the
Royal Empire Society. As long as a governor did not occasion a public scandal,
a parliamentary crisis, or a financial deficit, his position was secure.
In the British possessions, unlike those of all other colonial powers, day-to-day
legislation regulating the normal work of government originated in local legislative
bodies composed of both “official” members-mostly top-ranking bureaucrats-and “nonofficial” members.
The nonofficials at first represented special interests and, in the later stages
of colonialism, an electorate that gradually widened. In the initial phase of colonial
rule, the governor acted more or less as his own prime minister. Toward the end
of the colonial era, the governor became a constitutional monarch; power then was
exercised by a ministry composed of parliamentarians able to command a majority
in the chamber. In running the colony, the governor was assisted by the chief secretary
(sometimes known as colonial secretary), who headed the local civil service. His
office, the secretariat, was the nerve center and memory of government, the connecting
link between the central administration and the outlying districts as well as between
the central departments of government.
Belgium and imperial Germany were constitutionally almost as stable as Great Britain.
Under Belgian and German auspices, colonial governors held a position similar to
that of their British colleagues. Governors from Belgium, Germany, France, and
Portugal all possessed limited powers of legislation. The Belgians and Germans
also held tenure for extended periods; they exercised a great deal of influence
on the day-to-day administration of their territories. Unlike British governors,
however, they had to put up with interference from the metropolitan legislature
on budgetary matters. Yet a British governor placed, say, under the Kaiser's flag
would have found conditions broadly similar. A Kanzler or Erster Referent took
the place of the chief secretary; the Referenten in the capital corresponded to
heads of department under the Union Jack. Foreign ceremonial, though perhaps abstruse
and elaborate, would not have struck a British incumbent as ridiculous.
French possessions were run on somewhat different lines. Through administrative
rationalization French Africa was divided into two federations: French West Africa
(1904) and French Equatorial Africa (1910). Each federation was headed by a governor-general
who supervised the work of the territorial governors. In theory, the system was
highly centralized. In practice, governors and governors-general enjoyed a great
deal of independence. Governorsgeneral in many ways resembled British governors.
They alone might correspond with the minister of colonies; they controlled the
military establishment. They supervised the civilian administration except for
finance and justice, which enjoyed a certain autonomy. They commonly initiated
policy. Unlike the British, however, they were subject to inquisitions held by
inspecteurs d'état directly answerable to the ministry of colonies. The
French gubernatorial corps was much more politicized than its British equivalent.
Governors changed with bewildering rapidity; the effective power of the office
was therefore much diminished, Hence, the local bureaucracy, including the governor's
cabinet and various bureaus dealing with specialized issues like economy and finance,
assumed an importance unknown in the British system.
The colonial governments that went down to dissolution during the 1950s and 1960s
differed considerably from those of an earlier era. After World War II, the task
of defending and administering the colonies no longer seemed as prestigious as
during the heyday of colonialism. Careers in great corporations, in academia, and
in newly emergent service professions became increasingly attractive. Colonial
governance lost its air of romance. The olden day roi de la brousse had been a
petty sovereign; under the new dispensation, the district commissioner or police
commissioner became a bureaucrat hedged in regulations and bound by social concerns.
In the 1920s, for example, a Rhodesian police officer assigned to a lonely outstation
had been a man of great local consequence. Four decades later he had lost much
of his independence: he was subject to orders transmitted from Salisbury by telephone;
he was in constant communication with the capital by helicopter, automobile, or
truck. Even the charms of an open-air existence had diminished. The land was fenced
in. Big-game hunting had become almost a sport of the past. If he were a sports
enthusiast, he would find the capital better equipped with playing fields, swimming
pools, and tennis courts than was his outpost. The very nature of his work had
changed. Government had become more complex, more bureaucratic, and more publicity
oriented, “Unrest” had grown more widespread and was better publicized
abroad. Administrators were expected to be experts in “social problems” if
not in counterinsurgency.
In the more advanced territories, there were also far-reaching economic changes.
The more developed regions crossed the threshhold of industrialization, first represented
by light industry, agricultural processing plants, and manufacturing designed to
support such basic industries as mining. Governments took an increasingly active
part in colonial economies; the Southern Rhodesian iron and steel industry, for
example, owed a great deal to government intervention during World War II. Methods
of production grew more complex and more specialized than they had been in the
past. Employers now needed an experienced and stable labor force—not unskilled
hands of the kind needed to run backwoods enterprises. There was a call for social
reform. There was a new concern with urban problems. The more advanced colonial
governments began to seek the advice of social scientists-whose recommendations
then were normally ignored. Theoreticians of colonial government now thought of
Africans as customers rather than as mere producers. Experts in labor relations
no longer worried about the accustomed labor shortages but about unemployment.
At the same time, colonial government became a complex affair. The governor and
district commissioners had to collaborate with a growing number of experts within
the administration; they also were forced increasingly to contend with African
politicians skilled in the arts of propaganda and party management. The old type
of proconsul—like Johnston of Nyasaland, whose regime could be fairly described
as “one of benevolent autocracy tempered only by financial stringency” —died
out. The typical governor now was more of a moderator and a politician than a policymaker.
In times of emergency—internal or external—there were reversions to
the older pattern. Pierre Ryckmans, governor-general of the Belgian Congo during
World War II, was a viceroy in the true sense. Belgium had been occupied, as in
World War I; the Belgian government was in exile. Belgian power, such as it was,
derived largely from the Congo. Ryckmans, a cultured liberal and a highly literate
lawyer—author of a book entitled characteristically Dominer pour servir—was
suddenly elevated to a position of major importance.
Decolonization, whether achieved by peaceful or by warlike means, placed special
emphasis on the governor's personal ability. But now he required skills very different
from those of his predecessors. In the 1920s, for instance, a British governor
rarely had to worry about public opinion at home, much less about what foreigners
said abroad. Colonial matters were debated in a half empty House of Commons. Governors
in the 1950s and 1960s worked in the glare of world opinion as represented or manipulated
by radio and television commentators, newspaper editors, clergymen, professors,
U.N. diplomats, and salaried philanthropists. Governors operated in circumstances
wherein colonial rule appeared to be illegitimate by its very nature, quite irrespective
of its performance. Colonial governance had to change in style as well as in substance.
The Portuguese tried to hold on to the bitter end. Portuguese colonial government
in its final stages reverted to its military antecedent; military commanders placed
in charge of entire territories—men like Kaúlza de Arriaga and Antonio
de Spinola—resembled the viceroys of old. In the end, the junior Portuguese
officers, tired of a never ending war, accomplished what the guerrillas had been
unable to achieve; the army overthrew the Lisbon regime and dismantled the colonial
empire.
The British and French, however, had preferred to decolonize by negotiation. At
the Gold Coast, for example, Governor Sir Charles Arden-Clarke played a decisive
role in effecting a pacific transfer of power to African control; his skills were
those of a politician, negotiator, and broker rather than those of an old-time
administrator.
The objectives of the decolonizing governor were strikingly different from those
of his predecessor. Whether he was liberal in outlook like Arden-Clarke or a committed
Marxist like Rear admiral Rosa Coutinho, president of the local military junta
during the tail end of Portuguese rule in Angola, the decolonizing governor headed
an administration of transition. His task was dual in nature. He was expected to
dismantle the imperial structure but also to assure the departing metropolitan
power some residual influence in the newly independent country. Influence might
be of many kinds—economic, political, or even ideological—but Portuguese
Communists were as anxious as British Tories to play some part in shaping the African
successor states in their own image. The decolonizing governor, in certain respects,
oddly resembled the consul of the 1870s, the diplomatic broker in the coastal settlement
who had relied primarily upon indirect means of exerting power.
The colonial governors reflected the changing functions and foci of the metropolitan
societies from which they had sprung. They were also agents of change in their
own right—conquerors, administrators, development planners, diplomats, and
scholars. Their part in the development of Africa has been neglected of late, as
scholars have tried to right the balance of African historiography by tilting their
attention from imperial to Afrocentric studies. But the building of a railway,
the construction of a mine, the application of scientific research to African problems,
and the creation of archives are as much part of African as of imperial history,
though they may have been initiated by immigrant whites. The states of modern Africa
are colonial—not precolonial—products; so are the medical, educational,
and scientific services that sustain them and the African elites who exercise postcolonial
dominance. The colonial governors were themselves more than the servants of empire.
They were also the unwitting state builders of a new Africa.
We therefore see no reason to diverge from the views expressed in an earlier book
entitled Burden of Empire 2. We argued—as did Marx and Engels well over a
century ago in the respective contexts of India and Algeria—that the Western
colonizers were conquerors with a difference. The representatives of the “New
Imperialism” radically diverged from Zulu, Ndebele, Tutsi, or Swahili invaders
of earlier times. The Western empire builders, wittingly or unwittingly, brought
to Africa methods of production, scientific knowledge, and philosophies of governance
qualitatively different from those available to African chiefs and warlords of
previous generations. Railways, deep-level mining, veterinary laboratories, geological
surveys, printing presses, agronomy, medical science, modern methods of administration,
schools, hospitals, research institutions—in short, the whole complex of
Western arts, sciences, and governance—initially traveled to Africa in the
imperial baggage train. The very criteria against which the Western record in Africa
later came to be judged—democracy, the rule of law, and the rights of man—would
have been incomprehensible to African rulers like Msidi and Lobengula whom the
Western imperialists displaced.
These conclusions would not have shocked Marx or Engels who, in certain respects,
had more in common with Kipling than with self-styled Marxists of a later generation.
But these conclusions are no longer popular today. No academic laurels are won
by defending them. Colonialism instead has acquired an almost Satanic quality,
yet one oddly fused with irrelevance. As Afigbo puts it in his concluding essay, “the
political and administrative structures that obtained for most of the colonial
past can be described largely as irrelevant from the point of view of the subsequent
political and administrative structures of African states. 3” Colonialism,
as he sees it, created a tradition of ruthless repression, “a monstrous regime
of European adventurers”, a monstrous drama: in which Africans were subjected
to defeat, humiliation, and exploitation. “The governors described in this
volume were distinguished by aberrant personalities; they and their regimes are
more amenable to psychoanalysis than to conventional historical investigation.”
Our own interpretation is very different. Afigbo undervalues the links that tie
colonial to post-colonial Africa. The African independence movements used the languages
of their Western opponents, English, French, and Portuguese; they also used Western
concepts. They did not try to recreate ancient empires like Ghana, Songhay, Oyo,
Jokun, and such like. Neither did they restore the work of precolonial African
conquerors like Mansa Musa, Askia Muhammad, Shaka, Usman Dan Fodio, and other ancient
rulers mentioned by Afigbo. On the contrary, what he calls, “the monstrous
regiment of European adventurers,” the Lugards, the Cecil Rhodes, the Faidherbes,
the Bingers, the Albuquerques, have as good a claim to be regarded as the state
builders of modern Africa as the African nationalists who later took over from
the colonial regimes.
European colonialism, as we are well aware, had its seamy side. Africans will not
soon forget the brutalities of King Leopold's “Red Rubber” regime in
the Congo, or the ruthlessness with which the Germans suppressed the Herero of
Namibia. These methods, however, did not characterize the colonial regimes as a
whole; overall they ceased to disfigure the pages of Africa's history after World
War I. For all their respective deficiencies, the worst of the governors described
in these pages never stooped to the crimes committed by post-colonial regimes in
countries as diverse as Burundi, Uganda, Equatorial Guinea, and the Central African
Empire. Governor Binger compares favorably with emperor Bokassa; Sir Andrew Cohen
shines by comparison with field marshal Idi Amin. And the historical record is
clear—few profited directly or indirectly from their posts. Money could not
have been their goal; none died wealthy but many died poor.
Given the role of Western colonial enterprise in Africa, the composition, character,
and effects of colonial rule therefore raise some of the most significant questions
that can be posed regarding modern Africa. The future of Africa's rulers remains
linked to the proconsuls of the African past.
Notes
1. Colin Hughes and 1. F. Nicolson, “A provenance of proconsuls: British
colonial governors, 1900-1960,” Journal of Imperial
and Commonwealth History (1977, v. IV, no. 1, 1975, p. 77-106.)
2. L. H. Gann and Peter Duignan, Burden
of Empire: An appraisal of Western colonialism in Africa south of the Sahara.
(Stanford, Hoover Institution, 1971), see also Peter Duignan and L. H. Gann, eds.
“The Economics of colonialism” (Colonialism in
Africa,
v. 4, Cambridge, 1975).
3. See p. 528.
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