ABSTRACT
As these quotations indicate, no-one has done more than Ronald Robinson to penetrate the inwardness of Britain’s post-war African policy, and to try to relate it to ‘a general theory of imperialism’. After a lifetime’s thinking about Africa and applying his Colonial Office experience to its history, none knows better than he the truth of the moral philosopher’s words: ‘We carry within us the wonders we seek without us: There is all Africa and her prodigies in us’ (Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici). Two quintessential themes dominated the work of the Labour government between 1945 and 1951: economic recovery and Russian expansion. Both problems pointed to an increased interest in the empire in general and in Africa in particular. ‘My mind turns more and more’, wrote Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton in 1947, ‘towards a consolidation in Africa’.1 In October 1949 the Minister of Defence, A.V. Alexander (‘King Albert Victorious’), defined the government’s three main policy objectives as: (i) securing ‘our people against aggression’, (ii) sustaining a foreign policy dominated by ‘resistance to the onrush of Communist influence’ everywhere, from Greece to Hong Kong, and (iii) achieving ‘the most rapid development practicable of our overseas possessions, since without such Colonial development there can be no
major improvement in the standard of living of our own people at home’.2 (An astonishing admission!—where now is Lord Lugard? where Lord Hailey?) As far as Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin was concerned, from the moment that that neo-Palmerstonian took office he saw ‘the utmost importance’ from political, economic and defence points of view of developing Africa and making its resources ‘available to all’. Stepping up the flow of strategic raw materials out of Africa would help to free Britain from financial dependence on America. Bevin’s pet projects were to sell manganese ore from Sierra Leone to the United States, and coal from Wankie to Argentina in return for beef. Always dreaming cosmoplastic dreams, he also talked about a new triangular oceanic trade between eastern Africa, India and Australia. But more than this: Bevin feared the Russians would sooner or later ‘make a major drive against our position in Africa’.3 In Attlee’s world-picture too, Africa presented the same duality of concern: economically it was immoral not to develop its ‘great estates’, while politically the Cold War pointed to the necessity of an increasing reliance on African manpower, as well as coming to terms with African nationalism. On the one hand he wanted to increase European settlement in under-populated areas of east-central Africa, but on the other, recognised that in Gold Coast and Nigeria ‘an attempt to maintain the old colonialism would, I am sure, have immensely aided Communism’.4
