ABSTRACT
An article sent in May 1943 from West Africa to the Daily Mail in London contained a quotation from a British District Officer: ‘Truth is that we have no colonial policy. For years we have drained West Africa of her wealth without putting anything back. We have allowed vested interests to do much as they liked.’1 The permanent officials at the Colonial Office decided that much of the article was unanswerable-‘It is a fair comment’—and that nothing could be done to stop publication of an admittedly embarrassing piece of work.2 The Whitehall establishment had in fact recently been made all too aware of the absence of clearly defined objectives in colonial policy. In September 1941 Prime Minister Winston Churchill explained that though the Atlantic Charter, in which the British and Americans made known their respect for the right of people to choose their own government, had been intended to refer primarily to those states taken over by Nazi Germany, the British Government had made declarations on the colonies which were ‘complete in themselves, free from ambiguity’ and entirely in harmony with the spirit of the Charter. Yet the search for these statements, provoked by a parliamentary question, proved more than a little discomfiting. They were found to be neither complete nor unambiguous but ‘scrappy, obscure and jejune’. ‘Declarations on Colonial Policy seem to have been mainly conspicuous by their absence’, noted the Secretary of State for the Colonies, ‘and where any have been made, they are vague in the extreme’.3
