ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the decolonization movement originated as a movement for colonial reform in British Africa; what the theoretical assumptions behind this movement were; and how the British proposed, from London, to plan African evolution to self-government. It reveals clearly that consideration of policies of decolonization was entirely British in inspiration and that these British ideas antedated the outbreak of the war. The creation of a system was the planned purpose of decolonization. The Colonial Office files certainly do reveal that an almost complete reversal of attitudes towards social change in the British African territories developed in London after 1938. It is perhaps impossible to forecast human reactions to introduced change, and to herd men like cattle through the gates of a planned history. Decolonization was envisaged at best as centuries ahead in Africa in the 1940s; in the 1950s it emerged as a solution to problems created by the failure of colonial reform.
