Britain, the United States, and the Demise of the Central African Federation, 1959–63

Among the themes dominating British overseas policy in the early 1960s were the cultivation of the ‘special relationship’ with the United States and the decolonization of Britain’s remaining African empire. Historians and others have speculated about Washington’s influence on British colonial policy in the crowded period from 1959 to 1963, when the ‘Wind of Change’ swept through Africa. Recently, Ritchie Ovendale, Wm. Roger Louis and Ronald Robinson have argued that this period was characterized by close co-operation between London and Washington on African policy and the construction of an interdependent relationship based on their closely matching interests. Ovendale has gone further, detecting little evidence of direct American pressure on British colonial policy in this period. ¹ This chapter seeks to test these ideas in relation to the dismantling of the Central African Federation, arguably the most difficult episode in Britain’s withdrawal from Africa, and one whose complexities would test any relationship, however ‘special’.