ABSTRACT
The committee set up in early 1947 to chart a ‘new approach’ to African policy did precisely that when it reported on 22 May, 1947. The Report it produced embodied a radical reorientation of British aims and conceptions: it has even been called the ‘Durham Report of the African Empire’.1 It gave a clear and comprehensive picture of post-war Colonial Office strategy and is thus of essential importance for an understanding of British actions and reactions in Africa. The notion that ‘planning’ was a practicable proposition for the African territories had started with the 1940 Colonial Development and Welfare Act and now reached its zenith. Initiatives from African nationalists were soon to become of vital importance, but in 1947 it still seemed possible for British officials to anticipate and mould the future; all the speaking parts in the drama of Africa’s development were taken by the whites, though leading roles were now being reserved for the Africans. In the Report local government policy, already revealed in outline in Creech Jones’s Despatch of February, was complemented by a full-fledged and consistent policy for the development and demise of the African empire. No more than the broad outline of this plan was in fact revealed to the Colonial Service, but the political strategy it defined and the attitude it embodied were undoubtedly of major significance in the years that followed. This is a suitable opportunity to say something of one of the most important members of the committee and the author of its constitutional proposals, as well as of its local government and education recommendations, Andrew Cohen. It was Cohen who, with the political support of Creech Jones, dominated Colonial Office thinking in 1947. At the Cambridge Summer School in August he had been particularly successful. One of the officers who attended it later remarked that
the dominant impression that most of us were to carry away was that of the tall, fair-haired figure of Andrew Cohen striding restlessly up and down, deep in conversation, or sprawling untidily, a half-demolished pencil between his lips, behind the chairman’s table.2
