ABSTRACT
The sea voyage from Cape Town to Plymouth, which we made in an Ellerman cargo ship with luxurious accommodation for just fifty passengers, gave us seventeen days of precious leisure in which to recollect the experiences of the past twelve months and to plan our return to normality. More than anything else, I think, our travels had left us with the feeling that not just West Africa but all of tropical Africa had reached the end of an era. At a time when most outsiders were still thinking in terms of regions that could be developed at different speeds in order to respect the interests of the various small communities of Europeans who lived in each of them, we were more impressed by the nearly simultaneous growth of political aspirations throughout the continent and of the essential permeability of colonial frontiers to the flow of these ideas. It was not only that in Ghana we had witnessed the euphoric aftermath of a peaceful transfer of power that had been accomplished in just six years of consciously accepted apprenticeship between the colonial authority and its locally elected successors. It was even more the result of our second visit to Uganda, the country we knew best, where we had observed great material progress during the eight years since our previous visit but also a marked deterioration in the relations between the rulers and the ruled. There had been a huge expansion of the civil administration, military and police forces were being strengthened, and British officials no longer trusted their African confidential clerks and were employing each others’ wives instead. One had the feeling that from now on every penny of additional revenue would have to be spent on expanding security services. In these circumstances, whatever one's respect for colonialism's past record, it seemed plain that colonialism had nothing further to offer and that it was unlikely to last for even half of the twenty years that seemed to be the official expectation. As for the colonies of European settlement, the thirty-odd thousand Kenya whites seemed to have learned from the Mau Mau episode that they could not expect to be protected a second time by British forces and were modifying their political ambitions accordingly. Tanganyika and Nyasaland would clearly go the same way and probably Northern Rhodesia also. The Central African Federation would surely break up; Southern Rhodesia, with its much larger white population, would perhaps survive without major changes for a while longer. In South Africa, however, we imagined that the white minority government could last indefinitely by the ruthless use of force, and the only scenario for the radical change seemed to lie in outside intervention of some kind.
