Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (23 page)

Such remarks help make
My African Journey
appear, on the face of it, a rather perplexing text. It can be mined by Churchill’s supporters for quotations which appear to show his concern for the welfare of Africans and by his critics for evidence of his racism. In the first category is his ironical comment at the expense of the settlers:

‘The natives,’ says the planter, ‘evince a great reluctance to work, especially to work regularly.’ ‘They must be made to work,’ say others. ‘Made to work for whom?’ we innocently ask. ‘For us, of course,’ is the ready answer; ‘what did you think we meant?’
¹⁵¹

In the second category was his description of ‘the life and lot of the African aboriginal – secure in his abyss of contented degradation’ and his view of the Africans as childlike.
¹⁵²
In reality, both sets of sentiments were part of a complex of beliefs in which the Africans were undoubtedly seen as inferior
but as capable of improvement
; it was thus the duty of the imperial government to facilitate this by protecting them from the rapacious self-interest of the white settlers. The ambivalence of Churchill’s attitude was nicely captured by the following comment:

No one can travel even for a little while among the Kikuyu tribes without acquiring a liking for these light-hearted, tractable, if brutish children, or without feeling that they are capable of being instructed and raised from their present degradation. [. . .] Their care imposes a grave, and I think an inalienable, responsibility upon the British Government.
¹⁵³

Overall, his outlook was an optimistic one. He was particularly encouraged – as he said in a speech at the National Liberal Club on his return – by the large numbers of ‘clothed, cultivated, educated natives’ in Uganda, who had converted to Christianity and abandoned polygamy. In his view this evidence went a long way ‘to vindicate the ideal which the negrophile has so often held up before the British public, and which in other places has so often been disappointed’; and it also prompted some praise, rather unusual for him, of missionary activity.
¹⁵⁴
Furthermore, his concern for African welfare – and his appreciation of the possible benefits to the British economy – spurred him towards grandiose visions of economic development. Envisaging a huge dam across the Ripon Falls at the north end of Lake Victoria he wrote, ‘It is possible that nowhere else in the world could so enormous a mass of water be held up by so little masonry.’
¹⁵⁵
At the end of 1908, the right-wing
Observer
reviewed his book under the headline ‘Mr Churchill – Imperialist!’ It found in his suggestions ‘the real spirit of constructive statesmanship which convinces us once more that Mr Churchill’s natural place was with the party he has left’.
¹⁵⁶
This should not be taken as an indication that Churchill was drifting ideologically back towards the Tories, but rather as evidence that the rhetoric of imperial developmentalism could play well across the political spectrum. The Liberal
Daily News
perceived that, with his emphasis on the role of the state, Churchill was offering ‘a different sort of Imperialism’ to that favoured by Conservatives. ‘He will have nothing to do with the speculator-capitalist, he has no wish to leave the future of this beautiful country to the tender mercies of the casual empire-builder. [. . .] One cannot but contrast his philosophical suggestions with the vague chimeras which have bewildered the followers of Mr Chamberlain.’
¹⁵⁷

VI

Churchill was now entering the most left-wing phase of his career. Just before Christmas 1907, while travelling down the Nile, he wrote to J. A. Spender, editor of the
Westminster Gazette
, about domestic economic and social issues. The British people, he argued, were increasingly turning their minds to such questions. ‘Minimum standards of wages and comfort, insurance in some effective form or other against sickness, unemployment, old age, these are the questions and the only questions on which politics is going to turn in the future. Woe to Liberalism, if they slip through its fingers.’ These thoughts, he added, were ‘the fruit of my Central African reflections’.
¹⁵⁸
When he spoke at the National Liberal Club in January he made the link between Empire and social reform explicit, as he had done in the past: ‘If the British people will have a great Empire, if any ray of true glory is to fall upon it, they will need an imperial race to support the burden. They will never erect that great fabric upon the shoulders of stunted millions crowded together in the slums of cities, trampled in the slush of streets.’
¹⁵⁹
In April 1908 Asquith replaced the terminally sick Campbell-Bannerman as Prime Minister. He gave Churchill the opportunity to turn his thinking on welfare into practical action by appointing him President of the Board of Trade with a seat in the Cabinet. The
Cape Times
said that South Africa could congratulate itself upon the fact that he had not been made Colonial Secretary; the
Cape Argus
expressed relief at his removal from the Colonial Office and pleasure at the appointment of Earl Crewe as Colonial Secretary.
¹⁶⁰
It was Elgin who emerged the loser from these changes. Relieved of his post by Asquith in a rather peremptory fashion – ‘even a housemaid gets a better warning’, complained the victim – he retired embittered to his estate and took no further part in politics.
¹⁶¹
He hinted to his successor that Churchill’s flamboyant behaviour over the past two and a half years had undermined him (Elgin) with his colleagues.
¹⁶²

Examining Churchill’s tenure at the Colonial Office as a whole we can see that it illustrates many of the paradoxes and complexities of his attitudes to Empire. It shows that he was not dedicated to the expansion of territory regardless of circumstance. One of the main practical consequences of his African trip was an effort to cut back British commitments in the disturbed Somaliland protectorate, which he described as ‘one vast undulating waste-land of stony scrubby wilderness producing nothing but a scattered swarm of human hornets’.
¹⁶³
(He referred to his policy of moving troops to the coast not as ‘evacuation’ but as ‘concentration’ because ‘it sounds better’.)
¹⁶⁴
Nor can he be accused of pandering to the racist sentiments of white colonialists at all costs. He was eager, for instance, to extract reforms to improve the position of Africans as a quid pro quo for assisting the Natal government with its political difficulties.
¹⁶⁵
Yet although he was undoubtedly sincere in his intention that all races should be treated with justice, that notion was perfectly consistent in his mind with the concept of white supremacy. For him, there was a duty incumbent on the superior British race to safeguard and improve lesser ones. That, indeed, was part of the justification for imperial rule. In 1909 he told Wilfrid Scawen Blunt that the Empire brought no advantage to Britain and was ‘a lot of bother’. After these uncharacteristic words, he went on to express something much closer to his normal sentiments: ‘The only thing one can say for it is that it is justified if it is undertaken in an altruistic spirit for the good of the subject races.’ Blunt responded, ‘Yes, but where do we find the altruism?’
¹⁶⁶
It was a good question. Churchill, Elgin and men like them could provide some of it, when political expediency and their own racial assumptions did not get in the way. But all too often the interests of the ‘subject races’ were sacrificed in the face of pressures from intransigent local whites. London’s reserves of altruism were real, yet in the end they were insufficient to service an entire empire.

5

THE FATE OF AN EMPIRE, 1908–1922

In January 1922, Churchill was the chief guest at a Kenya Colony and Uganda dinner held at the Hotel Victoria in London. During World War I his career had met with near catastrophe, but he had fought hard to salvage his reputation. He was now back at the Colonial Office, where he had started his ministerial career, this time as Colonial Secretary himself. In his speech at the dinner Churchill dealt with some of the unfinished business from the years that he had served under Lord Elgin. He began with some general remarks in which he stressed that colonial officials should combine firmness with sensitivity to the feelings of indigenous populations. Careful understanding of their viewpoint was better, he suggested, than the impractical application of enlightenment theories. Indeed, ‘The democratic principles of Europe are by no means suited to the development of Asiatic and African people.’ He then went on to talk about East Africa and referred to Elgin’s 1906 commitment to the white settlers: ‘We consider we are pledged by undertakings given in the past to reserve the highlands of East Africa exclusively for European settlers, and we do not intend to depart from that pledge.’ All future Indian immigration to East Africa was to be strictly regulated.
¹
The Secretary of State for India and the Viceroy, neither of whom had been consulted, were furious.
²
The remarks caused a storm in India, where it was said that Churchill had ‘libelled the people of this country’.
³
Not only did his remarks seem to contradict a resolution of the previous year’s imperial conference recognizing Indians citizens as equal citizens of the Empire but, moderate politicians suggested, Churchill was playing into the hands of Gandhi and the extremists. One member of the Legislative Council – a largely toothless body, but one which gave some Indians a political voice – quoted at length from a book describing the economic achievements of Asians in East Africa and the role that Indian capital had played in financing some white settlers there. He then revealed, to prolonged laughter, that the writer was none other than Winston Churchill and that the book was
My African Journey
.
⁴

The episode was a revealing one, not least in terms of how Churchill was perceived. During the Edwardian period he had, of course, been seen as an imperialist, but not in the sense of being a diehard or a reactionary. (Many right-wingers had thought of him, for a brief time at least, as a dangerous Radical.) Although he had not been immune to criticism from figures such as Gandhi and Abdurahman, they had never suggested that his views were specially or uniquely unpleasant or old-fashioned. Yet now, in the early 1920s, he began to cement a reputation as someone who, from the progressive point of view, was both backward and ill informed. He appeared also to be out of step with many of his own colleagues. One possible explanation for this might be that Churchill had got stuck in a pre-1914 imperial mindset, whereas other people had moved on. This might convince on some issues, such as his negative attitude to Indian nationalism, even if his denunciation of the ‘frightfulness’ of the 1919 Amritsar massacre might seem to belie his reactionary image.
⁵
Elsewhere, though, the picture is more complicated. For example, rather than standing still on the question of Indian immigration to East Africa, he had actually moved to the right. Yet over Ireland he appeared flexible. Moreover, he had not returned to the imperial expansionism represented by his support for the forward policy in the 1890s, as can be seen from his scepticism about the new Middle Eastern territories that Britain acquired during the war. ‘I know it will be found very hard to relinquish the satisfaction of those dreams of conquest and aggrandisement which are gratified by the retention of Palestine and Mesopotamia’, he wrote in 1919. ‘As a matter of fact we have far more territory in the British Empire than we shall be able to develop for many generations.’
⁶

I

In order to understand the shifts in Churchill’s thought, as well as his seeming inconsistencies, it is necessary to review his actions from his first entry to the Cabinet in 1908 to the collapse of Lloyd George’s coalition government at the end of 1922. These were dramatic years in his personal life. A few months after he became President of the Board of Trade he married the beautiful and elegant Clementine Hozier, whom he drove to distraction through his financial extravagance but who remained fiercely loyal to him nonetheless. They had five children – Diana, Randolph, Sarah, Marigold, and Mary – although Marigold died in 1921 at the age of two following a throat infection. They were also dramatic years politically, as the Liberal ascendancy was broken by the Great War, paving the way for the realignment of the party system. Taking over the Board of Trade was a breakthrough for Churchill in more ways than one. It was not just another step up on the ladder of success. So far, the Empire, in one form or another, had formed the backdrop to his political rise, from his military adventures, via debates about free trade, to the Colonial Office itself. Now, he had his first home portfolio, and this required him to redefine himself politically.

Churchill was to a great extent drawn away from direct imperial responsibilities and did not return to them until after World War I. Although references to the Empire still cropped up in his rhetoric with some regularity, he made no efforts to resist this shift to home affairs, which was in fact to his advantage. His Cabinet colleague David Lloyd George had made skilful use of his Welsh background during his early phase at Westminster but had in the end broken free from it to achieve stature as a truly national British politician. Churchill’s progress was almost the obverse of this. He had required the Empire as a springboard into politics, but now needed to transcend an exclusive association with it if his career as a domestic politician was to thrive fully. For the next dozen years he did engage with important imperial issues but in a more episodic way than formerly. Nevertheless, his capacity to stir up trouble had not deserted him, and his eventual return to the Colonial Office was to see him preside over decisions, notably on the Middle East, that are controversial even today. The period as a whole was marked, moreover, by a darkening of his imperial vision, as British power was faced with a succession of monumental challenges. In 1909 – in contrast to his earlier ridicule of the ‘croakers’ who spoke of decline – he talked of the possible collapse of the Empire if social evils at home were not addressed.
⁷
In 1922 he warned that ‘the whole accumulated greatness of Britain’ was at risk.
⁸