Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (53 page)

At the international level, the advent of the apartheid regime in South Africa in 1948 added an unpleasant new dimension to discussion of race. Smuts’s electoral defeat that year followed by his death two years later had deprived Churchill of a reliable friend. Once back in office himself, the Prime Minister he had to deal with (until 1954) was the National Party’s D. F. Malan. In addition to its well-known segregation laws, Malan’s government sought to weaken South Africa’s connection with Britain, for example by making it harder for British immigrants to be granted citizenship. Churchill’s government did not approve of apartheid but, at the same time, it did not want South Africa to leave the Commonwealth and was wary of alienating Malan’s regime. Officially, apartheid was a South African internal question.
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David Hunt, one of Churchill’s private secretaries, recalled the Prime Minister ‘sending a telegram to Dr Malan and asking me whether he should say sardonically, “My dear Mr President [
sic
],
Alles sal reg kom
(everything will be all right). Keep on skelping the kaffirs!” ’ The joke was clearly in poor taste, but it does hint at a slight sense of awkwardness on Churchill’s part. He may have been, in Hunt’s words, ‘on the whole rather anti-black’, but overt, institutionalized racism was a source of embarrassment and uneasiness.
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Yet it was not an issue that Churchill wanted to confront directly, or even one that he was happy to see others confront. When the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Geoffrey Fisher, denounced apartheid as ‘a sort of slavery’, Malan protested vigorously. Lord Swinton (Ismay’s replacement at the Commonwealth Relations Office) brought the matter to Cabinet, warning that Malan might object to sitting with the Archbishop at the forthcoming coronation. Churchill said that Fisher should be reproved, and that he would be ‘well advised to stick to spiritual matters’.
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However, the government did hold firm against the South African desire to take control of Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Swaziland (known collectively as the High Commission Territories). The threat that they would be swallowed up was longstanding. In 1941, Churchill had written that if this occurred they would be run ‘in accordance with very old-fashioned ideas’.
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When the South Africans brought the issue of the territories up again in 1954, he told the Cabinet, ‘We will not hand these over to Malan.’ He believed that if South Africa renounced its allegiance to the Crown, Natal, a strongpoint of British loyalism, might secede from the Union, but he correctly predicted that Malan would not react violently to a refusal.
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He then made it clear in the Commons that the demands would not be met: ‘I therefore sincerely hope that Dr Malan and his Government, with whom we have hitherto happily co-operated on so many problems we share in common, will not needlessly press an issue on which we could not fall in with their views without failing in our trust.’
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Churchill also took a firm line in negotiations over the Simon’s Town naval base near Cape Town. ‘No weakening of our rights over Simonstown should be tolerated’, he urged, and argued there should be no NATO involvement there. ‘The Americans are getting a footing in many parts of what was once our Empire but I do not think our weakness has yet become so pronounced as to require American protection to preserve our rights in Simonstown in any period which we need to consider at this moment.’
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Agreement was finally reached in 1955, shortly after Churchill’s retirement, on terms more advantageous to the British than might have been expected. Although the South Africans gained control of the base, the Royal Navy kept the right to use its facilities in peacetime and was guaranteed their availability in time of war, even a war in which South Africa was not involved.
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There has been much debate over the 1951 government’s African policy as a whole. Did it represent a continuation of the Attlee administration’s decolonization agenda, or did it seek to turn back the clock? There is a strong argument for continuity, albeit in the sense that Labour had in reality been reactive rather than radical and that this dynamic did not change much under the Tories. Certain decisions, such as the creation of the doomed Central African Federation (of Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland) were a continuation from the previous regime.
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The case of the Gold Coast is also instructive. There, Kwame Nkrumah had founded the Convention People’s Party (CPP) in 1949. Pointing out that the Labour government was relatively sympathetic to African demands, and desiring immediate self-government, he urged striking while the iron was hot. Citing Churchill’s ‘liquidation’ speech, he warned that if the Conservatives were returned to power ‘our struggle for independence might be suppressed’.
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He was imprisoned for supporting an illegal strike, but was released when his party won the country’s first general election in 1951. The following year, Nkrumah became Prime Minister, and in 1957 he led his country to independence. Now known as Ghana, it was the first African country to win its freedom from Britain. Much of the progress was owed to the colony’s far-sighted Governor, Sir Charles Arden-Clarke. He knew that Conservative ministers were doubtful about the pace of change but he got his way anyway, in the absence of a workable alternative policy.
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Naturally, his efforts helped stoke up demands elsewhere in British Africa. If the Gold Coast had its own Prime Minister, why shouldn’t, say, Nigeria have one too? Churchill thought that it was ‘Crazy’ to give universal suffrage to ‘these naked savages’. Lyttelton hoped to ‘retard’ constitutional development in Nigeria and cited the principle of ‘divide et impera’.
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There was no big new wave of decolonization for the time being. However, the real question by this stage was when the various colonies would get independence, not if. The government’s strategy was to apply the brakes whenever practicable, not to engineer a major change of course.

VI

Of the many African issues the government had to confront, the worst was the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya. It was probably also the one that involved Churchill most emotionally, as the memory of his 1907 visit gave him a sense of connection to the country. The image he had gained then of its inhabitants as happy, childlike people conformed with the prevailing stereotype. In the face of horrific Mau Mau violence, this was suddenly replaced with a stereotype of Africans as primordial savages, in the grip of some form of collective psychosis. The blood-curdling nature of Mau Mau oaths (often taken unwillingly) helped justify the use of ‘primitive barbarity’ as a simplistic, catch-all explanation. In fact, Mau Mau’s origins owed much to land hunger, exacerbated partly by the reservation of the highlands to the settlers, as approved by Churchill years earlier. However, the rebellion should not be understood exclusively as an anti-imperial revolt but rather as a civil war within the Kikuyu, the ethnic group chiefly affected. Many Africans stayed loyal to the British regime, including, for example, Harry Thuku, the nationalist whose deportation Churchill had sanctioned in the 1920s. Only thirty-two European civilians were killed in Mau Mau attacks, in comparison with at least 1,819 African deaths. The British response to the crisis was brutal. Communities were subjected to collective punishments. Members of the security forces – black as well as white – committed terrible brutalities. The death penalty was extended to a wide range of offences, including administering Mau Mau oaths, carrying weapons, or ‘consorting’ with the group’s members. A total of 1,090 Kikuyu were executed for such crimes during the course of the emergency, many of them after trials that were patently unfair. At least 150,000 people passed through the detention camps, almost always being held without trial.
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Unsurprisingly, such measures were counterproductive, forcing thousands of Kikuyu to take to the forests and transforming sporadic Mau Mau violence into a full-scale guerrilla campaign.
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How much responsibility did Churchill and his ministers bear for the major abuses that took place? One Nairobi journalist has written recently, ‘Churchill’s role in the atrocities against the Kenyans is too obvious.’ This is because ‘He was the man who appointed and gave moral and institutional support to a number of war criminals’, including Sir Evelyn Baring, the Governor of Kenya from 1952. Furthermore, ‘Churchill was the head of an unrelenting Conservative Government that believed in its arrogant “civilising mission” to Africans, even as it reduced them to sub-humans.’
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To those who are inclined to see the decolonization process as essentially benign, such anger comes as a salutary reminder of the deep resentment that some people still feel about the British role. It is, moreover, undoubtedly true that Churchill bore some general moral responsibility for the things done in his government’s name. Beyond this broad responsibility, there is the question of his detailed involvement, how extensive it was, and whether or not his attitude was truly ‘unrelenting’. There was certainly an element of diehardism in his views, but close examination of his role in the crisis shows that at times he showed a surprising level of sympathy towards the rebels.

Churchill had no direct part in instigating the state of emergency. This was asked for by the newly arrived Baring in October 1952, after the murder of Paramount Chief Waruhiu wa Kungu, the latest in a rash of Mau Mau killings. Baring was under pressure from the settlers, who, he feared, might take the law into their own hands in the absence of strong official action. Lyttelton agreed to his request.
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Churchill’s own early interventions prove, on the one hand, that he was concerned about Kenyan affairs and that, on the other, his efforts had little effect. In a typical move, he suggested that an exercise for parachutists should be held in Kenya, feeling that a display of air power would make an impression on the population and improve confidence in the British regime. The Chiefs of Staff rejected this as unnecessary.
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He continued to worry away at the idea, although it was never implemented: ‘What I propose is that small parties of 20 or so should be dropped in selected places and that two or three cross-country vehicles should come and pick them up after they had interviewed the local natives.’
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Far better judged, but equally ineffectual, was the minute he sent to Lyttelton about cattle taken from the Kikuyu as a form of collective punishment. He asked if it was true that they were dying from lack of attention: ‘they must be fed, watered and milked; who is doing this? Remember they belong to the innocent as well as the guilty.’
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Such sentiments were worthy, but he did not succeed in getting the people on the ground to take much notice of them.

In March 1953 a large group of loyal Kikuyu was massacred at Lari.
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‘Today’s Mau Mau atrocities in Kenya show the urgency for getting troops there’, Churchill wrote. ‘At the same time there are advantages in staging a battalion en route for a few days at Khartoum and thus imprinting upon the minds of the Egyptian dictators the fact that we can quite easily cut them off entirely from the Sudan out of which they hope to talk, bribe and swindle us.’
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As always, he resented criticisms of the British and there was a chill in his relations with Nehru when, on the anniversary of the Amritsar massacre, the latter spoke up in support of Mau Mau.
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‘I never expected anything better from a Congress governed India’, Churchill wrote.
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But he was not willing to allow the settlers carte blanche. In mid-1953 General Sir George Erskine was appointed as Kenya’s Commander-in-Chief. Erskine took a very dim view of the settlers: ‘I hate the guts of them all, they all are middle-class sluts.’
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Churchill equipped him with a letter giving him the power to impose martial law. Erskine never used it, but he made sure its existence was known. He kept it in his glasses case, and when he wanted to bring settlers or members of Baring’s government into line, he would do so by pointedly snapping the case open and shut.
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Churchill’s own instinct was to find some way to negotiate with the Mau Mau. His quest for a Michael Collins-type leader with whom to strike a deal helps to explain his support for clemency for one of the movement’s most notorious leaders, Wahuriu Itote, known as ‘General China’. To understand this episode fully, we also need to be aware of Churchill’s attitude to capital punishment. He was a firm supporter of hanging. However, as Home Secretary – with the power to reprieve condemned criminals – he had been modestly lenient.
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Much later, in Opposition in 1947, he was one of several MPs who intervened on behalf of five men in the Gold Coast who had been condemned to death for ritual murder. He objected to the fact that several times they had been on the brink of execution, only to be granted a stay at the last minute. He criticized this as ‘ “cat and mousing” men up to the scaffold’.
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(Three of the five were later hanged.)
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In respect of Mau Mau, then, he had no objection to executions as such, but he did sound a note of caution. In May 1953 Baring pressed for measures to speed up trials, and Lyttelton warned the Cabinet that up to two hundred hangings might take place as a consequence of the Lari massacres.
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Churchill told the Cabinet that ‘care should be taken to avoid the simultaneous execution’ of large numbers of people as ‘Public opinion in this country would be critical of anything resembling mass executions.’ It is important to emphasize that he was objecting here, not to large numbers of executions per se, but to large numbers of people being hanged
at the same time
. Lyttelton promised that he ‘would seek the advice of his Cabinet colleagues if any question arose of carrying out simultaneously death sentences imposed on more than, say, twelve persons’.
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He also tried to use Churchill’s views as a means to restrain Baring’s zeal. ‘All of this is likely to be a troublesome question,’ he told the Governor, ‘and I wanted to give you the earliest warning of the PM’s attitude.’
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But the warning had little effect. Very soon after, rules for new fast-track courts were approved in Nairobi, without being scrutinized in London.
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