White Africa
ERIC STOKES
Colonialism in Africa 1870-1960: Vol 11 The History and Politics of Colonialism 1914- 1960 edited by L. H. Gann and Peter Duignan (cut. £5) Colonialism in Africa, with its second 563- page volume, now complete, and a third still to come, is an unusual work to appear from a university press like Cambridge. This is not because the editorial direction emanates from two fellows of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, California, because more than half of the book has been written by scholars in America, or because it was financed by the Reim Foundation of Ann Arbor. What is remarkable is the larger purpose of the editors. So distorted in their view has the writing of modern African history become, so deliberately oblivious of the role of European activities, that nothing less than a composite work conceived on this massive scale can hope to induce any correc- tion. The scholarly world stands convicted of the worst trahison des clercs—the pharisaism of the averted gaze and the double standard. For Gann and Duignan the cure for the disease of negrophilism is to be found not in hiring a team of politically sympathetic scholars (if such could anywhere be found) but in commissioning the ordinary prac- titioners of African history to direct their gaze specifically at the white man's role. A large degree of condensation and hence sketchiness of treatment is inevitable. K. J. Post writes on British policy and representa- tive government in West Africa 1920-51; the
late George Bennett on British settlers north of th'e Zambesi 1920-60; James Duffy on Portuguese Africa 1930-60, Roger Anstey on Belgian Tule, Hubert Beschamps on French Africa 1920-45 and R. I. Delavig- nette 1945-60; Michael Crowder on the role of the district officer, and so forth. In general it is all sound, sober, competent work, and provides a valuable compendium in a field where the output of specialist books has run riot. It would be wrong to expect much intellectual excitement. Where the writing quickens, as in Duffy's able contribution, or thickens with careful scholarship as in Martin Kilson's chapter on the emergence of black elites, it is probably because the writers have slipped back into the more impelling mainstream of the contemporary Afrocentric approach.
One senses a feeling of disappointment in the editors about the achievement of their larger design, and they express open dis- agreement with their contributors on some points. They would evidently like to see a stronger emphasis on the lateness of African nationalism, the artificiality of its elite leader- ship, and the determination of African his- tory by world events. The fight for African independence, they suggest, was won for the most part inadvertently by others on the battlefields of Europe and Asia. Another misconception they want to see scotched is the equation of colonialism with economic stagnation and neglect. While Africa was never a haven for surplus capital on Lenin's model, it underwent, they assert, in the brief span of colonial rule the most far-reaching economic revolution of its history.
But Gann and Duignan reserve their main artillery for the subject they have made their own—the apologetics of white settlement. With his views formed against a central EurOpean background and hardened by resi- dence in Rhodesia, Gann scorns the unexam- ined assumption of the liberal tradition that the major components of a society have only to be duly represented in the political arena for consensual compromise to emerge. For him liberal democracies with their panoply of civil liberties are the exotic product of relatively homogeneous national commu- nities in the West, whilst most African states are plural societies in the ethnic, if not in the economic sense. The frame of political society has therefore to be held together through coercion exercised by a dominant group, and African regimes, white or black, have to be judged on another standard than the measure of achieved liberty. 'The rules of habeas corpus or of Western parliamen- tary institutions,' we are told darkly, 'have little or no future in Africa.' Above all. Gann and Duignan are resolute to expose the double-think of the 'academic intelli- gentsia': 'Intellectuals . . . have an obligation to use their intellect, to think in a clear and consis- tent fashion. We are therefore opposed to the curious double standards that are widely . . . held in present-day academia. Many intellectuals call for peaceful coexistence be- tween opposing socio-economic systems in Europe. often on the grounds that the result of war would be too terrible to contemplate. Yet . . . they ,vehemently object to pleas for this same peaceful coexistence when applied to southern Africa, and instead put their trust in the sword. Many scholars assert ... that industrialisation in communist countries must excuse the cruelties of the regime . • , bring about a liberalisation ... and occasion a long-term convergence between East and
West. Yet many intellectuals protest ... when a similar analysis is applied to southern Africa. In the same way many academics object to racial segregation in southern Africa. But they find sociological excuses when white communist or non-white post- colonial countries solve their ethnic minority problems by mass expulsions, which in them- selves enforce ethnic segregation in an in- finitely more radical fashion.'
Although they do not deny the validity of the main accusation against the whites that 'they have attempted to withhold from Africans the full patrimony of Western civilisation,' Gann and Duignan have pro- duced the most sustained defence of White Rhodesia that is likely to appear under an academic imprint. Their contribution sits equally beleaguered in an alien environ- ment. For all their attacks on the world of scholarship for its 'highly charged moral overtones' there is no doubt in this work where the charge sticks. In a passionate age they make the cool, dispassionate, ob- jective scholarship of their fellow con, tributors look decidedly old-fashioned.
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