. . . plus c'est la meme chose
Nicholas Harman
WINDS OF CHANGE by Trevor Boyle John Murray, £19.99, pp. 308 It is hard to describe what fun it was get- ting rid of the African empire. We danced and laughed and puffed at aromatic herbs, sure that we were cleaning our own country of the sour taste of racism, while clearing Africa of the misrule that held it back. Conservative Central Office sent down to Cambridge an ex-colonel — clipped voice, clipped 'cash — to tell us that Britain would stay in Africa and should have stayed in India. His name was Enoch Pow- ell. How we laughed!
It ended in tears, of course. When Ghana got her freedom, in 1957, one bril- liant friend of mine — classical scholar, organist, party-goer, lover of life — went home to start its foreign service. In Accra after a coup d'Otat I found, with some diffi- culty, the way to his house. He was aston- ished to see rim, a ghost from those days of hope. 'My dear,' he said, 'they did not sack me, or give me early retirement. Th7 abol- ished me.' And he laughed.
There are no laughs in Mr Royle's book. It is not about Africans, but about the wor- thy people who worked themselves out of imperial jobs when Britain no longer had the strength, or the will, to hold on. The administrators and accountants and coffee- dealers were sure that the tiny elite they handed over to knew neither how to mend the machines nor to count the spoons. And they were sadly right. Their departure was followed by 40 years of general failure. (Just to get it out of the way, Africa's other imperialists left behind just as bad a mess, under those 'black Frenchmen' in their hopeless little states.) Europeans in Africa, even in those last days when the game was up, were richly gratified by the belief that if they had not been there things would be worse. In retirement they know they did their best, and only mildly regret being forgotten. Trevor Royle's main source is a Scottish archive of their reminiscences. But he found nothing unexpected, just convention- al elegies by conventional people, which on the whole they were.
Royle sets his anecdotes within a per- functory, pretty dull history of the Empire, whose character he thinks was marked either by 'swashbuckling magnificence' or by a 'curiously English suburban atmo- sphere'. He gets too many small things wrong. He believes Chagga to be a town, when in fact they are a people (and their coffee). He commits the solecism of `Bagandan representatives', and reports difficulties with African 'dignitaries'.
Having skipped lightly over various dis- graceful episodes — the jailing of Kenyatta and Hastings Banda, Hola camp, pusilla- nimities in face of Rhodesia's good old Smithie — he concludes that 'British colo- nial rule was . . . invariably even-handed'. Invariably? He does concede, though, that `race relations were rarely perfect'.
In other words, this is one for the nostal- gia market. It is true you can find Africans who, pondering their present mess, pretend to want us back. But you can be sure they say so either because they want a favour, or because they are trying to be polite, or most often — because the very idea is good for a laugh. They know Africa has not got the freedom that the end of empire promised. Accountants from the Interna- tional Monetary Fund impose 'structural adjustment plans' upon unwilling rulers in parodic democracies devised by the coun- tries that dole out aid, while free-market economics offer fresh techniques for pillag- ing the state. The people who now wield real power in Africa have the same spirit as their pipe- smoking, tennis-playing British forerun- ners. The IMF man in charge of a West African central bank confided his difficulty: `The trouble is that these people's marginal propensity to consume is greater than 100 per cent.' The laboured joke betrays yet another Cambridge man. That he was from Sri Lanka makes small difference. The Empire is over; imperialism endures because Africans found nothing to put in its place.
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