Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

During these years 1917-1918, a declaration was drawn up establishing complete independence for the dominions except for allegiance to the crown. This was not issued until 1926. Instead, on July 9, 1919 Milner issued an official statement which said, “The United Kingdom and the Dominions are partner nations; not yet indeed of equal power, but for good and all of equal status.… The only possibility of a continuance of the British Empire is on a basis of absolute out-and-out equal partnership between the United Kingdom and the Dominions. I say that without any kind of reservation whatsoever.” This point of view was restated in the so-called Balfour Declaration of 1926 and was enacted into law as the Statute of Westminster in 1931. B. K. Long of the South African Round Table group (who was Colonial Editor of The Times in 1913-1921 and Editor of Rhodes’s paper, The Cape Times, in South Africa in 1922-1935) tells us that the provisions of the declaration of 1926 were agreed on in 1917 during the Imperial Conference convoked by Milner. They were formulated by John W. Dafoe, editor of the Winnipeg Free Press for 43 years and the most influential journalist in Canada for much of that period. Dafoe persuaded the Canadian Prime Minister, Sir Robert Borden, to accept his ideas and then brought in Long and Dawson (Editor of The Times). Dawson negotiated the agreement with Milner, Smuts, and others. Although Australia and New Zealand were far from satisfied, the influence of Canada and of South Africa carried the agreement. Nine years later it was issued under Balfour’s name at a conference convoked by Amery.

EAST AFRICA, 1910-1931

In the dependent empire, especially in tropical Africa north of the Zambezi River, the Rhodes-Milner group was unable to achieve most of its desires, but was able to win wide publicity for them, especially for its views on native questions. It dominated the Colonial Office in London, at least for the decade 1919-1929. There Milner was secretary of state in 1919-1921 and Amery in 1924-1929, while the post of parliamentary under-secretary was held by three members of the group for most of the decade. Publicity for their views on civilizing the natives and training them for eventual self-government received wide dissemination, not only by official sources but also by the academic, scholarly, and journalistic organizations they dominated. As examples of this we might mention the writings of Coupland, Hailey, Curtis, Grigg, Amery, and Lothian, all Round Tablers. In 1938 Lord Hailey edited a gigantic volume of 1,837 pages called An African Survey. This work was first suggested by Smuts at Rhodes House, Oxford, in 1929, had a foreword by Lothian, and an editorial board of Lothian, Hailey, Coupland, Curtis, and others. It remains the greatest single book on modern Africa. These people, and others, through The Times, The Round Table, The Observer, Chatham House, and other conduits, became the chief source of ideas on colonial problems in the English-speaking world. Nevertheless, they were unable to achieve their program.

In the course of the 1920’s the Round Table program for East Africa was paralyzed by a debate on the priority which should be given to the three aspects of the group’s project for a Negro Dominion north of the Zambezi. The three parts were (1) native rights, (2) “Closer Union,” and (3) international trusteeship. Generally, the group gave priority to Closer Union (federation of Kenya with Uganda and Tanganyika), but the ambiguity of their ideas on native rights made it possible for Dr. Joseph H. Oldham, spokesman for the organized Nonconformist missionary groups, to organize a successful opposition movement to federation of East Africa. In this effort Oldham found a powerful ally in Lord Lugard, and considerable support from other informed persons, including Margery Perham.

The Round Tablers, who had no firsthand knowledge of native life or even of tropical Africa, were devoted supporters of the English way of life, and could see no greater benefit conferred on natives than to help them to move in that direction. This, however, would inevitably destroy the tribal organization of life, as well as the native systems of land tenure, which were generally based on tribal holding of land. The white settlers were eager to see these things disappear, since they generally wished to bring the native labor force and African lands into the commercial market. Oldham and Lugard opposed this, since they felt it would lead to white ownership of large tracts of land on which de-tribalized and demoralized natives would subsist as wage slaves. Moreover, to Lugard, economy in colonial administration required that natives be governed under his system of “indirect rule” through tribal chiefs. Closer Union became a controversial target in this dispute because it involved a gradual increase in local self-government which would lead to a greater degree of white settler rule.

The opposition to Closer Union in East Africa was successful in holding up this project in spite of the Round Table domination of the Colonial Office, chiefly because of Prime Minister Baldwin’s refusal to move quickly. This delayed change until the Labour government took over in 1929; in this the pro-native, nonconformist (especially Quaker) influence was stronger.

The trusteeship issue came into this controversy because Britain was bound, as a mandate Power, to maintain native rights in Tanganyika to the satisfaction of the Mandates Commission of the League of Nations. This placed a major obstacle in the path of Round Table efforts to join Tanganyika with Kenya and Uganda into a Negro Dominion which would be under quite a different kind of trusteeship of the African colonial Powers. Father south, in the Rhodesias and Nyasaland, the Round Table obsession with federation did not meet this obstacle, and that area was eventually federated, over native protests, in 1953, but this creation, the Central African Federation, broke up again in 1964. Strangely enough, the League of Nations Mandate System which became such an obstacle to the Round Table plans was largely a creation of the Round Table itself.

The Milner Group used the defeat of Germany in 1918 as an opportunity to impose an international obligation on certain Powers to treat the natives fairly in the regions taken from Germany. This opportunity was of great significance because just at that time the earlier impetus in this direction arising from missionaries was beginning to weaken as a consequence of the general weakening of religious feeling in European culture.

The chief problem in East Africa arose from the position of the white settlers of Kenya. Although this colony rests directly on the equator, its interior highlands, 4,000 to 10,000 feet up, were well adapted to white settlement and to European agricultural methods. The situation was dangerous by 1920, and grew steadily worse as the years passed, until by 1950 Kenya had the most critical native problem in Africa. It differed from South Africa in that it lacked self-government, rich mines, or a divided white population, but it had many common problems, such as overcrowded native reserves, soil erosion, and discontented and detribalized blacks working for low wages on lands owned by whites. It had about two million blacks and only 3,000 whites in 1910. Forty years later it had about 4 million blacks, 100,000 Indians, 24,000 Arabs, and only 30,000 whites (of which 40 percent were government employees). But what the whites lacked in numbers they made up in determination. The healthful highlands were reserved for white ownership as early as 1908, although they were not delimited and guaranteed until 1939. They were organized as very large, mostly undeveloped, farms of which there were only 2,000 covering 10,000 square miles in 1940. Many of these farms were of more than 30,000 acres and had been obtained from the government, either by purchase or on very long (999-year) leases for only nominal costs (rents about two cents per year per acre). The native reserves amounted to about 50,000 square miles of generally poorer land, or five times as much land for the blacks, although they had at least 150 times as many people. The Indians, chiefly in commerce and crafts, were so industrious that they gradually came to own most of the commercial areas both in the towns and in the native reserves.