The Last Imperialist

Sir Alan Burns's Epic Defense of the British Empire

Bruce Gilley

• Éditeur: Regnery Gateway
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781684512225
• Sujet: History
• Sous-sujet: British History

The British Empire, one of the most powerful forces in history, was also one of the most humane. Yet at its twilight, few were willing to defy the anti-colonial reaction that condemned millions to despotism under the regimes that replaced it. Sir Alan Burns was among them. In this lively and provocative work of history, Bruce Gilley vindicates Sir Alan's view that decolonization was poorly managed and too swiftly executed, a view based not on imperialist nostalgia but on a sober assessment of the ravages of the twentieth century. Gilley demonstrates that Burns understood the benefits of colonial rule and correctly foretold the chaos that accompanied its rapid dissolution. Relying on previously unavailable documentation from Burns's family, The Last Imperialist dethrones the revisionist historians and shatters their unbalanced accusations against European colonialism. This is history writing at its most courageous.

Part I FOUNDATIONS

Chapter 1 The Fate of Lesser Persons

The man straightened up in the airport waiting room and lowered his newspaper. His face was contorted with a mixture of emotions—anger, fear, sadness—at what he had just read. His rumpled suit and outdated waistcoat strained under the pressure. They’d killed Danquah.

Danquah had been Sir Alan Burns’ nemesis. Danquah stood for opportunism and politics, while Burns stood for justice and administration. Danquah claimed to have ended Burns’ career. A promised post as governor of exotic Malaya was withdrawn and replaced by a taxing, high-profile decade at the United Nations—all because of Danquah. The last time they met, at the ceremony for Ghana’s independence in 1957, the animosity was palpable. There were no handshakes, despite encouragement from bystanders. Danquah, a leading Ghanaian nationalist, boasted of how much pain he had inflicted on Burns, a former colonial governor. Full of confidence, Danquah was a man of the future, while Burns was a man of the past. Danquah was surrounded by reporters. Burns was ignored and flew home to shudders about the whole colonial enterprise. Now, eight years later, Danquah was dead, devoured by the revolution he started. Ghana was in steep decline, and the lives of close friends were at risk.

Accra, Ghana, February 4, 1965, New York Times Service—Dr. Joseph B. Danquah, a leader in the struggle for Ghanaian independence who later broke bitterly with President Kwame Nkrumah, died in detention today, the Government announced. The official statement said that Dr. Danquah, who was 69 years old, had died of a heart attack. He had been imprisoned since Jan. 8, 1964, under Ghana’s Preventive Detention Act. In the decades before the Gold Coast became independent from Britain and changed its name to Ghana, Dr. Danquah was the colony’s unquestioned political leader. After independence, he led the opposition against Kwame Nkrumah under a government that tolerated opposition less and less.¹

It was the twilight days of European empire. As colonial judges, station masters, revenue collectors, regimental commanders, and district officers came home, a long shadow of global indifference had spread over the affairs of newly independent countries like Ghana. Under that shadow, stories like the death of Danquah were now common. No one really cared anymore. Unless, like Sir Alan Burns, they remembered.

In retrospect, it was surprising how long Danquah had survived.² A witty and self-effacing lawyer, Joseph Danquah was the sort of person that colonial officials like Sir Alan Burns hoped would assume power in newly independent states. He was pushed aside in 1947 by the radical Nkrumah, who had been trained in London by Britain’s Communist Party and in the United States by black racialists. Nkrumah abandoned the lawyerly constitutionalism of his mentor in favor of violent street protest. In the election prior to independence, Nkrumah’s party trounced the moderates represented by Danquah with promises of untold riches and freedom once the British left.

The moment the Union Jack was lowered, Nkrumah introduced a series of repressive measures and steered West Africa’s most prosperous economy into a wall. Eleven of the twelve opposition members in Parliament were soon in prison. By 1965, wages had fallen to levels not seen since the 1930s, while Ghana’s foreign reserves, carefully built up under the British, had evaporated. Cocoa farmers, the backbone of the economy, were paid half the market price by Nkrumah. The British had paid them 50 percent above the market price.³ Backbenchers in the ruling party began to grumble that things were worse than in colonial days. Danquah wrote to Nkrumah about an “anti-climax of repression after liberation.”

In the first presidential election after independence, a sham really, Danquah won only 2 percent of the vote against Nkrumah’s 98 percent. Danquah warned that his erstwhile colleague was becoming a “despot, autocrat, or dictator… or God.” Amid the unbridled enthusiasm for an end to colonialism, such sentiments now seemed churlish. President Kennedy toasted the diminutive Nkrumah in Washington in early 1961 despite warnings from the State Department of an “alarming trend toward authoritarian socialism.”⁴ Kennedy’s ill-chosen words at the departure ceremony—“We ourselves are a revolutionary people[,] and we want to see for other people what we have been able to gain for ourselves”—seemed only to encourage Nkrumah’s fanaticism.

As living standards plummeted in 1961, a strike erupted among railway and dock workers over a government budget that would reduce wages and raise taxes. The strike rapidly spread to other sectors of the economy. Workers accustomed to the beginnings of prosperity under colonialism felt jilted by Nkrumah’s promise of “paradise in ten years” after the British left. The ruling party newspaper insisted that parliamentary criticisms of the budget were evidence of “the utter fraudulence and ineffectiveness of the bogus British colonialist system” and that the striking workers were “agents of neo-colonialism.”⁵ Nkrumah, on vacation in Russia, instructed his cabinet to declare martial law. The British and Canadian officers on staff in the Ghanaian army probably prevented the military from overthrowing Nkrumah in absentia. When Nkrumah returned from his Soviet-sponsored rest on the Black Sea, he jailed fifty of the strike leaders.

Danquah was arrested for demanding a “sensible” budget and spent eight months in prison. He and his fellow detainees smuggled out copies of protest letters to the United Nations, just as they had during colonial days, expecting it would cause a sensation. But for some reason, the defenders of justice at the United Nations did not seem to care about black lives now that the British were gone.

Believing that Nkrumah would eventually be thrown out of office, the CIA station in Accra began paying Danquah’s wife a small monthly stipend during his incarceration, hoping that this comparatively prudent nationalist would halt Nkrumah’s destructive march.⁶ President Kennedy was furious when he learned of the payments, knowing that Nkrumah, and generations of his admirers, would cite them as proof that any opposition to his baleful policies was merely a Western plot.

When he was released in 1962, Danquah wrote of a sense among Ghanaians that they had been “misled” by expectations of freedom and prosperity after independence. Under constant police supervision, he was forced to watch Nkrumah receive the Soviet Union’s Lenin Peace Prize in Accra. At the ceremony, Nkrumah observed sullenly that Danquah had grown fat on “bacon and egg.” He ordered the country’s expanding ranks of political prisoners—586 people detained in 1963 alone and 1,200 by 1965—to be fed only a dried bread made from cassava flour known as garri.

In 1964, the latest of several attempts to assassinate Nkrumah was foiled by security guards. When interrogated, the assassin commented that Danquah would benefit from Nkrumah’s death. The police commissioner concluded that Danquah had nothing to do with it.⁷ But in the dystopian politics of post-colonial countries, police reports were now irrelevant. Danquah was locked up again, this time in a bare concrete cell in the condemned prisoners’ section. He was not allowed to stand for the first three months and not allowed outside for the first six. On the garri diet, he lost forty pounds. No Ghanaian doctors attended him. Instead, imported doctors from communist Yugoslavia issued upbeat reports on his health. Small acts of kindness from the Ghanaian guards—peeling oranges for the weakened man or bathing him in his cell—persisted.

Four letters to Nkrumah, a combination of flattery and hectoring, went unanswered. In one, Danquah contrasted his cruel conditions with how the British had treated them both when they were detained briefly following a riot in 1948: “They treated us as gentlemen, and not as galley slaves, and provided each of us with a furnished bungalow (two or three rooms) with a garden, together with opportunity for reading and writing. In fact, I took with me my typewriter and papers for the purpose… and there was ample opportunity for correspondence.” The Irish district commissioner had provided three square meals a day from his own table. A colonial judge had released them both against the wishes of the colonial administration, because there was no evidence to justify continued detention. “The reason why detention in ‘free’ and civilized and humane Ghana is” so much worse than under British colonialism, Danquah wrote to Nkrumah, “has never been understood by me.”⁸

By early 1965, Danquah’s letters took on a measure of desperation: “It was our people’s love for justice that compelled them to ask the British in 1843 to come back to Ghana [after evacuating in 1828]… Our people’s love of British justice… compelled our ancestors to welcome the return of the British. Now the British people have gone away from us only some seven years ago… and already some people are asking in regard to certain incidents: ‘Is this justice?’ ”⁹ Shaming Nkrumah with unfavorable comparisons to colonialism was unlikely to persuade. By now, Danquah realized that his rival—Black Star of Africa, Messianic Majesty of Ghana, Man of Destiny, Redeemer and Victor, Party Chairman For Life, President of the Ghana Academy of Sciences, and Senior Captain of a new 7,500-ton luxury yacht—had no intention of relenting. Nkrumah declared Ghana a one-party state and the 1965 election unnecessary.

The constant interrogations of Danquah intensified as his health sputtered. He began to make preparations to die, asking Nkrumah to tell his wife that he had sought to make peace with him. “When I am rendered incapable of acting for myself by any fatality, such as death or insanity, there will be a legitimate provision to stabilize her in life and enable her to sustain me in her memory.”

Twelve days later, after more than a year in prison, Danquah was let out for a five-minute bath. On returning, he found his cell ransacked, his Bible lying shredded on the floor. A storm of anger arose. “Cows and fools!” he berated the warders. They claimed he overreacted and suffered a heart attack. No one really knew. A later inquiry led by a British judge concluded that the horrific treatment of “a man of his standing and intellect… beggars description.”¹⁰ The Ghanaian opposition leader living in Britain offered to return from exile and stand trial in a neutral African state if Nkrumah would stand trial for Danquah’s murder.¹¹ Nkrumah declined. But he made a show of retreating to his ancestral village, where the state-run press was instructed to photograph him in brooding postures.¹²

News of Danquah’s death brought recriminations from across Africa. “If independence means the substitution of indigenous tyranny for alien rule,” declared Nigerian president Nnamdi Azikiwe a few days after the death, “then those who struggled for the independence of former colonial territories have not only desecrated the cause of freedom, they have betrayed their peoples.”¹³ As a young nationalist, Azikiwe had spent three years working alongside Danquah in Ghana (then known as the Gold Coast), between 1934 and 1937, where he launched a nationalist newspaper, the African Morning Post, published a book on African independence, and consorted with anti-colonial leaders from across the region. Azikiwe now understood that those newspapers, organizations, orderly societies, and civic freedoms under colonialism did not just “happen.” “It is an irony of history,” Azikiwe would say about Danquah’s death, “that a great pioneer of Ghanaian scholarship should die in a detention camp barely eight years after his country had become free from foreign domination.”¹⁴ Ghana’s official radio station called Azikiwe a “witless parrot” and the rest of his cabinet “mad dogs” for their cautious approach to decolonization.¹⁵

An official funeral was out of the question. Danquah’s family insisted on a ceremony in his hometown. Nkrumah, the Afro-centrist, banned the use of traditional Akan drums intended to give Danquah’s spirit influence over the living. Instead, the brass band of the local Presbyterian church was allowed to play. There was something fitting in this. Danquah’s life and career had been critically shaped by his father’s embrace of Presbyterianism and by his own love of British colonial administration and constitutionalism. The brass band sounded a universal loss in a way that the Akan drums could not. “His death was seen as parricidal by many who considered Danquah the father of the nation, and Nkrumah his wayward son,” wrote a British historian who was a graduate student in Ghana at the time.¹⁶ A few days after the death, a Pentagon analyst for Africa raised the obvious question in a letter to the New York Times: “If a man who named the state ends in this manner, what may be the fate of lesser persons?”¹⁷

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As Sir Alan Burns sat with his wife Katie at New York’s newly renamed John F. Kennedy International airport on the morning of February 5th, 1965, the news of Danquah’s death was disquieting. Knowing that this man who vilified him as governor had died brought little joy. Any sense of vindication was overshadowed by anxiety for the “lesser persons” left behind. Somewhere in rural Ghana was his niece Marca, daughter of his brother Emile. It was Emile who led the training of Nkrumah in London by the British Communist Party. The Burns brothers never lost their mutual love despite being ideologically divided on colonialism and pretty much everything else. Marca, a veterinarian and animal geneticist, picked up the communist bug from her father. After independence, she volunteered to run a state-owned goat farm for Nkrumah. The state-run farms produced only 20 percent as much per worker as private farms, and they embezzled most of what they produced.¹⁸ Marca remained a dogged Nkrumahis...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• List of Figures
• Abbreviations Used in Notes
• Part I: Foundations
• Part II: The Sea We Fear
• About the Author
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright