Did Governor Cohen open the door to independence?

Kampala

Most Ugandans regard Andrew Cohen as just one of the governors the country had before independence. I also did that until I began doing research for this article.

Paradoxically, before that, working with former president Apollo Milton Obote, I had had the opportunity to hear him often speak very highly of Andrew Cohen. Then I thought the old nationalist had been captivated by a shrewd colonial governor. That has all changed and I even wish Obote had come across the literature about Cohen that I have read recently.

Andrew Cohen was more than the Governor of Uganda; he was the real midwife behind Harold McMillan’s wind of change blowing across Africa.

By the time Cohen joined the Colonial Office in 1934, the management of British colonialism was highly decentralised. There was minimal control from the Colonial Office. Every colony was treated as a virtually autonomous entity; it was for the Governor and his colonial service to devise and execute policy locally subject to the veto of the Colonial Office, a veto that was rarely used.

Cohen was to find it rather difficult to reconcile the imperial pretense of Britain and his conscious. In a meeting on March 29, 1938, he had the audacity to propose that colonial service men with field experience could do a better job in the colonial office than he and his colleagues who had not had the experience.

Facing miseries
When he visited Africa for the first time in 1937, he was so outraged by the misery of the people of Northern Rhodesia (present-day Zambia) that he proposed the nationalisation of British copper royalties to pay for social services in the colony.

He was also appalled by the racism he witnessed in Kenya and Rhodesia. On his return to Britain, he took a year off to study the racial problems of the US, hoping he would get an answer to what he had seen in Africa. The year in the US did not help.

In 1940, during World War II, Cohen was sent to organise civilian supplies at the siege of Malta. Cohen, 32, had immense responsibility; he even sometimes filled in as Lieutenant Governor. From then on, a towering impatience to get things done as well as cut red tape, characterised his life. He behaved as though the siege never left his subconscious.

When Cohen returned to the Colonial Office in 1943, he found that the colonial management was being unhinged from its traditions by the demands of the war. Centralised economic planning and control had been imposed on the Colonial Office in the course of the economic warfare that accompanied the war.

Loyalty to the colonial power, which was strained, was then being bought with promises of better living standards, social services and political advances after the war.

Matters were not made any better by the criticisms the US was making of British colonialism. These criticisms constituted a serious scare and Britain felt it had to counter them. In 1944, £120 million was allocated for post-war economic development of the colonies. There was a lot of excitement in the Colonial Office for they envisioned that they were about to export the welfare state to the colonies.

When Cohen compared these radical economic programmes with the political development of the colonies, he came to the conclusion that the department of political planning was out of step and out of date.

Between 1940 and 1942, Lord Hailey, the former governor of India, who was in charge of political planning at the Colonial Office, had taken a familiarisation tour around Africa. He had visited every district in British colonial Africa to “investigate as a matter of high policy, the important problem of future political advance for Africans in central government in its relation to the evolution of indirect rule”.

Lord Hailey reported that there were no nationalists except among “a few sections of the Gold Coast and possibly coastal areas of Nigeria” and even these few were under the full control of native chiefs and kings. Basing himself on this finding, he recommended continuing with the policy of political advancement based on perspectives of indirect rule.

Indirect rule
According to this policy, African representation in the colonial administration was to be done through indirect elections and through chiefly membership of native authorities and provincial councils. The educated and prospective nationalists were to be excluded. The Hailey formula was to continue the strategy of indirect rule of backing tribal leaders and institutions as a bulwark against nationalist agitation.

The aim was to have the kings, chiefs and notables keep the rural peasant majority loyal to the colonial regime so that the urban nationalists would not set the grassroots of populism alight. This strategy was expected to delay the independence of the colonies for some 60 to 80 years.

When the Labour Party led by Clement Attlee got into power in 1945, Creech Jones, became the Colonial Secretary and Cohen was promoted to the post of assistant undersecretary of state in charge of Africa. A rapport on colonial policy and strategy between the two men easily developed.

Both men had been associated with the Fabian Colonial Bureau, founded in 1940 as a special department of the Fabian Society to facilitate research, information gathering and the development of constructive ideas on colonial policy. Both regarded indirect rule as a relic of “reactionary imperialism”.

In February 1947, the Colonial Secretary, Creech Jones issued the first of his government dispatches (drafted by Cohen) informing governors across Africa that the policy of indirect rule was to be discarded.

The neo-traditionalist native authorities that had enjoyed administrative privileges and political representation were to be abolished. Cohen argued that these authorities were incapable of managing local economic projects and social services that rapid modernisation required. The educated elites/nationalists who had up to then been neglected were to be brought in to give leadership.
“The modern conception of colonial administration,” declared Creech Jones, “required a democratic system of local government.”

The foretaste of colonial policy of the duo was first hinted in a committee report dated May 22, 1947. “Both the international situation in the African territories themselves,” the document declared “and the state of international opinion [not to mention the public relations of the Labour Party], demanded a new approach to policy in Africa.”

The next thing Cohen did was to produce a blueprint for transferring power to the colonial subjects. This blueprint was very similar to the one produced by Lord Durham for Canada a century before. In the same way that Lord Durham had intended to bring about self-government for Canada, Cohen now intended to bring about self-government to African colonies in four stages, depending on the situation in each colony.

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