THE COMMONWEALTH AND INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY Joint Chairmen of the Honorary Editorial Advisory Board SIR ROBERT ROBINSON, O.M., F.R.S., LONDON DEAN ATHELSTAN SPILHAUS, MINNESOTA Publisher: ROBERT MAXWELL, M.C, M.P. COMMONWEALTH AFFAIRS DIVISION General Editors: sm KENNETH BRADLEY AND D. TAYLOR The Anglo-African Commonwealth POLITICAL FRICTION AND CULTURAL FUSION The Anglo-African Commonwealth POLITICAL FRICTION AND CULTURAL FUSION by ALI Α. MAZRUI Professor and Head of the Department of Political Science Makerere University College, University of East Africa P E R G A M ON P R E SS OXFORD · LONDON · EDINBURGH · NEW YORK TORONTO · SYDNEY · PARIS · BRAUNSCHWEIG Pergamon Press Ltd., Headington Hill Hall, Oxford 4 & 5 Fitzroy Square, London, W.l Pergamon Press (Scotland) Ltd., 2 & 3 Teviot Place, Edinburgh 1 Pergamon Press Inc., 44-01 21st Street, Long Island City, New York 11101 Pergamon of Canada Ltd., 6 Adelaide Street East, Toronto, Ontario Pergamon Press (Aust.) Pty. Ltd., 20-22 Margaret Street, Sydney, New South Wales Pergamon Press S.A.R.L., 24 rue des Ιcoles, Paris 5e Vieweg & Sohn GmbH, Burgplatz 1, Braunschweig Copyright © 1967 Pergamon Press Ltd. First edition 1967 Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 66-29595 Printed in Great Britain by The Carrick Press Ltd This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise disposed of without the pubHsher's consent, in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is pubhshed. (3162/67) To Jamal Acknowledgments FOR stimulation on some of the points I have discussed, I am gratefiil to a number of colleagues. I am particularly grateful to Mr. Ahmed Mohiddin and Dr. Dharam Ghai of the University of East Africa, and to Professor Donald S. Rothchild of the University of California, Davis. Most of the book was written when I was under a Rockefeller Foimdation research grant and was enjoying the stimulating hospitaUty of the Center for International Affairs, Harvard Univer­ sity, as a Research Associate. I am gready indebted to both institutions. The patient yet speedy t3rping of Mrs. Ailene Benson and Mrs. Jane Tatiock greatiy facilitated the endeavour. My warmest thanks to them both. My wife was invaluable. Every chapter was discussed with her. And her coroments on the literary and Unguistic matters discussed in the book helped to shape the analysis. She also read the whole typescript. For the appendices I am, of course, indebted to all the sources. President Nyerere's article (Appendix II) is being reprinted in the collection of Nyerere's works entitied Freedom and Unity and published by Oxford University Press. I am gratefiil to the Presi­ dent's office and to the Oxford University Press for permission to use the article as an appendix in this book. I am also gratefiil to Mr. Tom Mboya personally for giving me permission to use Appendix V. To the Joumal Transition I am indebted for some of the excerpts on the English Language. I am also grateful to the publishers of the books quoted. viii Acknowledgments To Conspectus and International Affairs I am very thankful for permission to re-use in Chapters 4 and 5 material which first appeared in articles written for them. Responsibility for any faults in the book must^ of course^ remain exclusively mine. Britain^s Third Commonwealth: An Introduction GEORGE PADMORE, the West Indian founding father of pan- Africanism, regarded the British colonies in Africa as " Britain's third Empire". However, it would be less than helpftil if, by extension, we now proceeded to describe the independent African states today as " Britain's third Commonwealth The sequence we propose to use here rests on a difierent basis from Padmore's— the crucial element in Commonwealth evolution for us in this book has been the shifting balance of racial composition. For our purposes the first British Commonwealth consisted exclusively of white governments—Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. It is a measure of the dominance of governments in Commonwealth relations that South Africa was for so long included among the " white Dominions " in spite of the fact that the bulk of her population was non-white. The second British Commonwealth came with the accession of India and Pakistan. This gave the Commonwealth its first non- white Prime Ministers. But the non-white member governments were still in a minority. We might therefore define the second British Commonwealth as that period when the Commonwealth was already multi-racial but with the white governments still main­ taining either a majority or a numerical parity with the rest of the Commonwealth. It will therefore be seen that this second Commonwealth did not come to an end with the independence of Ghana. The significance of Ghana was in being the first black African member of the Commonwealth. But Ghana on her own did not tilt the balance of 1 2 The AtJglO'Afrícan Commonwealth membership in favour of the coloured sector of the Commonwealth. It was Malaya a few months after Ghana which gave the Common­ wealth parity as between coloured and white members. There were now five each—the five white governments we mentioned above and the governments of India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Malaya and Ghana. Strictly speaking, then, the third British Commonwealth did not come into being imtil Nigeria became independent in 1960. Nigeria shifted the balance of racial composition in the Commonwealth in favour of the coloured members. This was a momentous develop­ ment in terms of strengthening the principle of multi-racialism in the Commonwealth. Almost in response to this new era of coloured preponderance in the Commonwealth, South Africa was forced to withdraw from the Commonwealth following the 1961 conference —the first Commonwealth conference to have a majority of coloured participants. The trend of coloured preponderance has continued upward ever since. The accession of Cyprus did indeed have a significance of its own. This was the first white country to become a member of the Commonwealth since the old Dominions were given their autonomy two generations previously. Yet, in a sense, Cyprus was a reluctant member of the Commonwealth—^the only reluctant one in the present company. Commonwealth membership was for Cypriot a consolation prize—what the Turkish Cypriots had wanted was either a continued colonial status or partition, whereas the first choice of the Greek Cypriots was imion with Greece. A characteristic feature of the third Commonwealth is a decline of Britain's own control over Commonwealth affairs. Britain is still the most influential single member in the association but, as we shall indicate in a later chapter, influence in Commonwealth afiiairs is now significantly shared by the African group of members. African states already constitute nearly half the Commonwealth. They exert their influence partly through solidarity with the Asian members on colonial issues, but also substantially through Britain herself. In some matters the most effective way of exerting influence on the Commonwealth as a whole is to exert influence on its most influential member. And pressure on Britain has often been the Britain's Third Commonwealth: An Introduction 3 most direct way by which Africans could make an impact on Commonwealth affairs. One form of African pressure has been the threat to leave the Commonwealth. When this threat was used by Ghana and Tangan­ yika on the issue of South Africa, it was effective enough to force South Africa's withdrawal in 1961. But the trouble with this kind of threat is that it loses its impact if used too often. Since then both Tanganyika and Ghana under Nkrumah have had occasion to use the threat again. In November 1963, for example, Tanganyika's Minister of External Affairs, Mr. Oscar Kambona, warned that if Britain did not grant majority rule in Southern Rhodesia "the entire African states' membership of the Commonwealth will have to be considered ".* By October 1963 the threat to leave the Commonwealth on the issue of Rhodesia had become so closely identified with Tanzania that conservative opinion in Britain was beginning to question the wisdom of trying to keep a country like Tanzania within the Commonwealth, or the utility of giving British aid to her. As one conservative commentator put it, Mr. Nyerere's recognition of Britain's generosity is a threat to leave the Commonwealth if he disapproves of the manner in which Britain exercises her own sovereignty.} Yet, when in December 1965 Tanzania's break with Britain finally came, it came as a severance of diplomatic relations with Britain and not a withdrawal from the Commonwealth. As President Nyerere put it in an article he wrote for a British newspaper on the eve of his break with Britain : We shall not leave the Commonwealth—^that is a multi-national organisation, not a British one, and is therefore, for the moment, at any rate, imaffected by our decision, φ Ghana broke with Britain at the same time. But Nkrumah went further than Nyerere. He mentioned the possibility of withdrawing * See Uganda Argus, Nov. 8, 1963. t Harold Soref in the Daily Telegraph (London). This criticism of Nyerere is reproduced with approval in East Africa and Rhodesia, Oct. 14,1965, p. 108. φ See Julius Nyerere, " Why I am threatening to break with Britain The Observer (London), Dec. 12, 1965. 4 The Anglo-African Commonwealth from the Commonwealth, and declared that Ghana would call upon members of the Organization of African Unity to sever all outside links which might stand in the way of African imity, including links with Britain. Yet Nkrumah did not pull Ghana out of the Common­ wealth after all. Along with Tanzania he had introduced and now maintained a new anomaly in Commonwealth relations. As the weekly West Africa put it at the time: Can a country break with Britain and still stay in the Common­ wealth ? ... it is difficult to see how, even if the new [Commonwealth] Secretariat is nominally responsible for arranging the meetings, a country which has broken with Britain could attend a Commonwealth Prime Ministers* conference in London. And though the Queen is Head of the Commonwealth, and Commonwealth Heads of State can and should communicate directly with Buckingham Palace, she is also Queen of England, and some embarrassment might arise if she was communicating widi a country which had broken with Britain.* Yet once again the threat to leave the Commonwealth was made but not ftilfilled. On the whole it was a wise decision not to ftilfil it. There are certain threats which lose in effectiveness when they are implemented. In terms of diplomatic influence, the Common­ wealth—^at least until December 1965—^had been of greater utility to the new African states than to Britain. Far from being an associa­ tion by which Britain influenced Africa, the Commonwealth had become a device by which the new African states sought to influence Britain. The most dramatic way of using this device had become the threat to leave the association if Britain did not respond to some demand. The device was subtly but efiectively used by the old regime of Nigeria to get Britain to extradite Chief Antony Enahoro in 1963. Enahoro, a leading member of the Action Group opposition party, was wanted by the Nigerian Government to face charges of treason. Britain sacrificed the principle of political asylum for the sake of maintaining good relations with a new African member of the Commonwealth. A year and half before that event Britain had risked the life of the Queen for the sake of Commonwealth relations. In spite of ex­ plosions in the streets of Accra on the eve of her visit, and in spite of the general fear that the visit would strengthen Nkrumah's hand * " Whose Qub ? " West Africa, No. 2534, Dec. 25, 1965.