Books

The end of empire

Robert Blake

Evelyn Baring: The Last Proconsul Charles Douglas-Home (Collins E7.50)

Sir Evelyn Baring KG, first Lord Howick of Glendale, had a career which epitomised the lives of the now vanished imperial governing class in the decline of empire. He Was the youngest son by a late second marriage of Lord Cromer (also Evelyn Baring) whose long rule in Egypt epitomised the heyday of that same empire. The Young Evelyn went to Winchester and New College where he got a first, thence to the Indian Civil Service for six years till 1933 followed by an interval in banking, and work in the Foreign Office during the war (Ins health precluded military service); he then became successively Governor of Southern Rhodesia, High Commissioner in South Africa and finally from 1952 to 1959 Governor of Kenya where the author of this excellent book was his ADC for the last two Years.

Mr Charles Douglas-Home, now Foreign Editor of The Times, has written a biography which is a model of its kind. The task Cannot have been entirely easy. Lord Howick died only five years ago and there are many friends and relations still alive. Iv!oreover, he was involved in at least three highly controversial episodes in which his OW n role was by no means beyond criticism, l8eretse Khama's marriage to Ruth Wiliam,.

the trial of Jomo Kenyatta and the

rlola massacre. The temptation for Mr Douglas-Home to act as counsel for the defence must have been considerable, but it h. as been avoided. The author prefers the Judicial role, incidentally contrasting with thC judge (Mr Justice Thacker) who tried Kenyatta, and who during the trial secured an ex-gratia payment of £20,000 from the ,Kenya government on the ground that, if he round Kenyatta guilty (the evidence was very dubious), he would have to flee the country since his own life would not be worth a penny. This was not all. Evelyn raring told Oliver Lyttleton, the Colonial

ecretary, before the trial that if the witnesses repeated in open court what they had said in their affidavits 'convictions should be obtained', and he added, 'Every possible effort has been made to offer them rewards and to protect them'. Had these transactions been revealed at the time, the ensuing furore would have been immense and Baring could not have survived.

There is also little doubt that he would not have survived Hola, but for two things. He was nearly at the end of his time as Governor, and in the run up to the general election of 1959 Harold Macmillan was determined to have no resignations. If Bar

ing had resigned, Lennox-Boyd, Colonial Secretary since 1954, who wished to go in any case for other reasons, would certainly have resigned too. One cannot read Mr Douglas-Home's most interesting account of Hola without a powerful conviction that someone ought either to have been removed or to have removed himself. If the Governor was not prepared to dismiss certain officials, the case for that 'someone' being the Governor himself was strong. Hola can be seen as British Africa's equivalent of Amritsar, though it was not on that appalling scale and no one could be charged with quite the same direct responsibility as Brigadier-General Dwyer.

Yet one must never underestimate the dilemma faced by honourable men in the sort of emergency situation with which Baring was obliged to cope throughout his time as Governor of Kenya. He had to deal with the bestial atrocities of Mau Mau, with an African leader whose complicity, however widely believed, was very difficult to prove, with an Attorney-General of a rigorously legalistic approach, with settlers perpetually on the verge of taking the law into their own hands, with a General who was responsible to the War Office (not as normally to the Governor); and with a chief of police who seriously thought that the English village 'Bobby' was the correct prototype for Kenya. It is hardly surprising that errors were made.

The other notable controversy in which Baring was involved occurred earlier when he was High Commissioner in South Africa. The High Commissioner, in addition to his diplomatic function as ambassador in Pretoria, was also the Governor of the so-called High Commission Territories — in those days Bechuanaland (Botswana), Basutoland (Lesotho) and Swaziland (unchanged) — with Resident Commissioners reporting to him from each and giving guidance to the local chiefs. Smuts pressed hard, like every South African Prime Minister from 1913 onwards, for their incorporation into the Union. Baring, who regarded with distaste the Union's racial policy, strongly opposed such a move — and even more strongly when Smuts was ousted by Malan in May 1948. The difficulty was that both Churchill and Attlee felt moral obligations arising from the war at least to Smuts whose defeat had been very narrow, and — more seriously — depended on South Africa for supplies of uranium (a fact which is highly relevant nowadays too). The marriage of Seretse Khama, heir to the principal chiefdom in Bechuanaland, to a white woman was very embarrassing (so embarrassing apparently that it is not even

mentioned in the Oxford History of South Africa published as recently as 1971). Bar

ing used all his influence to exclude Seretse from both the Bamangwato Chiefdom and from residence in Bechuanaland for ever — the Labour Government in the end limited the bans to five years — but his motives were

not those published. The official line propounded by Patrick Gordon Walker (who is not, pace the author, a Wykehamist) was the trouble that a mixed marriage might produce in the tribe. Since the tribe after initial hostility had strongly endorsed Seretse's succession, it was never a very convincing argument, and its implausibility is confirmed by Seretse's election many years later as first President of the independent Botswana. The real reason was that Seretse had to be sacrificed to the violent objections raised in South Africa, and the fear that the episode might lead either to the Union seizing the territories or cutting off of supplies of uranium or leaving the Commonwealth —or all three. The decision was an awkward contradiction of the multiracial ideal of empire and when Baring propounded the reasons for it to the late Lord Salisbury who was not renowned for highminded liberalism, he received the terse reply, 'That was the argument of Caiaphas'.

Baring had important achievements to his credit. He played a major part in both developing the High Commission Territories and preventing their absorption by South Africa. In Swaziland particularly he is remembered with great admiration and affection. In Kenya he was largely responsible for bringing about an agricultural revolution, creating an African farmer class growing the high cash crops previously the monopoly of the Europeans. He also prepared the way for constitutional change, though he hoped that self-government would not come till 1975 at the earliest and, when it came, would take the form of a 'multi-racial' democracy with built-in safeguards rather than one-man-one-vote. He never foresaw the extraordinary change in the tempo of African decolonisation which was to follow Macmillan's electoral victory in 1959.

I am relieved to see that Mr DouglasHome finds this as puzzling as I did when recently writing a history of Rhodesia. Harold Macmillan's memoirs throw little light on what must have been one of his major decisions. Nor is any answer given in Henri Grimal's Decolonization 1919-63. This study, widely acclaimed in France where it was first published in 1965, is an admirable book of reference, a detailed account of the run down of the British, French, Dutch and Belgian Empires; but, though the author tells us what happened and when, he seldom tells us why. Perhaps we shall be wiser when the thirty year rule no longer applies and the official papers become available. Meanwhile the book provides a useful European framework in which to set not only careers like Baring's, but the whole process of British decolonisation. Mr Douglas-Home has not only thrown quite new light on some hotly disputed aspects of that policy, he has also drawn a fascinating picture of a man who could fairly be called an 'English eccentric'. Who else could have turned up in brown suede shoes at Smuts's funeral or intetviewed a District Commissioner in his underpants with cocked hat and plumes on his head, having forgotten to explain that he had spilt something on his trousers? Yet with all this he was very much a grandee of the old school, a quintessential aristocrat, formidable and seemingly aloof. Such figures do not exist today. 'The Last Proconsul' is indeed an appropriate sub-title.